The invention: Artificially created high-yielding wheat and rice varieties that are helping food producers in developing countries keep pace with population growth
The people behind the invention:
Orville A. Vogel (1907-1991), an agronomist who developed
high-yielding semidwarf winter wheats and equipment for
wheat research Norman E. Borlaug (1914- ), a distinguished agricultural
scientist
Robert F. Chandler, Jr. (1907-1999), an international agricultural consultant and director of the International Rice Research Institute, 1959-1972
William S. Gaud (1907-1977), a lawyer and the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, 1966-1969
The Problem of Hunger
In the 1960′s, agricultural scientists created new, high-yielding strains of rice and wheat designed to fight hunger in developing countries. Although the introduction of these new grains raised levels of food production in poor countries, population growth and other factors limited the success of the so-called “Green Revolution.”
Before World War II, many countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America exported grain to Western Europe. After the war, however, these countries began importing food, especially from the United States. By 1960, they were importing about nineteen million tons of grain a year; that level nearly doubled to thirty-six million tons in 1966. Rapidly growing populations forced the largest developing countries—China, India, and Brazil in particular—to import huge amounts of grain. Famine was averted on the Indian subcontinent in 1966 and 1967 only by the United States shipping wheat to the region. The United States then changed its food policy. Instead of contributing food aid directly to hungry countries, the U.S. began working to help such countries feed themselves.
The new rice and wheat strains were introduced just as countries in Africa and Asia were gaining their independence from the European nations that had colonized them. The Cold War was still going strong, and Washington and other Western capitals feared that the Soviet Union was gaining influence in the emerging countries. To help counter this threat, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was active in the Third World in the 1960′s, directing or contributing to dozens of agricultural projects, including building rural infrastructure (farm-to-market roads, irrigation projects, and rural electric systems), introducing modern agricultural techniques, and importing fertilizer or constructing fertilizer factories in other countries. By raising the standard of living of impoverished people in developing countries through applying technology to agriculture, policymakers hoped to eliminate the socioeconomic conditions that would support communism.
The Green Revolution
It was against this background that William S. Gaud, administrator of USAID from 1966 to 1969, first talked about a “green revolution” in a 1968 speech before the Society for International Development in Washington, D.C. The term “green revolution” has been used to refer to both the scientific development of high-yielding food crops and the broader socioeconomic changes in a country’s agricultural sector stemming from farmers’ adoption of these crops.
In 1947, S. C. Salmon, a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist, brought a wheat-dwarfing gene to the United States. Developed in Japan, the gene produced wheat on a short stalk that was strong enough to bear a heavy head of grain. Orville Vogel, another USDA scientist, then introduced the gene into local wheat strains, creating a successful dwarf variety known as Gaines wheat. Under irrigation, Gaines wheat produced record yields. After hearing about Vogel’s work, Norman Borlaug, who headed the Rockefeller Foundation’s wheat-breeding program in Mexico, adapted Gaines wheat, later called “miracle wheat,” to a variety of growing conditions in Mexico.
Workers in an Asian rice field. (PhotoDisc)
Success with the development of high-yielding wheat varieties persuaded the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to pursue similar ends in rice culture. The foundations funded the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Philippines, appointing as director Robert F. Chandler, Jr., an international agricultural consultant. Under his leadership, IRRI researchers cross-bred Peta, a tall variety of rice from Indonesia, with Deo-geo-woo-gen, a dwarf rice from Taiwan, to produce a new strain, IR-8. Released in 1966 and dubbed “miracle rice,” IR-8 produced yields double those of other Asian rice varieties and in a shorter time, 120 days in contrast to 150 to 180 days.
Statistics from India illustrate the expansion of the new grain varieties. During the 1966-1967 growing season, Indian farmers planted improved rice strains on 900,000 hectares, or 2.5 percent of the total area planted in rice. By 1984-1985, the surface area planted in improved rice varieties stood at 23.4 million hectares, or 56.9 percent of the total. The rate of adoption was even faster for wheat. In 19661967, improved varieties covered 500,000 hectares, comprising 4.2 percent of the total wheat crop. By the 1984-1985 growing season, the surface area had expanded to 19.6 million hectares, or 82.9 percent of the total wheat crop.
To produce such high yields, IR-8 and other genetically engineered varieties of rice and wheat required the use of irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides. Irrigation further increased food production by allowing year-round farming and the planting of multiple crops on the same plot of land, either two crops of high-yielding grain varieties or one grain crop and another food crop.
EXPECTATIONS
The rationale behind the introduction of high-yielding grains in developing countries was that it would start a cycle of improvement in the lives of the rural poor. High-yielding grains would lead to bigger harvests and better-nourished and healthier families. If better nutrition enabled more children to survive, the need to have large families to ensure care for elderly parents would ease. A higher survival rate of children would lead couples to use family planning, slowing overall population growth and allowing per capita food intake to rise.
