By Tara Mittelberg, BA candidate at Northwestern University and intern with the Council's Global Food and Agriculture Program
Last month marked the 103rd birthday of Dr. Norman Borlaug, the late biologist who helped initiate the Green Revolution through the introduction of improved staple crop varieties in Asia and Latin America. Dr. Borlaug has been credited with saving over one billion people from starvation, a number that remains unrivaled today.
I first came to admire Dr. Borlaug when I attended the World Food Prize Global Youth Institute as a senior in high school. Through this weekend-long symposium, I had the opportunity to collaborate with students and leaders from all backgrounds to analyze the complex causes of and solutions to food insecurity. Like many students lucky enough to be involved with the World Food Prize youth programs, I developed an intense drive to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Borlaug and become a hunger fighter.
In two months, I will graduate from college and enter the ‘real world.’ Overall, I’m optimistic about the future: global poverty continues to fall at unprecedented rates, renewable energy is on a rapid ascent, and there are plenty of open doors for young people like me who wish to work in agriculture. However, it is difficult to ignore the uncertainty of our times, particularly with today’s political climate bringing buried tensions and polarization to the forefront.
Whether the debate is about genetically modified foods, climate change, or vaccines, the American public has become increasingly suspicious of scientific fact and authority. At the same time, rampant partisanship, social media echo chambers, and a disconnect between cosmopolitanism and traditionalism have left the United States and Europe more divided than ever. And proposed spending cuts threaten the international development programs that sow seeds of peace, prosperity, and democratic alliances abroad.
It is in this uncertain world that my generation will have to address some of the toughest challenges in history including climate change, population growth, economic inequality, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation. By 2050—the year I celebrate my 55th birthday—we will have 9.6 billion mouths to feed in a world that is 2˚C degrees warmer than 2000 levels. This task is daunting. But when I think of Dr. Borlaug—the man whose persistence, humility, and humanitarianism helped spark the Green Revolution—I realize that his work can inform how our generation moves forward to address today’s problems.
Dr. Borlaug’s revolutionary breeding techniques and efforts to bring scientific farming methods to the developing world resulted in the greatest gains in agricultural productivity in human history. Until he died in 2009, he continued to advocate for science, emphasizing that “governments must make their decisions about access to new technologies, such as the development of genetically modified organisms—on the basis of science, and not to further political agendas.” Today, we must continue to hold lawmakers and civilians accountable to science, particularly as it pertains to climate change and agricultural technology.
Despite his scientific background, Dr. Borlaug was not one to isolate himself in the lab or test fields. Instead, he had a gift for building bridges between stakeholders. According to Ed Runge, one of Dr. Borlaug’s fellow professors at Texas A&M University, “he could talk to a farmer. He could talk to [Indian Prime Minister] Indira Gandhi. He could talk to anybody.” Today, in a world where science has become politicized, agricultural scientists have an important responsibility—and the exciting opportunity—to channel Dr. Borlaug’s humility to ensure that they understand the concerns of both the consumers and farmers whom their work is attempting to serve.
The Green Revolution did not occur due to science alone. Its success depended on the concurrent investment by governments and private foundations in capacity building, agricultural extension, and personnel training. The institutional changes that these investments brought about ensured that the Green Revolution reached the poorest farmers during and beyond the 1970s. Today, agricultural development continues to deliver one of the best returns on investment in terms of peace-building. We must not let short-term politics get in the way of long-term prosperity.
When I hear of the challenges that we must address by 2050, I remind myself that this is the year that my peers and I will be in the peaks of our careers as scientists, business leaders, and policymakers. Far from a distant abstraction, the mid-century challenges are our challenges. We must stand firm and address these problems with Dr. Borlaug’s scientific objectivity, humility, and charity, for—in his words—“the destiny of world civilization depends on providing a decent standard of living for all mankind.”