The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis (26 page)

But when Ehrlich talked with people familiar with the Indian situation, he clearly had not listened to Norman Borlaug. In 1965, in consultation with Indian government officials, Borlaug’s trainees had carried 200 tons of high-yielding seed from Mexico to India. The following year, they had imported 18,000 tons and a massive amount of fertilizer. Indian plant breeders crossed local varieties with the Mexican
lines containing the Norin 10 dwarfing gene under the leadership of M. S. Swaminathan, an Indian geneticist in the civil service. Wheat production doubled in a matter of years and the specter of massive famine was averted. Much of the success in increasing yields was in the northwestern state of Punjab, where mechanized equipment and irrigation with groundwater extended the capabilities of farmers. Counter to Ehrlich’s fears, by the 1980s
India was exporting grains. Yields were climbing in other countries as well, including Pakistan and Turkey, as the high-yield varieties spread.

Miracles with Rice

As great as Borlaug’s achievements were with wheat, they were not sufficient to boost yields of staple crops everywhere. One crop that was missing was rice, the heart and soul of the culture and the daily meal throughout Asia. Rice piles high in bowls and on platters in every Asian restaurant, roadside food stall, and home kitchen. It provides most of the human energy for the densely populated continent.

With the Green Revolution underway and the number of mouths to be fed on an upward trajectory, countries established international centers to develop new seed varieties and
disseminate them to farmers. Mexico housed the center for wheat and maize. A center for rice took up residence in Asia, in Los Baños, Philippines, in the early 1960s. Breeders in India and elsewhere had already produced short-statured rice from crosses of different varieties. Climbing yields in wheat had shown the benefits of dwarf genes like those in Norin 10. Now it was time for dwarf rice.

After eight crosses of different varieties, a promising prospect, labeled IR8, emerged from Los Baños. IR8 was a cross between Peta, a tall, vigorous variety from Indonesia, and DGWG, a dwarf variety from Taiwan. In the first generation of the cross, all the plants were
tall. In the second, three were tall and one was short—the same ratio Mendel had found with his peas. “That’s when we knew we had it . . . that DGWG could be used to breed an
improved semi-dwarf variety,” recalled plant breeder Henry Beachell, who worked on the project in the Philippines. With the dwarf gene inherited according to the Mendelian ratio, commercial production of a semi-dwarf variety was feasible.

In just a few years, breeders produced “miracle rice” and released it to farmers. The new variety was short with strong stems and was insensitive to day length, just like Borlaug’s shuttled wheat. Yields were many times higher than those for conventional rice, provided that farmers used heavy doses of fertilizer. But IR8 was not an immediate miracle in the eyes of the ordinary person. It had a chalky texture, unlike more desirable polished grains, and the grains broke easily. The cooked rice hardened after cooling. And it tasted bad. Beachell recalled a young Filipina saying, “I don’t like IR8 because it
scratches my throat.” Subsequent breeding improved the chalkiness and taste and bred in other desirable features, such as resistance to pests and fast-growing plants, so that farmers could harvest more crops in a year. Miracle rice boosted yields in the
Philippines, China, and throughout Asia.

Dwarf genes were not the only boon for rice yields in Asia. At first, rice breeders could not readily take advantage of hybrid vigor for large-scale production of seeds, because rice, like wheat and peas, is self-fertilizing. But one breeder, Yuan Longping, who later became famous as “the father of hybrid rice,” was undeterred.

When asked about the ingredients for success in an interview many years later, the Chinese plant breeder gave the answer in four words: “knowledge, perspiration,
inspiration, and chance.” Yuan Longping’s encounter with chance took the form of a coworker who had come upon a common wild rice plant on Hainan Island with pollen that was yellowish,
irregularly shaped, and sterile. Sterile males had proven useful for commercially breeding hybrids in onions and sugar beets, the genetic
equivalent of hand-fertilizing plants to ensure that eggs could not be fertilized by pollen from the same plant. Male sterility had also enabled American farmers to stop trimming the tassels off corn, although that innovation backfired with the American
corn blight of the 1970s. Male sterility was the opening Yuan Longping needed to shut off self-pollination and make room for crossing the female egg with male pollen from another plant.

With the sterile pollen from wild rice in hand, he worked several years to make crosses of different rice varieties. He released the winning hybrids—Nan-You 2, Nan-You 6, Shan-You 6, and Wei-You 6—to
Chinese farmers in the early 1970s. Yields were as much as one-third higher, and within two decades the new seeds were producing
over half of China’s rice. Hybrid rice spread to Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and throughout other parts of Asia and the rest of the world. Breeders continue to search for even better varieties that are resistant to pests, disease, and high temperatures.

Rising yields became a trademark of the Green Revolution, the term for the incredible boost in grains from the high-yielding varieties, mainly wheat and rice, in the developing world. William Gaud, director of the United States Agency for International Development, coined the term at a 1968 meeting in Washington DC in a Cold War–era reference. Remarking on the record harvests, he claimed, “These and other development in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.” He went on to say that “this new revolution can be as significant and as beneficial to mankind as the industrial revolution of a
century and a half ago.”

Indeed, it was a revolution. Plant breeders had added dwarf genes and sterile pollen to humanity’s twentieth-century toolkit. In many countries, the growth in production of grains outstripped the rise in
population. Food became cheaper for people in the cities and in the countryside. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his humanitarian efforts to “feed the
hungry people of the world.”

Even Borlaug saw that the victory was temporary. Although he and Ehrlich did not share the same view on the fate of humanity, they did agree on one count: the impending disaster of what Borlaug called the “population monster.” The Green Revolution did not end
humanity’s struggle against hunger. The planet’s human population had climbed from about 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 3 billion in 1960, and to nearly 4.5 billion in 1980. Most of the
added numbers were in developing countries.

