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100th Birthday Of The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives

Happy Birthday Norman Borlaug



Congress gave a place of honor Tuesday to agriculture visionary Norman Borlaug, adding his statue to the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, but congressional leaders said an even better way to carry on his legacy is to continue his research to feed the world. Congressional leaders unveiled a bronze statue of the Iowan on Tuesday, which would have been his 100th birthday and is also National Agriculture Day. --Jacqueline Klimas, The Washington Times, 25 March 2014
Today, we live in a very different world from the one that Norman Borlaug was born into. It’s a world with less preventable misery, less hunger, and more hope for the hungry . What a legacy for this humble farmer from Iowa — this unlikeliest of revolutionaries, this man who changed the planet with a grain of wheat. --Mitch McConnell, The Washington Times, 25 March 2014 In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. 'The battle to feed all of humanity is over,' biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. Borlaug, who unfortunately is far less well-known than doomsayer Ehrlich, is responsible for much of the progress humanity has made against hunger. --Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, 13 September 2009

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Norman Borlaug is the best proof of Julian Simon’s belief in humans as “the ultimate resource,” as ingenuity leads to technological advances. And this theory has aged well, evidenced by the world poverty rate declining 80 percent since 1970 as things get better and better. Norman Borlaug lived from March 25, 1914, until Sept. 12, 2009, and is estimated to have saved the lives of 1 billion people. That’s news worth spreading. -- Jarrett Skorup, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 25 March 2014

Happy Birthday Norman Borlaug

Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 25 March 2014 I was 21-years-old before I first heard the name Norman Borlaug. It’s a shame it took until my third year of college to learn about one of the greatest humans who ever lived. Borlaug, who died in 2009, was an Iowa-born scientist who spent his life teaching new farming techniques in third world countries. His movement was eventually called the "Green Revolution." Borlaug was introduced to me during a discussion about another of my heroes — the late economist Julian Simon. Simon was the author of, "The Ultimate Resource," in which he argued ferociously against Malthusian concerns about overpopulation. One of Simon's main points was that human ingenuity was the greatest of resources, able to overcome problems seemingly caused by finite resources. More...


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