COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Agricultural scientist who averted famine with a controversial 'Green revolution' ... Norman Ernest Borlaug, agriculture scientist, born March 25 1914; died 12 September 2009

IMAGE Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel peace prize. Photograph: Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/Corb

In the 1990s, several environmental writers began describing the agriculture scientist Norman Borlaug, who has died aged 95, as the saviour of 'more lives than anyone in history'. However, such is the industrialised west's indifference towards under-developed countries that it was only there that he achieved any popular fame, his Nobel peace prize of 1970 notwithstanding. At the same time, other commentators pointed to the problems that had come in the wake of his 'Green revolution'.

Borlaug had developed a new variety of wheat that was resistant to disease and infestation: by the 1960s, it was producing up to three times more grain than traditional species. This, and his later introduction of high-yield rice in Asian countries, are credited with averting a predicted international crisis in food production that would have starved an estimated one billion people worldwide.

In 1944, George Harrar, plant pathologist and the head of a new Mexican plant breeding research programme, and Dr Frank Hanson, an official of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, invited Borlaug to leave his wartime laboratory job as a microbiologist with chemical and weapons company Dupont to go to Mexico and help poor farmers increase their wheat production.

It was highly demanding work. Borlaug and his assistants made 6,000 individual crossings of wheat, and by 1954 had successfully bred what became known as 'miracle seeds' of high-yielding dwarf varieties. The new seeds did not in themselves produce greater yields, but were highly responsive to chemical fertilisers and other inputs.

By 1956 his disease-resistant varieties had helped Mexico double its wheat production and, for the first time, become self-sufficient in grain. By 1963, 95% of Mexico's wheat crops used the semi-dwarf varieties developed by Borlaug, and the harvest was six times larger than in 1944.

By the mid-1960s, Borlaug's new varieties were being exported and developed in India and Pakistan, where yields were higher than any harvested in Asia. In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6m tonnes in 1965 to 7.3m tonnes in 1970; in India, from 12.3m tonnes in 1965 to 20.1m tonnes in 1970. By 1974, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals, and the technology had spread to north Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

But while Borlaug, along with MS Swaminathan and other young agronomists such as Gurdev Khush at the International Rice Research Institute, were feted for their contribution to eradicating postwar hunger, concerns steadily mounted over the long-term sustainability of the intensive chemical-based farming practices involved.

No one doubted that, in the short term, famines and food shortages were averted, but few people considered or tried to to counter the profound social and ecological changes that the revolution heralded among peasant farmers. The long-term cost of depending on Borlaug's new varieties, said eminent critics such as ecologist Vandana Shiva in India, was reduced soil fertility, reduced genetic diversity, soil erosion and increased vulnerability to pests. Not only did Borlaug's 'high-yielding' seeds demand expensive fertilisers, they also needed more water. Both were in short supply, and the revolution in plant breeding was said to have led to rural impoverishment, increased debt, social inequality and the displacement of vast numbers of peasant farmers.

Borlaug had a robust reply. He acknowledged that his Green revolution had not 'transformed the world into Utopia', but added that western environmental lobbyists were often elitists. 'They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger,' he said. '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 fertiliser and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists were trying to deny them these things.'

He displayed remarkable personal stamina in his research, working 12-hour days in harsh field conditions, and challenged younger researchers with the physical prowess he had developed through championship wrestling in his high school and university years. When his wife Margaret received the Nobel prize call from Oslo, it was 4am in Mexico where Borlaug was working, but he had already departed for the fields.

Borlaug was born into a fourth-generation family of Norwegian immigrants on a small farm in Iowa, where he worked as a small boy and through his teens. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1937 in forestry, he lost his first job because of the Depression, and returned to obtain a master of science degree and a PhD in 1942 in plant pathology and genetics. Once he had arrived in Mexico, he stayed for 30 years.

In 1964, he established the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, an autonomous international research training institute. As director of its worldwide wheat improvement programme, he trained more than 2,000 young scientists from nearly 20 countries. From 1984 until well into his 90s he taught at Texas A&M University, and lived in Dallas when not travelling.

Once again he became the bete noire of some environmentalists, this time over GM crops, which he tirelessly championed through the controversies of the 1990s as the best hope of the world to feed itself in the coming generations. The UN has recently announced that more than one billion people will this year be malnourished.

Margaret, whom Borlaug had met in college, died in 2007; he is survived by their son and daughter.