The Man Who Fed the World is copyright © 2006, Leon Hesser.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without the written permission of the Publisher - Durban House Press

Foreword
by Jimmy Carter

The title of this biography, The Man Who Fed the World, is indeed appropriate. My good friend Norman Borlaug has accomplished more than any other one individual in history in the battle to end world hunger.

As a young Rockefeller Foundation scientist in the mid-20th century, Dr. Borlaug developed high-yielding varieties of wheat that took Mexico from near-starvation to self-sufficiency within a few years.

A decade later, when India and Pakistan suffered widespread hunger and even famine, he introduced his new seed and production technologies in the Asian sub-continent and successfully campaigned at the highest levels of government to get policy changes that averted famine in the mid to late 1960s. In response to the combination of his scientific and humanitarian achievements, the Nobel Committee awarded Dr. Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

That was only the beginning of his remarkable accomplishments. Since 1970, for example, Norman Borlaug has made a number of trips to China, where his technology, his policy suggestions, and his training of young Chinese scientists helped alleviate hunger in that country of 1.3 billion people. In the Southern Cone of South America, the early maturity of his Mexican wheats permitted double cropping of wheat and soybeans, with
tremendous increases in production. For his technology and his humanitarian efforts, he is revered in many countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.

Since 1986, I have had the distinct pleasure of working with Norman Borlaug in sub-Saharan Africa where, in spite of AIDS, endemic malaria and other maladies, populations are increasing faster than food supplies. I have witnessed first-hand the reverence that thousands upon thousands of Africans have for Dr. Borlaug’s untiring efforts to relieve their hunger.

Norman Borlaug’s scientific achievements have saved hundreds of millions of lives and earned him the distinction as one of the 100 most influential individuals of the 20th century. I commend Leon Hesser for making more people aware of the remarkable life and achievements of this American hero.

Jimmy Carter

In reflecting on the experience, Borlaug says, “In 1944, I resigned from a challenging research position in the agricultural chemical division of E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. to accept a position with the Rockefeller Foundation as plant pathologist with the Cooperative Mexican-Rockefeller Foundation Agricultural Program. I accepted the job sight unseen, without ever having visited Mexico, without speaking a word of Spanish.

“Many times during the next four years, frustrated by unavailability of machinery and equipment, without the assistance of trained scientists, traveling over bad roads, living in miserable hotels, eating bad food, often sick with diarrhea and unable to communicate because of lack of command of the language, I was certain I had made a dreadful mistake in resigning from my former position. However, by 1948, research results, the bits and pieces of the wheat production puzzle, began to emerge, and the fog of gloom and despair began to lift. I began to see rays of sunlight and hope.”

In the spring of 1945, after Borlaug had been in Mexico about six months, [he was] assigned the task of organizing and directing the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program. [His] mandate was to do whatever was necessary to increase Mexico’s wheat production. He would work across a broad spectrum of disciplines: scientific research in genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology. [...]

First Innovation: High-volume Crossbreeding

A serious problem in Mexico that caused enormous fluctuations in yields was epidemics of wheat rust, Professor Stakman’s shifty enemy. Stem rust often blasted the wheat plants before harvest and turned the fields to sickly gray instead of a field of golden grain. Tragically, stem rust generally was deadliest in exactly those areas where wheat was potentially most productive. Two other kinds of rust—brown leaf rust and yellow stripe rust—were seldom as devastating as stem rust.

The native wheats were susceptible to many races of the stem-rust organism. In three years, from 1939 to 1942, stem rust had slashed Mexico’s national wheat harvest in half. Losses were greatest in Sonora, the most important wheat production region. Much of the former wheat land had been given over to flax, cotton, and other crops, which fared only somewhat better.

The objective of Borlaug’s first innovation, then, was to breed varieties of wheat that were resistant to stem rust. His approach was to crossbreed hundreds and hundreds of different lines in hopes of finding a few, or even one that was resistant to prevalent rust races and yielded well.

