Last week, Dr. Norman Borlaug won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He wasn’t broadly famous, so the well deserved award was a quiet event by modern standards. But it’s still a shame that the award ceremony didn’t get more publicity, because Norman Borlaug has saved more lives than any person currently living. Indeed, he may have saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived.

Shocked and changed by the scenes of starvation he witnessed as a young man working in the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, Dr. Borlaug devoted himself early in his life to the task of ending hunger. As a research scientist in Mexico in the 1940s, Dr. Borlaug used his expertise in plant pathology and genetics to develop varieties of wheat that were both high-yield and resistant to diseases. These new strains of wheat were introduced to developing countries along with modern production and farming techniques. Thanks to these innovations, Mexico became a net wheat exporter in the early 1960s. Over that decade, both Pakistan and India saw their wheat crop double, and they became self-sufficient wheat producers by 1968 and 1974 respectively. Because the wheat crops Dr. Borlaug cultivated have shorter and stronger stalks (“semi-dwarf”), they are able to prosper even in environments where the soil is poor and where longer stalks would wilt under the weight of extra grain. Dr. Borlaug’s contributions have been credited with saving the lives of over 1 billion people and are the key ingredient in what is popularly known as the “Green Revolution.” His work won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Norman Borlaug has saved more lives than any person currently living. Indeed, he may have saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived.

The Green Revolution helped avert the Malthusian vision of people like Paul Ehrlich, who famously predicted the onset of mass starvation and famine during the 1970s and 1980s (Ehrlich famously lost a bet on this score with Julian Simon). Dr. Borlaug’s methods are now at work in Asia and Africa, and if they meet with the same success that they did in Mexico, India and Pakistan, starvation and famine in these places will be made much rarer, if not wiped out altogether.

But no good deed goes unpunished. Environmental lobbyists sought to put limits on Dr. Borlaug’s invention, arguing that high-yield wheat threatens the environment in the developing world. Sponsoring organizations that helped back the Green Revolution—the World Bank, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation among them—were persuaded by the environmental lobby in the early 1980s to stop backing efforts to introduce high-yield crops in Africa. Dr. Borlaug’s response to this illogical and immoral effort to keep people from starving to death was as devastating as it was accurate:

Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

As Dr. Borlaug puts it, “One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy.” That bureaucracy includes the panoply of environmental interest groups that threaten to suffocate innovations like the Green Revolution that are dedicated to eradicating hunger worldwide. And the key figures in that bureaucracy continue to maintain influence despite the fact that their predictions are so consistently wrong. Dr. Borlaug has a theory about one of the doomsday men: “I guess it sells. I guess what he writes has a lot to do with raising funds.” He remarks that his track record notwithstanding, Paul Ehrlich continues to stick with his Malthusian predictions of doom because

People don't go back and read what he wrote. You do, but the great majority of the people don't, and their memory is short. As a matter of fact, I think this [lack of perspective] is true of our whole food situation. Our elites live in big cities and are far removed from the fields. Whether it's Brown or Ehrlich or the head of the Sierra Club or the head of Greenpeace, they've never been hungry.

Why is it that Dr. Borlaug’s track record is so unknown while people like Ehrlich and Brown continue to generate headlines with inaccurate predictions of doom? A reader responding to a blog post by Glenn “InstaPundit” Reynolds that noted the award of the Congressional Gold Medal to Dr. Borlaug probably put it best:

It's not because he spent his life serving the poor, per se. Press accounts are filled with stories about those who serve the poor. It's that Mr. Borlaug didn't serve the poor by giving away other people's money, or by demanding that other people give away their money. He served the poor by DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGY, which in the view of the press is just as evil as making money, if for no other reason than someone makes money from the developed technology.

Think about it: You seldom see accolades afforded all the brilliant researchers at GE Medical Systems, Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Medtronic, or you name it, for precisely the same reason.

Fame is not needed to justify or validate the life and achievements of Norman Borlaug. But fame and respect are due to him nevertheless for the astonishing contribution he has made to the quality of life around the world. And yes, more people should know about him. If they do, they’ll know more about his insights, and more lives will be saved thanks to the spread of that knowledge. That would be a better idea than fawning profiles of Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich, wouldn’t it?

Pejman Yousefzadeh is an attorney living in Illinois. He blogs at A Chequer-board of Nights and Days, and Red State.

Images credit: Photo by Flickr user Paul Keller.