Norman Borlaug

What an amazing epitaph: "saving more lives than anyone in human history". That is how Professor Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday, has been described: and it's not the usual hyperbole that comes at such times: conservatively he is estimated to have saved a billion lives through his agricultural advances.

Borlaug created Dwarf Wheat, which dramatically increased crop yields of cereals in the developing world. He spent his life helping peasant farmers in Mexico, Pakistan and India, not only saving countless individual lives but bringing much greater food security to these countries. It was work that won him the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal: the only person in history to win all three prizes.

I'm writing about Norman Borlaug to ponder this question: if he had attempted to undertake his vital work today, would he have been able to complete it, or would the so-called environmental lobby - that misguidedly campaigns against genetic modification research - have drummed up more "Frankenstein Food" scare-stories to stop him?

Because spot the difference between Borlaug's work and GM foods today: Dwarf Wheat is, after all, nothing more than genetically modified wheat. Borlaug's life's work was about producing more bountiful, more robust harvests in less hospitable climes - and that's exactly the same potential GM foods have, if only they could be properly developed without eco campaigners raiding fields to destroy them or terrifying consumers with distortions and often blatant lies about the safety of GM products.

Borlaug was not immune from attack by GM activists, about which he said this:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"

If Labour is on the lookout for bold radical policies for a fourth term of government let me suggest one right now: make the case for GM food boldly and bravely, and in so doing we will be following in the great footsteps of Norman Borlaug.

If that's not a worthy aspiration, I don't know what is.