Bread for a Hungry World

In the mid-1960s India and Pakistan were living on shiploads of American wheat, and some experts had written India off to famine. An Iowa farm boy had spent twenty years in Mexico breeding a short, rust-proof wheat that out-yielded the old kinds two and three times over. In 1965 he set out to plant it across South Asia, in the middle of a war.

1. Late 1930s · Minneapolis

   The rust lecture

   Norman Borlaug grew up on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, learned his letters in a one-room school, and wrestled his way into the University of Minnesota. He meant to be a forest ranger. When the Forest Service put his job off for six months, he stayed on campus and heard Elvin Stakman lecture on rust, the fungus that eats wheat. Borlaug switched to plant pathology and earned his Ph.D. in 1942.

2. 1944 · Mexico City

   South to Mexico

   The Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government have launched a farm program, directed by Stakman and George Harrar. Borlaug turns down a well-paid job at DuPont to run its wheat work. Mexico imports more than half the wheat it eats. Its farms average 750 kilos of grain a hectare, and rust wrecks the harvest year after year. Borlaug learns Spanish and works the fields with his own hands.

3. 1940s · Yaqui Valley, Sonora

   Two crops a year

   Breeding a new wheat takes about ten years. Borlaug cuts that in half. He grows one generation in the summer in the highlands near Mexico City and the next in the winter in the Yaqui Valley near sea level. Wheat that thrives in both places ignores the length of the day, so it will grow almost anywhere. Five farmers come to his first field day. Within eight years, thousands come.

   

4. 1953 · Pullman, Washington

   The dwarf gene

   Heavy with grain, Borlaug’s tall wheat falls over in the wind. He needs a short plant. USDA breeder Orville Vogel at Washington State has one: Norin 10, a dwarf wheat from Japan, crossed into American lines. Vogel sends Borlaug his early crosses in 1953. Borlaug spends years crossing them into his rust-proof Mexican wheats. The new dwarfs can yield 9,000 kilos a hectare, double the old ceiling.

5. 1956–1963 · Mexico

   Mexico feeds itself

   In 1956 Mexico grows all the wheat it needs for the first time. Then come the dwarfs. Pitic 62 and Penjamo 62 reach farmers, and within seven years the national average yield doubles. By 1963 more than 95 percent of Mexico’s wheat grows from Borlaug’s seed. Over his years there, the national harvest grows sevenfold, and Mexico starts selling wheat abroad.

6. 1963 · New Delhi and Lyallpur

   The mislabeled plot

   Indian geneticist M. S. Swaminathan sees what the Mexican dwarfs can do and invites Borlaug to India. In Pakistan, two of Borlaug’s former trainees have quietly mislabeled one of his wheats and fed it 120 pounds of nitrogen instead of the allowed 40. The result is phenomenal. After a year of trials, India orders 250 tons of seed and Pakistan 350, enough to plant on real farms.

7. Summer 1965 · Sonora to Los Angeles

   The convoy

   The seed fills 35 trucks. Then the bank balks: the letter of credit, about $170,000, has three misspelled words, and payment is held up. Borlaug ships anyway. The convoy rolls north into Los Angeles during the Watts riots, gets caught in the traffic snarl, and reaches the harbor just before the freighter leaves for Bombay and Karachi.

   Borlaug, on the frozen paymentI decided to take the risk and go ahead. It was the best decision I ever made in my life.
8. Fall 1965 · At sea

   War breaks out

   With the seed at sea, India and Pakistan go to war. To keep either side from seizing the other’s share, the cargo is unloaded at Singapore and sent on in separate ships. Bad fumigation has killed much of the seed, and it comes up thin on 7,000 acres in India and 10,000 in Pakistan. Each plant sends up stem after stem. By harvest the fields look almost full.

9. 8 March 1968 · Washington

   A name for it

   India has bought 18,000 tons of Mexican seed and Pakistan 42,000. Record harvests are coming in. William Gaud, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, tells a Washington audience that Pakistan will harvest the new wheat from 3.5 million acres this spring. That year West Pakistan grows all its own wheat for the first time, two years ahead of Borlaug’s forecast.

   USAID Administrator William GaudIt is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.