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Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past fivedecades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yieldagriculture. He received theNobel in 1970,primarily for his work in reversingthe food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps morethan anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expandedfaster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that werewidely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best sellerFamine --1975! The formof agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billiondeaths.

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors of hiswork, have recently given Borlaug the cold shoulder. Funding institutions havealso cut support for the International Maize and Wheat Center -- located inMexico and known by its Spanish acronym,CIMMYT -- where Borlaug helped todevelop the high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat upon which a substantialportion of the world's population now depends for sustenance. And thoughBorlaug's achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller hasever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug'slong life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.

The African continent is the main place where food production has not kept pace with population growth: its potential for a Malthusian catastrophe is great. Borlaug's initial efforts in a few African nations have yielded the same rapid increases in food production as did his initial efforts on the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Western environmental groups have campaigned against introducing high-yield farming techniques to Africa, and have persuaded image-sensitive organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to steer clear of Borlaug. So far the only prominent support for Borlaug's Africa project has come from formerPresident Jimmy Carter, a humanist and himself a farmer, and from the late mediagenic multimillionaire Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa.

Reflecting Western priorities, the debate about whether high-yield agriculturewould be good for Africa is currently phrased mostly in environmental terms,not in terms of saving lives. By producing more food from less land, Borlaugargues, high-yield farming will preserve Africa's wild habitats, which are nowbeing depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. Opponents argue thatinorganic fertilizers and controlled irrigation will bring a new environmentalstress to the one continent where the chemical-based approach to foodproduction has yet to catch on. In this debate the moral imperative of food forthe world's malnourished -- whether they "should" have been born or not, theymust eat -- stands in danger of being forgotten.

ORMAN BORLAUG was born in Cresco, Iowa, in 1914. Ideas beingtested in Iowaaround the time of his boyhood would soon transform the American Midwest into"the world's breadbasket," not only annually increasing total production -- somethodically that the increases were soon taken for granted -- but annuallyimproving yield, growing more bushels of grain from the same amount of land orless. From about 1950 until the 1980s midwestern farmers improved yields byaround three percent a year, more than doubling the overall yield through theperiod. This feat of expansion was so spectacular that some pessimists declaredit was a special case that could never be repeated. But it has been done again,since around 1970, in China.

Entering college as the Depression began, Borlaug worked for a time in theNortheastern Forestry Service, often with men from the Civilian ConservationCorps, occasionally dropping out of school to earn money to finish his degreein forest management. He passed the civil-service exam and was accepted intothe Forest Service, but the job fell through. He then began to pursue agraduate degree in plant pathology. During his studies he did a researchproject on the movement of spores of rust, a class of fungus that plagues manycrops. The project, undertaken when the existence of the jet stream was not yetknown, established that rust-spore clouds move internationally in sync withharvest cycles -- a surprising finding at the time. The process openedBorlaug'seyes to the magnitude of the world beyond Iowa's borders.

At the same time, the Midwest was becoming the Dust Bowl. Though some mythologynow attributes the Dust Bowl to a conversion to technological farming methods,in Borlaug's mind the problem was the lack of such methods. Since then Americanfarming has become far more technological, andno Dust Bowl conditions haverecurred. In the summer of 1988 the Dakotas had a drought as bad asthat in theDust Bowl, but clouds of soil were rare because few crops failed. Borlaug washorrified by the Dust Bowl and simultaneously impressed that its effects seemedleast where high-yield approaches to farming were being tried. He decided thathis life's work would be to spread the benefits of high-yield farming to themany nations where crop failures as awful as those in the Dust Bowl wereregular facts of life.

In 1943 the Rockefeller Foundation established the precursor to CIMMYT toassist the poor farmers of Mexico, doing so at the behest of the formerSecretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, of the Pioneer Hi-Bred seed companyfamily, who had been unable to extract any money from Congress for agriculturalaid to Mexico. Soon Borlaug was in Mexico as the director of the wheatprogram -- a job for which there was little competition, backwater Mexicoin the1940s not being an eagerly sought-after posting. Except for brief intervals, hehas lived in the developing world since.