Most plant breeders made only a few crosses or a few dozen crosses each season. Each of the many individual plants that resulted had to be observed throughout the growing season and seeds from the “best” individuals harvested and planted the next year, when more selections were made, a process that was then repeated for six to seven years. Norm couldn’t wait that long. He had to speed the process. He collected thousands of varieties from widely varying wheat-producing areas throughout the world. He and his Mexican apostles began crossing them. Borlaug says, “Crossbreeding is a hit-or-miss process. It’s time consuming and mind-warpingly tedious. There’s only one chance in thousands of ever finding what you want, and actually no guarantee of success at all.”

Crossbreeding by hand is a delicate operation, performed with surgical-type tweezers. The breeder must remove the male stamen, which contains the immature pollen, from each bisexual wheat flower. Otherwise, the plant will pollinate itself. The emasculated wheat head is then covered with a small glassine bag to prevent promiscuous out-crossing with wind-blown pollen. After two days the pistil (ovary) of the emasculated flower is pollinated (fertilized) with pollen of the other parental variety.

Norm was willing to take on the immense amount of work this entailed. From daylight ’til sundown, he was bent over in the experimental wheat trials, making notes and recording differences in the varieties in resistance to rust disease. At the time of crossbreeding, he sometimes slept out at the field station in his sleeping bag and
cooked his food over an open campfire, in effect reverting to his days as a forester. He went back to his hotel in Mexico City for a bath and hot meal only occasionally, when he could hitch a ride in the one-vehicle fleet that the Office of Special Studies had at that time.

The tedious work started to pay off. It resulted in the production of rust-resistant lines adapted to conditions in Mexico. Yields from the improved varieties ranged from 20 percent to more than 40 percent higher than the yields of those they replaced. Borlaug never wasted time searching for the perfect variety, but after adequate testing released for commercial use the best available at that point in time.

Second Innovation: Shuttle Breeding

Borlaug’s second breeding innovation had the initial objective of speeding the process by growing two successive plantings per year—one during summer in the low-soil-fertility, rainfed areas at Chapingo and Toluca, in high altitudes not far from Mexico City, and another during the winter season almost two thousand kilometers to the north, in the irrigated area near sea level in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, where growing conditions and soil fertility were much more favorable.

Ever since his trip to Sonora he had been mulling over an idea he wanted to put to the test. He had brought back some wheat from the farms in the Yaqui Valley, and now, in May of 1946, he wanted to prepare a plot to plant it. If it grew well in the highlands of Chapingo or Toluca during the summer, he would gather the seed in the fall, take it north again, and plant it in the Yaqui. (Because of the difference in altitude and temperature, the Toluca and Yaqui planting seasons were at different times of the year.) The following spring the next generation would be harvested in the Yaqui and would be put into the soil at Toluca, and so on back and forth. It would mean that he could grow two generations a year instead of one, cutting his breeding time by half.

It had not been tried before: two generations each year instead of one, plus a complete switch from one latitude and altitude to another. This concept flew in the face of traditional plant breeding methods, a dogma that precluded two generations per year. But Borlaug saw no genetic reason why he couldn’t grow and select two generations each year. He would try it.

The shuttle-breeding process yielded a double bonus. First, as Norm had predicted, they were able to advance the generations twice as fast. The second result, even more important, was fortuitous. As the segregating populations were shuttled back and forth over ten degrees of latitude and from near sea level at the Yaqui Valley in Sonora to over eight thousand feet of altitude at Toluca, they were exposed to different diseases, different soils, different climates and different day-lengths: shortening from the time of planting in winter in Sonora and lengthening in summer in Toluca. The result was much more than simply a speeding of the breeding process. The plants that survived and performed well at both locations were now well adapted to a wide range of conditions.

