Sad Fact, A Great Man has Died

Norman Borlaug has died. From a posting on Watts Up With That:

Renowned agricultural scientist Dr. Norman Borlaug has died at the age of 95. Borlaug, known as the father of the “Green Revolution” for saving over a billion people from starvation by utilizing pioneering high yield farming techniques, is one of only five people in history who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom ,and the Congressional Gold Medal.

During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.


Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa. Borlaug continually advocated the use of his methods and biotechnology to decrease world famine. His work faced environmental and socioeconomic criticisms, including charges that his methods have created dependence on monoculture crops, unsustainable farming practices, heavy indebtedness among subsistence farmers, and high levels of cancer among those who work with agriculture chemicals. He emphatically rejected many of these as unfounded or untrue. In 1986, he established the World Food Prize to recognize individuals who have improved the quality, quantity or availability of food around the globe.

A lot of "celebrities" get written up in the popular media but they are completely forgettable. Borlaug is a man who will be remembers for hundreds of years because he had a major impact in the last half of the 20th century. His life pretty well single-handedly saved us from a Malthusian disaster of overpopulation. Sadly, the popular press don't think dramatic stories like this are "important". Instead they drown you in the pathetic personal details of spoiled Hollywood "stars" and idiots like Paris Hilton.

Update 2009sep14: Here is a tribute/remembrance from Derek Lowe in his In The Pipeline blog. I've bolded a key bit:

Norman Borlaug has died at the age of 95, and he's definitely worth remembering. His tireless work on improving agriculture saved hundreds of millions of people from being born to starvation. And it also kept the world from having to tear up even more natural habitats to plant food crops.

People tend to forget (or have never known) about the way the world has managed to escape the Malthusian trap over the last two or three hundred years. (A Farewell to Alms
is a book that makes this case at length, more here). And the way that birth rates drop once countries become more prosperous holds out the hope that we won't fall into an even greater version of the same thing. I think that once the Industrial Revolution happened, world population was going to explode eventually. Norman Borlaug was one of the key people who helped keep things together while that happened.

But what about natural, traditional means of growing crops, in harmony with the land and all that? It's easy to forget the agriculture is unnatural, and is a relatively recent invention. (In fact, perhaps it was that step, rather than the Industrial Revolution, that set the world on a path to an eventual population explosion. It just did so more slowly). Once we started clearing land and saving seed, we left the natural way of things behind. To put that another way, that's when the human race stop playing only the cards it had been dealt. And using the highest-yielding seed and the most well-thought-out ways of growing it will keep us from having to clear more of the land we have left.

Derek points to an article summarizing Borlaug's life in the Des Moines Register. Here's a bit from that with bolding added:

On Friday, the day before the famous scientist, Iowa native and Nobel Peace Prize laureate died at his home in Dallas, Texas, he had a final conversation with his family.

"I have a problem," said Borlaug, 95, his granddaughter, Julie Borlaug, recounted Sunday. What was that, a family member asked?

"Africa."

...

Borlaug was convinced the Green Revolution could spread to Africa and believed that biotechnology was part of the solution, said former Sen. George McGovern, who won the Borlaug-founded World Food Prize last year for his work in developing an international school-nutrition program. McGovern went to see Borlaug earlier this year for what turned out to be his final birthday. Borlaug, who was born on his grandparents' farm 11 miles southwest of Cresco, died of complications from cancer.

"He was always the optimist," McGovern said. "He always felt we could bring governments around, bring people around."

Borlaug "was simply one of the world's best," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor. "A determined, dedicated, but humble man, who believed we had the collective duty and knowledge to eradicate hunger worldwide."

The Rockefeller Foundation, a major contributor to the Green Revolution and agricultural research since then, issued a statement Sunday calling Borlaug "a force beyond measure."

"The world is more peaceful and humane as a consequence of his work," the foundation said.

...

Borlaug's legacy includes many scientists he inspired, like Gebisa Ejeta. As a new college graduate in Ethiopia in the 1970s, Ejeta was struggling to figure what to do with his life. Then Ejeta's mentor, a plant breeder who had studied in America, told Ejeta he had been inspired by learning of Borlaug's work.

Ejeta decided to study plant genetics himself, earned a doctorate from Purdue University and later learned how to dramatically improve production of sorghum, a staple crop in his home country. Ejeta is this year's winner of the World Food Prize.

"I didn't quite fully understand the power of the work that Dr. Borlaug had done other than the fact that if a person could be given this kind of recognition for serving humanity, I thought this would be a field of study that would be worth looking into," Ejeta said Sunday.

Borlaug's final words, as related by his granddaughter, could be a fitting epitaph.

A scientist and family friend visiting Borlaug on Friday told him about a device he had developed so poor farmers could be sure they were using just the right amount of fertilizer.

Borlaug's response and last words: "Take it to the farmers."