The Green Revolutionary

On July 17, the Congressional Gold Medal (the nation's highest civilian award) was bestowed on Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that brought modern agricultural methods to much of the developing world. Borlaug's work, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, averted malnutrition, famine, and death for many millions.

As gratifying as it is to see Borlaug's great humanitarian achievement receive such well-deserved recognition, the sad fact is his ideas are under assault as never before. Barely a month before, former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan was picked to head a new group that pledges to achieve a "green revolution" in Africa. Despite its name, though, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa rejects proven and pivotal approaches to crop science. Alas, Annan's group is being handsomely bankrolled by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates's $30 billion foundation. If past performance is any indication, the only things likely to become greener are the numbered bank accounts of Kofi Annan and his cronies.

The contrast between Borlaug and Annan could hardly be greater. Borlaug is modest, earnest, and self-effacing, while Annan is arrogant and hubristic.

Borlaug worked miracles of several kinds. First, he and his colleagues laboriously crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce some new ones with resistance to rust, a destructive plant pest. This raised yields 20 to 40 percent. Second, in order to achieve maximum yields, he crafted so-called dwarf wheat varieties that, when aggressively fertilized, would not fall over in the field. Third, he devised an ingenious technique called "shuttle breeding"--growing two successive plantings each year, instead of the usual one, in different regions of Mexico. The availability of two test generations of wheat each year cut by half the time required for breeding new varieties. Moreover, because the two regions possessed distinctly different climatic conditions, the resulting varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes, altitudes, and soil types. This wide adaptability, which flew in the face of agricultural orthodoxy, proved invaluable, and Mexican wheat yields skyrocketed. Similar successes followed when the Mexican wheat varieties were planted in Pakistan and India, but only after Borlaug convinced politicians in those countries to change national policies in order to provide the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation.

How successful were Borlaug's efforts? From 1950 to 1992, the world's grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.7 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland--an extra ordinary increase in yield of more than 150 percent. Without high-yield agriculture, either millions would have starved or increases in food output would have been realized only through huge increases in the acreage of land under cultivation--with losses of pristine wilderness far greater than all the losses to urban, suburban, and commercial expansion.

Borlaug's greatest achievement may have been overcoming what he called the "bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers' customs, habits, and superstitions," in order to get his innovations adopted.

Both the need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remain, and in recent years, Borlaug has applied himself to ensuring the success of this century's equivalent of the Green Revolution: the application of gene-splicing, or "genetic modification," to agriculture. Products in development offer the possibility of even higher yields, lower inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived, orally active vaccines.

However, extremists in the environmental movement are doing everything they can to stop such progress, and their allies in national and United Nations-based regulatory agencies are more than eager to help. Borlaug sees history repeating itself:

At the time [of the Green Revolution], Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, "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." Hill was right. His prediction anticipated the gene-splicing era that would arrive decades later. . . . The naysayers and bureaucrats have now come into their own. If our new varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available [emphasis in original].