Norm said, “The Princess of Serendip had smiled on our unorthodox shuttle-breeding effort.” It soon became apparent that these new early-maturing, rust-resistant varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes and elevations in Mexico. Shuttle breeding subsequently gained credence worldwide as a method that reduced by half the years required to breed a new variety as well as for rapidly achieving wide adaptability to a range of variables.

Borlaug says, “Through the use of this technique, we developed high-yielding, day-length-insensitive varieties with a wide range of ecologic adoption and a broad spectrum of disease resistance—a new combination of uniquely valuable characters in wheat varieties.”

These characters were valuable in increasing wheat production in Mexico and neighboring countries, including parts of the USA, but were to prove even more valuable a decade later when the widely adapted dwarf Mexican varieties were successfully introduced into Pakistan, India, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and China. Without this combination of characters, the successful transplantation of the Mexican varieties into other countries would have been impossible. And the Green Revolution might never have happened.

Third Innovation: Changing the Wheat Plant’s Architecture

Mexico’s wheat varieties were naturally slender and inclined to be tall. None of the varieties was capable of efficiently using heavy applications of fertilizer to increase yields. When fertilized they grew tall and rank; with wind at the time of irrigation or with rain they fell flat on the ground. Thus, more fertilizer often meant less grain per hectare. As the use of fertilizer increased and yields climbed to 4,500 kilos per hectare, lodging—the tall wheat plants heavy with grain falling over before ripening— began to limit further increases in yields. Borlaug began a search for wheat from different areas of the world to locate a suitable source of genetic dwarfness to overcome this barrier. He grew more than 20,000 lines, but found none with short, strong stems.

In late 1952, Dr. Orville Vogel, a prominent US Department of Agriculture wheat breeder stationed at Washington State University, had obtained preliminary successes in crossing a Japanese dwarf winter-habit wheat with his tall US winter wheats. Vogel had obtained a sample of the Japanese dwarf wheat seed—Norin 10—from a USDA agricultural advisor who was serving in Japan after World War II. The advisor had sent the seeds back to the USDA, which distributed them to several American wheat scientists, including Vogel, in 1948.

When Borlaug learned about these short-strawed wheats, he embarked on a third major innovation. In 1953, he obtained a few seeds from Vogel’s most successful lines and began crossing them with the most promising, broadly adapted Mexican varieties. A new type of wheat—short and stiff-strawed instead of tall and slender—began to emerge. The progeny of the Japanese short wheat tillered profusely, thrusting up more stems from the base of the plant than western wheats, and it had more grains per head. A series of crosses and re-crosses gave rise to a group of so-called dwarf Mexican wheat varieties. The potential yield of the new varieties, under ideal conditions, increased from the previous high of 4,500 kilos per hectare to 9,000 kilos per hectare. [...]

The dwarf Mexican wheats were first distributed in Mexico in 1961 and the best farmers began to harvest five, six, seven, and even eight tons per hectare. Within seven years, the national average yields had doubled. Borlaug named two of the best strains Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo 64. It was these same dwarf Mexican wheats derived from the early days of Borlaug’s transformative efforts that would later serve as catalysts to trigger the
Green Revolution in India and Pakistan.

Borlaug’s remarkable achievement in so few years was rare. Advances in agriculture typically are gradual. In describing the event, Don Paarlberg, who at the time was Director of Agricultural Economics in the office of the Secretary, US Department of Agriculture, wrote: “Several things about this breakthrough made it special, gave
it particular significance. It came in the hungry part of the world, not in those countries already surfeited with agricultural output. It came in the semi-tropics, which had long been in agricultural torpor, not in the temperate climates, where change was already occurring at a pace more rapid than could readily be assimilated. It produced new knowledge and technology that could be used by farmers in small tracts of land, rather than being, like many technological changes, adaptable only on large farms. And it was a breakthrough that came voluntarily, up from the grass roots, rather than being imposed arbitrarily from above.”

