Gates: Borlaug’s dream of world free from hunger can be fulfilled

DES MOINES – This generation can be the generation that sees Nobel Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug's dream of a world free of hunger fulfilled, Microsoft founder Bill Gates told an audience at the World Food Prize symposium Thursday.

Gates said in the middle of the 20th Century, predictions of famine and starvation turned out to be wrong because they didn't predict Norman Borlaug.

“He not only showed humanity how to get more food from the Earth, he proved that farming has the power to lift up the lives of the poor,” Gates said.

Borlaug, a Cresco native, was the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for creating higher-yield varieties of wheat that staved off famine. Borlaug later created the World Food Prize to recognize agricultural achievements. He died last month at the age of 95.

The world is re-learning Baorlaug's lesson today as attention is back on the cause of fighting poverty and hunger through improving agriculture, Gates said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has set aside $120 million in grants to help small farmers around the world grow higher-yield crops and get them to market.

When the couple created the foundation, Gates said they thought its basic principal should be the belief that all lives have equal value and that everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life.

Over time, their search for the greatest leverage brought them to helping farmers of small plots of land, who make up three-quarters of the world's poorest people, he said.

“Melinda and I believe that helping the poorest small-holder farmers grow more crops and get them to market is the world's single-most powerful lever for reducing hunger and poverty,” Gates said.

The foundation's grants will go to funding higher yielding varieties of sorghum and millet, sweet potatoes with a higher vitamin content that resist pests and legumes that fix nitrogen in the soil.

Gates said the next Green Revolution has to be greener than the first, which transformed agriculture in Latin America and Asia and helped avert famines there.

Efforts also to be focused on Africa, where yields have been flat over the past 25 years, Gates said.

“Now is the time. The world food crisis has forced hunger higher on the world's agenda,” Gates said.

But the effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that separates those supporting technology that increases productivity and an environmental approach that promotes sustainability, Gates said.

“They say you have to choose. I believe it's a false choice, and it's dangerous for the field. It will block important advances and can breed hostility among people who need to work together,” Gates said.

He argues that higher productivity benefits the environment, because when productivity is low, people start farming on grazing land and cutting down forest to grow crops.

World Food Prize Foundation President Kenneth Quinn said Borlaug was pleased when Gates' foundation began funding agricultural projects. The happiest moment of the last year of Borlaug's life, Quinn said, came at a conference in Mexico funded by the foundation to deal with rust disease, his “old nemesis” that was coming back.

“You have inspired us, Mr. Gates, with your impassioned commitment to end hunger and poverty,” Quinn said.