Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity
THE GREEN
REVOLUTION
TO Borlaug, the argument for high-yield cereal crops,
inorganic fertilizers,
and irrigation became irrefutable when the global population began to take off
after the Second World War. But many governments of developing nations were
suspicious, partly for reasons of tradition (wheat was then a foreign substance
in India) and partly because contact between Western technical experts and
peasant farmers might shake up feudal cultures to the discomfort of the elite
classes. Meanwhile, some commentators were suggesting that it would be wrong to
increase the food supply in the developing world: better to let nature do the
dirty work of restraining the human population.
Yet statistics suggest that high-yield agriculture brakes population growth
rather than accelerating it, by starting the progression from the
high-birth-rate, high-death-rate societies of feudal cultures toward the
low-birth-rate, low-death-rate societies of Western nations. As the former
Indian diplomat Karan Singh is reported to have said, "Development is the best
contraceptive." In subsistence agriculture children are viewed as manual labor,
and thus large numbers are desired. In technical agriculture knowledge becomes
more important, and parents thus have fewer children in order to devote
resources to their education.
In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico established
CIMMYT, as an outgrowth of their original program, and sent Borlaug to Pakistan
and India, which were then descending into famine. He failed in his initial
efforts to persuade the parastatal seed and grain monopolies that those
countries had established after independence to switch to high-yield crop
strains.
Despite the institutional resistance Borlaug stayed in Pakistan and India,
tirelessly repeating himself. By 1965 famine on the subcontinent was so bad
that governments made a commitment to dwarf wheat. Borlaug arranged for a
convoy of thirty-five trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los
Angeles dock for shipment. The convoy was held up by the Mexican police,
blocked by U.S. border agents attempting to enforce a ban on seed importation,
and then stopped by the National Guard when the Watts riot prevented access to
the L.A. harbor. Finally the seed ship sailed. Borlaug says, "I went to bed
thinking the problem was at last solved, and woke up to the news that war had
broken out between India and Pakistan."
Nevertheless, Borlaug and many local scientists who were his former trainees in
Mexico planted the first crop of dwarf wheat on the subcontinent, sometimes
working within sight of artillery flashes. Sowed late, that crop germinated
poorly, yet yields still rose 70 percent. This prevented general wartime
starvation in the region, though famine did strike parts of India. There were
also riots in the state of Kerala in 1966, when a population whose ancestors
had for centuries eaten rice was presented with sacks of wheat flour
originating in Borlaug's fields.
Owing to wartime emergency, Borlaug was given the go-ahead to circumvent the
parastatals. "Within a few hours of that decision I had all the seed contracts
signed and a much larger planting effort in place," he says. "If it hadn't been
for the war, I might never have been given true freedom to test these ideas."
The next harvest "was beautiful, a 98 percent improvement." By 1968 Pakistan
was self-sufficient in wheat production. India required only a few years
longer. Paul Ehrlich had written in
The Population Bomb (1968) that it was "a
fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. By 1974 India was self-sufficient
in the production of all cereals. Pakistan progressed from harvesting 3.4
million tons of wheat annually when Borlaug arrived to around 18 million today,
India from 11 million tons to 60 million. In both nations food production since
the 1960s has increased faster than the rate of population growth. Briefly in
the mid-1980s India even entered the world export market for grains.
Borlaug's majestic accomplishment came to be labeled the Green Revolution.
Whether it was really a revolution is open to debate. As Robert Kates, a former
director of the World Hunger Program, at Brown University, says, "If you plot
growth in farm yields over the century, the 1960s period does not particularly
stand out for overall global trends. What does stand out is the movement of
yield increases from the West to the developing world, and Borlaug was one of
the crucial innovators there." Touring the subcontinent in the late 1960s and
encountering field after field of robust wheat, Forrest Frank Hill, a former
vice-president of the Ford Foundation, told Borlaug, "Enjoy this now, because
nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually the naysayers and the
bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won't be able to get permission
for more of these efforts."
THE HIGH-YIELD BOOM
FOR some time this augury seemed mistaken, as Borlaug's view
of agriculture
remained ascendant. In 1950 the world produced 692 million tons of grain for
2.2 billion people; by 1992 production was 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion
people—2.8 times the grain for 2.2 times the population. Global grain yields
rose from 0.45 tons per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of corn, rice, and other
foodstuffs improved similarly. From 1965 to 1990 the globe's daily per capita
intake grew from 2,063 calories to 2,495, with an increased proportion as
protein. Malnutrition continued as a problem of global scale but decreased in
percentage terms, even as more than two billion people were added to the
population.
The world's 1950 grain output of 692 million tons came from 1.7 billion acres
of cropland, the 1992 output of 1.9 billion tons from 1.73 billion acres --
a 170
percent increase from one percent more land. "Without high-yield agriculture,"
Borlaug says, "either millions would have starved or increases in food output
would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under
cultivation—losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all
losses to
urban and suburban expansion."
The trend toward harvesting more from fewer acres, often spun in the media as a
shocking crisis of "vanishing farms," is perhaps the most environmentally
favorable development of the modern age. Paul Waggoner, of the Connecticut
Agricultural Experiment Station, says, "From long before Malthus until about
forty-five years ago each person took more land from nature than his parents
did. For the past forty-five years people have been taking less land from
nature than their parents."
In developing nations where population growth is surging, high-yield
agriculture holds back the rampant deforestation of wild areas. Waggoner
calculates that India's transition to high-yield farming spared the country
from having to plough an additional 100 million acres of virgin land—an area
about equivalent to California. In the past five years India has been able to
slow and perhaps even halt its national deforestation, a hopeful sign. This
would have been impossible were India still feeding itself with traditionally
cultivated indigenous crops.
