Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Norman Borlaug led what was known as the Green
Revolution. As a plant scientist, he may have saved
more lives than anyone else in history -- as many as
a billion, by some estimates. He traveled the world
to help poor people develop better ways to produce
food.
He worked in the fields to show farmers new ways to
grow wheat, rice and other crops. And he worked in
the laboratory to breed new wheat varieties that
could resist disease. Lately he worried about a new
threat, a fungus called Ug99. It was discovered in
Uganda ten years ago and has spread in Africa and
now Asia.
Mister Borlaug said this new strain of stem rust
organism has the power to destroy most of the wheat
varieties being grown around the world.
Norman Borlaug taught at Texas A&M University and
worked on international projects until not long
before his death on September twelfth. He was
ninety-five and suffering from cancer.
In nineteen forty-four he began work on a project in
Mexico financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. By
the middle of the nineteen fifties, Mexico had
doubled its wheat production per hectare.
Norman Borlaug and his team had even greater success
in Pakistan and India. Farmers could grow four times
more wheat than before. Later in life he tried to
bring the Green Revolution to Africa.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen seventy and
the Presidential Medal of Freedom seven years later.
But not everyone considered him a hero.
Environmental activists criticized his intensive
methods, including the use of fertilizers and
pesticides. He suggested that Western critics had
never known real hunger, and wondered if they had
ever watched their children go hungry. But later, he
also urged farmers not to overuse chemicals.
At his ninety-fifth birthday party in March, Norman
Borlaug told VOA that he was worried about the
world's ability to feed itself. He said: "We are
adding eighty-four million more people to the world
population every year. There's a big job on our
hands."
World hunger has been rising slowly since the late
nineteen nineties. A big increase is expected this
year because of the economic crisis, combined with
higher food prices.
The World Food Program said that the number of
hungry people will pass one billion this year for
the first time in history. But the flow of food aid
is at a twenty-year low.
And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture
Report.
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
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