The program's initial goal was to teach Mexican farmers new farming ideas, butBorlaug soon had the institution seeking agricultural innovations. One was"shuttle breeding," a technique for speeding up the movement of diseaseimmunity between strains of crops. Borlaug also developed cereals that wereinsensitive to the number of hours of light in a day, and could therefore begrown in many climates.

Borlaug's leading research achievement was to hasten the perfection of dwarfspring wheat. Though it is conventionally assumed that farmers want a tall,impressive-looking harvest, in fact shrinking wheat and other crops has oftenproved beneficial. Bred for short stalks, plants expend less energy on growinginedible column sections and more on growing valuable grain. Stout,short-stalked wheat also neatly supports its kernels, whereas tall-stalkedwheat may bend over at maturity, complicating reaping. Nature has favored genesfor tall stalks, because in nature plants must compete for access to sunlight.In high-yield agriculture equally short-stalked plants will receive equalsunlight. As Borlaug labored to perfect his wheat, researchers were seekingdwarf strains of rice at the International Rice Research Institute, in thePhilippines, another of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations' creations, and atChina's Hunan Rice Research Institute.

Once the Rockefeller's Mexican program was producing high-yield dwarf wheat forMexico, Borlaug began to argue that India and other nations should switch tocereal crops. The proposition was controversial then and remains so today, someenvironmental commentators asserting that farmers in the developing worldshould grow indigenous crops (lentils in India, cassava in Africa) rather thanthe grains favored in the West. Borlaug's argument was simply that since no onehad yet perfected high-yield strains of indigenous plants (high-yield cassavahas only recently been available), CIMMYT wheat would produce the most foodcalories for the developing world. Borlaug particularly favored wheat becauseit grows in nearly all environments and requires relatively little pesticide,having an innate resistance to insects.

CIMMYT's selectively bredwheat, no longer a wholly natural plant, would notprosper without fertilizer and irrigation, however. High-yield crops sproutwith great enthusiasm, but the better plants grow, the more moisture theydemand and the faster they deplete soil nutrients. Like most agronomists,Borlaug has always advocated using organic fertilizers -- usually manure -- torestore soil nutrients. But the way to attain large quantities of manure is tohave large herds of livestock, busily consuming the grain that would otherwisefeed people. Inorganic fertilizers based on petroleum and other minerals canrenew soil on a global scale -- at least as long as the petroleum holdsout.

O Borlaug, the argument for high-yield cereal crops,inorganic fertilizers,and irrigation became irrefutable when the global population began to take offafter the Second World War. But many governments of developing nations weresuspicious, partly for reasons of tradition (wheat was then a foreign substancein India) and partly because contact between Western technical experts andpeasant farmers might shake up feudal cultures to the discomfort of the eliteclasses. Meanwhile, some commentators were suggesting that it would be wrong toincrease the food supply in the developing world: better to let nature do thedirty work of restraining the human population.

Yet statistics suggest that high-yield agriculture brakes population growthrather than accelerating it, by starting the progression from thehigh-birth-rate, high-death-rate societies of feudal cultures toward thelow-birth-rate, low-death-rate societies of Western nations. As the formerIndian diplomat Karan Singh is reported to have said, "Development is the bestcontraceptive." In subsistence agriculture children are viewed as manual labor,and thus large numbers are desired. In technical agriculture knowledge becomesmore important, and parents thus have fewer children in order to devoteresources to their education.

In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico establishedCIMMYT, as an outgrowth of their original program, and sent Borlaug to Pakistanand India, which were then descending into famine. He failed in his initialefforts to persuade the parastatal seed and grain monopolies that thosecountries had established after independence to switch to high-yield cropstrains.

