By Mark Heckman: Atalissa, Iowa USA
Have you thought about how truly blessed we are?I like to count my blessings and I remind myself every time I open my wallet.
I keep a $2 bill in my wallet. I’ve kept it there since 1998, when I learned that about half the planet’s people lived on less than $2 per day. That’s the figure the World Bank routinely cited back then.
The $2 bill reminds me to be grateful for my life as a farmer in a prosperous country. It also encourages me to remember the less fortunate. And I’ve discovered that it’s an excellent way to start a conversation about agriculture and the cost of food.
Now there may be an even better way: Earlier this year, the U.S. Mint released a $1 coin that features Norman Borlaug, the man who did more than anybody else in history to make food abundant and affordable.
This new golden coin is part of series known as American Innovation Dollars. The goal is to celebrate innovators and innovations from each of America’s states and territories on a form of currency. Iowa’s turn came this year, and it selected an image of Borlaug. He wears a broad-brimmed hat and holds a sheaf of wheat. An inscription identifies him as “Father of the Green Revolution.”
What a fitting honor for an outstanding Iowan. There’s so much to say about Borlaug (1914-2009), but let’s keep it simple: He was an agronomist whose pioneering work in crop genetics led to a boom in global food production. Some have claimed that billions of people are alive today because of what he did. In 1970, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The more we recognize Dr. Borlaug, the better. The new US coin highlighting his innovative contribution creates opportunities for Americans and others to learn his story and appreciate how science and technology fuels farmers to feed the world.
And that brings me back to my original conversation piece: the $2 bill.
In 2026, due to inflation, that bill has about half the purchasing power it did in 1998.
The good news is that the world has become wealthier. Today, about half of the global population lives on about $10 per day. That may not seem like a lot of money—and truly, it’s not—but we also should applaud progress. We’re headed in the right direction. That’s nothing to take for granted.
The World Bank publishes an online tool that allows users to look at the economic data from a variety of angles. Right now, 392 million people live on less than the value of my $2 bill per day and 94 million live on less than the value of my Borlaug coin per day. That’s too many, but respectively it’s less than 5 percent and about 1 percent of the world’s population.
This poverty is not evenly distributed, of course. In the developed world, the number of people who depend on these small sums is tiny. It’s much higher in the nations of sub-Saharan Africa.
The number we probably want to think about, however, is not $1 or $2. It’s $4, which is roughly the amount of money it costs for what the World Bank calls “the population-weighted global average cost of a healthy diet, defined as the minimum cost of purchasing a healthy diet basket composed of locally available foods that meet dietary guidelines.”
That’s a fancy way of saying that although four Borlaug coins might not go far at my local Hy-Vee supermarket, they’d do a lot in Madagascar and Mozambique.
Ultimately, however, these are just cold, hard numbers. The world is awash in data—and humanity has plenty of people who think they can fix every problem of inequality with their bold schemes of social engineering and economic redistribution.
A better solution is to have a quiet faith in the likes of Dr. Borlaug, who applied the science and technologies of his time to give farmers like me the tools to drive up crop production and drive down food prices.
As we honor the man behind the Green Revolution with a new coin, we should welcome the fact that we stand on the cusp of a Gene Revolution. It promises to help us to grow even more food on less land and in sustainable ways.
Let’s choose to get started.Onward!
Mark Heckman grows hogs, cattle, corn, soybeans as well as cover crops as part of a family farm partnership in SE Iowa. He consults in the renewable energy processing supply chain and is VP for a bio-analytics company that assesses biofuel characteristics.Mark serves as Vice Chairman and is a member of the Global Farmer Network.www.globalfarmernetwork.org
