WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Tuesday presented the Congressional Gold Medal to an Iowan whose work on high yield varieties of wheat is credited with starting the Green Revolution and alleviating starvation in India and Pakistan in the 1960s.

Norman Borlaug, an agriculture scientist, grew up near Cresco and was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. He went on to the University of Minnesota.

"The most fitting tribute we can offer this good man is to renew ourselves to his life's work, and lead a second Green Revolution that feeds the world, and today we'll make a pledge to do so," President Bush said during a ceremony in the Capitol Rotund.

Borlaug's innovations are credited with saving up to a billion lives, and in 1970 he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

"The name Norman Borlaug may not be known in many households on earth, but his life's work has reached almost every kitchen table on earth," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Borlaug, 93, used Tuesday's ceremony to remind that hunger remains a problem with the rapid rise in the world's population.

"We need better and more technology, for hunger and poverty and misery are very fertile soils into which to plant all kinds of 'isms,' including terrorism," he said.

In 1986, Borlaug founded the World Food Prize. The annual $250,000 award goes to people whose work increases the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.

Borlaug continues to work for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico and the Sasakawa Global 2000 program to bring the Green Revolution to Africa. He also serves as a distinguished professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University, where he gives guest lectures.

The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian honor that Congress awards. George Washington was the first to receive the medal in 1776. Other past winners include Thomas Edison, Bob Hope, Pope John Paul II and the Rev. Martin Luther King.