During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of his grain and modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.1 He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

More recently, he has helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa. Borlaug has continually advocated the use of his methods and biotechnology to decrease world famine. His work has faced environmental and socioeconomic criticisms, though he has emphatically rejected most of these as unfounded or untrue. In 1986, he established the World Food Prize to recognize individuals who have improved the quality, quantity or availability of food around the globe.---Read the full Wikipedia report here.

From the Nobel Peace Prize presentation speech:

This year (1970) the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament has awarded Nobel's Peace Prize to a scientist, Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug, because, more than any other single person of this age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world. We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.

Who is this scientist who, through his work in the laboratory and in the wheat fields, has helped to create a new food situation in the world and who has turned pessimism into optimism in the dramatic race between population explosion and our production of food?

Norman Borlaug, a man of Norwegian descent, was born on March 25, 1914, on a small farm in Cresco, Iowa, in the United States, and originally studied forestry at the University of Minnesota. It was as an agriculturalist, however, that he was to make his greatest contribution.

"The basis for the award of the honorary doctoral degree to Dr. Borlaug is the impressive result he has achieved in wheat improvement, and the organization of the exploitation of the results of this improvement in agriculture, particularly in the developing countries. The new breeds of grain evolved by Dr. Borlaug and his assistants have resulted in improvements in harvest, quantitatively and qualitatively, that previously were considered hardly possible."

This distinction is only one of a great many academic honors conferred on Dr. Borlaug by universities and similar institutions in the USA, Pakistan, India, and Canada.

Dr. Borlaug went to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in 1944. Today he is director of the Wheat Improvement Program in Mexico.

Ever since that day, twenty-five years ago, when Dr. Borlaug started his work on the improvement of grain, and right up to the present, he has devoted all his energy to achieving the historical result which today is referred to all over the world as the "green revolution." This revolution will make it possible to improve the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people in that part of the globe which today might be called as the "non-affluent world."

Nations with ancient cultures, which right up to modern times have suffered the scourge of recurrent hunger crises, can now be self-supporting in wheat. A long and humiliating dependence on the so-called rich nations of the world for their daily bread will have been brought to an end.

--Read the full text of the Nobel Peace Prize presentation speech here.