Despite the institutional resistance Borlaug stayed in Pakistan and India,tirelessly repeating himself. By 1965 famine on the subcontinent was so badthat governments made a commitment to dwarf wheat. Borlaug arranged for aconvoy of thirty-five trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a LosAngeles dock for shipment. The convoy was held up by the Mexican police,blocked by U.S. border agents attempting to enforce a ban on seed importation,and then stopped by the National Guard when the Watts riot prevented access tothe L.A. harbor. Finally the seed ship sailed. Borlaug says, "I went to bedthinking the problem was at last solved, and woke up to the news that war hadbroken out between India and Pakistan."

Nevertheless, Borlaug and many local scientists who were his former trainees inMexico planted the first crop of dwarf wheat on the subcontinent, sometimesworking within sight of artillery flashes. Sowed late, that crop germinatedpoorly, yet yields still rose 70 percent. This prevented general wartimestarvation in the region, though famine did strike parts of India. There werealso riots in the state of Kerala in 1966, when a population whose ancestorshad for centuries eaten rice was presented with sacks of wheat flouroriginating in Borlaug's fields.

Owing to wartime emergency, Borlaug was given the go-ahead to circumvent theparastatals. "Within a few hours of that decision I had all the seed contractssigned and a much larger planting effort in place," he says. "If it hadn't beenfor the war, I might never have been given true freedom to test these ideas."The next harvest "was beautiful, a 98 percent improvement." By 1968 Pakistanwas self-sufficient in wheat production. India required only a few yearslonger. Paul Ehrlich had written inThe Population Bomb (1968) that it was "afantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. By 1974 India was self-sufficientin the production of all cereals. Pakistan progressed from harvesting 3.4million tons of wheat annually when Borlaug arrived to around 18 million today,India from 11 million tons to 60 million. In both nations food production sincethe 1960s has increased faster than the rate of population growth. Briefly inthe mid-1980s India even entered the world export market for grains.

Borlaug's majestic accomplishment came to be labeled theGreen Revolution.Whether it was really a revolution is open to debate. As Robert Kates, a formerdirector of theWorld Hunger Program, at Brown University, says, "If you plotgrowth in farm yields over the century, the 1960s period does not particularlystand out for overall global trends. What does stand out is the movement ofyield increases from the West to the developing world, and Borlaug was one ofthe crucial innovators there." Touring the subcontinent in the late 1960s andencountering field after field of robust wheat, Forrest Frank Hill, a formervice-president of the Ford Foundation, told Borlaug, "Enjoy this now, becausenothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually the naysayers and thebureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won't be able to get permissionfor more of these efforts."

OR some time this augury seemed mistaken, as Borlaug's viewof agricultureremained ascendant. In 1950 the world produced 692 million tons of grain for2.2 billion people; by 1992 production was 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billionpeople -- 2.8 times the grain for 2.2 times the population. Global grain yieldsrose from 0.45 tons per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of corn, rice, and otherfoodstuffs improved similarly. From 1965 to 1990 the globe's daily per capitaintake grew from 2,063 calories to 2,495, with an increased proportion asprotein. Malnutrition continued as a problem of global scale but decreased inpercentage terms, even as more than two billion people were added to thepopulation.

The world's 1950 grain output of 692 million tons came from 1.7 billion acresof cropland, the 1992 output of 1.9 billion tons from 1.73 billion acres --a 170percent increase from one percent more land. "Without high-yield agriculture,"Borlaug says, "either millions would have starved or increases in food outputwould have been realized through drastic expansion of acres undercultivation -- losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than alllosses tourban and suburban expansion."

The trend toward harvesting more from fewer acres, often spun in the media as ashocking crisis of "vanishing farms," is perhaps the most environmentallyfavorable development of the modern age. Paul Waggoner, of the ConnecticutAgricultural Experiment Station, says, "From long before Malthus until aboutforty-five years ago each person took more land from nature than his parentsdid. For the past forty-five years people have been taking less land fromnature than their parents."

