Green Revolution

Agricultural Innovation

The 1940s heralded the beginning of concerted efforts from the global North toward extensive “development assistance” to the South. In 1943, the Comparative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico was created under the powerful Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. Leading this venture's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center was a pioneering American microbiologist named Norman Borlaug. Borlaug, later to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work, directed the organization's research toward agricultural innovation through plant breeding, with the view of reducing the risk of unpredictable yields faced by poor farmers. Borlaug was born in 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, and as a young man during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he studied plant pathology at the University of Minnesota. At that time, the U.S. Midwest was experiencing a relentless drought, affecting numerous states in the southwestern plains. Widespread overgrazing and extensive dryland farming, caused by the mounting demand for wheat products, aided the drought in the near obliteration of the region's farmland and natural prairie grasses, causing recurrent crop failures. However, in little over a decade, this American Dust Bowl saw the beginnings of a spectacular turnaround. Through scientific advancements, including technological advances in high-yield agriculture, the Midwest was transformed into what some called “the world's breadbasket,” and by the 1980s it had more than doubled its annual agricultural outputs. Conversely, for Borlaug, these early successes represented nothing more than an unsatisfactory application of the new technology, and he stressed that only in those areas where the high-yielding techniques were fully applied were the problems wholly eradicated. The soon-to-be Dr. Borlaug became motivated to spread the benefits he saw in high-yield farming techniques to those constantly facing the threat of starvation and undernourishment.

Drawing on the extensive breeding and agricultural experience of the global North, the Mexican program's work incorporated the development of new “dwarfed” wheat and rice varieties that were bred to be particularly reactive to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Through a system of hybridization and back-crossing, in which a hybrid individual is crossed with one of its “parents,” or a genetically comparable individual, to produce offspring with hereditarily desirable traits, new genetically engineered crop seeds were fashioned. Borlaug's team started with five established Mexican wheat varieties and meticulously crossed them with 12 imported strains. The investigations delivered promising results, and four hybrids were selected for development. The resulting HYVs were seen to have several distinct advantages over the customary crop varieties: Because the new strains were dwarfed, the plant exerted less energy in growing inedible components like the stalk. Likewise, the head of the plant (that which carries the ears of wheat or grains of rice) could be heavier without the risk of the increased leverage bending the stem and restricting the plant's growth (“lodging”). In addition, the altered photosensitivity of the new strains was [Page 229]premeditated to allow the plants to mature unaltered by annual climate variation or localized day-length, thus allowing multicropping.

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