MIT Technology
Review, January/February 2008
Green
Revolutionary
Four decades
ago, Norman E. Borlaug developed a wheat variety that fed the
world. Now he's battling an old enemy: a pathogen whose spread
could cause starvation.
By John Pollack
In 1798, the
English economist Thomas Malthus argued that population increases
geometrically, outstripping the arithmetic growth of the food
supply. He promised "famine ... the last, the most dreadful
resource of nature." It took another 125 years for world
population to double, but only 50 more for it to redouble. By
the 1940s, Mexico, China, India, Russia, and Europe were
hungry. Franklin D. Roosevelt's farsighted vice president-elect,
former secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace, believed the
solution lay with technology. He was right: the Malthusian tragedy
never happened, chiefly because Norman E. Borlaug transformed
the breeding of wheat, which feeds more people than any other
crop.
From 1939 to
1942, Mexico's harvest was halved by stem rust, a fungus whose
airborne spores infect stems and leaves, shriveling grains. Anxieties
about wartime food shortages led the American philanthropic organization
the Rockefeller Foundation to create the country's first foreign
agricultural program: the Coöperative Wheat Research and
Production Program, which was based in Mexico and which Borlaug
joined, as its plant pathologist, in 1944. The program was prescient:
rust hit the North American breadbasket in 1954, wiping out 75
percent of the durum wheat crop used for pasta.
"There
was panic in the U.S. and Canadian departments of agriculture,"
Borlaug tells me. "We had to accelerate the program to develop
rust-resistant wheat varieties." Borlaug struggled with a
lack of machinery, equipment, and trained scientists. Yet by 1948,
he tells Leon Hesser in The Man Who Fed the World, a recent biography,
"research results, the bits and pieces of the wheat production
puzzle, began to emerge, and the fog of gloom and despair began
to lift."
Before Borlaug,
plant breeders sought new traits in plants by creating perhaps
a few dozen "crosses" of varieties each year. For Borlaug,
this would have meant "at least 10 years developing resistant
varieties," he recalls, "and there would be another
epidemic in that time. I wanted to speed things up." Collecting
wheat varieties from around the world, he began a massive cross-breeding
program. Such work is "mind-warpingly tedious," he tells
Hesser. "There's only one chance in thousands of ever finding
what you want, and actually no guarantee of success at all."
To improve those
odds, Borlaug tried something unusual: doing two successive plantings
of his experimental crosses each year, effectively doubling his
rate of research. He was almost stymied by what he calls "the
dogma of plant breeding everywhere at the time: plant in the same
season and place as local farmers." But soon he was planting
in summer in low-quality, rain-fed soils at high altitude near
Mexico City, and then taking any promising varieties hundreds
of miles north to sow a winter crop in the warmer, drier, lower-lying
Yaqui Valley. This "shuttle breeding" helped Borlaug
achieve rust resistance in under five years. It also produced
exceptionally adaptable varieties, suited for use across climates.
Having achieved
rust resistance and plant adaptability, Borlaug now addressed
the problem of structure. When Mexican wheat was heavily fertilized,
it grew too tall, collapsing when irrigated or rained on--thus
limiting yields. After 20,000 fruitless crosses, Borlaug heard
about a Japanese dwarf variety that might confer its strength
and stockiness. He started thousands more crosses, until "by
1964, we got the really beautiful short wheat varieties."
The yields were spectacular, and the variety was quickly adopted
around world. In 1968, his approach, which stimulated advances
in other staple foods, was dubbed the "Green Revolution"
by William Gaud, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International
Development. Two years later, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Paradoxically,
1968 also saw the genesis of an environmentalist dogma that was
pessimistic about humanity's capacity to feed itself. In that
year--when the global population growth rate peaked, at 2 percent
per year--Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, intoning,
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. ... Hundreds
of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash
programs." The madding crowd of "stinking hot"
Delhi was odious to Ehrlich: "My wife and daughter and I
... entered a crowded slum area. ... People, people, people, people.
... [We] were, frankly, frightened." It was a "fantasy,"
he said, that India would ever feed itself. Yet Borlaug's program
delivered such stunning results that India issued a 1968 stamp
commemorating the "wheat revolution," and by 1974 it
was self-sufficient in all cereals.
Nonetheless,
a neo-Malthusian fear of overpopulation became endemic to environmentalist
thinking. Science philosopher and Arts and Letters Daily founder
Denis Dutton says, "Well-fed Greens flaunt their concern
for the planet but are indifferent, even hostile, to the world's
poor with whom they share it. Some Greens I knew acted for all
the world as though they relished the idea of a coming worldwide
famine, much as fundamentalists ghoulishly looked forward to Armageddon."
