John Cornyn

A ceremony was held in Washington in July to honor a humble man who arguably saved more lives than anyone in history.

Norman E. Borlaug, 93, was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal for his life’s work in developing and spreading modern agriculture practices around the world.

A columnist recently called Borlaug “the greatest living American." At a time of rapid population growth worldwide, he pioneered genetic advances and farming techniques that have kept the world’s food supply growing faster than the population.

Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, is credited with preventing more than one billion souls from starvation in underdeveloped countries. His achievement is unparalleled, and he has received almost every humanitarian honor, from the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Nobel Prize. I was proud to co-sponsor the bill to provide him the Congressional Gold Medal. 

Borlaug was born on a farm in Saude, Iowa, in 1914. His service to the world was shaped by his Depression-era experiences. “You’d see young people asking for a nickel to buy bread, and older people sleeping in the park," he recently told the Dallas Morning News.

“We were a pretty sick nation at that time. It made me tough. I was angry that this kind of condition could exist and persist in our own society."

After doing wartime duty at a DuPont laboratory, Dr. Borlaug was sent by the Rockefeller Foundation to Mexico in 1944 to do agricultural research. Mexico then was a net importer of grain, with most production from subsistence farmers.

Borlaug spent 10 years breeding wheat cultivars resistant to disease, especially rust. He was able to speed up his work by taking advantage of Mexico’s two growing seasons.

A major breakthrough occurred when Borlaug switched from tall, thin varieties of wheat — stalks that collapsed under the weight of heavy wheat grain — to a Japanese semi-dwarf variety with shorter, stronger stalks. By 1963, Mexico’s wheat harvest was six times its 1944 total, and the country had become a grain exporter.

The Rockefeller Foundation then urged Borlaug to take his program to Pakistan and India. By this time, in the late 1960s, he was able to make even faster progress, and aid workers called the results a “green revolution."

Ironically, as this work was under way, the popular scientific community was predicting the exact opposite — namely global famine and mass starvation in Asia. The low point was in 1968, when biologist Paul R. Ehrlich published a wildly-popular bestseller, “The Population Bomb."

Predicted Ehrlich: “In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." 

He was wrong. Under Borlaug’s tutelage, Pakistan’s wheat production went from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 20 million tons in 2000. India also became self-sufficient quickly, going from 12 million to 76 million tons of wheat in the same period. Other Asian countries, especially China, have had similar success.

Borlaug is also an ardent conservationist. Because of increased productivity, millions of acres of trees and rain forest have been saved from destruction for cultivation around the world, to the benefit of us all.

Dr. Borlaug still teaches one class each year at Texas A&M University in College Station, where students learn firsthand from one of mankind’s greatest and most humble benefactors.

His work goes on. The Borlaug Institute at A&M concentrates on agricultural and economic advancement in more than 100 countries all over the world.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and Bexar County district judge, serves on the senate’s Armed Services, Judiciary and Budget committees. He can be reached in San Antonio at 600 Navarro or at (210) 224-7485.