The Green Revolution
Norman Borlaug, 92, has saved perhaps more lives than anyone else in history.
In 1944, Borlaug accepted an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to work on a project to boost wheat production in Mexico. At the time, Mexico was importing a good share of its grain. Borlaug spent nearly 20 years breeding the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution. Borlaug’s team painstakingly cross-bred thousands of wheat varieties to find those resistant to highly destructive “rust” fungi. They also changed the architecture of the wheat, from tall gangly stems to shorter sturdier ones that produced more grain.
It was an achievement that made Mexico self-sufficient in wheat by the late 1950s and, when later deployed throughout much of the developing world, forestalled the mass starvation predicted by neo-Malthusians. (In the late 1960s most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions of people would perish.)
Borlaug worked with scientists and administrators in India and Pakistan, & got his dwarf wheat varieties to hundreds of thousands of South Asian peasant farmers. These varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than traditional varieties.
At the time, many developing nations — eager to supply cheap food to their urban citizens, who might otherwise rebel — required their farmers to sell into a government concession that paid them less than half of the world market price for their agricultural products. The result was hoarding and underproduction. Borlaug persuaded the governments of Pakistan and India to drop such self-defeating policies.
By 1968 Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat, and by 1974 India was self-sufficient in all cereals. Researchers at a research institute in the Philippines used Borlaug’s insights to develop high-yield rice and spread the Green Revolution to most of Asia. As with wheat, so with rice: Short-stalked varieties proved more productive. They devoted relatively more energy to making grain and less to making leaves and stalks. And they were sturdier, remaining harvestable when traditional varieties had collapsed to the ground and begun to rot.
Despite occasional local famines caused by armed conflicts or political mischief, food is more abundant and cheaper today than ever before in history.
Borlaug remains a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico and president of a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. He believes that biotechnology will be crucial to boosting world food supplies in the coming decades.
“The Man Who Fed the World,” Ronald Bailey’s review of Leon Hesser’s The Man Who Fed the World