If you think that plant breeding sounds like boring work, you need to know about the Green Revolution.

In the middle and later years of the last century, there was a world crisis in the production of food. Wheat, the world’s Number One crop, was in special trouble. So was rice. It was agricultural scientists who solved the problem.

In the early nineteen-seventies, a huge drought in Sub-Saharan Africa (that part that lies south of the Sahara Desert) caused a succession of disappointing harvests and raised the specter of starvation on a massive scale.

Fortunately, science was already at work trying to head off such calamities. Starting in the nineteen-forties, the Mexican government had been worried about potential food shortages. According to an account by Noel D. Vietmeyer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Mexico had few agricultural scientists of its own, and the nation had to import from other countries more than half the wheat it consumed.

Norman Borlaug, the architect of the Green Revolution (Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation)

In response to a request for help, the U.S.-based Rockefeller Foundation sent a young forester to Mexico to try to improve wheat yield. His name was Norman E. Borlaug, and he actually was employed by a chemical manufacturer, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company. Over a period of many seasons, Borlaug crossed and recrossed varieties of wheat, seeking a strain that resisted the fungus called black stem rust. The disease was one of the reasons Mexico’s wheat crop was endangered. Borlaug’s work “was drudgery on a monumental scale,” Vietmeyer has written.

Borlaug’s experimentation had also resulted in wheat plants that were shorter and bushier than most (dwarf varieties, they are called) and that are adaptable to a great range of climates, altitudes, and day lengths. Short stature was helpful, he found, in helping the plant resist lodging, or toppling over in the wind. When other varieties received fertilizer, they yielded more, as planned. But they also grew taller and were more susceptible to lodging than the new dwarfs.

Just in time.
The new varieties arrived just in time to head off the drought. India and Pakistan requested huge quantities of wheat seed, which Borlaug was able to ship, though not without heartbreaking bureaucratic and other mixups.The seed for India and Pakistan left Mexico on the same ocean freighter, but the two South Asian countries went to war while they were waiting for the life-giving cargo. Because of national pride, neither country wanted to share the contents of the same ship.

Borlaug managed to stop the shipment at Singapore and divide it between two vessels, one bound for India and the other headed for Pakistan. A problem with germination rates, brought on by the Mexican government's killing most of the seeds by overfumigation, almost wrecked the project.

Green Revolution wheat arrived in South Asia just in time to stave off famine. (ICRISAT library)

But Borlaug recommended planting the seeds anyway, doubling irrigation, and tripling fertilizer, and the remaining seeds not only sprouted but thrived. Within a few years, Mexican dwarf wheats were growing on 10 million hectares of Asia. Production soared in India and Pakistan, and both countries soon achieved self-sufficiency in wheat.

By 1968, the words “Green Revolution” were enshrined in popular as well as scientific terminology. It was put there by William S. Gaud, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in a speech that year. Two years later, Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Clearly, his efforts saved millions of people from starvation. Borlaug, stated Noel Vietmeyer, “has done more to relieve world hunger than any other living person.” The scientist's work with high-yield wheat varieties soon spread to rice, and millions more were fed.

Criticism.
In more recent years, some scientists and others have criticized the methods of the Green Revolution. They point out that the increases in food required heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and irrigation. Norman Borlaug has remained a strong advocate of the techniques he pioneered, but he has never claimed that the revolution was the permanent solution to all of Earth’s food problems.

In 1970, when Borlaug rose to thank the Nobel Committee for his prize, he warned:

The Green Revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation. It has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the Green Revolution will be ephemeral only.

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