A Real Winner

 

It has been said with more than a grain of truth that if you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize start killing loads of people quickly.  Once you have murdered enough then make peace.  This, it would appear is the quickest way to win the Noble Peace Prize.  It is perverse because it is also so true and many previous winners fall into this category.  But, the hardest way to win this prize is to actually believe in a noble principle and work with backbreaking intensity all your life to achieve it. 

An example of some one who falls in to the latter category is Norman Borlaug.  He grew up a farm boy in Iowa and saw at first hand the poverty of the depression years and it instilled in him a conviction that it was impossible “to build a peaceful world on an empty stomachs”.  This fuelled a lifetime commitment of almost a century during which this determined man did more than anyone else during the 20^th century to help the world feed itself and the fruit of his labour was the saving of hundreds of millions of lives.

 

Now, that is the way to win a Noble Peace Prize!  It was typical of the man that when his wife told him he had won the prize he was working in a wheat field outside Mexico City and he responded by telling her someone was pulling her leg.  When persuaded of the truth of the prize he did not leave the field but kept working commenting that he could celebrate later.  It was this sense of urgency that stayed with him and his knowledge that every second two more people into the world crying to be fed.  By 2050 he predicted that the world would need to double its food supply of 2005.

He specialized in plant breeding and left a good job to go to Mexico in  1944 and started experimenting with wheat to help people who were starving there.  Mexican farmers faced soils which were depleted, crops ravaged by disease, low yields and were not even able to feed themselves, much less sell surplus for profit.   For ten years he persevered even ploughing by hand and, thanks to his efforts, by 1956 Mexico’s wheat production had doubled and it had become self sufficient.  It did not stop there, he then went to India and, while the war between Pakistan and India raged around him, began planting until it too became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains.  He even came out of retirement, in 1984, to take his seed and techniques to Africa. 

 

When the Nobel committee presented him with the Peace Prize they commented “More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world”

Isn't it sad, and a sign of the poverty of our education system, that hardly anyone even has heard of this amazing character?

“The fundamental basis of the community is agriculture, tillage of the soil.”

Baha’i Writings