authorLeon Hesser
Dr. Leon Hesser is the award-winning author of The Man Who Fed the World (foreword by President Jimmy Carter, endorsed by The Rockefeller Foundation) and Against All Odds. He has spent his life helping relieve global hunger and poverty. His parents instilled those passions in him as he grew up on a Midwestern farm in the U.S. Leon has since served in prominent positions with U.S. State Department in Washington, DC, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Harvard University as a Visiting Scholar, among others.
After earning a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, Dr. Hesser spent his career in International Agricultural Development. During the 1970s, he was Director of the Office of Agriculture, US. Department of State, with responsibility for guiding America’s global assistance to solve hunger problems. He had a staff of 50 personnel plus 75 to 80 contracts with U.S. universities to provide short-term assistance on call. And he worked in 22 individual countries, mainly in Asia and Africa, over a 35-year career, helping to increase food production.
In Pakistan in the late 1960s, Dr. Hesser was Chief of the Agriculture Division, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of State. Beginning in early 1966, he and his staff worked closely with Dr. Norman Borlaug to introduce Borlaug’s wheat technology which doubled wheat production in four years and relieved hunger and starvation. Essentially, the same happened in India and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America. These events were called The Green Revolution. For this, Dr. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Dr. Hesser remained friends with Dr. Borlaug and moved to Rochester Hills, Michigan, in 2019, where he continues to write. Following early retirement, Dr. Hesser has consulted in twenty countries of Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. He has also worked closely with "BioWash" developer Dr. Ted Tidwell, at his request, to begin to introduce globally a system of non-toxic crop-growth enhancers to help increase food production safely.
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