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"I don't expect to make any money off it," he said. "I'd like it to trickle down to the people who need it.

He does worry that the technique could be used as an excuse to clear
rain forests from currently aluminum-toxic soil. Instead of this, said
Larsen, already-cut land could be made more productive.

"If we can make use of the land that's available now, maybe we can make
it so we don't have to cut forests down in the future," he said.

In 1968, his approach, which stimulated advances in other staple foods, was dubbed the "Green Revolution" by ­William Gaud, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Two years later, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Paradoxically, 1968 also saw the genesis of an environmentalist dogma that was pessimistic about humanity's capacity to feed itself. In that year--when the global population growth rate peaked, at 2 percent per year--Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, intoning, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. ... Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs." The madding crowd of "stinking hot" Delhi was odious to Ehrlich: "My wife and daughter and I ... entered a crowded slum area. ... People, people, people, people. ... [We] were, frankly, frightened." It was a "fantasy," he said, that India would ever feed itself. Yet Borlaug's program delivered such stunning results that India issued a 1968 stamp commemorating the "wheat revolution," and by 1974 it was self-sufficient in all cereals.

he believes Africa's best hopes rest with biotech­nology, even though regulatory problems prevent its immediate use against Ug99. Also needed, he believes, are publicity, political will, funding, and renewed coöperation among international agricultural researchers. The work he is inspiring is nothing less than a new African Green Revolution.

The reasons for failure in Africa are complex. "Irrigation is first," explains Michael Lipton of the University of Sussex's Poverty Research Unit. "In sub-Saharan Africa, 4 percent of cropland is irrigated. In South and East Asia it's nearer 40 percent."

Then there's soil. "Africa's soils ... [are] equivalent--and were once adjacent--to the Cerrado's acid soils," Borlaug says. The Cerrado, an area that extends across central Brazil, historically had some of the least productive soil in the world. But improved crop varieties of the sort ­that Borlaug created--along with liming, fertilizer, and low- or no-till methods--have led to the ­single largest increase in arable-land usage in the last 50 years.