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Norman Borlaug

Published: 5:48PM BST 13 Sep 2009

Borlaug, then visiting professor at Texas A&M University looking over some sorghum tests, Oct. 30, 1996, in one of A&M's teaching greenhouses, in College Station, Texas. Photo: AP

Borlaug spent his life on the borders of traditional agriculture and biotechnology and stood at the centre of the greatest and most dramatic success stories in world farming — the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, he was responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were once widely predicted.

But Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” was not “green” in the modern sense. High yields demanded artificial fertiliser, chemical pesticides and new soil technology. As a result of this he was vilified by many in the environmental movement in the securely affluent West, some of whom argued that higher food production sustains more people and thus poses a threat to the natural environment.

It was somewhat ironic, therefore, that his interest in plant breeding had been sparked by his own horror at the environmental devastation and dustbowls of the 1930s, when native deer and wild turkeys disappeared from the American Midwest. Many blamed the phenomenon on a combination of technological farming and dry weather conditions. But Borlaug's staunch belief that the problem was not too much technological farming but too little has proved to be the correct one. The introduction of new, drought resistant strains of crops has made dust bowl conditions rare because few crops have failed. Moreover, more productive hybrids have enabled marginal land to be taken out of production; wild areas have been reclaimed for nature and the deer and wild turkeys have returned. Borlaug believed that similar results could be achieved elsewhere.

It was also largely left to Borlaug to argue the moral imperative of food for the world's malnourished – whether they "should" have been born or not, he argued, once alive they must have enough to eat.

Norman Ernest Borlaug was born in the small Norwegian-American farming community of Saude, near Cresco in Iowa on March 25 1914. He grew up on his father's small grain and livestock farm and, after graduating from Cresco High School, studied at the University of Minnesota where he gained a degree in Forestry and was a member of the university's wrestling team.

After graduation, he worked for a time in the forestry service in Massachusetts and Idaho, but the job fell through. He then began a graduate degree, followed by a doctorate, in plant pathology. After three years of research work at Du Pont de Nemours in Delaware, in 1943 Borlaug joined the Rockefeller Foundation co-operative project with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, set up to solve the problem of the devastation of the country's wheat harvests by stem rust. Except for brief intervals, he lived in the developing world from then on.

Borlaug and his colleagues developed a drought-hardy, rust-resistant strain of wheat, then crossed it with a dwarf Japanese strain to produce a hybrid short enough to survive the wind, and channel growth into grain. Once the Rockefeller's Mexican programme was producing high-yield dwarf wheat for Mexico, Borlaug began to argue that farmers in other areas of the world would benefit from growing similar crops. The proposition was controversial since it implied replacing indigenous Indian and African crops such as lentils and cassava with "western" crops such as wheat. In 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico established the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), as an outgrowth of their original programme, and sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India, which were then descending into famine.

At first Borlaug failed to persuade the state-owned seed and grain monopolies to switch to high yield crops. But by 1965 famine was so bad that the governments agreed to try his dwarf wheat. A shipment was arranged from America, but the India-Pakistan war intervened.

Nevertheless Borlaug and local scientists planted the first crop of dwarf wheat, sometimes working to the sound of artillery. Sowed late, the crop germinated poorly, yet yields rose by 70 per cent. This prevented general starvation in the region, although there were riots in Kerala when local people were presented with sacks of wheat flour instead of the traditional rice.

Owing to the wartime emergency, Borlaug was given the go-ahead to try again the following year. The results exceeded all expectations. By 1968 Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; India followed a few years later. Since the 1960s, food production in both countries has outpaced the rate of population growth and, in the mid 1980s, India even became a net exporter. In 1968, the administrator for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) wrote in his annual report that the phenomenal improvement in food production in the subcontinent looked like "a Green Revolution" – which was how it came to be known.

In the 1980s, the "Green Revolution" spread to China, which is now the world's biggest food producer, but by the time Borlaug began to turn his energies to Africa, where Malthusian mass starvation was still a plausible threat, a backlash had set in. Notwithstanding the fact that Borlaug's initial efforts in a few African nations yielded the same rapid increases in food production as did his efforts on the Indian subcontinent, environmental lobbyists persuaded Borlaug's backers in the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation too backed away partly because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. Borlaug, once an honoured presence at international symposia, began to feel like a pariah.

