Norman Borlaug’s obituary was printed in September last year. No doubt, you missed it, and many of you have never heard of him. A Nobel laureate, he transformed agriculture in Mexico and Asia. Not without controversy though. “Mr Borlaug loved to talk of reaching for the stars, but his day-to-day motto was an earthly one. Get the plough. Start growing now.”
From the Economist: “As dawn broke over northern Mexico, Norman Borlaug wriggled from his sleeping bag. Rats had run over him all night, and he was cold. In a corner of the dilapidated research station where he had tried to sleep, he found a rusting plough. He took it outside, strapped the harness to himself, and began, furiously and crazily, in front of a group of astonished peasants, to plough the land.
Wherever he went, Mr Borlaug showed the same impatience. Paperwork was spurned in favour of action; planting, advising, training thousands. In India, where he set up hundreds of one-acre plots to show suspicious farmers how much they could grow, he was so frustrated by bureaucracy that when at last his seed came, shipped from Los Angeles, he planted it at once despite the outbreak of war between India and Pakistan, sometimes by flashes of artillery fire. And when in 1984 he was drawn out of semi-retirement to take his seed and techniques to Africa, he forgot in a moment, once he saw the place, his plan to do years of research first. “Let’s just start growing,” he said.” Continue the article at Economist.com
“[Borlaug] acknowledged that his Green revolution had not "transformed the world into Utopia", but added that western environmental lobbyists were often elitists. "They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger," he said. ‘If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists were trying to deny them these things.’”
Please read the rest of his Obit from the Guardian HERE, then come back and let us know what you think…
Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.
Norman Borlaug
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What lesson did I miss?
ReplyDeleteHe did a great thing - genetically engineering better seeds (heaven forbid they had to be labeled as such) and creating methods for increased crop productions.
When he saw a need, he ACTED to fill that need.
The articles didn't talk about whether or not the long-term sustainability questions were valid or not... were they?