Successful Farming | October 5, 1999 | Dan Looker, Business Editor
At 85, Norman Borlaug, who is considered the father of the Green Revolution, remains an energetic and articulate advocate for the world's poor and hungry. Today Borlaug worries that radical environmentalists and a scientifically uneducated public may slow the kind of food production research needed to feed millions more humans that will crowd the planet in the next century. Borlaug, the only agronomist to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in developing high-yielding wheat varieties, worries that environmental activists will slow the application of molecular biology and transgenic technology to food production.
"All of this noise in Europe has serious potential for holding this back for several years and even depressing prices for those who are using this," Borlaug told @griculture Online in a telephone interview from Texas A & M University, where he is distinguished professor of international agriculture. Borlaug believes the current worries in Europe over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are temporary and will die down in two or three years.
Politics, not science behind it
"It's political. It's not scientific," he said. "My point is that we need these new technologies as we go along." But Borlaug worries that public understanding of molecular biology is so poor, even among high school biology teachers, that many people are prone to accept unfounded arguments against genetically engineered foods. "You get a few extremists into the [environmental] movement and they stir up controversy and confuse people for their own interests," he said. His biggest worry is that the more extreme environmentalists will influence public policy enough to set back research on increasing crop yields and improving crop resistance to insects and disease.
Borlaug compares that scenario to the influence of the Ukrainian geneticist and agronomist T.D. Lysenko on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Lysenko believed that good husbandry could change genetics. He ruthlessly silenced any Soviet geneticists who disagreed with him. Lysenko set back Soviet agricultural research for decades, Borlaug said. Borlaug argues that using plants with Bt genes to protect them from insects is far better for the environment than spraying plants with insecticides that might harm beneficial insects and birds. (Bt, or bacillus thurengiensis, is a toxin produced by a natural bacteria that kills only the larvae of moths and butterflies.) And transgenic changes to plants may help make the best agricultural land more productive, "so we can leave other land that should be in forestry undisturbed," he says.
'Rabid environmentalists' don't see big picture
"That should be appealing to some of these rabid environmentalists but sometimes they don't see the big picture," he said. Borlaug said that until now, increases in yields have come from traditional plant breeding.
That's less precise than inserting a specific genetic trait from another plant. But making many small changes in a plant's genetics through crossbreeding has had the cumulative effect of increasing yields. The new biotechnology hasn't yet found a way to increase yields with one gene, Borlaug said. And he believes that's why chemical companies with a lead in biotechnology research have purchased seed companies such as Pioneer and DeKalb - to gain access to the highest yielding plant varieties.
Farmers wouldn't buy GMO seed if it wasn't in the highest yielding varieties, Borlaug said.
Borlaug believes that someday molecular biologists may discover individual genes that increase yields. But he doesn't expect agronomists to abandon traditional plant breeding any time soon. Instead, he expects researchers to use biotechnology to add more desirable single traits such as insect resistance to varieties bred with conventional methods. Some of the highest-yielding single-cross corn hybrids haven't been introduced on the market because of insect or disease problems. Using biotechnology to solve those problems could bring those high-yield seeds to market, he said. "In the next 10 to 20 years I anticipate a combination of transgenics with traditional breeding methods," he said.
Dislikes the term GMO
Borlaug dislikes the term, genetically modified organism, because that really describes all plant breeding, even the unscientific selection of higher yielding food plants by ancient peasant farmers. "All of the things we were doing with conventional breeding was genetically modifying plants," he said. Wheat, for example, is a cross of three different species of wild grasses, he said. "Wheat is a very complex plant compared to corn."
Scientific understanding of inheritance and how genetic traits are passed down through generations of plants didn't start until 1865, when the Austrian priest and botanist Gregor Mendel published the results of his breeding experiments with peas. That became the foundation of modern genetics, which wasn't applied to plant breeding until the turn of the 20th century, Borlaug says.
Borlaug's own work represented some of the most dramatic application of Mendel's theories. In 1954 he crossed a Japanese dwarf wheat strain with a new disease-resistant Mexican strain he had developed. The result was a higher-yield strain with a shorter stem. The seeds were made available to Mexican farmers in 1961. Such high-yielding dwarf wheat varieites later made poor countries such as India self-sufficient in wheat. Similar breeding methods greatly improved yields of rice.
The Green Revolution no doubt improved the diets and averted starvation and malnutrition for millions of people. Today, Borlaug continues to work and travel tirelessly in his continuing battle against hunger. He conceived the idea of awarding a World Food Prize to honor other agricultural researchers and innovators who have fought hunger around the world and he is on the Council of Advisors of The World Food Prize Foundation. He is also president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, an international extension program to increase farm production in Africa. Borlaug is dismayed at the lack of interest in world hunger in developed nations and the backlash against agricultural science. But he doesn't think human beings will permanently abandon steps that are taking plant breeding to the level of genetic molecules. "It will come back sooner or later when we start running short of food. I hope we don't throw it away before we put ourselves in such a situation," he said.
