Scientific Alliance

Looking back on Norman Borlaug's achievements

Norman Borlaug died on September 12th, aged 95. The name will be unfamiliar to many, but not to those concerned about food security in the developing world.

Borlaug has been called the 'grandfather of the Green Revolution' for his breakthrough in breeding disease-resistant strains of so-called semi-dwarf wheat. This led to apocalyptic forecasts of global famine – given a high profile by Paul Ehrlich and others in the 60s and 70s – being proved dramatically wrong.

In the 40 years from 1963, the world population doubled, and the number of chronically malnourished people (essentially a problem of poverty and infrastructure rather than overall food availability) hardly changed. Over 3 billion more people were fed from essentially the same total area of farmland.

The principle on which the new varieties of wheat were bred is simple in principle, but far-reaching in its consequences. Visitors to the Cambridge Botanic Garden can see an excellent display of old and new varieties of wheat grown side-by-side. Accustomed as we are to modern short-straw cereals, it comes as something as a shock to see that wheat varieties grown in the first half of the 20th Century were about shoulder height; more like maize plants. Rather than putting so much energy into straw production, dwarf wheats produce much more grain.

But to get the best yields, high levels of nitrogen are needed in the soil. This can be provided in principle by animal manure or a green manure of a leguminous crop which has been ploughed in, but this can only be achieved year after year in a consistent way by the use of manufactured fertilizer, in which atmospheric nitrogen is fixed via use of the Haber-Bosch process.

The fact that this planet currently supports about 6.7 billion people, and will have the capacity feed the 9 billion or so who are likely to be alive by mid-century, is due to the use of high-yielding cereal crops and synthetic nitrogen fixation.

Borlaug's dramatic achievement was recognised by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. However, he had the misfortune to be working at a time when environmentalism was beginning to catch people's attention and gain support. To set against the success of the Green Revolution were the deep concerns being expressed about human impact on the environment, catalysed by the publication of Rachel Carson's iconic (and emotive) book 'Silent Spring'.

Over the years, the view that humankind should work 'with Nature' – and the implicit belief by the deeper greens that our species has no greater worth than any other – has become pervasive among those with the good fortune to live in prosperous societies and have enough to eat. While trying (with significant success) to change attitudes in their own countries, environmentalists have also created a belief among development agencies that poorer countries should not follow the same path to prosperity as the industrialised world had taken. As they put it, developing countries should not make the same 'mistakes' as we had already done.

One of these 'mistakes' was the development of highly productive intensive agriculture. The Green Revolution, kick-started by Borlaug's wheat breeding success in Mexico, has actually resulted in a greater production of food per capita than was the case half a century ago. In this period, the world's population has more than doubled.

To feed the further 2 billion or more people likely to be alive by the time the population peaks will need more of the same progress, in this case also using the most recent technological advance, genetic modification.

Nevertheless, environmentalists, development agencies and the organic movement continue to preach from the gospel of small-scale, extensive farming. Although well-meaning, this is at best likely to result in the institutionalising of a somewhat more secure form of subsistence agriculture. Undoubtedly the rapid urbanisation seen in many developing countries creates problems and human miseries of its own, but the long-term continuation of a primarily rural economy is no better.

If food security can only be guaranteed by a productive, intensive farming system, so be it. First solve the problem of hunger, then deal with whatever other problems remain. Whatever critics may say, the industrialised world has been very successful at doing just this. Norman Borlaug did not want to deny developing countries the opportunity to do the same, and neither should we.

World Development Report demands immediate action on climate change

This year's World Bank WDR – Development and Climate Change – argues that poverty reduction remains top priority, but it must be combined with urgent action on climate change.

The report prescribes massive investment in new energy technologies and renewal of generating systems to slash carbon dioxide emissions, and argues that continued growth alone would not be fast or equitable enough to enable developing countries to counter the effects of climate change.

It is inevitable that this year's report would address climate change, just a few months before the signatories of the UN Convention on Climate Change will sit down in Copenhagen to thrash out a post-Kyoto deal.

The issue has become ubiquitous, and the stakes are high. Failure to at least agree a face-saving formula to permit further delay (in practice, the most likely outcome) would make a massive dent in the credibility and prestige of the climate change mitigation juggernaut.

But failure to agree might actually be a good thing. Intensive work on new energy generation and transport technologies would doubtless continue, and some of these will certainly become commercially viable before too long. But the first priority must surely be to rebuild national economies and encourage sustainable growth in the developing world, to create resilient societies which are more capable of dealing with any future threats.

But when might these threats materialise? According to a recent New Scientist article, Mojib Latif, a climate modeller and IPCC author, has suggested that we may be in for one or two decades of lower temperatures. This trend – ironically reported at a World Meteorological Organization conference on predictions of the short-term impacts of global warming – is, according to Latif, caused by natural variations in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO). The NAO was also blamed for at least part of the most recent warming trend.

At the same conference, it was reported that higher than usual summer losses of Arctic ice were partly due to natural cycles, and that this year's loss is likely to be much lower than for the last two years. It seems that some mainstream climate scientists are at last ready to discuss the relative contributions of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and natural cycles in determining climate trends. Whatever the outcome of the debate, it is good for the scientific community that it is happening.

Meanwhile President Sarkozy, never lacking in ambition, has launched a new tax set at 17euro per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted to help 'save the human race'.

If he also succeeds in introducing a proposed 'carbon levy' on imported goods to protect French industry from the anti-competitive effect of his tax, he will surely have put the cause of free trade back quite considerably in support of a cause which seems to becoming less pressing.

The Scientific Alliance
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