Today is World Hunger day, and I want to celebrate Norman Borlaug. He was a professor at my school, Texas A&M University, and I think Borlaug is a great hero to introduce people to EA. I'm surprised no post has the Borlaug tag. I gave a presentation on Borlaug during my EA intro fellowship talk, and people really loved it.

If you're not familiar, Norman Borlaug was an agricultural scientist who developed disease-resistant, high-yield wheat. This innovation enabled farmers to feed more people with less land, even if the environment does not cooperate. This was crucial, as countries were able to prevent famine and feed their populations, saving hundreds of millions of lives. Entire countries had their fields transformed into golden wheat in the 1970s. However, that is only the end of the story. Let's really see what made him impactful.

Early Life

Borlaug is not your typical EA. He is not a billionaire donor nor an Ivy League/Stanford student, and definitely not your Bay Area tech bro. Instead, Borlaug is poor. Almost dirt poor, he plays with dirt under his fingernails on the family farm. He is the oldest child, meaning he has responsibility over his three sisters. He always tamed cattle and played with food, going fishing and hunting like a real-life Minecraft player.

You've probably attended elementary and middle school with many students and many teachers in a big building, but Borlaug had none of that. His middle school had one teacher and one room, that's it. Yet Borlaug seems very intelligent, not in calculus but in farming and communication. He knows how to talk to peers, understand the pain of hunger, and experiment with food. Moreover, he's an athlete. He's a footballer, a baseballer, and definitely a formidable wrestler. He loves to wrestle his opponents, but nobody knew that he would wrestle world hunger.

Unlike most EAs who study at Oxford, Stanford, and similar universities, Borlaug attended the humble University of Minnesota. Actually, he failed the entrance exam to the University of Minnesota. Borlaug was no 4.0 GPA student, but he did fought on Minnesota's wrestling team. There's a problem: Borlaug was still poor and couldn't pay for college. Remember, this was during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Everyone is poor. No money.

Borlaug joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and saw firsthand people who were starving for food. In fact, he saw starving employees who worked for him. Borlaug saw this and internalized how awful hunger is.

Research

Borlaug graduated with a Ph. D. in plant pathology in 1942, after discovering the world of plant diseases such as rust. He’s very passionate about food: he did farming his whole life, but this motivation wasn't purely internal. Indeed, his experiences at the Civilian Conservation Corps probably made him excited. He's using the outside-in model of fulfillment over inside-out. This desire to help other people fueled his passion for agriculture throughout his entire life.

Another critical action was Borlaug's move to Mexico to join the Rockefeller Foundation. This means instead of researching plant pathology in a lab, Borlaug actually went into the field and bred different wheat strains. Borlaug also convinced local farmers to plant the wheat for him. This is crucial here: Borlaug is seeking real-world feedback on how wheat is actually used.

Most scientists would stop at the lab stage: they test a couple of experiments, publish a paper, and then call it a day. Yet usually nobody actually reads those papers, and the real world is always different from a lab. Borlaug discovered early on that distribution matters as much as discovery. Borlaug can have the best wheat in the world, but if nobody uses it, then he will save zero lives.

Borlaug also overcame the consensus that shuttle breeding doesn't work. He believed wheat could be bred in different environments, which is why he had multiple sites in Mexico from the swampy, humid heat to the chilling valleys. This made Borlaug more likely to discover a breakthrough versus an incremental improvement. Just imagine a crop that can be grown anywhere. From the deserts to the mountains, you can eat.

Institutional Persuasion

Borlaug led his team at the Rockefeller Foundation and CIMMYT. This gave him institutional credibility, which helped him achieve his goals.

Borlaug was still focused on results. Golden fields in Mexico. Massive success in crop yields. Farmers were joyful. Mexico continued to scale up with continued success during the 1950s, as the bottleneck is now distribution rather than innovation. By 1963, over 95% of Mexican wheat used Borlaug's variant. It was perfect. However, there’s a bigger challenge ahead.

India is at war, experiencing two drought years. Famine is everywhere, and millions of people need food, or else they're all going to die. Even the politicians and bureaucrats are desperate, but they're also slow. Moreover, countries in the past were not known for being free of corruption. So why would these people listen to Borlaug?

This is where I think Borlaug achieved most of his impact: convincing governments to use his solution. In other words, Borlaug is a salesperson, and in fact, Borlaug is the greatest salesperson (in number of lives saved).  Let's see why he succeeded.

First, he had a good product, and it works. His product was the wheat strands developed in Mexico. His product had proof in the form of yields and disease resistance, and farmers actually use his product. This gave him concrete support.

Second, politicians in India needed to find a solution because the scale of famine was unprecedented: tens of millions of lives were at stake. Imagine a disaster that kills one in ten people in your family and cripples the other nine. Even politicians were not immune, since they collect money from the lower-class citizens. Wheat imports from the U.S. were unreliable. Besides, India does not want to be dependent on the U.S.

This presents another problem: the Indian government prefers to be free from foreign intervention, such as policies from the United States. This would have shot down Borlaug's plan. What Norman Borlaug did was network extensively with agronomists such as M.S. Swaminathan in India. This gave Borlaug internal legitimacy within India despite Borlaug himself not being from India.

Borlaug was also very hardworking in following through. He flew to India many times to speak to people both in the office and in the field. He wants to ensure the distribution works as planned when India implements Borlaug's new solution, as he knows execution is how the project fails, not the science. After the Indian farming tests succeed, India rapidly increased wheat production. This fed millions of people during the crisis.

 There are really three things that built his trust:

• Borlaug overcommunicated details in simple language. "We can help you farm more wheat and feed your people."
• Borlaug never appealed to capitalism, socialism, nationalism, or effective altruism. He appealed to hunger and win-win scenarios.
• On another aspect, Borlaug probably could have turned his wheat into a company and patented his wheat strain. It probably wouldn't stop the assimilation of the wheat strains anyway, but it would slow it down, leading to more deaths.
  • Countries may distrust foreign companies entering into their borders. Looked at what happened with the U.S. and TikTok/Temu.

Failures

After Borlaug succeeded in India, many countries followed suit, implementing Borlaug's wheat strains in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Borlaug didn't always succeed. He failed in Africa.

Excerpt (from link):

Nonetheless, by the 1980s finding fault with high-yield agriculture had become fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoil the developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projects for Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some green organizations became determined to stop him there. "The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa," says David Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management Institute.

Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too—though it might have in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. "World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa," Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller 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 the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. 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 and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Thankfully, it only slowed down the Green Revolution in Africa, but it does show how truth-seeking is an important EA principle. Borlaug was committed to finding out how to best feed people, and his results do not lie. There are still many Malthusian critiques against him, but I don't think they hold much weight.

Using Borlaug in EA

When I gave my EA Intro Talk to students at my Texas A&M Effective Altruism group, they really loved Norman Borlaug in my presentation. They were far more engaged than rational arguments for EA (such as ITN, scope sensitivity, drowning child). I think Borlaug's arc really followed the Hero's Journey, similarly to Paul Farmer and Victor Frankl.

I wonder if Borlaug is useful in EA to appeal to the general population. Besides, EA ought to learn from the person who saved the most lives.

The next Norman Borlaug?

I think a great project would be food resilience in nuclear scenarios. It isn't necessarily to counter extinction, but I get sad thinking about billions of people dying from famine. We can have a Borlaug in other cause areas too, not just food resilience. Maybe AGI alignment, or biosecurity, or better futures.