The crops developed by Norman Borlaug have saved millions of people from starvation.


By Tim Harford
Presenter, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

In the early 1900s, newlyweds Cathy and Cappy Jones left Connecticut in the US to start a new life as farmers in north-west Mexico's Yaqui Valley, a little-known dry and dusty place, a few hundred kilometres south of the Arizona border.



When Cappy died in 1931, Cathy decided to stay on. By then she had a new neighbour: the Yaqui Valley Experiment Station, a grand agricultural research centre with impressive stone pillars, and cleverly designed irrigation canals.

For a while, the centre raised cattle, sheep and pigs, and grew oranges, figs and grapefruit.

But by 1945, the fields were overgrown, the fences fallen and the windows shattered. The station was infested with rats.

So when Cathy heard strange rumours about a young American man setting up camp in this dilapidated place - despite the lack of electricity, sanitation, or running water - she drove over to investigate.

There she found the Rockefeller Foundation's Norman E Borlaug, who was trying to breed wheat which could resist stem rust, a disease that ruined many crops.

Further south, where he was supposed to be based, you had to sow in spring and harvest in autumn. Here, he planned to exploit a different climate which would also let him sow in autumn and harvest in spring, and perhaps favour different varieties of wheat.

However, the Foundation didn't have permission to work in the region, so he couldn't be there officially.

That meant no machinery, and no help to make the place habitable. But he left his wife Margaret and their daughter Jeanie behind in Mexico City, and went anyway.

"It often appeared to me that I had made a dreadful mistake in accepting the position in Mexico," he confessed in the epilogue to his book, Norman Borlaug on World Hunger.

But he was determined to tackle the scourge of hunger, something he had seen at first hand. "I am a product of the worst of the depression," he told the Dallas Observer in 2002.

Cathy took pity on the young man, teaching him Spanish, inviting him round for weekly meals, and letting him wash himself and his clothes. He later said he wouldn't have survived without her help.



from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2Wuod2N