W. Graeme Donovan WMST 245 – Women in International Development Page 1

WMST 245 – WOMEN IN INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

by W. Graeme Donovan

Women’s Studies Center

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

West Virginia University

Video about Norman Borlaug, and the Green Revolution

The video we saw in class was called “Setting the Grassroots on Fire: Norman Borlaug and Africa’s Green Revolution.” It was produced in 1999, and it documents Borlaug’s current work as Director of the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA). The SAA, supported by the Nippon Foundation in Japan, and in collaboration with the Global 2000 Initiative of the Carter Center in Atlanta, is trying to bring higher yielding food crop technologies to African agriculture. In the video, Borlaug says “This is a new experience for me, here south of the Sahara. But I see the same fire now beginning to burn – I call this ‘setting the grass-roots on fire.’ And it’s heating up for the political decision-makers.” Hence the title of the video.

Norman Borlaug, now nearing 91 years old, is a leader of the “great army of hunger fighters” [his words], who are credited with saving a billion lives by creating the Green Revolution. For his work in plant breeding of wheat and maize, working out of the international center for maize and wheat in Mexico (CIMMYT), he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

The video includes some very interesting footage from Borlaug’s early days in Mexico, and inside the Nobel Prize ceremony itself, something few of us will get to see in person! Among many other things which I thought were thought provoking in the video were the comments and criticisms made at the time Borlaug was meeting with Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, prior to her making a decision to overrule some of her scientists, and invite Borlaug and his team to carry out the extensive plant breeding exercise in her country which led over a period of years to its having stores brimming over with cereal stocks. The criticisms were that there were “insufficient field experiments” to allow such a decision to be taken, and that Borlaug and his fellow scientists were “playing with the lives of millions of innocent people.” Do we hear similar criticisms today about bio-technology, the next stage in breeding techniques for food crops which may help us meet the further challenges of food production in the next 20-30 years?

Some of the other highlights of the video were:

  • Footage from the Great Depression of the 1930s in the USA, when poverty was common, and even hunger not unknown. This and the Dust Bowl seem to have been formative experiences for Borlaug, whose passion about eliminating the scourge of hunger and human misery has driven him ever since to get better technology out to farmers.
  • Borlaug was the first in his family to go to university, where he studied forestry and plant pathology.
  • We discussed the tools seen in the movie, which were for the most part the hand hoes common in African agriculture, and we were struck by the rhythmic songs sung by farmers as they carried out repetitive physical tasks like weeding, noting that such singing is also done in other cultures, like Burma, where the women sing as they transplant rice seedlings out into the paddy.
  • We noted the fact that the half hectare (about one acre) farm in Benin shown in the video was supporting at least 5 children and 2 adults, and recalled that our own personal “share” of the world farm was just over 2 acres [we talked about this in an earlier session, when we divided the total of world agriculture by the population to derive our hypothetical personal farm].
  • The film showed a huge gully in Tanzania, into which a boy was driving some cattle, and reminded us of the problems of soil erosion, which can cause such gullies. We noted, though, that a far more important problem is soil degradation, caused by farmers year after year extracting more nutrients from the soils through their crops than they put back with fertilizers or manure. Soils treated like this gradually lose their chemical fertility, and then their physical structure, and become more and more useless for growing crops.
  • Still on the subject of soils, it was very interesting to see that at the famous Rothamstead Research Station in England, soil samples have been kept from the early 1800s to the present day, along with unprocessed samples of wheat and other cereals grown on them, providing scientists with an extremely long and invaluable data base for research on nutrients in soils, their uptake by plants, and other relationships of crucial importance for agriculture and food production.
  • There was a provocative suggestion in the film that among other things soil degradation had contributed to the poverty, destitution and desperation of people in Rwanda and Burundi, that underlay the genocide and bloody strife which has erupted there in recent times.
  • There were chilling sequences in the video depicting the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia (of the 1970s and 1980s), when huge sums of money were spent on armies and armaments as the Cold War tore Africa apart. Unfortunately, too many countries are still wasting vast sums on military preparations, while people are in danger of starving. But an optimistic note was struck by showing footage from modern Ethiopia, with ex President Jimmy Carter and others meeting with the current Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, whose personal concern for agricultural growth is helping to begin to transform the possibilities for development in that country.
  • The association of President Carter with the Sasakawa-Global 2000 initiative has been invaluable for giving it the political backing it needed at the highest levels, because when he goes to a country, he speaks with the top people, and brings to their attention what can be done in agriculture, health, and nutrition. President Carter has also led several vital health initiatives in Africa, in addition to trying to mediate many wars and political disagreements.
  • The video ended with a recent triumph of plant breeding, the development of Quality Protein Maize (QPM). This has rectified one of the major problems with maize, the fact that it lacked a couple of vital amino acids, making its protein of lower quality than that of some other cereals. Adults for whom maize is a staple food can compensate for this by adding legumes and other nutritious foods to the staple. But the QPM will be especially helpful for small children, who in maize growing areas commonly get their first solid food (from 6 months of age onwards) from maize porridge. For them having the more complete and valuable protein in their first solid food is a tremendous benefit.
  • Finally, the video noted that Africa’s population may grow by another 500 million over the next 20 years. So the challenges to agricultural science and food policy never stop, and will be formidable in the years ahead. But we can all take heart from Norman Borlaug’s optimism, and passion about solving the problems.

