On July 17, the Congressional Gold Medal (the nation’s highest civilian award) was bestowed on Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that brought modern agricultural methods to much of the developing world. Borlaug’s work, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, averted malnutrition, famine, and death for many millions.
As gratifying as it is to see Borlaug’s great humanitarian achievement receive such well-deserved recognition, the sad fact is his ideas are under assault as never before. Barely a month before, former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan was picked to head a new group that pledges to achieve a “green revolution” in Africa. Despite its name, though, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa rejects proven and pivotal approaches to crop science. Alas, Annan’s group is being handsomely bankrolled by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’s $30 billion foundation. If past performance is any indication, the only things likely to become greener are the numbered bank accounts of Kofi Annan and his cronies.
The contrast between Borlaug and Annan could hardly be greater. Borlaug is modest, earnest, and self-effacing, while Annan is arrogant and hubristic.
Borlaug worked miracles of several kinds. First, he and his colleagues laboriously crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce some new ones with resistance to rust, a destructive plant pest. This raised yields 20 to 40 percent. Second, in order to achieve maximum yields, he crafted so-called dwarf wheat varieties that, when aggressively fertilized, would not fall over in the field. Third, he devised an ingenious technique called “shuttle breeding”–growing two successive plantings each year, instead of the usual one, in different regions of Mexico. The availability of two test generations of wheat each year cut by half the time required for breeding new varieties. Moreover, because the two regions possessed distinctly different climatic conditions, the resulting varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes, altitudes, and soil types. This wide adaptability, which flew in the face of agricultural orthodoxy, proved invaluable, and Mexican wheat yields skyrocketed. Similar successes followed when the Mexican wheat varieties were planted in Pakistan and India, but only after Borlaug convinced politicians in those countries to change national policies in order to provide the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation.
How successful were Borlaug’s efforts? From 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.7 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland–an extra ordinary increase in yield of more than 150 percent. Without high-yield agriculture, either millions would have starved or increases in food output would have been realized only through huge increases in the acreage of land under cultivation–with losses of pristine wilderness far greater than all the losses to urban, suburban, and commercial expansion.
Borlaug’s greatest achievement may have been overcoming what he called the “bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions,” in order to get his innovations adopted.
Both the need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remain, and in recent years, Borlaug has applied himself to ensuring the success of this century’s equivalent of the Green Revolution: the application of gene-splicing, or “genetic modification,” to agriculture. Products in development offer the possibility of even higher yields, lower inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived, orally active vaccines.
However, extremists in the environmental movement are doing everything they can to stop such progress, and their allies in national and United Nations-based regulatory agencies are more than eager to help. Borlaug sees history repeating itself:
In his leadership of the U.N., Kofi Annan was precisely the kind of naysayer and bureaucrat feared by Borlaug and Hill. In the early days of Annan’s new position with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, established with an initial $150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, he left no doubt about his technophobic antagonism to modern crop science: “Africa should rely on African solutions–local labor, seeds, and markets–without seeking imported biotech ‘magic bullets’ or the promise of more open foreign markets.” “We in the alliance will not incorporate [gene-spliced organisms] in our programs. We shall work with farmers using traditional seeds.”
These statements are tantamount to suggesting that instead of modern vaccines and hygienic practices in Africa, witch doctors should cast spells to prevent infectious diseases. Genetically improved seeds can spell the difference between subsistence farmers being able to sell part of their harvest and their families dying of starvation. Annan is perpetrating a grotesque and potentially lethal fraud against African farmers.
Such technophobia should come as no surprise. During Annan’s tenure, the U.N. conducted a virtual war on gene-splicing, and the results were catastrophic, especially for poor nations. Many U.N. agencies and programs–including the U.N. Environment Program, World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and Convention on Biological Diversity–have been complicit in the unscientific, highly politicized, and excessive regulation of biotechnology, which has prevented critical advances in agricultural and pharmaceutical research and development. Biotechnology regulation is a growth industry at the U.N., one that regularly defies scientific consensus and common sense. The result is vastly inflated R&D costs, less innovation, and diminished exploitation of superior techniques and products–especially in poorer countries.
By any criteria, Kofi Annan’s performance at the U.N. was execrable, and his own behavior deplorable. He presided over the Oil-for-Food debacle in Iraq, the cover-up of the investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, diversion of dual-use technology (GPS equipment, a portable high-end spectrometer, and a large quantity of high-specification computer hardware) to North Korea, and inappropriate diversion of U.N. Development Program funds to the government of Burma. Corruption and malfeasance were business-as-usual for Annan’s U.N. and made a mockery of U.N. attempts to alleviate poverty and enhance human rights.
During Annan’s tenure, the U.N. waged war on the most precise, predictable, and effective techniques to advance agriculture. Judged by integrity, managerial competence, or acumen, Annan is eminently unqualified for his new position. Bill Gates might ask himself how he would feel if Annan tried to deny computers to Africans–and called instead for relying on tally sticks and other traditional calculating tools. Or how Africans would like it if Annan decreed that they should farm without tractors. Similar to resolving a glitch with Windows, the Gates Foundation should reboot–or, more precisely, give Kofi Annan the boot. And for its African agricultural initiative, it should seek a Norman Borlaug.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and fellow at the Hoover Institution, headed the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993. He is the author, most recently, of The Frankenfood Myth.