The opposition to Borlaug's intensive farming methods was exacerbated by the negative publicity surrounding genetic engineering. Borlaug's work was not, properly speaking, in genetic modification. He used so-called natural methods of plant breeding and was wary of the monopolistic agenda of big agribusiness.

But he saw genetic modification as only a refinement of old plant breeding methods and became a strong advocate of its possibilities, both to enable more mouths to be fed and to help the environment. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug argued, high-yield farming would help preserve Africa's wild habitats from further depletion by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. The battle over biotech products, he reflected bitterly, was being fought mainly in the rich West, where "governments collectively subsidise their very small farming populations to the tune of $350 billion a year and where many of the major problems of human nutrition are related to obesity".

In 1984, at the age of 71, Borlaug was drawn out of retirement by the Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa who, with former American president Jimmy Carter, was working to improve African agriculture.

In 1986, Borlaug became president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, and leader of the Sasakawa-Global 2000 agricultural programme in sub-Saharan Africa, which has worked with several million farmers in 15 countries to increase food production.

Borlaug remained Senior Scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation and, in 1984, joined the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University as a Professor of International Agriculture.

In 1985, he was the driving force behind the establishment of the World Food Prize, which is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding achievement in the fields of food production and nutrition.

Borlaug held numerous honours and awards, including the American Medal of Freedom, which he received in 1977; the Vannevar Bush Award for lifetime achievement in science (2000); and the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (2002). He held 50 honorary doctorates and belonged to the academies of science in 12 nations.

He served on two Presidential Commissions: on World Hunger (1978-79) and on Science and Technology (1990-92). He was also a member of the American Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Norman Borlaug married, in 1937, Margaret Gibson, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Agencia Estado

In the OECD’s worldwide tests of pupils’ abilities in reading, maths and science, Brazil is near the bottom of the class (see chart). Until the 1970s South Korea was about as prosperous as Brazil but, helped by its superior school system, it has leapt ahead and now has around four times the national income per head. World domination, even the friendly and non-confrontational sort Brazil seeks, will not come to a place where 45% of the heads of poor families have less than a year’s schooling.

Brazil began its education late. When the country was a Portuguese colony even the elite had little access to education at home. The first printing press did not arrive until the 19th century, hundreds of years after books were first printed in the region’s Spanish-speaking countries. Before then presses were illegal. In 1930 just one in five children went to school. When Brazil did decide to build a nationwide education system, the wants of the elite came first. As in India, Brazil still spends a lot on its universities rather than on teaching children to read and write.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came to power criticising his predecessor’s achievements and promising rapid improvements. In fact, his successes have largely come from continuing and expanding the initiatives he inherited. He renamed and enlarged Fundef, the previous government’s programme to supplement local funding for teachers’ pay and schools in poor districts. Cash transfers to poor families, conditional on their children attending school, became more generous and were rolled together with other programmes under the brand name Bolsa Família. After two bad appointments, the president picked a good education minister, Fernando Haddad, who enjoys the backing of educational reformers.

Thanks to these programmes 97% of children aged 7-14 now have access to schooling and attendance is good. Yet the federal government can do only so much in a country with around 50m in education. The task of improving schooling falls to state and municipal governments. They face many problems, but two stand out.

First, Brazil suffers from teacher truancy. Teachers enjoy a “right” to five days’ absence a year with no warning or explanation, but some take many more. In schools run by state governments, 13% of all school days were lost owing to absent teachers in 2006. On a bad day in bad schools in bad states, teachers’ absenteeism can reach 30%. There are meant to be substitutes who can fill in for missing colleagues but this means that teaching lacks continuity—and there may not be enough stand-ins to go around.

Second, too many pupils repeat whole school years over and over. And after a long time spent getting nowhere, lots of children drop out early. Just 42% complete high school. Improving the quality of schools so that more children pass would lead to a marked increase in the amount of money available for each pupil. To accomplish this Brazil needs qualified teachers, who are in short supply. Many have two or three different jobs in different schools and complain that conditions are intimidating and the pay is low.

In São Paulo, which does particularly badly for a rich state, the institutions that administer education are depressed and chaotic, says Norman Gall of the Braudel Institute of World Economics, a think-tank that runs reading circles in ten schools in poor urban districts. The São Paulo state bureaucracy tries to administer its 5,000 schools and 230,000 teachers with a thin staff on low pay. Transferring responsibility for schools to municipalities seems to help, and this has been happening across the country in recent decades.

