Norman Borlaug- have you heard of him? Do you know what he has in common with Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel?
If you don’t know, you aren’t alone. I didn’t know either. Of course we know every detail about Lindsay Lohen’s current drug bust and arrest, and the speculation is never ending if Nicole Richie is pregnant, but when a person achieves what only four other people in history have ever done which is winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, our media organizations, obviously can’t be bothered with news like this.
Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal last week. Newsweek magazine has an article about him entitled, He Only Saved A Billion People– Some of the sentences and paragraphs in this post are from this article.
“Norman Borlaug is an agronomist who is credited with saving the lives of 1 billion human beings worldwide, more than one in seven people on the planet. Borlaug is a great success story showing how one person can make a difference. In the 40’s, and 50’s, he developed a hybrid called “dwarf wheat” that tripled grain production there. Then, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, he brought agronomists from around the world to northwest Mexico to learn his planting and soil conservation techniques.”
He also has some interesting thoughts on the organic food supply- From the Newsweek article:
“Borlaug scoffs at the mania for organic food, which he proves with calm logic is unsuited to fight global hunger. (Dung, for instance, is an inefficient source of nitrogen.) And while he encourages energy-conscious people to “use all the organic you can, especially on high-end crops like vegetables,” he’s convinced that paying more for organic is “a lot of nonsense.” There’s ‘no evidence the food is any different than that produced by chemical fertilizer.'”
His thoughts on organic food got me thinking- we do hear all the time about how much better organic food is then conventional, how many less pesticides and chemicals are in it, but who really funds those studies? Which groups are putting out this information? When someone of Norman Borlaug’s experience and knowledge says something like this, it catches my attention. Hopefully there will be more information that will come from this- maybe more unbiased studies and information, so we really can make informed decisions based on impartial studies.
This article is very interesting and if you have a moment check it out. It isn’t very long and it gives me a new appreciation for this man, and what he has accomplished for the world- especially the starving. One person CAN make a difference!
