Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug (1914 – 2009), full name Norman Ernest Borlaug, was a US agronomist from the mid-western state of Iowa. He was the Father of the ‘Green Revolution’. He spent most of his 60 working years in the farmlands of Mexico, South Asia and later in Africa, fighting world hunger, and saving by some estimates up to a billion lives in the process. He was awarded Nobel Peace Prize (1970) and many others for his contribution.

Borlaug didn’t have money to go to college. But through a Great Depression era programme, known as the National Youth Administration, Borlaug was able to enroll in the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis to study forestry. He excelled in studies and received his Ph.D in plant pathology and genetics in 1942. From 1942 to 1944, he was employed as a microbiologist at DuPont in Wilmington. However, following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Borlaug tried to enlist in the military, but was rejected under wartime labour regulations.

In 1944, many experts warned of mass starvation in developing nations where populations were expanding faster than crop production. Borlaug began work at a Rockefeller Foundation-funded project in Mexico to increase wheat production by developing higher-yielding varieties of the crop. By 1963 wheat production in Mexico stood six times more than that of 1944.

During 1960s, South Asia experienced severe drought condition and India had been importing wheat on a large scale from the United States. Borlaug came to India in 1963 along with Dr. Robert Glenn Anderson to replicate his Mexican success in the sub-continent. The experiments began with planting of few of the high yielding variety strains in the fields of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa in New Delhi, under the stewardship of Dr. M S Swaminathan. These strains were subsequently planted in test plots at Ludhiana, Pantnagar, Kanpur, Pune and Indore. By 1965, when the drought situation turned alarming, the Government took the lead and allowed wheat revolution to move forward. By employing agricultural techniques he developed in Mexico, Borlaug was able to nearly double South Asian wheat harvests between 1965 and 1970. By 1968, it was clear that the Indian wheat harvest was nothing short of revolutionary.

United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) observed that in 40 years between 1961 and 2001, “India more than doubled its population, from 452 million to more than 1 billion. At the same time, it nearly tripled its grain production from 87 million tonnes to 231 million tonnes. It was in India that Norman Borlaug’s work was described as the ‘Green Revolution.’

Africa suffered wide spread hunger and starvation through 70s and 80s. The then Chairman of the Nippon Foundation, Ryoichi Sasakawa wondered why the methods used in Mexico and India were not extended to Africa. He called up Norman Borlaug, now leading a semi-retired life for help. However, the success in Africa was not as spectacular as it was in India or Mexico. Nevertheless, yields of maize, sorghum and wheat doubled between 1983 and 1985.

Nearby pages
Norman Cota, Norman Douglas, Norman Macleod, Norman Washington Manley, Normandy