In developing nations where population growth is surging, high-yieldagriculture holds back the rampant deforestation of wild areas. Waggonercalculates that India's transition to high-yield farming spared the countryfrom having to plough an additional 100 million acres of virgin land -- an areaabout equivalent to California. In the past five years India has been able toslow and perhaps even halt its national deforestation, a hopeful sign. Thiswould have been impossible were India still feeding itself with traditionallycultivated indigenous crops.

ONETHELESS, by the 1980s finding fault with high-yieldagriculture had becomefashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and RockefellerFoundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoilthe developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projectsfor Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some greenorganizations became determined to stop him there. "The environmental communityin the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundationsnot to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa," says DavidSeckler, the director of theInternational Irrigation ManagementInstitute.

Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank toback off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundationlargely backed away too -- though it might have in any case, because it wasshifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. "WorldBank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggestobstacle to feeding Africa," Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europepersuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; anexception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizerand avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford andRockefeller Foundations, became, he says, "a tar baby to them politically,because all the ideas the greenies couldn't stand were sticking to me."

Borlaug's reaction to the campaign was anger. He says, "Some of theenvironmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, butmany of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation ofhunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington orBrussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world,as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer andirrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home weretrying to deny them these things."

In 1984, at the age of seventy-one, Borlaug was drawn out of retirement byRyoichi Sasakawa, who with Jimmy Carter was working to get African agriculturemoving. Carter was campaigning in favor of fertilizer aid to Africa, as hestill does today. The former President had fallen in with Sasakawa, who duringthe Second World War had founded the National Essence Mass Party, a Japanesefascist group, but who in later life developed a conscience. Today theSasakawaPeace Foundation is a leading supporter of disarmament initiatives;Carter andSasakawa often made joint appearances for worthy causes.

Sasakawa called Borlaug, who related his inability to obtain World Bank orfoundation help for high-yield-agriculture initiatives in Africa. Sasakawa wasdumbfounded that a Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn't get backing for aphilanthropic endeavor. He offered to fund Borlaug in Africa for five years.Borlaug said, "I'm seventy-one. I'm too old to start again." Sasakawa replied,"I'm fifteen years older than you, so I guess we should have startedyesterday." Borlaug, Carter, and Sasakawa traveled to Africa to pick sites, andthe foundation Sasakawa-Global 2000 was born. "I assumed we'd do a few years ofresearch first," Borlaug says, "but after I saw the terrible circumstancesthere, I said, 'Let's just start growing.'" Soon Borlaug was running projectsin Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, and Togo. Yields of cornquickly tripled; yields of wheat, cassava, sorghum, and cow peas also grew.

Borlaug made progress even in Sudan, near the dry Sahel, though that projectended with the onset of Sudan's civil war, in 1992. Only Sasakawa's foundationcame forward with more funds, but although well endowed, it is no World Bank.Environmentalists continued to say that chemical fertilizers would cause anecological calamity in Africa.

Opponents of high-yield agriculture "took the numbers for water pollutioncaused by fertilizer runoff in the United States and applied them to Africa,which is totally fallacious," David Seckler says. "Chemical-fertilizer use inAfrica is so tiny you could increase application for decades before causing theenvironmental side effects we see here. Meanwhile, Africa is ruining itswildlife habitat with slash-and-burn farming, which many commentatorsromanticize because it is indigenous." Borlaug found that some foundationmanagers and World Bank officials had become hopelessly confused regarding thedistinction between pesticides and fertilizer. He says, "The opponents ofhigh-yield for Africa were speaking of the two as if they were the same becausethey're both made from chemicals, when the scales of toxicity are vastlydifferent. Fertilizer only replaces substances naturally present in the soilsanyway."

In Africa and throughout the developing world Borlaug and most otheragronomists now teach forms of"integrated pest management," which reducespesticide use because chemicals are sprayed at the most vulnerable point in aninsect's life cycle. Borlaug says, "All serious agronomists know thatpesticides must be kept to a minimum, and besides, pesticides are expensive.But somehow the media believe the overspraying is still going on, and thiscreates a bias against high-yield agriculture." Indonesia has for nearly adecade improved rice yields while reducing pesticide use by employingintegrated pest management. The use of pesticides has been in decline relativeto farm production for more than a decade in the United States, where the useof fertilizer, too, has started declining relative to production.

