♪ ♪
NARRATOR: It was in the spring of 1966, in northeastern India,
that Norman Borlaug came face-to-face with the enemy
he had been fighting all his life.
(children crying)
(flies buzzing)
Borlaug was a driven man,
a scientist obsessed by hunger.
And he was tormented by the thought that all of this
could have been prevented, if only people had listened sooner.
For years, Borlaug had traveled the globe,
preaching a radically new approach to agriculture,
one that he had helped develop over the course of 20 years.
Unprecedented population growth was straining
the food supply of countries around the world,
raising the specter of widespread famine
and social chaos.
LYNDON JOHNSON: Next to the pursuit of peace,
the greatest challenge to the human family
is the race between food supply and population increase.
That race tonight is being lost.
♪ ♪
WALTER CRONKITE: Dr. Norman Borlaug, an Iowa-born crop expert,
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday
for his work toward easing the world's hunger problem.
(applause)
NARRATOR: Within just five years. Borlaug would be hailed
around the world for saving countless lives
through what was called "The Green Revolution."
But Borlaug's stunning successes
had also unleashed vast, turbulent forces.
CHARLES MANN: The number of people who are hungry
declined dramatically.
But there was enormous social upheaval.
There is huge environmental damage.
RAJ PATEL: Norman Borlaug was responsible for the spread of large-scale
industrial agricultural production around the world.
I certainly don't think
that it's any credit to the Nobel Prize
that Norman Borlaug got it.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Half a century later,
Borlaug's revolution continues to shape our world.
TORE OLSSON: It's really impossible to understand
the massive growth of the human population,
to understand the urbanization of our species,
to understand our tremendous
increasing ecological impact on the world,
unless we understand Norman Borlaug
and the Green Revolution.
♪ ♪
MANN: Borlaug grew up on a very small farm
in northeastern Iowa.
And it's isolated in a way that is very hard
for a 21st-century person to imagine.
♪ ♪
NOEL VIETMEYER: On very quiet winter nights,
Norm and his sisters would go out;
they could hear
the train whistle, which was 14, 15 miles away.
♪ ♪
It was the only connection they had to the rest of humanity.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Norman Borlaug was born in 1914
into a clan of immigrant farmers.
His great-grandparents had fled Norway in 1847,
driven by the same potato blight that ravaged Ireland.
As children, Norm and his two younger sisters rose before dawn
and worked on the family's 100-acre farm
until after sunset, in a manner that would have been familiar
to the ancient Romans.
♪ ♪
MANN: Every year he harvested himself
a quarter of a million ears of corn.
He worked very, very hard, but he hated it.
VIETMEYER: Norm had no prospects whatever.
He had to stay on the farm and work.
And then when his father died, he would take over.
(crowd murmuring)
NARRATOR: In the late 1920s, when Norm was finishing grade school,
he saw signs of a technological revolution
that was transforming rural life.
VIETMEYER: Henry Ford produced a little tractor,
and that tractor did for farmers
what his Model T did for the general public.
(engine chugging)
MANN: The Fordson, it's called.
Typically, in those days, about 40% of a farm
was devoted to growing the food for the oxen and horses.
When you had a tractor,
that land became available to grow food,
and the farm's effective size doubled.
Their income doubled.
To have corn harvested in a couple of days in a tractor
was an incredibly liberating experience for him.
Anybody would draw a lesson from that.
He certainly did,
that this kind of technology equaled freedom from toil.
(tractor rumbling)
NARRATOR: "The fabled future had arrived," Borlaug recalled,
"and was even more fabulous
than anything we'd dared wish for."
VIETMEYER: That's how he got some education
beyond eighth grade.
Because of the tractor and these modern things.
He had confidence in technology for the rest of his days.
(wind howling)
NARRATOR: Within a few years, Borlaug's bright hopes
had been swallowed up by the Great Depression.
♪ ♪
In Iowa, the rain stopped,
clouds of locusts blotted out the sun,
dust storms buried farms and towns alike.
♪ ♪
Borlaug's high school graduation was an eerie affair;
no one mentioned the future.
In the fall of 1933, with just $61 in his pocket,
he left the farm for Minneapolis.
♪ ♪
MANN: He hoped to get an athletic scholarship
at the University of Minnesota.
He didn't think he was very smart.
He didn't think he was well educated or anything like that.
He hoped that this was his way into a better life.
NARRATOR: Not only was there no sports scholarship,
it took an entire term and three separate applications
before the University of Minnesota opened its doors.
He chose to study forestry, then something of a campus cult,
representing both a rebellion against capitalism
and an escape from its collapse.
Food and shelter were a constant struggle,
but there were consolations:
Borlaug was moonlighting as a waiter
when he met Margaret Gibson.
JEANIE BORLAUG: My mother was waiting tables to pay for her education.
I think she thought he was
very serious.
And my mother was not real serious,
but she had a great personality.
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1937,
with graduation around the corner
and a job waiting at the Forestry Service,
Norm married Margaret in a quiet ceremony at her brother's home.
But their tidy future vanished just three months later,
when Norm's forestry job fell victim to budget cuts.
Suddenly at loose ends, he went back to school
for graduate studies in plant pathology.
But the most indelible lesson of his college years
took place in the streets of Minneapolis.
VIETMEYER: He walked around a corner
and there was a milk plant.
♪ ♪
Norm could see behind a big fence
a bunch of corporate goons with batons.
(engine rumbling)
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Across the Midwest, desperate farmers were trying
to shore up commodity prices by cutting off
the supply of food to the cities.
"We'll eat our wheat and ham and eggs," they chanted,
"and let them eat their gold."
(horn honking, people shouting)
MANN: Dairy farmers were going to dump the milk
because they couldn't sell it for enough to make a living.
Hungry people descended on these trucks and demanded the milk.
And all of a sudden, they, they charged.
And Norm was trapped by the crowd,
and these batons were coming right towards him,
swinging and hitting people over the head.
NARRATOR: "Bodies and blood were scattered and spattered
all over the street," Borlaug wrote.
"I took off running, trembling, frightened.
"I'd seen how fast violence springs to life
"when hunger, misery, and desperation
infect the public mind."
It was terrifying to him, and he saw how hunger
can just turn, as he sort of put it, men into beasts.