Early Years In Iowa
And I saw chaos in this country. I saw all the rural banks go broke. There was no bank insurance. And many of the farmers—the good, big farmers—their way of saving at that time was in stock of that bank. ...And when the bank went broke—okay, they're going to collect on that stock. So they'd foreclose on your land.... At the auction, neighbors came with pitchforks and shotguns and that property wasn't bought at its true value. That's how close we were to real trouble in this country.

And then, in 1933, when I went to Minneapolis to register to go to the University...I happened to wander down in North Minneapolis, down in the market section. Didn't even know where I was. Big mass of churning people. A strike. Milk and vegetable producers. I'm standing there like a little country boy in the big city and all at once there's a photographer climbed up to take a picture of this mass of churning people. And I'm standing there beside this car. And somebody grabbed him and took him and busted his camera, and the first thing you know I was in the middle of a terrible riot. And I saw all of these things coming from the country where I'd never seen hunger. So, because of all of this I had a very strong concept of what it was like in other countries.

The Green Revolution
I disagree quite heatedly sometimes with the economists who say "India's wasting a lot of capital resources by carrying this huge stock of grain. Better they had carried much more modest stocks of grain and invested that capital part of it in other things that would be generating income." But they [India] still remember '65, '66, '67. We haven't had anything like that to keep us...aware of what it really means when you run out. And that makes a difference. How much does security of food mean? Now they've got another problem—how to distribute that [food] equitably. But that's because of poverty of so much of their population. Lack of employment or underemployment.... But under emergencies, at least, the government has within its power, if it wants to exert it, to distribute that [grain reserve]; it's right there. It's not like it was in the middle '60s when you didn't know if the ship was going to arrive in time.

Earth's Carrying Capacity
Well, if you talk about the total carrying capacity of the planet Earth, at the present time we have not reached it. But we have it poorly located. We've got too many people in some places where the carrying capacity has been surpassed. But not from the standpoint of global [carrying capacity]. But how you move those people from overtaxed or overpopulated to less populated [areas], then you get into social-political problems. But, biologically speaking, we haven't reached this. But that's no way to handle these problems.

African Agriculture
In 1985 Borlaug received a call from the publicist for Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa asking why something like the Green Revolution hadn't been tried in sub-Saharan Africa when there were famines in Ethiopia and Sudan.

I said, "I don't know anything about African agriculture south of the Sahara. I've never been there. I've been retired. I'm too old to start learning now." And I hung up the telephone. The next morning he called back and he said, "Mr. Sasakawa wants you to know that he's 15 years older than you are, and we should have started yesterday. So let's start tomorrow."

...I'm very hopeful now that there's going to be a major change in Ethiopia. [It] could become self-sufficient in all basic grains in two years. If this happens in Ethiopia, I'm going to chide Ghana. "[President] Rawlings," I'm going to say, "Look, you were running first and then you relaxed. Aren't you ashamed? Look at what's happened. You're running in third place." Benin, the same way. They are ready. Tanzania can make a rapid change with these changes in policy. The one bottleneck they have is transport.

BACK TO COURIER ONLINE