The Green Revolution spreads to India

In 1964 and 1965, India received five million tons of emergency wheat grain aid each year from the United States under the US government’s Food for Peace program. Canada and Australia also sent grain. It was the largest food rescue operation in history. In spite of this, the famine worsened.

Malthusian thought—unchecked population growth always exceeds the growth of means of subsistence—was reawakening. Many biologists and economists were siding with Malthus.

Concern about the ability of the Earth to feed its people reached a crescendo with inadequate wheat crops, especially in India, in 1965, 1966 and 1967. Soon after taking office, President Richard Nixon instructed his Science Advisory Committee to study the world food problem. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations pushed its campaign against hunger.

The Paddock brothers, William and Paul, published a widely read book in 1967, Famine 1975!: America’s Decision; Who Will Survive?, contending that famine on a vast scale was inevitable, and counseling that efforts to avert it be restricted to certain areas that promised some hope of success. India was written off as beyond hope.

The following year, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Writing as a biologist and environmentalist, his book was primarily about the world’s rapidly growing populations and the need for “population control.” But he also made predictions about food production, which he said could not possibly keep up with increases in human population.

In 1967, even close associates of Norman Borlaug were not optimistic that food production would catch up in India. George Harrar, then president of The Rockefeller Foundation, and the person who had headed the expert team of Rockefeller scientists in Mexico from 1943 to 1952, said in an address in March of 1967: “It is a fundamental fact that, next to world conflict, the greatest single threat to mankind is that of explosive population increase. To date, neither the disadvantaged countries nor those who would help them have been able to limit the vast increase in numbers.”

India and Pakistan were contributing more than their share to the population explosion, and had barely been meeting their food needs by importing increasing amounts of American wheat under the Food for Peace program. Nonetheless, the two countries wanted to improve their own food production rather than become permanent wards of the United States.

This was the climate of opinion in which Borlaug’s new highyielding Mexican wheats began to appear in the Asian subcontinent. The timing could not have been more propitious. As in the past, Borlaug’s work seemed the product of benevolent destiny. Borlaug arranged through the Rockefeller Foundation for Dr. Glenn Anderson, wheat expert and “gung ho leader” from the Canadian Department of Agriculture, to join the Rockefeller Foundation staff and help with the project in India. Dr. Ignacio Narvaez, native Mexican and one of Borlaug’s earliest and most talented wheat apostles, was sent to Pakistan under a Ford Foundation grant.

In 1964, with help from the participants Norm had trained in Mexico, Borlaug’s wheats were planted as experiments in various locations in both India and Pakistan. In 1965, in collaboration with local scientists and administrative officials, Borlaug arranged for 250 tons of seed of the Mexican dwarf wheat varieties to be imported into Pakistan and 200 tons to be imported into India for wide-scale testing on farms. Especially in those settings in which Norm’s recommended cultural practices were followed, the on-farm trials yielded exceptionally well.

India’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, Shri C. Subramaniam, said, “This wheat is better than anything we’ve ever seen. We’d better go with it.”

Based on these promising results, supplemented with equally good results from the International Spring Wheat Yield Nursery that had been grown at many locations in the Near East, Borlaug concluded that it was time for strong production campaigns in both countries. But, to be successful, based on his experience in Mexico, he knew that the campaigns would have to be aggressive. The conventional wisdom at the time was that agricultural progress in developing countries would inevitably be slow. In 1967, the US President’s Science Advisory Committee reported, “Since yield take-offs in the past have required educated, alert farmers, capital, and a commercial system of agriculture, they will be extremely difficult to achieve in the developing nations.”

But Norman Borlaug knew from his observations of the euphoric reactions to field trials of farmers in Pakistan and India that even small-scale peasant farmers would go with the exciting new technology if given a chance. A system was needed to provide participating farmers with a complete package of the new technology: the high-yielding seeds with instructions on when and how to plant, how to fertilize it, and how to manage weed and insect-pest control. As Norm saw it, that would be relatively easy compared with getting changes in government policies to make the campaigns a success.