As elsewhere, teachers’ unions present a huge obstacle to improvement. Almost anything that disturbs their peace brings on strikes. At the moment São Paulo’s teachers are striking over a proposal to make new recruits take tests before they start work to ensure they are qualified; last year they were up in arms when the state government asked them to teach from standard textbooks. They opposed a plan to pay staff bonuses depending on their schools’ performance but have gone quiet on this since 70% of the state’s teachers received a bonus a few months ago.

Not everywhere is as bad as São Paulo, and even there you can see some signs of improvement. The state has cut the number of teaching days lost to supposed ill-health (the biggest cause of no-shows) by 60% in a year after changing the law. Reforms in the state could spread across the country if its governor, José Serra, becomes Brazil’s next president in the 2010 election, as opinion polls suggest. In Brazil’s north-east, hardly associated with enlightened public policy, a network of schools called Procentro and run by professional managers rather than unsackable political hacks, is proving successful and expanding. In other places state governments have shown a willingness to work with the private sector to improve schools. Across the country, money follows pupils to schools and children are tested—two of the ingredients for a market in public education. At Moisés’s school in Diadema a new head teacher has instilled some discipline and classes are now a bit more orderly. Jonathan Hannay, who runs Support for Children at Risk, a local charity, and has four children in public schools in the area, says things have improved in the past year, if only because teachers and pupils now work from matching sets of teaching manuals and exercise books. Such small changes can make a difference. But, if it is ever to live up to its potential, Brazil needs to keep reforming its schools, bearing down on the teaching unions and spending more on basic education.

Mercurial football genius whose flamboyant lifestyle brought a premature end to his playing career

'Genius" is a term so chronically overused in conjunction with sport that it is in danger of being comprehensively devalued. It should be rationed scrupulously, reserved for the truly sublime rather than being squandered on the merely remarkable. However, there should be no hesitation in dusting down the "g" word for a rare fitting recipient, and such a man was George Best.

Look beyond the lurid, fast-living image and set aside, for a moment, the alcoholism that was destined to transform his life so tragically. Like Stanley Matthews before him, Best was the symbol of footballing excellence for a whole generation. There were other magnificent players, including Bobby Charlton and Denis Law at his own club, Manchester United; but the mercurial Irishman was on a pedestal of his own.

As Matt Busby, his Old Trafford mentor, put it: "George had more ways of beating a player than anyone I've ever seen. He was unique in his gifts." Unfortunately, he was singular, too, in that he was the first "pop star" footballer whose every off-field action was scrutinised by the media. Relevant advice was scant, there being no precedent to his situation, and eventually the ceaseless attention, in which he revelled at first but which he subsequently reviled, goaded him inexorably towards self-destruction.

Best was born in 1946, the first of six children of an iron-turner at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. A Protestant, though not in the political sense, he was brought up on the Cregagh housing estate and was crazy for kicking a football from the age of nine months. Though his prodigious natural talent became evident early in his childhood, he was a skinny specimen, verging on the puny and embarrassed by his lack of stature, and his family considered him too small to tilt at a future in the professional game.

Nevertheless Best was fanatical about football and idolised the mid-1950s Wolverhampton Wanderers side, then the epitome of sporting glamour through their exploits in a series of Continental friendlies in the days before formal European competition. An intelligent boy, he passed the 11-plus examination only to find that his grammar school majored in rugby. His reaction - and how typical this would seem, later in life - was truancy, partly because he had been split from former friends and partly to play in soccer matches.

Soon he was transferred to a secondary modern which catered for his obsession and he progressed, though not enough to earn selection for Northern Ireland Schoolboys. However, Best's breathtaking ability was spotted by Bob Bishop, Manchester United's chief scout in Ulster, who rang Matt Busby and proclaimed: "I think I've found a genius."

Even then, the path to stardom was to be tortuous for the seemingly frail wisp of a 15-year-old who crossed the Irish Sea to Old Trafford in 1961. Having barely left his home city before, he travelled on an overnight ferry with the similarly unworldly Eric McMordie - later to enjoy success with Middlesbrough and Northern Ireland - and was distinctly underwhelmed by his reception in Manchester.