Notes on the Green Revolution

The 20th Century has been the most remarkable in the history of agriculture. Agricultural production has increased tremendously, by virtue of new high-yielding varieties of crops, more fertilizer, investments in irrigation, better crop protection, and mechanization. Between 1930 and 1980, maize yields quadrupled in the U.S.A. Between 1950 and 1986, world wheat yields tripled (from 770 kgs to 2160 kgs per hectare). Between 1965 and 1980, world rice production grew at 3.2 percent per year.

But between 1985 and 2020, we may need grain yields to increase by more than 56 percent, to feed the population then projected to be 7.8 billion. Where will these increases come from? There are some signs that yield increases may be slowing down, and some suggestions that they may be reaching some kind of plateau, especially for wheat and rice. Is this true? What can we expect? Can we get any guidance from the past?

Two main things happened late in last century and early this century:

(a) discoveries about plant nutrition on which a huge fertilizer industry came to be based; [1900 2 million tons; 1939 9 million tons, 1945 7 million tons; 1955 21 million tons; 1965 31 million tons; 1975 90 million tons; 2000 140 million tons]

(b) rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of genetics on which a great plant breeding industry was erected. [Gregor Johann Mendel 1822-1884, Austrian monk and botanist; performed experiments on garden peas from 1856 to 1868, published in 1866; contradicted the prevailing view that each character in an offspring is a blend of the characters in their parents, a view still held today, and implied by the phrase “mixing of the blood”; instead, Mendel saw that each individual possessed a pair of hereditary characters {in 1909 the term “gene’ was coined by the Danish geneticist W.L. Johannsen (1857-1927)[1]}for each character; when individuals were crossed, the two hereditary characters got separated, and each gamete had only one of each hereditary character - Mendel’s first law, the Law of Segregation - furthermore, when two or more pairs of hereditary characters are involved in any cross, the members of one pair segregate independently of the members of all other pairs - Mendel’s second law, the Law of Independent Segregation; Mendel’s peas had round or wrinkled seeds, red or white flowers, yellow or green seeds, inflated or constricted pods, axial or terminal flowers, and long or short stems; from the free breeding of these peas, Mendel observed that one form of a character took precedence over another - he called these dominant characters - while other characters remained latent - he called these recessive characters (red dominated white flowers, round dominated wrinkled seeds); the scientific community of Mendel’s day paid little attention to his published findings, and their importance lay dormant until his work was re-discovered after 1900 by Hugo De Vries (Holland), Carl Correns (Germany), and Erich von Tshermak-Seysenegg (Austria)][2]

The big gains from scientific agriculture came after World War II. In Japan, rice yields climbed by about 15 percent between 1550 and 1720, mainly because of more systematic irrigation systems. Between 1720 and the Second World War yields grew another 50 percent, especially when crop breeding began in the early part of this century. Then from 1945 to 1985, average yields more than doubled, with more breeding, and heavy use of fertilizers, and later plant protection chemicals.

In spite of the evidence all around in the higher income countries, however, observers were still pessimistic about the developing countries. The scientific breakthroughs were young. There were many doubts about the responsiveness of the millions of small, poor farmers to new technologies and economic opportunities. And, of course, populations in the poor countries were growing rapidly (ironically, because they had apparently had few problems applying other scientific breakthroughs in the health and human physiology field!!).

People saw the task of agriculture in providing for this burgeoning population as being next to impossible in some countries. In 1967 the Paddock brothers, W. and P., published a book called “Famine-1975” in which they said, “There is neither a new agricultural method nor...a birth control technique on the horizon that can avert the inevitable famines”. Paul Ehrlich boldly predicted that “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now”.

