Who will feed the world now..........!

A central figure in the "green revolution", Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914- ) was born on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, to Henry and Clara Borlaug. For the past twenty-seven years he has collaborated with Mexican scientists on problems of wheat improvement; for the last ten or so of those years he has also collaborated with scientists from other parts of the world, especially from India and Pakistan, in adapting the new wheats to new lands and in gaining acceptance for their production. An eclectic, pragmatic, goal-oriented scientist, he accepts and discards methods or results in a constant search for more fruitful and effective ones, while at the same time avoiding the pursuit of what he calls "academic butterflies". A vigorous man who can perform prodigies of manual labor in the fields, he brings to his work the body and competitive spirit of the trained athlete, which indeed he was in his high school and college days.

After completing his primary and secondary education in Cresco, Borlaug enrolled in the University of Minnesota where he studied forestry. Immediately before and immediately after receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in 1937, he worked for the U.S. Forestry Service at stations in Massachusetts and Idaho. Returning to the University of Minnesota to study plant pathology, he received the master's degree in 1939 and the doctorate in 1942.

From 1942 to 1944, he was a microbiologist on the staff of the du Pont de Nemours Foundation where he was in charge of research on industrial and agricultural bactericides, fungicides, and preservatives.

In 1944 he accepted an appointment as geneticist and plant pathologist assigned the task of organizing and directing the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico. This program, a joint undertaking by the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation, involved scientific research in genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology. Within twenty years he was spectacularly successful in finding a high-yielding short-strawed, disease-resistant wheat.

To his scientific goal he soon added that of the practical humanitarian: arranging to put the new cereal strains into extensive production in order to feed the hungry people of the world - and thus providing, as he says, "a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation," a breathing space in which to deal with the "Population Monster" and the subsequent environmental and social ills that too often lead to conflict between men and between nations. Statistics on the vast acreage planted with the new wheat and on the revolutionary yields harvested in Mexico, India, and Pakistan are given in the presentation speech by Mrs. Lionaes and in the Nobel lecture by Dr. Borlaug. Well advanced, also, is the use of the new wheat in six Latin American countries, six in the Near and Middle East, several in Africa.

When the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in cooperation with the Mexican government established the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), an autonomous international research training institute having an international board of trustees and staff, Dr. Borlaug was made director of its International Wheat Improvement Program. In this capacity he has been able to realize more fully a third objective, that of training young scientists in research and production methods. From his earliest days in Mexico he has, to be sure, carried on an intern program, but with the establishment of the Center, he has been able to reach out internationally. In the last seven years some 1940 young scientists from sixteen or so countries (the figures constantly move upward) have studied and worked at the Center.
By 2050, the world would need to double its food supply.Simple motto of Sir Borlough was "Get the plough. start growing now.

Investing from a stock market

Over the course of your life, you will probably invest at some point or other in the stockmarket. It is important to understand what the stockmarket is and what it is not. I will outline some very basic ideas below.

The stockmarket is a risky investment. If you invest in a broad-based way (that is, covering many types of companies in many sectors), you have lower risk because while some of these may do badly, chances are that others will do well. At the other extreme, a single stock by itself is quite a risky investment.

The risk also reduces over time. If you think you may need your money at short notice, the stockmarket is not the right place to invest it. Put money in the stockmarket only if you don’t mind leaving it there for 5-7 years.

Beware of people who promise to invest your money for you claiming that they will get you better returns than the market. Even if you escape the Madoffs of the world, remember this: it has been proven that most money managers are no better at picking stocks than monkeys throwing darts. And unlike the monkeys, the money managers don’t work for peanuts!

Be even more skeptical of business newspaper columnists. If they knew how to predict the markets, they’d be retired! I read everywhere these days that “this is the perfect time to buy a house”. Haha, this is definitely some PR money at work.

The only way to possibly beat the market is to develop great understanding and intuition about how things will evolve. Not many of us will get there. A few people like Warren Buffett have managed to beat the market on the average, but even they are wrong once in a while. This is why they do not go and bet all their money on a single outcome. They know that at the future is always a gamble and they gamble wisely.

The investor who is most dangerous for himself or herself is the person who first invested when the market was in a bull run, i.e. rising continuously. He or she does not have the experience of markets that go down and stay down for years. That is why I am warning you – you are lucky to grown up in a time of resilient markets that cannot be kept down for long. But that may also prove unlucky if, by the time you have money to invest, you start to believe that markets will always give you supernormal returns.