The greatest impact of the Green Revolution has been seen in Asia, which experienced dramatic increases in rice production, and on the Indian subcontinent, with increases in rice and wheat yields. Latin America, especially Mexico, enjoyed increases in wheat harvests. Subsaharan Africa initially was left out of the revolution, as scientists paid scant attention to increasing the yields of such staple food crops as yams, cassava, millet, and sorghum. By the 1980′s, however, this situation was being remedied with new research directed toward millet and sorghum.
Research is conducted by a network of international agricultural research centers. Backed by both public and private funds, these centers cooperate with international assistance agencies, private foundations, universities, multinational corporations, and government agencies to pursue and disseminate research into improved crop varieties to farmers in the Third World. IRRI and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMMYT) in Mexico City are two of these agencies.
Impact
Expectations went unrealized in the first few decades following the green revolution. Despite the higher yields from millions of tons of improved grain seeds imported into the developing world, lower-yielding grains still accounted for much of the surface area planted in grain. The reasons for this explain the limits and impact of the Green Revolution.
The subsistence mentality dies hard. The main targets of Green Revolution programs were small farmers, people whose crops provide barely enough to feed their families and provide seed for the next crop. If an experimental grain failed, they faced starvation. Such farmers hedged their bets when faced with a new proposition, for example, by intercropping, alternating rows of different grains in the same field. In this way, even if one crop failed, another might feed the family.
Poor farmers in developing countries also were likely to be illiterate and not eager to try something they did not fully understand. Also, by definition, poor farmers often did not have the means to purchase the inputs—irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticides—required to grow the improved varieties.
In many developing countries, therefore, rich farmers tended to be the innovators. More likely than poor farmers to be literate, they also had the money to exploit fully the improved grain varieties. They also were more likely than subsistence-level farmers to be in touch with the monetary economy, making purchases from the agricultural supply industry and arranging sales through established marketing channels, rather than producing primarily for personal or family use.
Once wealthy farmers adopted the new grains, it often became more difficult for poor farmers to do so. Increased demand for limited supplies, such as pesticides and fertilizers, raised costs, while bigger-than-usual harvests depressed market prices. With high sales volumes, owners of large farms could withstand the higher costs and lower-per-unit profits, but smaller farmers often could not.
Often, the result of adopting improved grains was that small farmers could no longer make ends meet solely by farming. Instead, they were forced to hire themselves out as laborers on large farms. Surges of laborers into a limited market depressed rural wages,
ORVILLE A. VOGEL
Born in 1907, Orville Vogel grew up on a farm in eastern Nebraska, and farming remained his passion for his entire life. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture from the University of Nebraska, and then a doctorate in agronomy from Washington State University (WSU) in 1939.
Eastern Washington agreed with him, and he stayed there. He began his career as a wheat breeder 1931 for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stationed at WSU. During the next forty-two years, he also took on the responsibilities of associate agronomist for the university’s Division of Agronomy and from 1960 until his retirement in 1973 was professor of agronomy.
At heart Vogel was an experimenter and tinkerer, renowned among his peers for his keen powers of observation and his unselfishness. In addition to the wheat strains he bred that helped launch the Green Revolution, he took part in the search for plant varieties resistant to snow mold and foot rot. However, according to the father of the Green Revolution, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, Vogel’s greatest contribution may not have been semi-dwarf wheat varieties but the many innovations in farming equipment he built as a sideline. These unheralded inventions automated the planting and harvesting of research plots, and so made research much easier to carry out and faster.
In recognition of his achievements, Vogel received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1975 and entered the Agricultural Research Service’s Science Hall of Fame in 1987. Vogel died in Washington in 1991.
making it even more difficult for small farmers to eke out a living. The result was that rich farmers got richer and poor farmers got poorer. Often, small farmers who could no longer support their families would leave rural areas and migrate to the cities, seeking work and swelling the ranks of the urban poor.
Mixed Results
The effects of the Green Revolution were thus mixed. The dissemination of improved grain varieties unquestionably increased grain harvests in some of the poorest countries of the world. Seed
companies developed, produced, and sold commercial quantities of improved grains, and fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers logged sales to developing countries thanks to USAID-sponsored projects.
Along with disrupting the rural social structure and encouraging rural flight to the cities, the Green Revolution has had other negative effects. For example, the millions of tube wells sunk in India to irrigate crops reduced groundwater levels in some regions faster than they could be recharged. In other areas, excessive use of pesticides created health hazards, and fertilizer use led to streams and ponds being clogged by weeds. The scientific community became concerned that the use of improved varieties of grain, many of which were developed from the same mother variety, reduced the genetic diversity of the world’s food crops, making them especially vulnerable to attack by disease or pests.
Perhaps the most significant impact of the Green Revolution is the change it wrought in the income and class structure of rural areas; often, malnutrition was not eliminated in either the countryside or the cities. Almost without exception, the relative position of peasants deteriorated. Many analysts admit that the Green Revolution did not end world hunger, but they argue that it did buy time. The poorest of the poor would be even worse off without it.
See also Artificial chromosome; Cloning; Genetic “fingerprinting”; Genetically engineered insulin; In vitro plant culture.
