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The Indian sub-continent was different. Here there was huge dependence on wheat, and the population was rocketing. When Borlaug began work there in the 1960s massive starvation looked unavoidable. To widespread scepticism, he imported his new seed and began his missionary science.

He knew that fertilising exhausted soil was a key to increasing yields. Dung and compost were insufficient. “Use all the organic materials you can,” says Borlaug, “but don’t come to Third World nations and tell them they can solve their problems with organic fertiliser alone.” He points to the environment wrecking sixfold increase in cattle numbers which would be needed.

His Indian experiment succeeded beyond the wildest hopes. Wheat production quadrupled in a decade; by today that increase is tenfold. The region’s population has more than doubled, yet its people are better fed than they have been in more than half a century. For Dr Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize followed in 1970.

Later, his hybrid wheat reached China. In China population growth is now coming under control. This is one of three observations worth holding on to if you are to follow me to a conclusion which (against the tenor of our times) is optimistic. First, world population is not — contrary to widespread belief — spiralling out of control. Though still our planet’s biggest worry, the rate of growth shows signs of reducing. Most projections see a gradual flattening of the increase until a point after the middle of this century when the world population may stabilise at about double its present level.

Second, starvation is not an effective form of birth control. In fact, the more secure and well fed people become, the fewer children they have. The harsh but seemingly plausible argument that producing more food is pointless because extra food will be met by more hungry mouths to feed is wrong.

Third, better crop yields do not add to the pressure on rainforests or on wild or marginal land: they reduce it. To hack into hillsides, swamps and woodland is often the resort of agriculturalists who are desperate. Without the extra millions of tons of cereals which work such as that of Borlaug now produces from existing ancient farmlands, hungry populations in Asia would be higher up the mountainsides and deeper into former forests in search of land to till. Intensive farming allows us to limit the land under the plough.

In short, this is a battle mankind can win. Norman Borlaug sees his life’s work as part of a holding operation until a time he will not live to see: when population stabilises. He persuaded me that the challenge, though immense, is finite: to feed another six billion people in the half century ahead.

He believes this is possible. His dream, he told me, is that biotechnology will find a way to impart to other cereals the famous hardiness of the rice family. This may achiev able by genetic modification.

Borlaug’s work has not been, properly speaking, in GM. He has used “natural” methods (if you are prepared to call a pekingese or boxer dog “natural”) of breeding. His genius strikes me as having lain in systematisation, acceleration, evangelism and hunch.

This has not prevented many in the green movement from vilifying what in its day was called Dr Borlaug’s “Green Revolution”. Greens hate the Green Revolution. Their case (if I can understand it at all) is that “traditional” crops and methods are best; but the term “traditional” defies useful definition, ignoring the damage that traditional low- intensity farming (for instance in Africa) can do to the environment.

Though he was initially sceptical about GM as applied science, Borlaug is now persuaded of its promise. He is wary of the patent-hogging multinationals but he nevertheless believes that by driving GM scientists out of universities and public institutions we are in danger of helping profit-making interests to corner science.

I put it to him that if he really thinks knowledge must triumph, then he should have no fear of the pseudo science of the green lobby. He replied that by distortion and intimidation Lysenko wrecked research right across Russia and set back Soviet science by 30 years.

I had forgotten about the lunatic plant science of the Stalinist Trofim Lysenko. But I recognise in the green lobby Borlaug’s warning about distortion and intimidation. How shaming that to sound a warning we must turn for moral authority to a 90-year-old hero of 20th-century science.

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