Green Giant

Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug is credited with saving the lives of 1 billion people. So why is a small cadre of activists bent on tarnishing his legacy?

A A A Comments By Mark Stuertz Thursday, Dec 5 2002

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Borlaug is congratulated by Norway's King Olaf after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Borlaug with Jimmy Carter in Accra, Ghana, in 1988. Both oversee Sasakawa Global 2000, an African agricultural program.

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In Cresco, Ted Behrens, Borlaug's nephew and founder of the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation, recently acquired his uncle's 106-acre farm along with the one-room schoolhouse Borlaug attended as a child. He is raising money to restore the farm. "It is a remarkable success story of a group of local people determined to preserve this modest 106-acre farm of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate--land considered hallowed ground by millions of less fortunate people in Third World countries," Behrens says. "Not only did he help save a billion people from starvation, but he also helped save 12 million miles of wildlife from being plowed down for low-yield crops," says the Hudson Institute's Dennis Avery. "That makes him not only the greatest humanitarian in the history of our time, and maybe all time, but also the greatest conservationist."