HISTORY AND CULTURE:
The Man Who Launched the Green Revolution

By Henry I. Miller

Norman Borlaug changed the face of modern agriculture by combining good science and common sense—a shocking contrast to the naysayers and environmental extremists who are driving the agenda today. By Henry I. Miller.

A review of The Man Who Fed the World, by Leon Hesser (Durban House, 2006).

The story of Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder known as the “Father of the Green Revolution,” offers the same kind of nobility and idealism shown by Jimmy Stewart in the title role of the classic movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Borlaug’s life has been one of extraordinary paradoxes: a child of the Iowa prairie during the Great Depression who attended a one-room school, aspired to become a high school science teacher, flunked the university entrance exam—but went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for averting malnutrition, famine, and the death of millions.

Borlaug introduced several innovations. First, he and his colleagues laboriously crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce some that were resistant to rust, a destructive plant pest, raising yields by 20–40 percent. Second, he crafted so-called dwarf wheat varieties that would not fall over in the field when aggressively fertilized so as to achieve maximum yields. 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 years required for breeding new varieties. Moreover, because the two regions possessed distinctly different climatic conditions, the resulting early maturing, rust-resistant
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 to provide the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation.

Borlaug’s story is a saga of the greatness of the United States during the twentieth century—of opportunity, individuality, courage, and achievement.

In his professional life, Borlaug, who is now 92, struggled against prodigious obstacles, including what he called the “constant pessimism and scare-mongering” of critics and skeptics who predicted, despite his efforts, that mass starvation was inevitable and that hundreds of millions would perish in Africa and Asia. His work resulted in high-yielding varieties of wheat that made it possible for Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, and parts of South America to feed their populations.  

How successful were Borlaug’s efforts? From 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.70 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland—an extraordinary 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 drastic expansion of land under cultivation—with losses of pristine wilderness far greater than all the losses to urban, suburban, and commercial expansion.

Borlaug recalls without rancor the maddening obstacles to the development and introduction of high-yield plant varieties: “bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions.”

Both the need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remain. 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, fewer inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived orally active vaccines.

Extremists in the environmental movement, however, are doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks, and their allies in national and U.N-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].

Borlaug observes that the enemies of innovation may create a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”

Due to Borlaug’s efforts, from 1950 to 1992 the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.70 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland—an extraordinary increase in yield.

Although we must be prudent in assessing new technologies, these assessments must not be based on overly conservative—or inaccurate—assumptions or be swayed by the self-interest of bureaucrats or the antibusiness, antiestablishment, antiglobalization agendas of a few activists.  

Norman Borlaug’s story is a saga of the greatness of the United States during the twentieth century—of opportunity, individuality, courage, and achievement. He strove to exploit new technology on the basis of good science and good sense.

I have known Borlaug personally for more than a decade. Perhaps as remarkable as his scientific and humanitarian accomplishments are Borlaug’s modesty, guilelessness, and desire to contribute to society.

Assessments of new technologies must not be swayed by the self-interest of bureaucrats or the antibusiness, antiestablishment, antiglobalization agendas of a few activists.

Borlaug’s modus vivendi might be summed up in the following observations he made about the importance of food and the application of science to feeding the hungry.

First: “There is no more essential commodity than food. Without food, people perish, social and political organizations disintegrate, and civilizations collapse.”

Second: “You can’t eat potential.” In other words, you haven’t succeeded until you get new developments into the field and into people’s bellies.

Finally: “It is easy to forget that science offers more than a body of knowledge and a process for adding new knowledge. It tells us not only what we know but what we don’t know. It identifies areas of uncertainty and offers an estimate of how great and how critical that uncertainty is likely to be.”  

For me, the essence of Norman Borlaug is in a line from a poem by Matthew Arnold describing Sophocles: a man “who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”

Available from the Hoover Press is To America’s Health: A Proposal to Reform the Food and Drug Administration, by Henry I. Miller. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

Henry I. Miller, M.S., M.D., is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where his research focuses on public policy toward science and technology. It encompasses a number of areas, including pharmaceutical development, the new biotechnology, models for regulatory reform, and the emergence of new viral diseases.