Dutton, who served in the Peace Corps, personally saw the Green
Revolution benefit India. "For the catastrophist, India becoming
a food exporter was disturbing," he says. "This wasn't
supposed to happen. They blame Borlaug for spoiling the fun."
Not all Borlaug's
critics were catastrophists: some opposed the intensity of his
agriculture, especially its use of inorganic fertilizer. Borlaug
acknowledges the need for care, but he says the "natural"
alternative, cow manure, "would require us to increase the
world's cattle population from around 1.5 billion to some 10 billion."
As he dryly observed in a 2003 TV interview, "Producing food
for 6.2 billion people ... is not simple." He added, "[Organic
approaches] can only feed four billion--I don't see two billion
volunteers to disappear."
Raised on a
farm, Borlaug thinks many of his detractors would benefit from
a week or two in the fields. He cites Ghanaian farmers who use
no-till agriculture (that is, plant waste is left to improve the
humus and reduce erosion) and control weeds with herbicides. Their
lives are improved by the reduction in weeding. "Less backache,
you see," he once said. "You know, it's amazing how
often campaigners in rich countries think poor people don't get
backache."
A New Scourge
Many thought the work that earned Borlaug his Nobel brought
an end to stem rust, but it is back, in the form of a variant
called Ug99, which emerged in Uganda and spread to Kenya and Ethiopia.
"If it continues unchecked," says Borlaug, "the
consequences will be ruinous."
Africa, in fact,
presents an especially worrying challenge, for the simple
reason that it did not benefit much from the Green Revolution.
Borlaug's Nobel largely honored gains in Asia: there, calorie
availability per person rose, wheat and rice prices fell, and
increased incomes stimulated industrial output. Similar benefits
were enjoyed almost everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa, where
more than 200 million people--a third of the population--still
go hungry. In the last four decades, Africa's average per capita
food production has actually decreased.
Ug99 will be
fought, at least initially, with the plant-breeding techniques
Borlaug so artfully employed. However, he believes Africa's best
hopes rest with biotechnology, even though regulatory problems
prevent its immediate use against Ug99. Also needed, he believes,
are publicity, political will, funding, and renewed coöperation
among international agricultural researchers. The work he is inspiring
is nothing less than a new African Green Revolution.
The reasons
for failure in Africa are complex. "Irrigation is first,"
explains Michael Lipton of the University of Sussex's Poverty
Research Unit. "In sub-Saharan Africa, 4 percent of cropland
is irrigated. In South and East Asia it's nearer 40 percent."
Then there's
soil. "Africa's soils ... [are] equivalent--and were once
adjacent--to the Cerrado's acid soils," Borlaug says. The
Cerrado, an area that extends across central Brazil, historically
had some of the least productive soil in the world. But improved
crop varieties of the sort that Borlaug created--along with
liming, fertilizer, and low- or no-till methods--have led to the
single largest increase in arable-land usage in the last
50 years.
Politics, both
regional and global, were and are another hindrance. "If
the Green Revolution in India was proposed to the World Bank today,
it would be turned down," says Rob Paarlberg, an agricultural-policy
expert at Wellesley College. By the 1980s, he says, "public
investment in roads, research, irrigation, fertilizers, and seeds
was politically unacceptable to the Washington consensus on the
right--and on the left, among environmentalists opposed to chemical
fertilizers, road building, and irrigation projects." Thus,
real per capita levels of official development assistance for
the agricultural sector in the poorest countries fell by nearly
50 percent between 1982 and 1995.
Finally, Borlaug
says, "Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer
to farmers and ideas and business for commerce." Africa,
Borlaug argues, also needs concerted international help. Meanwhile,
Ug99 has reached Yemen: from there, Borlaug warns, "it
can reach Iraq, Iran, India, and Pakistan"--even the breadbaskets
of Europe and America. A scramble is on to find resistant varieties,
ensure that their yields will encourage farmers to adopt them,
and produce sufficient tonnages of seed.
Last year, ABC,
CBS, and NBC cameras were absent when Borlaug was presented with
the Congressional Gold Medal. And alas, Borlaug's friend and biographer
Leon Hesser has now produced a prosaic work that, while good on
his hero's early years, fades as Borlaug appears on the international
stage. Borlaug deserves better, but when journalist Gregg Easterbrook
sought a publisher for a popular biography, "they said he
was boring," the self-described "environmental optimist"
says. "If he'd killed someone instead of saving hundreds
of millions of lives, then they'd have been interested."
Copyright
Technology Review 2007.
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