Remembering Norman Borlaug

From the creator

This the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com Norman Borlaug led what was known as the Green Revolution. As a plant scientist, he may have saved more lives than anyone else in history -- as many as a billion, by some estimates. He traveled the world to help poor people develop better ways to produce food. He worked in the fields to show farmers new ways to grow wheat, rice and other crops. And he worked in the laboratory to breed new wheat varieties that could resist disease. Lately he worried about a new threat, a fungus called Ug99. It was discovered in Uganda ten years ago and has spread in Africa and now Asia. Mister Borlaug said this new strain of stem rust organism has the power to destroy most of the wheat varieties being grown around the world. Norman Borlaug taught at Texas A&M University and worked on international projects until not long before his death on September twelfth. He was ninety-five and suffering from cancer. In nineteen forty-four he began work on a project in Mexico financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. By the middle of the nineteen fifties, Mexico had doubled its wheat production per hectare. Norman Borlaug and his team had even greater success in Pakistan and India. Farmers could grow four times more wheat than before. Later in life he tried to bring the Green Revolution to Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen seventy and the Presidential Medal of Freedom seven years later. But

Published 2009-10-15 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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