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Los Baños, Philippines
August 24, 2001
The man who is often referred to
as one of the fathers of the Green Revolution in rice farming,
Dr. Gurdev Khush, officially retires this month as
IRRI's principal plant
breeder after working at the institute for 34 years.
It is a measure of Dr. Khush's stature as the world's foremost
rice breeder that, in any rice field, anywhere in the world,
there's a 60 percent chance that the rice was either bred at
IRRI under his leadership or developed from IRRI varieties.
Dr. Khush has become one of the world's most decorated
scientists, winning the Japan Prize in 1987, the World Food
Prize in 1996, both the Wolf Prize from Israel and the Padma
Shri Award from his native India in 2000, and the International
Scientific and Technical Cooperation Award of the People's
Republic of China this year.
Dr. Khush's final work, the creation of IRRI's new plant type,
is also almost complete. The plants are already yielding
strongly in temperate areas of China, and they are expected to
be ready for farmers in tropical Asia by 2005. Developing the
new plant type has taken nearly 12 years of hard and sometimes
disheartening work. It is designed to yield up to 12 tons per
hectare in irrigated tropical conditions, but adjusting its
genetic characteristics to match tastes and environmental
conditions has been more difficult than expected. Nevertheless,
it's almost "ready for the road."
"I expect it to move very quickly into farmers' fields once it
is released," Dr. Khush says. "It will give farmers the chance
to increase their yields, so it will spread quickly. Already it
is yielding 13 tons per hectare in temperate China."
Looking back on his three and a half decades with IRRI, Dr.
Khush says he has come to love the institute as his home. "It
provided me an excellent opportunity for professional
development and allowed me to contribute to world food
security."
He believes that IRRI will have an important role to play in
developing technologies for food security, environmental
protection, and poverty alleviation for many years to come. He
also believes that the institute should be developing
collaborative arrangements with private-sector
corporations.
"IRRI has tremendous assets that the private sector does not
possess, such as genetic resources, knowledge, and links with
the national agricultural research and extension systems of
rice-growing countries. The private sector, on the other hand,
has resources to invest in cutting-edge science and the
generation of technologies. So, the roles of IRRI and the
private sector should be synergistic."
A Farmer's Son
Gurdev Singh Khush was born the
son of a farmer in the village of Rurkee, in Punjab, India, in
1935. After excelling at high school, he went on to graduate
from Punjab Agricultural University with a bachelor's degree in
science, majoring in plant breeding.
Determined to further his studies in the United States, the
young Khush borrowed money from relatives and went to England,
where he worked as a laborer in a canning factory to earn his
fare to America. There, he obtained a scholarship to study
genetics at the University of California, Davis, and did so well
that he gained his Ph.D. in genetics in less than three years.
He was not yet 25 years old.
Dr. Khush then spent seven years at the University of
California, Davis, researching the cytogenetics of tomatoes. He
joined IRRI as a plant breeder in August 1967, when he was 32,
and immediately began to make his mark on food production in a
hungry developing world.
He has since played a key role in developing more than 300 rice
varieties in IRRI's race to keep rice production ahead of
population growth. One of them, IR36, was released in 1976 to
become the most widely planted variety of rice, or of any other
food crop, the world has ever known. It was planted on 11
million hectares in Asia in the 1980s, yielding an additional
five million tons of rice a year, boosting rice farmers' incomes
by US$1 billion, and, because of its resistance to pests, saving
an estimated $500 million a year in insecticide costs.
IR64 later replaced IR36 as the world's most popular rice
variety, and IR72, released in 1990, became the world's
highest-yielding rice variety.
The Nobel laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug has summed up Dr. Khush's
career by saying, "The impact of Dr. Khush's work upon the lives
of the world's poorest people is incalculable."
Busy Retirement
Dr. Khush looks forward to a busy
retirement. While continuing to serve IRRI as a consultant until
August of next year, he plans to take up residence in California
in April. He intends, first, to write about 10 research papers
from information he has been unable, for lack of time, to
compile. Then he intends to write a book on aspects of rice
culture, possibly for use in high schools. After all that, he
might consider an autobiography.
As well, Dr. Khush has been invited to serve on the boards of
several companies, but he hasn't accepted anything yet. First,
he intends to spend more time with his family. His wife,
Harwant, has a Ph.D. in educational management, his son Ranjiv
is a molecular biologist, his eldest daughter
Manjeev and youngest daughter Kiran are medical doctors in San
Francisco, and a third daughter, Sonia, is an economist with the
Save the Children Foundation in Washington, D.C.
IRRI is the world's leading international rice research and
training center. Based in the Philippines and with offices in 11
other countries, it is an autonomous, nonprofit institution
focused on improving the well-being of present and future
generations of rice farmers and consumers, particularly those
with low incomes, while preserving natural resources. IRRI is
one of 16 Future Harvest centers funded the Consultative Group
on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an association
of public and private donor agencies.
For more information, visit the
websites of CGIAR or
Future Harvest.
Future Harvest is a nonprofit organization that builds awareness
and supports food and environmental research for a world with
less poverty, a healthier human family, well-nourished children,
and a better environment. Future Harvest supports research,
promotes partnerships, and sponsors projects that bring the
results of agricultural research to rural communities, farmers,
and families in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
For additional information,
contact
Duncan Macintosh
IRRI
DAPO Box 7777,
Metro Manila, Philippines
telephone (63-2) 845-0563 or (63-2) 844-3351 to 53
fax: (63-2) 891-1292 or (63-2) 845-0606
email:
d.macintosh@cgiar.org
Web (IRRI):
http://www.cgiar.org/irri
Web (Library): http://ricelib.irri.cgiar.org
Web (Riceweb):
http://www.riceweb.org
Web (Riceworld):
http://www.riceworld.org
IRRI news release
N3745
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