Cosmos contributing editor Elizabeth Finkel, pictured with Norman Borlaug earlier this year.

Credit: Elizabeth Finkel

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SYDNEY: Since his death on Saturday, reports of Norman Borlaug's passing have graced the world's news headlines. But few of this generation will be familiar with his name or the many millions of lives he saved.

Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution which ushered in a new era of highly productive agriculture. By freeing people from imminent starvation, it set countries like Mexico, China and India on the road to development.

His legacy of high-yielding crops brought in an era of unparalleled cheap food for the entire world. In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and credited with having saved more lives than any other person in history.

Six times the yield

Borlaug's early years fated him for his life journey. He grew up in a small Norwegian immigrant community in rural Iowa. Agriculture was the backbone of a generally happy and comfortable existence. But he knew hunger from his university days during the Great Depression.

He originally qualified as a forester but early on became captivated by the diseases of plants particularly, a very shifty fungus known as rust.

It was as a rust expert that in 1944 he was recruited to a project aimed at helping Mexico improve its agricultural output. The project was a joint initiative of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government.

It took over a decade but Borlaug bred a new generation of wheat that raised productivity by over 600%. Nothing like it has ever been seen before or since. Mexico went from being unable to feed itself to a net exporter of wheat.

Superwheat

Borlaug's superwheat rested on two breakthroughs. One was breeding dwarf wheat that put its resources into the grain rather than the stalk, and was sturdy enough not to topple over in the wind. Today the descendants of that dwarf wheat stretch across the world's fields from Australia to Azerbajan.

The other breakthrough was breeding rust-resistance into the wheat. Having helped Mexico take its first steps out of a subsistence economy, Borlaug turned his attention to Pakistan and India.

He had already laid the groundwork for these countries by training many of their young agronomists at a kind of United Nations of agriculture that he helped create in Sonora, Mexico. Still it was no easy matter to introduce the new varieties and get beyond the natural and political obstacles.