Such developments have begun to sway some of Borlaug's opposition. TheCommittee on Sustainable Agriculture, a coalition of environmental anddevelopment-oriented groups, has become somewhat open to fertilizer use inAfrica. "The environmental movement went through a phase of revulsion againstany chemical use in agriculture," says Robert Blake, the committee's chairman."People are coming to realize that is just not realistic. Norman has been rightabout this all along." One reason the ground is shifting back in his direction,Borlaug believes, is that the green parties of Europe have been frightened bythe sudden wave of migrants entering their traditionally low-immigrationnations, and now think that improving conditions in Africa isn't such a badidea after all.

Supposing that opposition to high-yield agriculture for Africa declines, thequestion becomes What can be accomplished there? Pierre Crosson, anagricultural analyst for the nonpartisan think tankResources for the Future,calculates that sub-Saharan Africa needs to increase farm yields by 3.3 percentannually for the next thirty years merely to keep pace with the populationgrowth that is projected. This means that Africa must do what the AmericanMidwest did.

"Africa has the lowest farm yields in the world and also a large amount ofundeveloped land, so in theory a huge increase in food production couldhappen," says John Bongaarts, the research director of thePopulation Council,a nonprofit international research organization. "If southern Sudan was parkedin the Midwest, they'd be growing stuff like crazy there now." Practicalproblems, however, make Bongaarts think that rapid African yield increases are"extremely unlikely in the near future." The obvious obstacles are desperatepoverty and lack of social cohesion. When Borlaug transformed the agricultureof Pakistan and India, those nations had many problems but also reasonably wellorganized economies, good road and rail systems, irrigation projects under way,and an established entrepreneurial ethos. Much of Africa lacks these.

Additionally, African countries often lack a social focus on increasingagricultural output. Young men, especially, consider the farm a backwater fromwhich they long to escape to the city. African governments and technicalministries tend to look down on food production as an old-fashioned economicsector, longing instead for high-tech facilities that suggest Western prestigeand power. Yet a basic reason that the United States and the European Unionnations are so strong is that they have achieved almost total mastery overagriculture, producing ample food at ever-lower prices.

An encouraging example of an African government taking a progressive view ofagriculture comes from Ethiopia, where, since the end of its civil war, Borlaughas run his most successful African project. Visiting Ethiopia in 1994, JimmyCarter took Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on a tour of places where Borlaug'sideas could be tested, and won Zenawi's support for an extension-servicecampaign to aid farmers. During the 1995-1996 season Ethiopia recorded thegreatest harvests of major crops in its history, with a 32 percent increase inproduction and a 15 percent increase in average yield over the previous season.Use of the fertilizer diammonium phosphate was the key reform. The rapid yieldgrowth suggests that other sub-Saharan countries may also have hope forincreased food production.

Whether Africa can increase its food production may soon become one of thequestions of international affairs. It may be one at which, in a decade or two,Western governments will frantically throw money after a crisis hits, whereasmore-moderate investments begun now might avert the day of reckoning. And oneof the questions of the next century may be whether the world can feed itselfat all.

IS opponents may not know it, but Borlaug has long warned ofthe dangers ofpopulation growth. "In my Nobel lecture," Borlaug says, "I suggested we haduntil the year 2000 to tame the population monster, and then food shortageswould take us under. Now I believe we have a little longer. The GreenRevolution can make Africa productive. The breakup of the former Soviet Unionhas caused its grain output to plummet, but if the new republics recovereconomically, they could produce vast amounts of food. More fertilizer can makethe favored lands of Latin America -- especially Argentina and Brazil -- moreproductive. The cerrado region of Brazil, a very large area long assumed to beinfertile because of toxic soluble aluminum in the soil, may become abreadbasket, because aluminum-resistant crop strains are being developed." Thislast is an example of agricultural advances and environmental protection goinghand in hand: in the past decade the deforestation rate in the Amazon rainforest has declined somewhat, partly because the cerrado now looks moreattractive.

