Norman Borlaug, the father of the “Green Revolution”, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and celebrated by Time magazine in 1999 as one of the 100 most influential minds of the 20th century, died at his home in Dallas on 12 September 2009 from lymphoma.

In a cerebral interview in the Economist in 2007, Borlaug pointed out that global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%. Using traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation. The more intensively you farm, Mr Borlaug contended, the more room you have left for rainforest.

In the 1960s India hadn't yet recovered from the Bengal Famine which left 3 million dead. Indian farmers in the 1960s produced only 12 million tons of wheat annually; significantly less than their population required. In 1965 M.S. Swaminathan, C. Subramaniam and B. P. Pal, along with Dr Borlaug introduced the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides to the subcontinent. Today India is a net exporter producing some 200 million tons of grain a year.

Alexi Koltowicz, a progressive blogger at Scholars & Rogues, had this to say:  “When reading a critic, you’ll generally find the charge that Borlaug’s hybrids “required chemical fertilizers”. That’s not true. His hybrids require more nutrients because they work faster and harder than their non-hybridized kin. Chemical fertilizers are simply the easiest way to provide those nutrients, not the only way. A plant doesn’t care how it gets the nutrients; in fact, a plant can only take up nutrients in element form. Something with nitrogen in it doesn’t do a plant any good. It requires Nitrogen. Chemical fertilizers are simple elements, so plants use them immediately. “Organic” fertilizer like manure has those elements, but they’re tied together with other bits and pieces. The combined lot is worthless to a plant until a host of soil biota break the organic matter down into forms that the plant can use.

When you’re trying to avert starvation you don’t have the years necessary to build healthy, active soil. Once starvation is averted, however, you’d be a fool to push your luck over the long term for the sake of export revenues.”

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the Earth, but many of them are elitists,” Borlaug told the Atlantic Monthly magazine. “They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

“Africa, the former Soviet republics, and the cerrado are the last frontiers. After they are in use, the world will have no additional sizable blocks of arable land left to put into production, unless you are willing to level whole forests, which you should not do. So, future food-production increases will have to come from higher yields.”

Borlaug’s original experiments with selective breeding in Mexico took a decade to achieve the higher yields he was looking for.  The potential for genetic engineering excited him, “Some people fear genetic modification, which is not very sound, because we've been genetically modifying plants and animals for a long time. Long before we called it science, people were selecting the best breeds.”

Thomas Maugh, writing Borlaug’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times, tells the following anecdote about Borlaug.

“Borlaug formally retired from the International Wheat and Maize Project in 1979, becoming a professor at Texas A&M University. But in 1984, he got a call from Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa, who offered Borlaug funding for five years of work to aid agriculture in Africa.

Speaking through an interpreter, Borlaug said, "I'm 71. I'm too old to start again." Sasakawa called back the next morning and said, "I'm 15 years older than you, so I guess we should have started yesterday. Let's start tomorrow."

Borlaug later said: "I assumed we'd do a few years of research first, but after I saw the terrible circumstances there, I said, 'Let's just start growing.' " He soon had projects running in several countries, including Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.”

Borlaug didn’t have the success in Africa he had elsewhere in the world.  Crumbling infrastructure, unstable and autocratic governments, as well as feeble economic systems conspired to prevent clever agricultural products from taking root.

Presented with the US Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, Congress declared: "Dr. Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived, and likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history."