Borlaug

Given that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has been in the news recently for prematurely honouring Obama with this year's prize, I thought I would write a little about a man whom they deservedly celebrated in 1970.

I first came across the name of Dr. Norman Borlaug when I was in the eighth grade. He was mentioned in one line in one of my school books. For some reason, I decided to look him up (maybe because I thought the name was funny). The World Book Encyclopaedia (this was way before the internet) had devoted only about a page to him. But that was long enough to make the man a hero in my eyes.

Dr. Borlaug developed "semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties" and led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India." (Wikipedia). As fascinating as that sounds in itself, it was the repercussions that turned me into an instant fan. His efforts (often in the teeth of stubborn opposition, red tape and, in one case, outright war) led to the Green Revolution which more than doubled the production of foodgrains in the aforementioned countries, and saved "over a billion people from starvation".

The manner in which the Green Revolution itself came about has a real touch of the dramatic about it. Indeed, the description in Wikipedia reads a bit like a screen play:

"During the mid-1960s, the Indian subcontinent was at war, and experiencing widespread famine and starvation, even though the U.S. was making emergency shipments of millions of tons of grain, including over one fifth of its total wheat, to the region.[16] The Indian and Pakistani bureaucracies and the region's cultural opposition to new agricultural techniques initially prevented Borlaug from fulfilling his desire to immediately plant the new wheat strains there. By the summer of 1965, the famine became so acute that the governments stepped in and allowed his projects to go forward.[12]

Biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971," and "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."[23]

In 1965, after extensive testing, Borlaug's team, under Anderson, began its effort by importing about 450 tons of Lerma Rojo and Sonora 64 semi-dwarf seed varieties: 250 tons went to Pakistan and 200 to India. They encountered many obstacles. Their first shipment of wheat was held up in Mexican customs and so could not be shipped from the port at Guaymas in time for proper planting.[citation needed] Instead, it was sent via a 30-truck convoy from Mexico to the U.S. port in Los Angeles, encountering delays at the Mexico - United States border. Once the convoy entered the U.S., it had to take a detour, as the U.S. National Guard had closed the freeway due to Watts riots in Los Angeles. When the seeds reached Los Angeles, a Mexican bank refused to honor Pakistan treasury's payment of US$100,000, because the check contained three misspelled words. Still, the seed was loaded onto a freighter destined for Bombay, India, and Karachi, Pakistan. Twelve hours into the freighter's voyage, war broke out between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region. Borlaug received a telegraph from the Pakistani minister of agriculture, Malik Khuda Bakhsh Bucha: "I'm sorry to hear you are having trouble with my check, but I've got troubles, too. Bombs are falling on my front lawn. Be patient, the money is in the bank ..."[12]

These delays prevented Borlaug's group from conducting the germination tests needed to determine seed quality and proper seeding levels. They started planting immediately, and often worked in sight of artillery flashes. A week later, Borlaug discovered that his seeds were germinating at less than half the normal rate.[citation needed] It later turned out that the seeds had been damaged in a Mexican warehouse by over-fumigation with a pesticide. He immediately ordered all locations to double their seeding rates.[citation needed]

The initial yields of Borlaug's crops were higher than any ever harvested in South Asia. The countries subsequently committed to importing large quantities of both the Lerma Rojo 64 and Sonora 64 varieties. In 1966, India imported 18,000 tons —the largest purchase and import of any seed in the world at that time. In 1967, Pakistan imported 42,000 tons, and Turkey 21,000 tons. Pakistan's import, planted on 1.5 million acres (6,100 km²), produced enough wheat to seed the entire nation's wheatland the following year.[16] By 1968, when Ehrlich's book was released, William Gaud of the United States Agency for International Development was calling Borlaug's work a "Green Revolution". High yields led to a shortage of various utilities — labor to harvest the crops, bullock carts to haul it to the threshing floor, jute bags, trucks, rail cars, and grain storage facilities. Some local governments were forced to close school buildings temporarily to use them for grain storage.[12]

Wheat yields in developing countries, 1950 to 2004, kg/HA baseline 500

In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 7.3 million tons in 1970; Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production by 1968.[citation needed] Yields were over 21 million tons by 2000. In India, yields increased from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20.1 million tons in 1970. By 1974, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals. By 2000, India was harvesting a record 76.4 million tons (2.81 billion bushels) of wheat. Since the 1960s, food production in both nations has increased faster than the rate of population growth.[citation needed] Paul Waggoner, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, calculates that India's use of high-yield farming has prevented 100 million acres (400,000 km²) of virgin land from being converted into farmland—an area about the size of California, or 13.6% of the total area of India.[24] The use of these wheat varieties has also had a substantial effect on production in six Latin American countries, six countries in the Near and Middle East, and several others in Africa.[citation needed]

Borlaug's work with wheat led to the development of high-yield semi-dwarf indica and japonica rice cultivars at the International Rice Research Institute, started by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and at China's Hunan Rice Research Institute. Borlaug's colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research also developed and introduced a high-yield variety of rice throughout most of Asia. Land devoted to the semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties in Asia expanded from 200 acres (0.8 km²) in 1965 to over 40 million acres (160,000 km²) in 1970. In 1970, this land accounted for over 10% of the more productive cereal land in Asia.[16]"

Apart from the billion or so people who owe their lives to him, Dr. Borlaug's Revolution also saved untold acres of forest land from being cleared for farming. You would have supposed the environmentalists would have hailed him as their personal messiah for this. But there's just no pleasing some people. Again from Wikipedia:

"Borlaug's name is nearly synonymous with the Green Revolution, against which many criticisms have been mounted over the decades by environmentalists, nutritionists, progressives, and economists. Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by people who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects.[27] Borlaug's work has been criticized for bringing large-scale monoculture, input-intensive farming techniques to countries that had previously relied on subsistence farming.[28] [Someone please tell me how this is a bad thing.] These farming techniques reap large profits for U.S. agribusiness and agrochemical corporations such as Monsanto Company and have been criticized for widening social inequality in the countries owing to uneven food distribution while forcing a capitalist agenda of U.S. corporations onto countries that had undergone land reform.[29] [The 'inequality' is probably between people who get to eat as opposed to those who starve.] There are also concerns about the long-term sustainability of farming practices encouraged by the Green Revolution in both the developed and developing world.[citation needed] [Long term sustainability... remember, people are starving right here, right now.]

Other concerns of his critics and critics of biotechnology in general include: that the construction of roads in populated third-world areas could lead to the destruction of wilderness [Really...]; the crossing of genetic barriers; the inability of crops to fulfill all nutritional requirements; the decreased biodiversity from planting a small number of varieties; the environmental and economic effects of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides; the amount of herbicide sprayed on fields of herbicide-resistant crops.[30]"

This opposition hasn't been a harmless armchair tantrum. In the early 1980s, the environmentalist groups pressured Borlaug's sponsors to stop giving him the funding needed to take his methods to Africa. The suffering that has caused would take detailed research to calculate. Luckily, he found other sponsors, notably Ryoichi Sasakawa, and as a result, the Dark Continent has been put on some sort of track to getting enough food to feed its people.

Given the towering contributions the man made to worldwide prosperity, it is depressing to consider that his death received such little coverage in the world media. Depressing, but not surprising. He passed away on September 12th, 2009. Michael Jackson had died just two months earlier and the world hadn't done crying yet. (I mean no insult to Michael Jackson by this.)