Borlaug's medal
Our congratulations to Dr. Norman Borlaug, a member of the Plant Sciences Institute Board,who will be awarded one of the nation's highest honors, the Congressional Gold Medal. As a native son and a frequent visitor to Iowa, we have heard so much about Dr. Borlaug that his accomplishments are often reduced to platitudes. I want to offer my view on Borlaug and why his deeds are so important.
During the early 1970s, several student activist movements swept across the country, and one was called the "relevancy movement." Students agitated for courses that were relevant to the world around them. At the time, I was an assistant professor at the University of California San Diego, and, in response to the movement, my colleagues and I put together a course on food and agriculture.
Two readings for the course were the 1967 book by William and Paul Paddock, entitled Famine - 1975 and Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book, The Population Bomb. The authors claimed that we were on the cusp of a Malthusian catastrophe and warned that millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s.
Thankfully, the worldwide calamity never happened. Some argued that the authors were alarmists and that the data for their projections were flawed. However, the authors' claims were made credible by the terrible famine in Bangladesh in 1974-75 that took a million lives.
The larger crisis was averted because the Green Revolution began to fill the food baskets of the world. Borlaug and the other founders of the Green Revolution won the greatest battle of any war we've ever fought.
Who could be more deserving of the Congressional Gold Medal.