Little was done to welcome the painfully shy duo and they succumbed to homesickness, returning to Belfast and, in Best's case, to a likely future as a printer. Soon, though, he changed his mind and went back to Old Trafford where, before long, he was to stand the established order on its head in spectacular fashion.

He announced his limitless potential in training sessions, sparkling against star performers such as the goalkeeper and fellow Ulsterman Harry Gregg, whom Best duped too repeatedly for beginner's luck to have been a factor. Still only 17, he tasted senior action for the first time in September 1963 and by December he was a fixture in Busby's side, one of the final elements, and surely the most crucial, in the painstaking reconstruction process which had been under way since the Munich air disaster five years earlier.

Operating alongside fellow world-class forwards in Law and Charlton, Best was incandescent, a magical manipulator of a football and an entertainer supreme. Positioned nominally on the wing but roaming at will, he was capable of going past opponent after opponent, able and frequently eager to make brutal assailants look like clumsy buffoons, and he was as clinical a finisher as any in the land.

Much is made of his heavenly fusion of skill and speed, balance and timing, which made him sometimes virtually unplayable. In addition, though, Best was immensely brave and, in his early twenties, attained a resilient strength and an unshakeable self-belief which enabled him to laugh in the face of the vicious physical punishment to which he was routinely subjected. To enhance his worth still further, he was mentally acute, which allowed him to apply his instinctive flair to maximum advantage. In short, in a footballing sense he was flawless, possessing the assets to excel in any role.

True, there were times when team-mates would scream in exasperation when the Irishman, having dribbled past three defenders, would teeter on the verge of losing possession to a fourth. The chances were, though, that in the next breath they would be hailing a wonder goal, created from a seemingly impossible position.

Performing in this vein, Best contributed monumentally to League Championships in 1965 and 1967 and to the attainment of United's so-called holy grail, the European Cup, in 1968. Indeed it was, perhaps, during the exhilarating pursuit of that elusive prize that George Best the footballer made the quantum leap to Georgie Best the pop icon.

Early in 1966, the Red Devils had defeated mighty Benfica, the Portuguese champions, by three goals to two in the first leg of a European Cup quarter-final at Old Trafford. The second leg in Lisbon's Stadium of Light was a daunting prospect and Busby, with uncharacteristic caution, had urged his men to play it safe for the first 20 minutes.

Best had other ideas. Running at the Eagles' formidable rearguard with swashbuckling abandon, he scored two fabulous goals in the opening 12 minutes and inspired a scintillating 5-1 victory. His display was greeted rapturously but the impact was magnified still further when he donned a sombrero to descend from the plane's steps on his return to England. With his good looks, flowing locks and, now, his sense of the flamboyant away from the pitch, he was enshrined as "El Beatle".

Duly, his life took on a different dimension. Now he was public property as never before and he delighted in the advantages thus accrued. Commercial opportunities abounded, beautiful girls prostrated themselves before him and the attraction of alcohol became gradually more insistent. For a long time, though, despite dire warnings from Busby that he was going down the wrong road, that was not a problem to a young and exceptionally fit athlete.

Inklings that difficulties were brewing for Best surfaced after 1968, during which he was voted both English and European Footballer of the Year after contributing an opportunist goal to United's European Cup Final defeat of Benfica at Wembley. In the wake of that longed-for triumph, a perhaps understandable sense of complacency emanated from Old Trafford, where a 59-year-old manager with an ageing team might have been excused a little weariness after battling back from the horror of Munich.

Best, though, had a different agenda. He was still young and hungry for more honours, becoming increasingly frustrated at what he saw as lack of ambition around him. Not surprisingly, a gradual decline set in at the club, and the fact that it was largely masked by Best's individual splendour - he was top scorer in five successive campaigns from 1967-68 to 1971-72 and once netted six times in an FA Cup tie against Northampton Town - did little to placate United's principal asset.

Sadly, there was to be no consolation on the international front, where Best turned in occasional inspirational displays - notably in a stirring win over Scotland at Windsor Park, Belfast, in 1967 - but usually was hamstrung by the poor overall standard of the team. As a result, he would refer to his Northern Ireland efforts as "recreational football", a slight which reflected overweening gall at his unavoidable absence from the world's great tournaments rather than genuine malice.