Borlaug continues, "But Africa, the former Soviet republics, and the cerradoare the last frontiers. After they are in use, the world will have noadditional sizable blocks of arable land left to put into production, unlessyou are willing to level whole forests, which you should not do. So futurefood-production increases will have to come from higher yields. And though Ihave no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feedthe population monster is another matter. Unless progress with agriculturalyields remains very strong, the next century will experience sheer human miserythat, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has comebefore."

But "very strong" progress on yields seems problematic. John Bongaartscalculates that agricultural yields outside Western countries must double inthe coming century merely to maintain current -- and inadequate -- nutritionlevels. The United Nations projects that human numbers will reach about 9.8billion, from about 5.8 billion today, around the year 2050. To bring theentire world's diet in that year to a level comparable to that of the West,Bongaarts calculates, would require a 430 percent increase in foodproduction.

Lester Brown, the head of theWorldwatchInstitute, an environmentalorganization, fears that China may soon turn from an agricultural success storyinto a nation of shortages. Because much of it is mountainous, China alreadyuses most of its attractive tillage area, leaving scant room for expansion. Itsremarkable improvements in wheat and rice yields have come in part, Brownthinks, at the expense of depleting the national water table: irrigation watermay soon become scarce. As newly affluent Chinese consumers demand more chickenand beef, feeding increased amounts of grain to animals may cause grainscarcity. If, as some experts project, the Chinese population rises from 1.2billion to 1.6 billion, yield increases will not bridge the difference, Brownfears.

Privatization and dwarf rice have enabled China to raise rice yields rapidly toabout 1.6 tons per acre -- close to the world's best figure of two tons. Butrecently rice-yield increases have flattened. The International Rice ResearchInstitute is working on a new strain that may boost yields dramatically, butwhether it will prosper in the field is unknown. Ismail Serageldin, thechairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, inWashington, D.C., believes that the "biological maximum" for rice yield isabout seven tons per acre -- four times today's average in developingcountries,but perhaps a line that cannot be crossed.

An important unknown is whether genetic engineering will improve agriculturalyields. Corn is among the highest-yielding plants. "If the high naturalmultiples of maize could be transferred by gene engineering to wheat or rice,there could be a tremendous world yield improvement," Paul Waggoner, of theConnecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, says. So far genetic engineeringhas not produced any higher-yielding strains, though it does show promise forreducing pesticide application. Some researchers also think that biotechnologywill be able to pack more protein and minerals into cereal grains. Others,Borlaug among them, are skeptical about whether yield itself can be engineered.So far gene recombination can move only single genes or small contiguous geneunits. Borlaug says, "Unless there is one master gene for yield, which I'mguessing there is not, engineering for yield will be very complex. It mayhappen eventually, but through the coming decades we must assume that geneengineering will not be the answer to the world's food problems."

Today Borlaug divides his time among CIMMYT, where he teaches young scientistsseeking still-more-productive crop strains for the developing world; TexasA&M, where he teaches international agriculture every fall semester; andthe Sasakawa-Global 2000 projects that continue to operate in twelve Africannations.

Borlaug's Africa project is a private-sector effort run by an obscure NobelPeace Prize winner and a former American President whose altruistic impulsesare made sport of in the American press. Its goal is something the West seemsalmost to have given up on -- the rescue of Africa from human suffering.RecentlyWestern governments have been easing out of African aid, pleading "donorfatigue," the difficulty of overcoming corruption, and fear of criticism fromthe environmental lobby. Private organizations, including Borlaug's,Catholic Relief Services, andOxfam,carry on what's left of the fight.

If overpopulation anarchy comes, it is likely to arrive first in Africa.Borlaug understands this, and is using his remaining years to work against thatcataclysm. The odds against him seem long. But then, Norman Borlaug has alreadysaved more lives than any other person who ever lived.