A Good Man -“Green Pioneer” joins Elie Wiesel, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela & Martin Luther King
An Iowa boy once left his family’s farm for the city, but never forgot his roots. He grew up to feed millions. Earlier this week, he received the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of his lifetime work saving millions of people around the world from starvation.
Norman Borlaug was a pioneer of the "Green Revolution". He was born on a farm in 1914 made enormous contributions towards easing the suffering of the world’s poor. He recently became one of only five people in the world’s history to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, Nobel Peace Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He now stands with Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel and Nelson Mandela—the only others to receive all three honors.
The ceremony was held in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol was attended by President Bush, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and other congressional figures. More importantly, Borlaug’s friends and colleagues from Iowa, Mexico, India, Africa and Japan were there to laud him.
Borlaug, 93, was honored for his achievements in developing high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat.
He founded the World Food Prize in 1986 to increase attention to landmark achievements in food and agriculture on a scale equal to the Nobel Prize.
Borlaug says that his passion to end hunger was at least partly due to growing up during the darkest days of the Depression in Iowa, where he saw a lot of suffering.
He left home to attend the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, figuring he had a better chance of obtaining a job to support himself in a big city.
"There I saw what poverty really was," he said. "This was my first experience in a big city. People, many of them, not only elderly but middle-aged and younger, with their hands out asking for a nickel to buy bread. He adds, “The chaos of that period, the hunger and the misery, left a big impact on me."
Borlaug studied forestry for his bachelor's degree. He had to drop out a couple of times along the way to work and gain enough money to continue his education. Eventually, he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in plant pathology.
He went on to take part in a Rockefeller Foundation program in Mexico, where he worked to improve wheat yields for the next 16 years.
The remarkable results he achieved were brought to Asia and Latin America, igniting what is known as the "Green Revolution" because so many people were fed rather than dying of malnutrition and starvation.
Even at 93, Borlaug continues working and spreading the message of ending hunger, and he said it's his hope that today's event will bring more notice to "an army of hunger fighters" in many parts of the world.
"I have been fortunate in a number of cases of being a leader of this team," he said.
During Borlaug’s gold medal ceremony in 1960 he noted that 60 percent of the world's people routinely went hungry. By the year 2000, that had dropped to just 14 percent.
Even so, this translates to 850 million men, women and children who lack proper nutrition, he points out.
"Thus, despite the successes of the Green Revolution, the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won."
Posted by Rebecca Sato
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