Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of an article from Dec. 15, 2009, written shortly after Dr. Borlaug passed away. It features a new introduction and is written to honor the man who would have been 110 years old on March 25, 2024.

In the winters, I spend my time officiating high school wrestling. Last year, while going through my pre-meet duties, I noticed a wrestler with the last name Borlaug. I asked him if he knew who Norman Borlaug was and was delighted to learn that wrestler was his great-nephew.

Wrestling must be in the family blood, because Norman Borlaug was an accomplished high school and college wrestler who helped expand the popularity of sport at the high school level in Minnesota. (He also worked as a referee). He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

The coach of Borlaug’s great nephew, a high school civics and history teacher, overheard our conversation and asked, “Who’s Norman Borlaug?”

That’s a typical response whenever I mention him. In fact, I didn’t learn of him until after completing my college degree. It’s a shame how few people know the name or the remarkable achievements of the man who took action to feed the world’s population at a time when much of the scientific establishment believed we were on the verge of an inevitable global famine.

Called “arguably the greatest American in the 20th century,” Norman Borlaug probably saved more lives during his 95 years than any other person. He is one of just six people to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And yet Dr. Borlaug, who died in 2009, is scarcely known in his own country.

Born on a family farm in Iowa in 1914, Borlaug spent most of his life in impoverished nations inventing, improving and teaching the Green Revolution. His idea was simple: Make developing countries self-sufficient in food by teaching them how to use modern agricultural techniques that are simple to implement. Borlaug spent most of his time in Mexico, Pakistan and India, and focused on five areas: seeds, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides and mechanization. His successes were remarkable.

In 1950, Mexico imported more than half its food. Thanks to Borlaug’s efforts to convince farmers there to try his techniques, Mexican food production increased tenfold by 1970, and the country had become a net exporter. In India and Pakistan, production doubled. Multiple sources estimate that Borlaug's efforts, combined with those he trained and equipped, saved the lives of one billion human beings.

The Green Revolution was almost entirely funded by developing countries and private charities (notably, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations), rather than by the governments of prosperous nations. At the time, the overwhelming view of academic, intellectual and political elites in wealthy countries was that it was already too late.

Biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb” typified this attitude.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He later said, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971,” and “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” Ehrlich’s book, required reading at many colleges, stated that it was a fantasy that India would ever feed itself.

But Ehrlich was ignorant of what Norman Borlaug was already in the process of accomplishing. This is the most famous of many of Ehrlich’s colossal errors, which stemmed from a skepticism of markets and human ingenuity.

“In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970,” Reason magazine science writer Ronald Bailey noted back in 2000. “In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. Last year [1999], India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich’s dire predictions in 1968, India’s population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown ninefold.”

In spite of Ehrlich’s claims, Borlaug had India feeding itself within a mere five years of the release of “The Population Bomb.” Around the time of Ehrlich’s misguided doom-mongering, Borlaug’s colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research were spreading his ideas about high-yield rice through Asia, causing another food production explosion. Toward the end of his life, Borlaug was working to institute his agricultural revolution in Africa.

It’s a great irony of my life that at my public high school, we read Ehrlich while never learning about Borlaug.

No good deed goes unpunished, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Borlaug was attacked by proponents of the trendy new faith of radical environmentalism, on the grounds that Green Revolution farming requires pesticide and fertilizer. Gregg Easterbrook quotes Borlaug saying the following in the 1990s:

“(Most Western environmentalists) have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. 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 in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

There’s an old proverb: “He who has bread has many problems. He who has no bread has only one problem.” During Borlaug’s long career, and continuing to today, modern-day environmentalism typically focuses on massively intrusive government interventions requiring trillions of dollars and enormous societal change. Whether the issue is feeding the hungry, international aid or reliable energy, much less is said about solving real current problems through human ingenuity and proven methods given to us through free enterprise or market solutions.

More than 50 years ago Borlaug wrote, “One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well-camouflaged bureaucracy.”

Some things never change.

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