Grim reader: How many lives did Norman Borlaug save?
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argument in much of the Obitosphere is about how many lives his
innovations saved. Is it one billion, as a Wall Street Journal
contributor suggested? Hundreds of millions, as the New York Times’
obit has it? Tens of millions, in the opinion of a San Francisco
Chronicle editorial? Perhaps it’s safest just to say, with the Boston
Globe, that Borlaug “is reckoned to have saved more lives … than any
man in human history.”
Borlaug was the father of the “Green Revolution,” developing disease-
resistant, extra-bountiful seeds that tripled Third World agricultural
yields. The result, according to Britain’s Independent, was “modern
science’s equivalent of the Biblical feeding of the five thousand.”
The persistent threat of famine was banished from India, China, and
other large swathes of the world. But though Borlaug’s innovations
made him one of just five people to have won a Nobel Prize, a
Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Congressional Gold Medal (the
others are Martin Luther King, Elie Wiesel, Mother Theresa and Nelson
Mandela), the Toledo Blade notes that he “may have been the most
important person in the 20th century whom people never heard of.”
A slew of opinion writers and editorialists set out to change that.
Borlaug’s career was “a testament to the value of education, hard
work, and a sense of wonder,” declares the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“Father Earth is dead,” declares New York Times “Freakonomics” blogger
Stephen J. Dubner. His colleague John Tierney does him one better,
writing about Borlaug under the headline “Greatest Human Being,
R.I.P.” Tributes have come in from such luminaries as George McGovern
(“one of the great men of our age”), ex-President George H.W. Bush
(“an American hero”) and current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
(“Dr. Borlaug helped millions of people escape from a life of hunger
and deprivation”). The Times of India called him “India’s annadaata,”
a term of endearment that translates to “provider of food.”
For all the praise, though, food is a controversial subject these
days. The major obits all note that by the 1980s, activists broke with
Borlaug over the mass use of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers,
which Borlaug believed were crucial to growing enough food to feed the
poor; in an interview cited by the Los Angeles Times, he dismissed
some environmentalists as “elitist.” At least a few of them shoot back
this week: In one representative take, civileats.com’s Paula
Crossfield, writing in the Huffington Post, blames the Green
Revolution for non-nutritious diets, exacerbated climate change, and
modern colonialism, among other sins. Grist’s Tom Philpott chimes in,
writing suspiciously about Borlaug’s role in Yankee geopolitics. “His
tireless effort to boost grain yields, while no doubt resulting in a
flood of cheap grain, created all manner of problems,” Philpott
writes, “that won’t be easily solved.”
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