Borlaug’s grand scheme for the campaigns was what he called the “Kick-Off Approach,” which he based on outright rejection of the hypothesis that agricultural development of necessity has to be slow. His Kick-Off Approach was founded on manipulating three factors—technical, psychological and economic— in such a way as to achieve rapid results. The technical factor had already been proved to his satisfaction in the results of the field trials. He now had to work on the psychological and economic factors to get the required policy changes.

Due to drought, late sowing and poor germination, India’s spring harvest in 1966 from approximately three thousand hectares sown to Mexican wheat varieties, in half-acre plots on thousands of farms, produced mixed results. Many were good; a few were excellent. Borlaug, ever the optimist, said, “With superb handling of supplementary topdressing with nitrogen fertilizer and timely application of irrigation, the seedlings tillered profusely.” And indeed in many locations yields were much better than any that had previously been recorded in India. Norm said, “The Lady of Serendip had smiled upon us, there was widespread enthusiasm, and euphoria reigned in a few locations.”

At the time, the drought and famine were at their worst in northeast India, especially in Bihar and West Bengal.

Under these dismal conditions, Minister of Food and Agriculture Subramaniam made a courageous and historic decision. Against the advice of several of his senior scientists, he decided to import eighteen thousand tons of the short-strawed, highyielding Lerma Rojo 64 seed from Mexico.

About the large import of seed, Norm says, “It unleashed a flood of criticism, because of the risks involved, from many academicians in ivory halls in affluent countries from around the world. Shri Subramaniam and I were charged by some critics with recklessly and irresponsibly playing with the lives of millions of people.”

In the fall of 1966, approximately 240,000 hectares were planted with seed of Mexican varieties. Before the  plantings were made, a great controversy developed, with the economists from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Planning Commission, and the Rockefeller Foundation, including heavyweight David Hopper, on one side of the issue and Borlaug and Glenn Anderson on the other.

Norm recalls, “The economists insisted that we should cut back the fertilizer application from 120-40-0 kilograms per hectare of nutrients to 40-20-0 so that three times more area and families could share the benefit of fertilizer. We argued loudly and heatedly that this scale-back in fertilizer recommendations was premature, for we had not yet overcome the skepticism and psychological barrier of the traditionalists, peasant farmers, bureaucrats and senior scientists. At one point, the debate became both emotional and heated. With the diplomacy of Dr. Ralph Cummings, head of the Rockefeller Foundation team in India, we finally calmed down. We stood our ground and won the argument and the heavy rate of fertilizer was applied on 240,000 hectares.” The dramatic results vindicated Borlaug and Anderson. The Mexican seeds were the catalyst. Fertilizer was the fuel. [...]

Borlaug informed those present of the outstanding success of the wheat campaign and the enthusiasm of the farmers for the new wheats and the associated package of production technology. He closed by saying that if the government of India now would adopt an economic policy that would stimulate the adoption of the new technology, it could trigger a revolution in wheat production.

Borlaug indicated that government action was needed to assure

1. the availability of the right kind of fertilizer at reasonable prices at the village level six weeks before the onset of the planting season; 
2. credit for the farmers to purchase fertilizer and seed before planting, to be paid back at harvest; and
3. an announcement before the initiation of the planting season that, at harvest, farmers would receive a fair price for their grain. 

He said the price should be similar to that of the international market rather than only half that price, as had prevailed for decades under the cheap food price policies that had prevailed since India’s independence. [...]

Norm left for Mexico four hours after the meeting. Two weeks later he received from offices of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in New Delhi a series of clippings dated April 1st from all the major New Delhi newspapers. The clippings disclosed a drastic change in policies on fertilizer on two fronts: the government would begin to increase fertilizer imports for the short-term and would embark on a dynamic program to expand domestic fertilizer production. The subsequent increases in availability and use of fertilizer contributed to dramatic increases in food production.