The man who hated hunger
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | September 16, 2009
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HE WAS AWARDED the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, and the Congressional Gold Medal. Scores of universities conferred honorary degrees upon him. Research institutions on three continents were named after him. He was greatly honored, and for good reason: He is reckoned to have saved more lives – hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion – than any man in human history.
Yet until last weekend, when he died at 95, you could have asked 1,000 people at random, and chances are 998 of them would never have heard of Norman Borlaug. Almost as many would likely never have heard of the “Green Revolution’’ Borlaug spearheaded – the spectacular increase in agricultural productivity he first achieved in Mexico in the 1960s and then worked to spread through much of the Third World. Instead of the worldwide famine so confidently predicted by population alarmists of the time, Borlaug’s agricultural miracle sent wheat and rice harvests soaring, outstripping the growth in population. The result was a world in which food became more abundant and affordable than it had ever been.
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But Borlaug had seen too much of hunger ever to be cowed by such censure. The complaints of his well-fed Western detractors would vanish, he said, were they to spend just one month among the world’s poorest and hungriest people. Man may not live by bread alone, but he must surely die without it. Because Norman Borlaug lived, hundreds of millions of human beings were spared that terrible fate.
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[JR: He solved the technical problem. Now we need to get the corrupt gooferments out of the way. Where are the folks who are going to take today's "insolvable" problems, ignore the Doomsday pundits, and just solve them? American ingenuity is in our "genes". Even if those "jeans" just stepped off the boat! That's why we need to end welfare; it just demotivates people. We need to end the drug war; it just imprisons us and rewards our enemies. We need to downsize the gooferment; it just weighs us down. Then throw open the "golden door" to all those dirty folks yearning to be free. That's been America's "secret". Free people from their shackles and stand back. They will surprise everyone. Sometimes even themselves. Let's stop strangling the proverbial "golden goose"!]
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