The title of this biography, The Man Who Fed the World, is indeed appropriate. My good friend Norman Borlaug has accomplished more than any other one individual in history in the battle to end world hunger.

As a young Rockefeller Foundation scientist in the mid-20th century, Dr. Borlaug developed high-yielding varieties of wheat that took Mexico from near-starvation to self-sufficiency within a few years.

A decade later, when India and Pakistan suffered widespread hunger and even famine, he introduced his new seed and production technologies in the Asian sub-continent and successfully campaigned at the highest levels of government to get policy changes that averted famine in the mid to late 1960s. In response to the combination of his scientific and humanitarian achievements, the Nobel Committee awarded Dr. Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

That was only the beginning of his remarkable accomplishments. Since 1970, for example, Norman Borlaug has made a number of trips to China, where his technology, his policy suggestions, and his training of young Chinese scientists helped alleviate hunger in that country of 1.3 billion people. In the Southern Cone of South America, the early maturity of his Mexican wheats permitted double cropping of wheat and soybeans, with
tremendous increases in production. For his technology and his humanitarian efforts, he is revered in many countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.

Since 1986, I have had the distinct pleasure of working with Norman Borlaug in sub-Saharan Africa where, in spite of AIDS, endemic malaria and other maladies, populations are increasing faster than food supplies. I have witnessed first-hand the reverence that thousands upon thousands of Africans have for Dr. Borlaug’s untiring efforts to relieve their hunger.

Norman Borlaug’s scientific achievements have saved hundreds of millions of lives and earned him the distinction as one of the 100 most influential individuals of the 20th century. I commend Leon Hesser for making more people aware of the remarkable life and achievements of this American hero.

Jimmy Carter

In reflecting on the experience, Borlaug says, “In 1944, I resigned from a challenging research position in the agricultural chemical division of E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. to accept a position with the Rockefeller Foundation as plant pathologist with the Cooperative Mexican-Rockefeller Foundation Agricultural Program. I accepted the job sight unseen, without ever having visited Mexico, without speaking a word of Spanish.

“Many times during the next four years, frustrated by unavailability of machinery and equipment, without the assistance of trained scientists, traveling over bad roads, living in miserable hotels, eating bad food, often sick with diarrhea and unable to communicate because of lack of command of the language, I was certain I had made a dreadful mistake in resigning from my former position. However, by 1948, research results, the bits and pieces of the wheat production puzzle, began to emerge, and the fog of gloom and despair began to lift. I began to see rays of sunlight and hope.”

In the spring of 1945, after Borlaug had been in Mexico about six months, [he was] assigned the task of organizing and directing the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program. [His] mandate was to do whatever was necessary to increase Mexico’s wheat production. He would work across a broad spectrum of disciplines: scientific research in genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology. [...]

Page 2 >>

The Man Who Fed the World is copyright © 2006, Leon Hesser.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without the written permission of the Publisher - Durban House Press