Intentions - Results

A Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Norman Borlaug, an American born of Norwegian parents who emigrated to the United States in the early years of the 20th Century. That Nobel laureate has died, age 95. He was the founder of the Green Revolution, and was awarded countless international awards for his research in developing a new variety of wheat that produced a high-yield hybrid of high quality, enabling agrarians to feed far greater numbers of people than ever before.

Two years before his death he was awarded the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal. At a time when his great discovery led to an incredible wheat production in parts of the world whose people were starving, he was lionized and feted. Now his great achievement as a botanist is questioned by environmentalists. And yet, as a result of his research, he was said to have been responsible for saving more lives than any other person who ever lived.

Not yet out of his teens, still a farm boy, he signed up for a national agency whose purpose was to combat poverty and despair, at a time of worldwide poverty and despair; the Great Depression. At work on a joint project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Government in an attempt to increase Mexico's poor wheat harvests, Norman Borlaug experimented with a dwarf variety of wheat and was able to finally produce a high-yield, high-quality hybrid whose success surprised everyone, including himself.

Mexico's insufficient wheat crop became a sad story of the past. India and Pakistan soon found themselves self-sufficient in wheat, no longer dependent on imports. By the time the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mr. Borlaug 40 million hectares of land internationally was used for hybrid wheat cultivation, representing ten% of the global agricultural landscape.

Futurists' dooms-day predictions of mass starvation in economically emerging areas of the world, were denied by this new reality.

Africa appears not to have been able to take full advantage of the Green Revolution, because of its ongoing political instability, its constant tribal wars, and then finally the emergence of environmentalism in the West, through which the mono-culture of one specific type of grain became suspect and finally was decried as inimical to humanity's future. The decline of crop diversity was bemoaned and decried as an agricultural evil brought upon the world.

Mono cultures were more susceptible to destruction from plant viral agents, disease and pests. The emerging biotechnology that Norman Borlaug championed as the way of the future and the salvation of humankind from food scarcity, was given an environmental black eye. But instead of outright condemning agricultural practises that have great merit along with some discrediting faults, why not practise all methods of food production that prove to be successful?

Something called moderation; not being dependent on one single source, but many, inclusive of a multitude of successful agricultural practises.