Norman Borlaug

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Counted totals by category

Each category is totalled in its own unit; units are never added together.

Category	Unit	Positive	Negative	Net
people	lives	+1 billion	0	+1 billion
people	people	0	0	0

Overall: not enough data yet (needs 2 category tabs). Tab positions: Lives #1

Influence (reach, not impact): Wikipedia articles in 77 languages (Wikidata, as of 2026-10-18); 211,289 English Wikipedia page views, 2025-10-01 to 2026-09-30. Not counted in the score.

Counted entries

Approved claims with 2 trusted sources; these drive the totals (counted = scale × credit share).

Positive

Claim	Sources	Scale	Credit	Counted
Dwarf wheat/Green Revolution credited with averting famine that would have starved est. 1 billion (Guardian); magnitude 1.0; counterfactual, shared credit	theguardian.com + govinfo.gov [CONFIRMS ~1 billion] Public Law 109-395: 'increasing the number of lives Dr. Borlaug has saved to more than a billion people.' + govinfo.gov Public Law 109-395 (Congressional Gold Medal act): 'increasing the number of lives Dr. Borlaug has saved to more than a billion people.'	1 billion	Direct est. Approved (counterfactual estimate counts): Public Law 109-395 (2006): 'the number of lives Dr. Borlaug has saved [to] more than a billion people'; Guardian obituary: 'would have starved an estimated one billion people'. Lowest figure 1 billion.	1 billion
Bred disease-resistant dwarf wheat; Mexico self-sufficient in wheat by 1956, 95% of crop semi-dwarf by 1963, harvest 6x 1944 (Guardian); no people count given, scale 0 as placeholder	theguardian.com + worldfoodprize.org [CONFIRMS attribution; no people count] 'Borlaug's new wheat varieties enabled Mexico to achieve self-sufficiency in 1956.' (95%/6x figures not restated)	0	Direct	0

Negative

Claim	Sources	Scale	Credit	Counted
None.

Not counted / unproven

Unproven or rejected claims. They are shown for transparency and do not affect the totals.

Not counted, positive

Claim	Sources	Scale	Status
Trained 2,000+ young scientists from ~20 countries at CIMMYT wheat program (Guardian); magnitude 0.1	theguardian.com + cimmyt.org [DOES NOT CONFIRM 2,000/~20 countries] 'several thousand men and women agricultural scientists from more than 50 countries are proud to say they were Norman Borlaug's "students."'	200	unproven
New wheat varieties to improve living conditions of 'hundreds of millions' (Nobel 1970 speech); lower bound 200M x 0.1; vague, overlaps famine entry	nobelprize.org + govinfo.gov [CONFIRMS 'hundreds of millions'] 'saved hundreds of millions from famine and outright starvation in India and Pakistan.'	20 million	unproven

Not counted, negative

Claim	Sources	Scale	Status
None.