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Excerts from "Feeding a World
of 10 Billion People: The Miracle Ahead," by Dr. Norman E. Borlaug (Background) The invention of agriculture—some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago—heralded the dawn of civilization. It began with rainfed, hand-hoe agriculture, which evolved into animal-powered, scratch-tooled agriculture, and finally into an irrigated agriculture along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers that for the first time allowed humankind to produce food surpluses. This permitted the establishment of permanent settlements and urban societies which, in turn, engendered culture, science and technology. The rise and fall of ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Meso-America were directly tied to agricultural successes and failures, and it behooves us to remember that this axiom still remains valid today. ... I have seen much progress in increasing the yields and production of various crops, especially the cereals, in many food-deficit countries. Clearly, the research that backstopped this progress has produced huge returns. Yet, despite more than tripling the world food supply during the past three decades, the so-called "Green Revolution" in cereal production has not solved the problem of chronic undernutrition for hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken people around the world. They are unable, due to unemployment or underemployment, to purchase the food they need, despite its abundance in world markets. ...[W]e need more venturesome young scientists who are willing to dedicate their lives to helping to solve the production problems facing several billion small-scale farmers. |
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Background This material is an excerpt from a lecture given by Dr. Borlaug on May 31, 1997, at De Montfort University in Leicester, the United Kingdom. The occasion was the official designation of the university's Norman Borlaug Institute for Plant Science Research. Full text Borlaug was born in 1914 in a small farming community near Cresco, Iowa. Fittingly, the Latin Cresco means "I grow." Through eighth grade, Borlaug attended a one-teacher, one-room schoolhouse. He graduated from Cresco High School. At the University of Minnesota, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in forestry and a doctoral degree in plant pathology. In work he began in 1944 as a genetics expert with the Rockefeller Foundation, he helped launch the Green Revolution. He led the breeding of sturdy, high yielding, short-strawed, disease-resistant wheat varieties. These wheats improved food production in many countries--first in Mexico and then in Pakistan, India and other countries. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for these achievements. His work today continues to focus on sustainable farming methods in regions that are not self sufficient in growing food.
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