A photograph was taken. My father, Eric McGaw, in late middle age, standing alongside Borlaug, then 92 years old, three years before his death. They are both smiling. They look, in the way that people sometimes look in photographs with the giants of their fields, like two men who knew exactly what the other had done with his life.

This is a post about that photograph. About what it meant, in 2006, for an agricultural communications officer to stand next to the man who had, by most reasonable measures, saved more human lives than any other person of the twentieth century.

Who Norman Borlaug was

Norman Borlaug was an American plant pathologist and agronomist born in 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants. He worked, for most of his career, in northern Mexico, at a research station that would eventually become the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT. There, in the 1940s and 50s, he led a breeding program that produced new varieties of wheat — short-stemmed, disease-resistant, high-yielding — that, when paired with appropriate fertilizer, irrigation, and farming practices, dramatically increased grain production in places that had been chronically food-insecure. The varieties spread to India, Pakistan, and the rest of the developing world over the 1960s, and the resulting transformation in global food production came to be known as the Green Revolution.

In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee's citation said he had "more than any other single person of this age, helped to provide bread for a hungry world." Subsequent estimates of how many lives the Green Revolution saved range from a billion to several billion. Borlaug himself was uncomfortable with the framing. He wrote that the Green Revolution had been a victory for some, but had not solved the underlying problem; he spent the rest of his life arguing that agricultural research investment had to keep up with population growth, that scientific work in plant breeding had to continue, that the fight against hunger had no permanent end.

By 2006, Borlaug was 92. He was still working — still flying around the world, still showing up at agricultural research institutes, still pressing his case. He had narrowed his focus in his late years to Africa, the continent the original Green Revolution had largely bypassed. He had founded, with Japanese philanthropist Ryōichi Sasakawa and former US president Jimmy Carter, the Sasakawa Africa Association — an effort to bring Green Revolution methods to African smallholder farmers. He was also a member of the original Borlaug-Ehrlich generation of voices who had argued, since the 1960s, that scientific agriculture was the only thing standing between humanity and catastrophic famine.

He came to ICRISAT in 2006 because ICRISAT was, by then, the institute most closely associated with the next phase of the work he had started.

What ICRISAT was, and is

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics was founded in 1972 — a sister institute, in the CGIAR network, to CIMMYT in Mexico, IRRI in the Philippines, and a dozen other agricultural research centers around the world. ICRISAT's mandate was the dryland tropics: the harsh, low-rainfall, often nutrient-poor regions of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America where the original Green Revolution's water-intensive, fertilizer-heavy methods had largely failed. The crops ICRISAT works on are not the celebrity grains of the Green Revolution. They are sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, chickpea, pigeonpea, and groundnut. They are the crops eaten by some of the poorest people in the world.

Under the leadership of Director General William Dar — who served from 2000 to 2014, the longest-serving DG in ICRISAT's history — the institute articulated its work as the Grey to Green Revolution. The framing was that the dryland tropics were grey: written off by the original Green Revolution, dismissed as too dry, too poor, too marginal to support the kind of agricultural transformation that had been achieved in irrigated wheat and rice systems. The Grey to Green Revolution was the proposition that agriculture in the drylands could be transformed too, but on its own terms — through crops adapted to variable rainfall, through farming systems that worked with the diversity of the landscape rather than against it, through partnerships that put smallholder farmers at the center of how research priorities were set.

My father co-authored, with William Dar and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center's D. V. R. Reddy, the foundational chapter that laid out the Grey to Green Revolution framework: "A Grey to Green Revolution in the Semi-Arid Tropics of Asia and Africa," published in 2004 as part of a Crop Science Society of America Special Publication. That chapter is one of the documents that stitched the institute's vision together. It is also one of the documents that put my father's name in the same sentence as the Director General's, on the page where ICRISAT explained itself to the world.

The visit

When Borlaug came to ICRISAT in 2006, he was visiting an institute that was, in many ways, the natural extension of his life's work. The Green Revolution had transformed wheat and rice production. The Grey to Green Revolution was, ICRISAT proposed, the next chapter — bringing the same scientific intensity to the drylands, on terms appropriate to the drylands, for the people the original Green Revolution had not been able to reach.

Borlaug spent time with the institute's scientists. He toured the research stations. He met with Dar. He met with the senior leadership team. And, somewhere in the visit, a photograph was taken of him with my father.

Eric was, by then, Head of Information Services at ICRISAT. He had been at the institute since 1989 — first as Research Editor, then as Public Awareness Officer, then as Head of Communications, then as Head of Information Services. He had spent a brief period in the late 1990s working independently as McGaw Associates, taking on substantial communications work for ICRISAT itself among other clients, before the institute hired him back. He had, by 2006, been with ICRISAT for seventeen years, with one short interruption, and was the senior communications voice of an institute whose vision he had helped articulate. He was the natural person to be in a photograph with the visiting Nobel laureate.

The photograph itself is unremarkable in composition: two men, smiling, in the kind of indoor setting that institutional visits produce. Office walls. Some of ICRISAT's branded materials in the background. The kind of photograph that gets taken hundreds of times a year at agricultural research centers around the world when a senior figure visits, and that nobody, as a rule, particularly remembers.

What makes it remarkable is the through-line.

The line that runs through the photograph

Norman Borlaug was the man who started the Green Revolution. He had, more than any other single person, helped to provide bread for a hungry world.

My father was the senior communications officer of an institute working on what came after the Green Revolution — the Grey to Green Revolution, the next chapter, the work of bringing the same scientific commitment to the drylands of Asia and Africa where the original Green Revolution had not reached. He had co-authored the chapter that laid out that vision. He had spent seventeen years helping ICRISAT explain that vision to its donors, partners, governments, and the public. He was, in 2006, in his role at the institute, one of the people responsible for translating the work of plant breeders and agronomists into the language that policymakers and journalists and farmers could understand.

Three years after the photograph was taken, in 2009, Borlaug died at 95.

A few years after that, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, my father moved to Africa to work on the same problem from a different angle: first at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in Nairobi, the African-led institution founded in 2006 with backing from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and then at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) in Accra. AGRA was chaired in its early years by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Eric met Annan in person in Ghana, and the photograph he took there of Annan with their colleague Jeff Haskins is preserved in the ILRI news archive.

Borlaug. The man who started the Green Revolution. Annan. The man trying to bring it to Africa.

Eric stood with both of them. He stood with both of them not because he was important enough that his presence in the photographs is what makes them historical, but because his work — the long, patient, mostly invisible work of agricultural communications — was the same work that made those moments possible. Plant breeders and Nobel laureates and Secretaries-General can articulate what needs to happen. People like my father do the work of making sure other people know about it.

The 2006 photograph is the closest he ever came to standing with the man who started the whole thing. He stood, in his middle age, alongside one of the most consequential lives of the twentieth century. He smiled. The picture was taken. And then he went back to his office and kept working.

Sources

Norman Borlaug — Nobel Prize biography. William D. Dar, Eric M. McGaw, and D. V. R. Reddy, "A Grey to Green Revolution in the Semi-Arid Tropics of Asia and Africa," CSSA Special Publication 32 (2004). ICRISAT — icrisat.org.