India has paid tribute to Norman Borlaug, the American agricultural scientist who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yielding crops that helped to prevent hundreds of millions of people from dying through famine.

Borlaug, known as the grandfather of the Green Revolution that transformed agriculture in India and many other poor countries in the 1960s, died on Saturday night of cancer complications in Dallas, Texas, at the age of 95. Sharad Pawar, the Indian Agriculture Minister, said that his country and many other nations owed “a debt of gratitude to this outstanding personality” for helping to forge world peace and saving the lives of 245 million people worldwide.

“In the death of Norman Borlaug, the world today has lost not only an eminent agriculture scientist but a man dedicated to the cause of humanity,” he said. “Having known him since 1974, it is with a profound sense of personal grief that I mourn his passing away. My thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends in their moment of irreparable loss.” He said that Borlaug would be “a source of inspiration and sustenance for all of us” as India moved towards a second Green Revolution.

The first Green Revolution quadrupled India’s food production through high-yield grains and turned it from a starving nation into a self-sufficient food exporter.

Borlaug’s work began in 1944, when he was put in charge of a joint project between the Mexican Government and the Rockefeller Foundation to try to boost grain production in Mexico. Within two decades he had developed a high-yielding disease-resistant variety of wheat. He then worked to put such cereal strains into mass production across South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, while asking governments to introduce farmer-friendly economic policies.

Many experts say that he averted a widely predicted global famine in the second half of the 20th century and saved up to a billion lives.

A professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University since 1984, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honour of the United States, in 2007.

Borlaug’s children issued a statement saying they hoped that their father’s life would be “an example to all”. They said: “We would like his life to be a model for making a difference in the lives of others and to bring about efforts to end human misery for all mankind.

“One of his favourite quotes was, ‘Reach for the stars. Although you will never touch them, if you reach hard enough, you will find that you get a little star dust on you in the process’.”

A fertile mind

• In 1943, the Mexican Government founded with the Rockefeller Foundation a programme to increase wheat production to feed the country’s growing population

• Borlaug joined the following year as a geneticist and plant pathologist, and began developing strains of high-yield, disease-resistant strains of dwarf wheat

• The programme combined the new strains with advances in irrigation and fertilisers and was spectacularly successful. Having imported half its wheat in 1943, Mexico was self-sufficient by 1956

• In 1961, Borlaug was invited to India as the country was on the brink of mass starvation and under his leadership the programme expanded its work

• Between 1965 and 1970, India increased its wheat production from 12.3 million to more than 20 million tonnes and introduced new strains of rice that increased yields dramatically

• As the “green revolution” spread to other parts of the globe, world grain production increased by 250 per cent between 1950 and 1984

Sources: actionbioscience.org, Rand Corporation, nobelprize.org

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