Then along came the Green Revolution. It was already starting to swing in in the late 1960s, when the term was coined by William S. Gaud, former administrator of USAID, in a speech to the Society for International Development. He was describing the dramatic leaps forward in wheat in India and Pakistan in 1966-1968. Later Michael Lipton and Richard Longhurst described it like this, “History records no increase in food production that was remotely comparable in scale, speed, spread and duration.”[3]

The Green Revolution was built on plant breeding, and boosted along by fertilizer, and irrigation, and helped by an expansion in cropped area. From 1950 to 1985, increased production of cereals came from more fertilizer (33 percent), more area (25 percent), better crop varieties (23 percent), more irrigation (8 percent), and other factors (11 percent).

The new varieties of crops had the following characteristics:

(a) dwarf stature - new architecture; shorter, stiffer stalks to hold up the bigger weight of grain;

(b) less susceptibility to lodging;

(c) higher harvest index - bigger ratio of grain to straw and leaves;

(d) photoperiod insensitivity - this extended the time in which they could be planted;

(e) great tillering ability - more grain producing stalks per plant;

(f) grain dormancy in the head- the grain could get bigger and bigger without germinating while still in the head;

(g) short duration - this allowed double and triple cropping within the growing season;

(h) responsiveness to nutrients;

(i) disease and pest resistance; drought resistance.

Some of the lessons from this experience are:

(a) crop yields can go a lot higher yet; potentials may be 25 tons of grain equivalent per hectare on extremely high potential land, 20-25 tons on very high potential, 15-20 tons on high potential, 10-15 tons on medium potential, 5-10 tons on low potential and no more than 5 tons on very low potential; South America 18 tons/ha, Africa 14.2 tons/ha, Asia 13.1 tons/ha, N. and C. America 11.2 tons/ha, Europe 10.4 tons/ha, WORLD 13.3 tons/ha [these were upper limit theoretical yields, under optimal conditions of sunlight, water, nutrients, without pest and disease attacks; we were getting about 2,450 lbs/acre of cereals, or 2.75 tons/ha, on our little share of the world farm];

(b) once higher yields are attained, it takes more and better research just to maintain the yields, let alone to keep them going up;

(c) most gains have come from increased harvest index rather than from increased biomass [in fact, so far, plant breeding has not been able to increase biomass production above a daily gain of 200 kg dry matter (DM)/ha for C-3 plants, and 200-400 kg DM/ha for C-4 plants, but it has been very effective in diverting more of the biomass towards grain; harvest index is 5-17 percent in wild wheat relatives, 51 percent in a modern variety, and may be able to be pushed as high as 63 percent, a further gain of 25 percent];

(d) investments in plant breeding and crop improvement have had impressive rates of return;

(e) future gains will come from a combination of breeding and better management of resources.

Let’s look at the future, and some of the things that will be important:

(a) we’ll need to put together a package in which every part is better - more fertilizer, more and more efficient irrigation, higher yielding varieties with multiple pest and disease resistance and stress tolerance, and increasingly impeccable crop management; in other words, we’ll need to combine a seed strategy, a soil and water management strategy, and a crop protection strategy;

(b) we’ll need to be able to make the gains sustainable, in the face of some resource constraints, such as drought stress, low nutrient reserves, aluminum toxicity, soil acidity, steep slopes, soil erosion, high phosphorus fixation, and poor drainage;

(c) in plant breeding we’ll have to reach further and further out, beyond the primary genepool (plants classified in the same species) to the secondary (other species and wild relatives) and the tertiary genepools (unrelated species) - this will need a lot of attention to collecting, protecting, conserving, and using germplasm, both in situ (preserving biodiversity in the fields) and ex situ (in gene banks);

(d) in the matter of improving the genetic potential of plants, (i) it has been hard to find ways to improve on photosynthetic rates, and it seems likely that we may not make many gains in this; one area under investigation is the enzyme “rubisco” , or ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase; its activity may limit photosysnthesis, and efforts are being made to increase its activity; but (ii) we can make gains in the partitioning of photosynthates, timing of the reproductive cycle, regulatory processes, and environmental responses;

(e) we can also make gains in improving the expression of genetic potential, by better managing crops in the field - fertilizers, water, soil management and tillage, plant populations, planting dates and methods, weeding and other crop care, harvesting, and crop protection; an especially urgent and important problem is finding ways to meet crop nutrient needs in Africa; by the year 2000 it is estimated that almost 20 percent of arable land in 93 less-developed countries will be irrigated, which will encompass two thirds of the wheat and rice; we must also look for much better ways of using the available water in non-irrigated situations;