At the time of the election, Borlaug and Swaminathan had been traveling across northern India, inspecting the test plots. This time, properly treated in Mexico, the wheat was germinating well. Giddy with success, the two men met with Subramaniam, the minister of agriculture. “A revolution is starting,” Borlaug said, in his later recollection. “You must take action. Farmers are demanding more support.” The country had to provide them with fertilizer, water, and financial support—the same demands that Johnson had been making. Subramaniam responded with fury. The election had cost Gandhi’s Congress party multiple seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. One of the lost seats belonged to Subramaniam, who had been so preoccupied with arranging food aid that he had not gone home to campaign. Caught up in their work, Borlaug and Swaminathan had not realized what was happening. Subramaniam directed the two men to Deputy Prime Minister Ashok Mehta, director of the Planning Commission, who was still in office—and still the main opponent of building more fertilizer plants.
For Borlaug, the most meaningful part of winning the Nobel Peace Prize was probably the reaction from his long-ago neighbors in Iowa. Soon after the announcement, he was celebrated in Cresco, which put up a statue to its native son. Credit 89
The meeting with Mehta was stormy. Borlaug told him that tens of thousands of farmers had seen what the new wheat could do. They want to produce more, he said, and they will demand the necessary fertilizer. India did not have the capital to build a lot of fertilizer plants, the deputy prime minister said. The Haber-Bosch process consumes enormous amounts of energy, and India did not have enough electricity. Borlaug said, in effect, feeding the citizenry is the first duty of any government. Fertilizer feeds people. If you don’t have the money, let foreign companies build the factories. Since the days of Nehru, Mehta explained, government policy has been to refuse to permit foreign multinational corporations to control such vital sectors of the economy. Borlaug got angry. Unless the government somehow provided nitrogen to the fields, he shouted, the farmers would riot, vote out Gandhi and her Congress party, and install a new government that would respond to their needs. They wouldn’t care what was in the five-year plans, he said. They just wanted to have enough to eat.
Later Subramaniam came back into the government as Indira Gandhi’s finance minister. “He always liked to say that the single finest hour in Borlaug’s life was the time he spent shouting at Ashok Mehta,” Swaminathan told me. “It may be true.” To the end of his days, Subramaniam believed that the meeting convinced Mehta to throw the Indian government’s support fully to agriculture. The government provided fertilizer and water. Yields soared in response—Indian harvests were 50 percent higher than they had been the year before. The country had never produced so much food. The next year yields were higher again. The year after that, Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize. With the prize money, he bought his parents’ house in Iowa—the first home he had ever owned. He gave it to his sisters.
“A Revolution That Failed”
In September 1970 a nineteen-year-old college student named James Boyce traveled on a fellowship to India. He first went to the central state of Madhya Pradesh, where the Peace Corps was helping villages test the new, high-yielding strains of wheat. As I mentioned earlier, state governments had asked “progressive” farmers to try out the wheat. “Progressive” meant that they supposedly weren’t wedded to the hidebound ways of the past. In return for their willingness to take risks, the government provided them with seeds, fertilizer, and, most important, brand-new wells for irrigation.
Boyce is now an economist at the Political Economy Research Institute, at the University of Massachusetts. “There were about twenty-four of these villages with ‘progressive’ farmers,” he told me not long ago. “And the remarkable thing was that in all twenty-four these supposedly ‘progressive’ farmers just happened to be the richest, most politically connected people in the village—the biggest landowners, the sons of politicians, you name it. People hated them.” The project was supposed to target small farms, but these people had evaded the property ceiling by nominally breaking up their estates and registering the parcels under the names of relatives—living, dead, and fictitious. Several were members of the state legislature. None actually worked on the land. Boyce laughed, thinking about it. “And that was the introduction of the Green Revolution to this part of India!” The testing project was supposed to be aided by the Peace Corps volunteers, but most of them quit because it was being used to give comparatively wealthy people an additional leg up. The new varieties made a big difference in the fields—they increased the disparity between rich and poor.
Later Boyce and his wife, the population researcher Betsy Hartmann, lived in a village in northwest Bangladesh and wrote a book about it. The World Bank, Sweden, and the Bangladeshi government had funded three thousand irrigation wells in the region. All were supposed to be used by cooperative groups of small landholders. Instead, as they recount in A Quiet Violence (1983), every single one of them went to local rich people. The wells were a new technology, the deep tube well. One was acquired by the wealthiest landowner in Boyce and Hartmann’s village. Because farmland in Bangladesh is typically broken into tiny parcels, even big landowners farmed many small, scattered plots. No matter where the landowner put the tube well, it would be able to irrigate some parcels that he did not own. These parcels, if irrigated, would be able to grow the new strains of wheat and rice, even in the dry winter. In other words, they would become valuable enough to steal, whether through fraud, violence, or bribing local officials. Fearing that their land was at risk, villagers smashed the tube well before it could be used.
