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By Root 515 0

and booby droppings, immense deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus had accumulated over centuries. Guano mining became a very profitable, and very grim, business. The tiny island of Ichaboe yielded 800,000 tonnes of guano in a few short years. Between 1840 and 1880, guano nitrogen made a colossal difference to European agriculture. But soon the best deposits were exhausted. The miners turned to rich mineral saltpetre deposits in the Andes (which proved to be ancient guano islands lifted up by South America’s westward drift), but these could barely keep pace with demand. By the turn of the twentieth century the fertiliser crisis was desperate. In 1898, the centenary of Malthus’s pessimistic prognostication, the eminent British chemist Sir William Crookes gave a similar jeremiad in his presidential address to the British Association entitled ‘The Wheat Problem’. He argued that, given the growing population and the lack of suitable new acres to plough in the Americas, ‘all civilisations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,’ and unless nitrogen could be chemically ‘fixed’ from the air by some scientific process, ‘the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life.’

Within fifteen years his challenge had been met. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a way of making large quantities of inorganic nitrogen fertiliser from steam, methane and air. Today nearly half the nitrogen atoms in your body passed through such an ammonia factory. But an even bigger factor in averting Crookes’s disaster was the internal combustion engine. The first tractors had few advantages over the best horses, but they did have one enormous benefit as far as the world was concerned: they did not need land to grow their fuel. America’s horse population peaked at twenty-one million animals in 1915; at the time about one-third of all agricultural land was devoted to feeding them. So the replacement of draught animals by machines released an enormous acreage of land to grow food for human consumption. At the same time motorised transport was bringing land within reach of railheads. As late as 1920, over three million acres of good agricultural land in the American Midwest lay uncultivated because it was more than eighty miles from a railway, which meant a five-day trip by horse wagon costing up to 30 per cent more than the value of the grain.

In 1920 plant breeders developed a vigorous and hardy new variety of wheat, ‘Marquis’, by crossing a Himalayan and an American plant, which could survive further north in Canada. So thanks to tractors, fertilisers and new varieties, by 1931, the year in which Crookes had chosen to place his potential future famine, the supply of wheat had so far exceeded the demand that the price of wheat had plummeted and wheat land was being turned over to pasture all over Europe.

Borlaug’s genes

The twentieth century would continue to confound the Malthusian pessimists, most spectacularly in the 1960s in Asia. For two years in the mid-1960s, India seemed to be on the brink of mass famine. Crops were failing in a drought, and people were starving in growing numbers. Hunger had never been absent from the subcontinent for long, and memories of the great Bengal famine of 1943 were raw. With over 400 million people, the country was in the midst of an unprecedented population explosion. The government had put agriculture at the top of its agenda, but the state monopolies charged with finding new varieties of wheat and rice had nothing to offer. There was little new land to bring into cultivation. Five million tonnes of food aid a year from America were all that stood between India and a terrible fate, and those shipments could surely not continue for ever.

Yet even amid such defeatism, India’s wheat production was taking off, because of a sequence of events that had begun more than twenty years before. On General Douglas MacArthur’s team in Japan at the end of the Second World War was an agricultural scientist named