Back in Manchester, his disillusionment was heightened when Busby refused to make him captain, citing his growing irresponsibility as the reason, and there followed a succession of disciplinary spats and absences without leave as Best turned ever more frequently towards the bottle. In addition, he fell out with Bobby Charlton, being sickened by what he perceived as the older man's holier-than-thou attitude over Best's playboy lifestyle. For his part, Charlton believed, with simple logic, that Best was letting the side down.

Meanwhile the Belfast boy's sexual conquests were spread regularly across the newspapers - he admitted that he saw most attractive women as a challenge - and his goldfish-bowl existence intensified when he moved into a custom-built, ultra-modern house in Sale which became a Mecca for rubberneckers.

After Busby's retirement, Best led his two successors as manager - first Wilf McGuinness and then Frank O'Farrell - a merry dance with his unscheduled absences, and by the spring of 1972 his situation was approaching crisis point. Though still playing superbly at times, and carrying an otherwise mediocre team, he could no longer shoulder the responsibility and his drinking spiralled dangerously out of control.

That May, unable to cope, he announced his retirement and decamped to Marbella, only to return for the start of the new season. But more strife was in store. By December he was transfer-listed after further indiscretions, only to be lured back by yet another new manager, Tommy Docherty. It was a dubious rapprochement which ended in acrimony when the team hit the skids, quickly followed by Best himself, who played his last game for relegation-doomed Manchester United as a distinctly portly 27-year-old, on New Year's Day 1974.

What followed was largely irrelevant to what made George Best special in the first place, his football career continuing for a further 10 years but playing second fiddle to drink, sex and gambling, and it constitutes a tale more edifying in summary than gruesome detail.

At various junctures he ran the Slack Alice night-club in Manchester and Bestie's Bar at Hermosa Beach, California. There was a spectacular fall-out with one Miss World, Marjorie Wallace, which resulted in Best's being charged with theft before being released without a stain on his character, and a fling with another holder of that title, Mary Stavin. There were marathon benders without number, and sundry brawls; a Christmas spent in prison for drink-driving; various hospitalisations for alcoholism; divorce from Angela Macdonald Janes, the long-suffering mother of his son, Calum; and admitted guilt over the emotional neglect of his mother, who died an alcoholic at the age of 54.

Post United, the pick of Best's footballing travels included three summers with Los Angeles Aztecs, during which he faced the likes of Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer and intermittently rediscovered the old flair, fitness and enthusiasm. Also there was an initially exhilarating but eventually unsatisfying brief stint with Second Division Fulham in harness with his fellow showman Rodney Marsh.

Then came turbulent sojourns with Fort Lauderdale Strikers and Hibernian, and fleeting service with San Jose Earthquakes, during which he contrived one goal of divine quality, which saw him mesmerise four defenders before beating the goalkeeper.

After his divorce from his first wife, there were long-term liaisons with the model Angie Lynn and with Mary Shatila, who also guided his business affairs as he earned a living through personal appearances. In 1995, still fighting alcoholism, he arranged to marry Alex Pursey, a Virgin flight attendant half his age, but failed to turn up for his own wedding because he had gone drinking with another girl. The ceremony took place a week later, but it didn't stop his drinking with other girls. They divorced after nine years.

Best continued to thrive as a professional celebrity, an after-dinner speaker and soccer pundit who was engagingly witty when sober, sometimes obnoxious when not. Despite that, despite everything, the game he illuminated so brilliantly remained his defining passion to the last.

"I didn't decide one day that I would drink myself to death," he announced after having a liver transplant in July 2002. "It is as a result of alcoholism. Alcoholism is a disease. It's the same with drugs. You don't decide suddenly, 'I'll be a drug addict.' " Best was addicted to alcohol - his continued drinking even after his transplant was to lose him much public sympathy - and he was addicted to women. But most of all he was addicted to football.

He leaves unanswerable questions behind him. How great might he have become but for the bottle? Had Matt Busby been younger, less scarred by past trauma, might he have imposed sufficient discipline to inspire the most naturally gifted player of modern times to scale even loftier peaks? At this distance, it doesn't matter. For seven or eight seasons George Best gave untold pleasure to countless fans all over the world, created so much that was beautiful and left a hoard of deathless memories. And that is enough.

Ivan Ponting