Such stories occurred all over India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, according to witnesses like Boyce and Hartmann. Latin America saw them, too. The increase in yields made farmland more valuable, which made it worth seizing. Rich landowners, seeing an opportunity for advancement, evicted sharecroppers and renters and went into business for themselves, monopolizing local access to seeds and fertilizer. Increased harvests made prices fall. Big estate-holders could more than make up for the decline with volume; smallholders were immiserated. All of this had begun in Mexico. In the name of increasing yields, Borlaug had shifted the program from the poor in the Bajío to a few prosperous landowners in Sonora. Those landowning farmers had worked hard, but they had reaped almost all the gains. The other big winners were corporate middlemen: grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill and agrichemical suppliers like Monsanto and DuPont.
When I first visited Mumbai, in the mid-1980s, my friends and I spent a few days walking around the city. It was not hard to find evidence of extreme poverty. At one point a couple of kids in a schoolyard invited us to visit their class. Because we had nothing else to do, we agreed. In the classroom, the students goggled at us. It was like show and tell, and we were the show. The school was a charity effort, with most of the students from destitute families. They wore cast-off chinos and T-shirts from the charity. Afterward the teacher offered us tea. I asked where the students came from. Most were kicked out of their villages by the Green Revolution, he said, matter-of-factly. The city is full of these people.
Hard by the social costs were the environmental costs. The intensive fertilization mandated by the Green Revolution has heavily contributed to nitrogen problems on land and water. Pesticides have wreaked havoc on agricultural ecosystems and sometimes poisoned sources of drinking water. Poorly constructed and managed irrigation systems have drained aquifers. Soils have become waterlogged or, worse, loaded with salts when irrigation water evaporated. Possibly most worrisome, the energy costs of agriculture, mainly from making fertilizer, have soared. Industrial-style Borlaugian agriculture is a significant contributor to air pollution and climate change.
Criticisms like these began to appear soon after Borlaug won the Nobel. Between 1972 and 1979 the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development published fifteen analy
ses of the Green Revolution. Every single one was sharply negative. To Biplab Dasgusta, a prominent economist and Marxist politician in India, the major consequences of the Green Revolution included an “increase in the number and proportion of homeless households” and “growing concentration of land and assets in fewer hands.” The Green Revolution, observed Per Olav Reinton of Oslo’s International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), “demonstrates more clearly than most aid programs how good intentions produce misery.” Perhaps the most influential and unequivocal study was The Political Economy of Agrarian Change (1974) by the Oxford economist Keith Griffin. His summation: “The story of the green revolution is a story of a revolution that failed.” Between 1970 and 1989, more than three hundred academic studies of the Green Revolution appeared. Four out of five were negative.
Over time the tone became more vituperative. The journalist-activist Susan George was content to state in 1972 that the Green Revolution had “brought nothing but misery to the poor.” Four years later the Dutch economist Ernest Feder described it as a “scheme for the self-liquidation of Third World peasantry.” By 1991 the anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva was charging that Borlaug’s legacy to the world was nothing but “diseased soils, pest-infested crops, water-logged deserts, and indebted and discontented farmers.” Two years before Borlaug’s death in 2009, the celebrated left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn accused him of mass murder. “His ‘green revolution’ wheat strains led to the death of peasants by the million.” When Borlaug spoke at conferences, students sometimes booed.
Borlaug seldom replied directly, though the attacks stung. In private, he told friends that most of the criticism was sheer elitism. Somehow rich environmentalists in the West thought the world was better off if people in poor areas didn’t improve their lives. He had nothing against organic this or that but it was unrealistic to promote it as a solution to hunger in the world of 10 billion. And it was immoral to stand in the way of feeding hungry people.
The most important point, in his view, was that the new methods and new crops had done what they were supposed to: increase yields. Economists have estimated that the global average productivity gains from Green Revolution crops are about 1 percent per year for wheat, 0.8 percent per year for rice, and 0.7 percent per year for maize. The numbers sound small, but over time the impacts grow large, compound-interest style. Between 1960 and 2000, wheat harvests in developing countries tripled. Rice harvests doubled. Maize harvests more than doubled. The extra food, Borlaug said, was why the population could increase while the proportion of hungry people went down.
Some of the environmental problems were real, he conceded. But they were due to bad policy and administration rather than anything inherent to Green Revolution technology. Farmers who had never used fertilizers and pesticides needed to be trained in their deployment; they needed to be educated about the need to calibrate dosages. Borlaug said this again and again and again, sometimes in numbing detail, but it never seemed to satisfy the critics.
