The Greatest Living American?

Greg Easterbrook writes about Norman Borlaug who played a tremendous, and often vastly underappreciated role in India’s modern development -

The greatest living American is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and joins Jimmy Carter as the two living American-born laureates around whose necks this distinction as been placed.

How did Borlaug win his Nobel back in 1970?

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes.

As a temporary American expat to India, Borlaug’s impact on India’s development was possibly greater than Deming’s on Japan…

First, some background from Wikipedia on just how bad the food situation was in India back in the heady mid 1960s -

…the Indian subcontinent was at war, and experiencing widespread famine and starvation, even though the US was making emergency shipments of millions of tons of grain, including over one fifth of its total wheat, to the region.[12] The Indian and Pakistani bureaucracies and the region’s cultural opposition to new agricultural techniques initially prevented Borlaug from fulfilling his desire to immediately plant the new wheat strains there. By the summer of 1965, the famine became so acute that the governments stepped in and allowed his projects to go forward.

Borlaug created several new wheat species through careful cross breeding of strains from all over the planet coupled with trial and error in relatively large scale production

The Face of Progress

in Mexico. Enter Borlaug’s wheat into India and voila -

In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 7.3 million tons in 1970; Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production by 1968. Yields were over 21 million tons by 2000. In India, yields increased from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20.1 million tons in 1970. By 1974, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals. By 2000, India was harvesting a record 76.4 million tons of wheat. Since the 1960s, food production in both nations has increased faster than the rate of population growth.

So why, Easterbrook asks, is Borlaug relatively unknown today? Well, there are many reasons and for starters, there hasn’t been a famine in the US for a hundred years . But I think Instapundit reader Richard Fagin nails one of the modern reasons well -

It’s not because he spent his life serving the poor, per se. Press accounts are filled with stories about those who serve the poor. It’s that Mr. Borlaug didn’t serve the poor by giving away other people’s money, or by demanding that other people give away their money. He served the poor by DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, which in the view of the press is just as evil as making money, if for no other reason than someone makes money from the developed technology.

You won’t see any accolades afforded all the brilliant researchers at GE Medical Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Medtronic, or you name it, for precisely the same reason.

I’m not sure if I’d go all the way and say that the press broadly views new tech to be as evil as money (current infatuation with GreenTech, Google, 787s, etc. being great counter examples) but, there’s a nugget of truth to Fagin’s retort.

It’s been said that publicity, medals and memorials have as much to do with the group that awards / builds them as with the folks that actually did the deed worth rewarding. In that way, arguably, they don’t document the past as much as provide a means by which the awards committees of the present try to incent their vision of the future.

The problem is that today’s Borlaug would be regarded as a “frankenfood” researcher working in common cause with global agribusiness behemoths supporting Golden Rice and/or insecticides. What Borlaug et. al. do is, in many respects, the textbook definition of “un-natural”. And, well, nowadays press accolades aren’t quite lining up for that lot. While western contemporaries might not recognize Borlaug, Desi techno-optimists however, seem to.