The Men Who Fed the World

“When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together. They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is a sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget.”

About half the world’s population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed by Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues of the Green Revolution.

His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history. [He] did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Largely because of his work, countries that had been food deficient, like Mexico and India, became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains.

“More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize.

Mr. Yuan made two major discoveries in hybrid rice cultivation. Those discoveries, in the early 1970s — together with breakthroughs in wheat cultivation in the ’50s and ’60s by Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist — helped create the Green Revolution of steeply rising harvests and an end to famine in most of the world.

Hybrid rice varieties typically produce 20 to 30 percent more rice per acre than nonhybrid strains. But as Mr. Yuan and his ever-growing teams of rice experts introduced hybrid strains across Asia and Africa, they also taught farmers a wide range of advanced rice-growing techniques that produced further gains.

Steeply rising yields helped to make famines a distant memory in most rice-growing countries. “He saved a lot — a lot — of lives,” said Hu Yonghong, the director of the 500-acre Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden.

In recent decades, the Communist Party came to celebrate Mr. Yuan as a model scientist: patriotic, dedicated to solving practical problems, relentlessly hard-working even in old age. Unusually for such a prominent figure, though, Mr. Yuan never joined the Chinese Communist Party.