Norman Borlaug: When it comes to adding value, no corporate executive could dream of achieving as much as Norman Borlaug. The agronomist who died on Saturday led the “green revolution” of the 1960s. The grains and farming techniques he and his co-workers developed now keep half the world’s people from going hungry.
Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. An award for applied economics should have been created for him. He was an exemplar of many of the modern economy’s virtues.
There’s the power of imagination, to start. Starvation used to be a fact of life all over the world. It was expected that crops would fail and yields would be low. Borlaug and his backers at the Rockefeller Foundation had a different idea, and went to work.
There is still too much global hunger, but Borlaug’s dream has become reality in much of the world. How? Modern science and technology played a major role. Thanks to an experimental method, the chemistry of manufacturing fertiliser and the knowledge of foreign plants – a Japanese-Mexican wheat marriage was the important initial breakthrough – a few men were able to multiply the power of their own intelligence.
Add in a can-do spirit and gritty perseverance.
Borlaug made endless hazardous journeys across Mexico in the 1950s and feared no one when it came to spreading the good news about crop yields. Then add globalisation. Borlaug did not just develop his products — he marketed and distributed them around the world. He overcame logistical difficulties and intense political and cultural resistance. His green revolution made agricultural development a multinational affair.
But one ingredient generally considered vital in the modern economy is missing from the Borlaug story: the capitalist’s quest for profit. Rockefeller gains provided the seed capital, so to speak, but Borlaug was not trying to reap vast sums. He and the governments with whom he worked were largely motivated by the desire to help people have enough to eat. Making the world a better place was enough of a bottom line.
