Heroes

A recent acquaintance holds up Dorothy Day as a personal heroine. Dorothy Day was a twentieth century pacifist, anarchist, socialist, and co-founder of The Catholic Worker.  She has now been recommended to the Vatican by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops for sainthood. Her movement survives, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, advocating for the downtrodden, and not least, devoted to prayer. There is much to admire.

But she is not my heroine. If we were all Dorothy Day we would all be poor. She would argue that would not be a bad thing, we would survive by sharing what we have. I would counter that we would have nothing to share. We would have no police. She would say we would not need them. Fair enough but I would respond that we would also have no roads, no sewers, no miracle drugs, no electricity, no levees to protect from floods, and precious little to eat. Oh and by the way, Pope Pius XI said "No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist." I would add, no one can be at the same time an anarchist and a socialist, odd choice for sainthood.

I don't discount pacifism entirely, though I have little regard for anarchy. Martin Luther King accomplished great things with his non-violent movement. Mahatma Gandhi was a true pacifist and his may have been the most successful pacifist movement of all time. Like Dorothy Day there is much to admire in both men.

But my twentieth century hero is Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who has been called the father of the Green Revolution. Because of him, and others like him, a world of seven billion people can not only feed itself,  but do so in such a way that there are fewer of us living in poverty than when Dr. Borlaug began his work.

All four of these people devoted their lives to helping the poor and the oppressed. But of the four, Dr. Borlaug did the most to help them escape their poverty. Dr. Borlaug began his most important work in Mexico in the 1940s where he helped develop a high yielding hybrid wheat. That and improved farming techniques he brought from his native Iowa soon transformed Mexico from a net grain importer to an exporter. In the process a disruption began in the traditional semi-feudal relationship between farming peons and the ruling elite, a process that continues today.

Dr. Borlaug went on to take his hybrid grains to much of the developing world, including China and India. He was perhaps least successful in sub Saharan Africa where he ended his career. By the 1980s a growing environmental movement had begun to resist hybridized crops and artificial fertilizers, preferring organically grown indigenous foods. In Africa that meant cassava, not wheat. Incredibly an attitude developed that if yields were insufficient to feed a growing population then so be it. Better to let starvation do a little dirty work than feed the masses. End world hunger stopped being the life ambition for beauty pageant contestants in the United States. Malthusian worry about global over population became an over riding concern.

So food production never took off in Africa the way it did in much of the world. There is where poverty remains the most persistent. Ironically, for families engaged in subsistence farming child labor is important, the more  children the better. With technology knowledge becomes more important. Children are encouraged to stay in school. Families tend to become smaller and more prosperous. That is what happened in Mexico and in no small part they have Dr. Norman Borlaug to thank for it. He is their hero, mine too.