ABSTRACT
Norman Borlaug's early upbringing in an Iowa farm and his experience of hardship during the US Depression of the early 1930s instilled in him the desire to bring science to address the problems of low farm productivity, poverty and hunger. During 1942-43, nearly 2 million children, women and men died of hunger during the great Bengal Famine. By the late 1950s, Borlaug had developed several semi-dwarf spring wheat varieties, capable of yielding 5 to 6 tonnes per hectare. The catalyst of the miracle was the new plant type sent by Norman Borlaug in 1963. With support from President Jimmy Carter, the late Ryoichi Sasakawa, Mr Yohei Sasakawa and the Nippon Foundation, he organised the Sasakawa-Global 2000 programme. On that occasion he pointed out that between the years 1960 and 2000 the proportion of the world's people who felt hunger during some portion of the year had fallen from perhaps 60 per cent to about 14 per cent.
