Who Is Norman Borlaug - Road to the Middle Class

Norman Borlaug is the guy behind the green revolution, the advances in grain breeding that has produced staggeringly large increases in crop yield in the third world.

It started in Mexico, as Elizabeth M. Whelan reports.

Over the course of 20 years, he developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat. The results were spectacular: Mexico evolved from a wheat importer to a net exporter by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, Dr. Borlaug’s work nearly doubled wheat production in Pakistan and India, saving millions from starvation.

You’d expect the media and the liberals to be all over this guy like a cheap suit, but somehow it never took.

Perhaps it’s because he helped people help themselves. Our MSM buddies much prefer people who help people by handing out other peoples’ money. You can’t do much media without emotionally compelling victim situations that can only be solved by handing out other peoples’ money.

Perhaps it’s because a lot of the funding came from the Rockefeller Foundation. You know, evil oil money. Remember how the evil John D. Rockefeller put the father of magazine feature writer Ida M. Tarbell out of business more than a century ago? Who can forget?

And then there’s the GM connection. Who knows how much of that high-yield grain is Frankenfood!

This week, Dr. Norman Borlaug was awarded in the Capitol Rotunda the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian award.

I’d say he deserved it.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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