Who was Norman Borlaug?

An American agronomist whose wheat breeding is credited with averting famine across South Asia and Latin America — plausibly having saved more lives than any other individual, and almost unknown outside agriculture.

What he did. Working in Mexico from the 1940s, Borlaug bred wheat varieties that were disease-resistant, high-yielding and — crucially — short-stemmed. The last point is the unglamorous key: traditional tall wheat, given enough fertiliser to grow a heavy head of grain, falls over under its own weight, a failure called lodging. Dwarf varieties put the extra growth into grain rather than stalk and stay upright, so they can actually use fertiliser and irrigation.

Shuttle breeding, his other innovation, grew two generations a year at different altitudes and latitudes in Mexico — halving breeding time and, unexpectedly, producing varieties insensitive to day length and therefore adaptable across many countries.

The scale. Introduced into India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s against significant bureaucratic resistance and during a war, the new varieties helped both countries roughly double wheat production within years, at a moment when mass famine was being openly predicted. Mexico had become a wheat exporter. The transformation became known as the Green Revolution, and Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

The criticisms are substantial and worth stating. The package required fertiliser, irrigation and pesticides, which favoured farmers who could afford them and widened rural inequality; it depleted groundwater and degraded soils in some regions; it narrowed crop diversity; and by raising the ceiling on population it is argued to have postponed rather than resolved the underlying problem.

Borlaug's own response was that critics arguing against intensive agriculture from comfortable countries had never experienced hunger, and that lower-yield farming would require far more land — a genuine trade-off, since yield increases have spared enormous areas from cultivation.

He worked into his nineties, latterly on wheat rust and on African agriculture.