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By Root 607 0

Cecil Salmon. Salmon collected sixteen varieties of wheat including one called ‘Norin 10’. It grew just two feet tall, instead of the usual four – thanks, it is now known, to a single mutation in a gene called Rht1, which makes the plant less responsive to a natural growth hormone. Salmon collected some seeds and sent them back to the United States, where they reached a scientist named Orville Vogel in Oregon in 1949. At the time it was proving impossible to boost the yield of tall wheat by adding artificial fertiliser. The fertiliser caused the crop to grow tall and thick, whereupon it fell over, or ‘lodged’. Vogel began crossing Norin 10 with other wheats to make new short-strawed varieties. In 1952 Vogel was visited by a scientist working in Mexico called Norman Borlaug, who took some Norin and Norin-Brevor hybrid seeds back to Mexico and began to grow new crosses. Within a few short years Borlaug had produced wheat that yielded three times as much as before. By 1963, 95 per cent of Mexico’s wheat was Borlaug’s variety, and the country’s wheat harvest was six times what it had been when Borlaug set foot in Mexico. Borlaug started training agricultural scientists from other countries, including Egypt and Pakistan.

Between 1963 and 1966 Borlaug and his Mexican dwarf wheats faced innumerable hurdles to acceptance in Pakistan and India. Jealous local researchers deliberately underfertilised the experimental plots. Customs officials in Mexico and America – not to mention race riots in Los Angeles – delayed shipments of seed so they arrived late for the planting season. Overenthusiastic fumigation at customs killed half the seeds. The Indian state grain monopolies lobbied against the seeds, spreading rumours that they were susceptible to disease. The Indian government refused to allow increased fertiliser imports, because it wanted to build up an indigenous fertiliser industry, until Borlaug shouted at the deputy prime minister. To cap it all, war broke out between the two countries.

But gradually, thanks to Borlaug’s persistence, the dwarf wheats prevailed. The Pakistani agriculture minister took to the radio extolling the new varieties. The Indian agriculture minister ploughed and planted his cricket pitch. In 1968, after huge shipments of Mexican seed, the wheat harvest was extraordinary in both countries. There were not enough people, bullock carts, trucks or storage facilities to cope with the crop. In some towns grain was stored in schools.

In March of that year India issued a postage stamp celebrating the wheat revolution. That was the very same year the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published declaring it a fantasy that India would ever feed itself. His prediction was wrong before the ink was dry. By 1974, India was a net exporter of wheat. Wheat production had tripled. Borlaug’s wheat – and dwarf rice varieties that followed – ushered in the Green Revolution, the extraordinary transformation of Asian agriculture in the 1970s that banished famine from almost the entire continent even as population was rapidly expanding. In 1970 Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In effect, Borlaug and his allies had unleashed the power of fertiliser, made with fossil fuels. Since 1900 the world has increased its population by 400 per cent; its cropland area by 30 per cent; its average yields by 400 per cent and its total crop harvest by 600 per cent. So per capita food production has risen by 50 per cent. Great news – thanks to fossil fuels.

Intensive farming saves nature

Taking all cereal crops together worldwide, in 2005 twice as much grain was produced from the same acreage as in 1968. That intensification has spared land on a vast scale. Consider this extraordinary statistic, calculated by the economist Indur Goklany. If the average yields of 1961 had still prevailed in 1998, then to feed six billion people would have required the ploughing of 7.9 billion acres, instead of the 3.7 billion acres actually ploughed in 1998: an extra area the size of South America minus Chile. And