Technology Review - Published by MIT

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.


Thomas R. DeGregori, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Houston
Department of Economics
204 McElhinney Hall
Houston, Texas 77204-5019
Ph. 001 - 1 - 713 743-3838
Fax 001 - 1 - 713 743-3798
Email trdegreg@uh.edu
Web homepage http://www.uh.edu/~trdegreg