Norman Borlaug RIP

Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who started the green revolution, has died.

How many people on earth can be credited with saving hundreds of millions from starvation? Yet he is less known than the average sports star.

One thing greatly needed in Africa is to implement the green revolution, similar to how it was implemented in Asia...

As Scientific American magazine points out, what stands in the way is a lack of money to buy good seed, fertilizer, and of course an infrastructure that allows them to sell part of their crop for a profit.

They also recommend this:

Here are bold but realistic goals that Africa and its donor partners can adopt: to double grain yields in Africa by 2012, to graduate at least three quarters of African smallholder farm households from subsistence to commercial farming within a decade, and to expand nutrition programs alongside increased food production to cut the ranks of the hungry by at least half by 2015.

Mugabe is alas doing the exact opposite...