Where the Green Revolution had taken hold, tractors were replacing water buffaloes in the fields, and herbicides were replacing people who pulled weeds out by hand. As in North America earlier in the century, people were leaving the countryside and moving to the cities for jobs in factories and offices. Three
out of every ten people lived in cities in 1950. New York was the world’s largest city, with a population of 12 million. By 1980, as the main thrust of the Green Revolution was winding down, Tokyo, Mexico City, and
São Paulo surpassed that number, and four out of every ten people lived in cities. All of these people would need to eat.

The Dark Side of the Revolution

Criticisms of the Green Revolution run deep. Of course, there can be no criticism of the laudable goal to end hunger. The question is whether the Green Revolution was the best way to ward off the tragedy of so many people in the world without access to a healthy diet. Despite the wizardry of shuttle breeding, hybrids, and dwarfing genes, the Green Revolution reached those farmers who could afford the whole package: miracle seeds, chemical fertilizers, irrigation, and machinery. That left
millions upon millions who did not stand to benefit from the ingenuity of the plant breeders. The revolution was American-style, following the pattern in the earlier part of the century as hybrid corn changed the landscape. Bigger farms, more monocultures, tractors and combines, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides became the way to increase yields. But increasing yields does not equate with reducing hunger. If a poor farmer with a small plot of land cannot afford the inputs, he or she gets no benefit from the technologies, no matter how sophisticated they might be. Even for those fortunate enough to afford the inputs, the knowledge built up over generations about ways to control pests and grow local varieties is too easily lost in the rush to take part in the promise of sky-high yields.

Carl Sauer, an American geographer who had worked in Mexico, raised these concerns to the Rockefeller Foundation in the early days of the program: “A good aggressive bunch of American agronomists and plant-breeders could ruin the native resources for good and all by pushing their American commercial stocks,” he argued. “Mexican agriculture cannot be pointed toward standardization on a few commercial types without upsetting native economy and culture hopelessly. The example of Iowa is about the most dangerous of all for Mexico. Unless the Americans understand that, they’d better
keep out of this country entirely.” By the end of the 1970s, the bloom was off the rose for Mexican agriculture. The Yaqui Valley became a high-yielding, highly mechanized center of wheat production, but farmers in other, less-endowed parts of the country were unable to participate in the prosperity.

The same story played out in India’s breadbasket of Punjab where the Green Revolution took hold two decades later. Tube wells for irrigation pockmarked the landscape, and consumption of chemical fertilizers skyrocketed.
People prospered. Yet even today there are many other parts of the country where farmers work their fields with wooden plows, have only cattle dung to fertilize their soil, and are ruined if the
rains do not come. The contrast is striking even to the most unobservant visitor.

It’s impossible to rewind history to see what might have happened had Borlaug and his colleagues applied their passion and ingenuity to the depleted soils, to the traditional crops of the poor farmer, or to the inability of the less privileged to get access to the inputs or income to purchase food. Borlaug, in his defense, did recognize that poverty is what keeps people hungry, a tragedy that high yields and abundant food in faraway places cannot remedy. Indeed, while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, he added, toward the end of his speech: “There remains the unsolved social-economic problem of finding effective ways to distribute the needed additional food to the vast underprivileged masses who have little or no purchasing power. This is still the great unsolved problem with which the economists, sociologists, and political leaders
must now come to grips.”

The Green Revolution has had its downsides even for those who could take part. It locked farmers into commercial seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, goods for which they have to pay upfront. If they can’t get good prices for their crops, debt ensues. Reports of farmers in Punjab and elsewhere, overburdened by debt and drinking pesticides to take their own lives,
fill the newspapers. Vandana Shiva, a prominent author and one of Borlaug’s main critics, wrote that “the Green Revolution has been a failure. . . . The beneficiaries have been the manufacturers of agricultural machinery,
dam builders and large landowners.”

The Green Revolution also depended on lots of water. One way to get it was with machinery powered by fossil fuels to dig and pump wells. Today, more groundwater is extracted in India than in any other country in the world. How much longer the gift from the ground can last is open to question. The slurping of groundwater means that
water tables are dropping. Farmers need to dig deeper wells and use more energy for stronger pumps just to keep their crops from withering. And in India, as
in ancient Mesopotamia and many other places throughout the world, poor drainage on irrigated soils leaves salt crusting the surface and turns
productive fields into wasteland.

The impact of the Green Revolution is uneven not only within countries but also among countries. The revolution never reached African countries south of the Sahara. The difficulties are many: millions of poor farmers work patches of land smaller than most suburban lawns in North America; Africa has a poor network of roads; there are few prospects for irrigation; and the governments of African nations have not been keen to take part. Toward the end of his life, Borlaug aligned with former US president Jimmy Carter to bring the technologies to Africa that had boosted
yields in Mexico and much of Asia. But his efforts did not meet with the same success in Africa. When Borlaug was on his deathbed in 2009 at the age of ninety-five, his daughter asked him if he needed anything. “Africa. Africa. I have not finished my
mission in Africa,” he replied.

There are arguments on both sides about whether the Green Revolution made the environment better or worse. Borlaug often claimed that the increase in yields helped the environment, arguing that if the same amount of cereal was produced with 1950 yields, twice as much land would be needed. That would mean more decimated forests and grasslands and more
extinctions of wildlife species. On the negative side is the dramatic uptick in the amount of chemical fertilizers farmers use. The nitrogen-fixing factories burn fossil fuels and fertilizers on the field emit the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, contributing to the climate crisis. An excess of nitrogen runs off of farms into dead zones in coastal waters. Other environmental offshoots from the Green Revolution include the heavy use of pesticides to spray on monocultures, the depletion of aquifers, and the loss of locally suited crops.