The Legacy of Norman Borlaug

It’s hard to think of many people who had a greater impact on the 20th century than Norman Borlaug, who died last Saturday at the age of 95. Universally acknowledged as the father of the “Green Revolution," Borlaug’s agricultural innovations literally changed the lives of billions. Given the precarious historical crossroads we find ourselves at, it’s worth taking a moment to reassess his legacy.

Conventional opinion hails Borlaug as one of the great heroes of the 20th Century; yesterday’s New York Times obituary describes him as a “plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives.” How, according to the experts, did he do it? As the Times explains it:

By the late 1940s, researchers knew they could induce huge yield gains in wheat by feeding the plants chemical fertilizer that supplied them with extra nitrogen . . . but beyond a certain level of fertilizer, the seed heads containing wheat grains would grow so large and heavy, the plant would fall over, ruining the crop.

In 1953, Dr. Borlaug began working with a wheat strain containing an unusual gene. It had the effect of shrinking the wheat plant, creating a stubby, compact variety. . . The plants would produce enormous heads of grain, yet their stiff, short bodies could support the weight without falling over. On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world’s population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties.

The obituary writer sums up saying that “this strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous,” but from the way his career is described, it might be more accurate to describe Borlaug’s signature achievement as a way to greatly enhance the usefulness of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer which is most commonly made using natural gas.

Whether or not this innovation actually achieved what it’s backers claim is itself debatable. Sharon Astyk is one among many voices who have taken issue with the claim that the Green Revolution “fed the world”:

If you track the research, what you find is this. The vast majority of increases in grain yields since the beginning of the Green Revolution didn’t feed hungry people - they went to feed livestock, to make meat in the rich world, and then to ethanol - with the help of the same industrial corporations that we plan to rely upon to feed us. The same corporations that are going to “feed the world” by introducing new, drought resistant crops invested heavily in ethanol infrastructure, helping move more of the world’s grain harvest into gas tanks, rather than into people’s mouths.

But whether or not increased yields prevented (and continue to prevent) mass famine, an agricultural system based on training plants to sustain massive blasts of high-energy, industrially produced fertilizer has some other obvious problems. Never mind what nitrogen runoff does to streams and rivers and oceans etcetera; using a finite resource to produce most of the world’s food would seem to be the definition of unsustainable. We are essentially eating fossil fuels, and Borlaug was largely responsible. (Never mind also that the idea that by creating a system that requires massive inputs of chemicals from western agro-industrial giants, Borlaug “taught the world to feed itself” is laughable at best).

But what choice did we have? With rising birthrates matched by falling death rates due to advances in basic medicine and sanitation, in the 1960s governments, activists and everyone else were terrified about the coming “population bomb,” especially in the third world. Were there alternatives? Here are a few possibilities:

Agroforestry/Tree Cropping. The first edition of J. Russell Smith’s classic Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture was published in 1929. Smith saw the terrible erosive effects of unchecked till agriculture in the present and throughout history, and proposed putting the same effort we put into annual plant breeding into hybrid tree production, especially nuts, for human and animal consumption. As trees are much more productive per acre than annual crops and do not require yearly tilling or replanting, it seems that finding ways to use trees to produce staple crops should be a primary strategy to feed the world move toward a truly sustainable agriculture. Smith became a key influence on the agroforestry and permaculture movements.

Grow Biointensive. This enormously influential method of intensive gardening was developed by Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons in the 1970s using a fusion of Biodynamic and French Biointensive techniques. According to Jeavons, a Biodynamic garden can sustainably produce all the calories an individual needs on an average of 1,000 square feet, recycling all wastes.

The Fukuoka Method. Masanobu Fukuoka who passed away last year, practiced what he called “natural farming” for rice production, with comparable yields to conventional farming. Crucially, Fukuoka’s method was neither energy intensive modern nor traditional, but involved careful crop rotation and no tilling.

Keyline Design. Keyline Design was invented by Australan farmer P.A. Yeomans. Another major influence on permaculture, it involves a sophisticated system of contour farming to passively catch and store water in the landscape and rapidly build topsoil.

Permaculture. Permaculture is a comprehensive, whole-systems design approach which encompasses not only food production but energy, housing and village design and small-scale economics. An open ended, non-dogmatic approach, permaculture is the a grass-roots, multi-disciplinary approach to sustainability. As co-founder Bill Mollison put it, if traditional agriculture is labor intensive and conventional agriculture is energy intensive, permaculture is design intensive.

The “problem” with all of these approaches is that unlike green revolution techniques, they do not require the continuous intervention and high energy inputs of national governments and multinational corporations. To put it simply, Dow Chemical and Monsanto will never make money from permaculture, and if tree-cropping and agroforestry actually worked, the chemical giants would go out of business.

What would have happened had the world spent as much time, energy and resources researching and disseminating sustainable techniques as it did on the “green revolution”? Is it hopelessly cynical to believe that such an outcome was never in the cards?

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