To some extent, I suspect, the attacks confounded him. He had seen for himself the fruits of the Green Revolution. So had others. In 2008 and 2009 the journalist Joel Bourne toured through Punjab, in the north, talking to the farmers who had lived through the introduction of the new varieties. “There was nothing like it in their lifetimes,” Bourne told me. “The first season they grew so much wheat they had no place to store it all. They closed the schools early and filled them full of grain.” In 2016 the reporter Harish Damodaran traveled to the village of Jaunti, in the outskirts of Delhi, where Swaminathan had selected ordinary farmers—people with little land—to try the new seeds in 1964. The survivors were in their eighties, but they remembered that year well. Their harvests tripled, they said. “This was a miracle,” one man told Damodaran. “It totally changed our lives.” For an article, I traveled in the western state of Maharashtra in the mid-1980s. Farmer after farmer told me how the new seeds had increased their harvests. These were not wealthy people. One man told me with quiet pride that he and all of his brothers now had bicycles. In these places, whether by chance or design, the package had been distributed more equally.
In Borlaug’s view, many Green Revolution critics were blind to how bad the past had been. The India he saw in the early 1960s was little different from that captured in the 1940s by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White—a land of impoverished, drought-blasted farms like this rust-stricken wheat field in northern India. Credit 90
Borlaug worked almost until his death in 2009. An eccentric Japanese rich person funded his efforts to develop high-yielding varieties for Africa, which had been little touched by the Green Revolution. He spent his ninetieth birthday at a reception in his honor given by the U.S. State Department. He had just flown back from Uganda, where he had been fighting a scary new strain of stem rust.
When I last spoke to Borlaug, a few years before he passed away, I asked him about the past criticisms. Critics, he said, never wanted to answer the counterfactual question: Where would the world be today if we had the same growth in population and affluence but none of the yield increases of the Green Revolution? Overuse of fertilizer, water-logging soils, loading up land with toxic salts from badly run irrigation schemes—these were real issues, he said. But wouldn’t you rather have these for problems than the kind of hunger we had in 1968?
He asked me if I had ever been to a place where most of the people weren’t getting enough to eat. “Not just poor, but actually hungry all the time,” he said. I told him that I hadn’t been to such a place. “That’s the point,” he said. “When I was getting started, you couldn’t avoid them.”
The Workshop and the World
In February 1964 Borlaug went to a meeting in Pakistan of agricultural experts and government officials to explain why he believed the nation should adopt his new, high-yielding wheat varieties. The trip was difficult, and he arrived at the meeting having not slept for two days. The first speaker was the vice chancellor of the University of Sindh. He mocked Borlaug’s announced hope of doubling the nation’s wheat output. Especially ridiculous, he said, was the idea of doing it with Mexican wheat. Mexican varieties were too delicate for Pakistan. They were too short and needed too much water and fertilizer. Most of all, he said, the grain was the wrong consistency. It was even the wrong color. “Pakistanis,” the vice chancellor shouted, “never ate red wheat!”
Borlaug’s varieties, developed with Mexican bread in mind, were hard red wheat with high levels of protein and gluten and bitter undertones in the taste. (The “red” in red wheat refers to the color of the husk—the bran—around the kernel, rather than the kernel itself.) Combined with yeast, high-gluten flour produces bread with an “open crumb”—big, irregular holes of the sort seen in sourdough loaves. By contrast, the traditional South Asian chapati or roti—unleavened Indian or Pakistani flatbread—is made from soft white wheat, which has an amber husk, relatively little gluten and protein, and fewer bitter notes. On the dinner table, the results are light, fluffy, and almost sweet, with a closed crumb: tiny, fine holes in the bread.
The chapati is as much a part of daily life in much of South Asia as the baguette is part of daily life in France. It was such an emblem of Indian identity that it was used as a symbol of rebellion against the British in the nineteenth century. To South Asians, the whiteness of a chapati “suggested purity, luxury, even modernity” (I am quoting Cullather, the Indiana University historian). Because most Indian and Pakistani families ground their wheat at home between two circular stones, bran was mixed in with the flour. With amber-colored wheat, the bran doesn’t change the color of the flour. The dark red bran in Mexican wheat produces dark flour, which to Indians has an aura of dirt and poverty. In addition, the texture of the bread and the feel of it in the mouth were wrong. Even the smell while it cooked was wrong.
For a Westerner, Iowa-born and -raised, to insist that Indians and Pakistanis make chapati with this strange Mexican wheat was as if a foreigner were demanding that
French people make baguettes from pumpernickel. French people would regard the demand as a cultural affront. Similarly, the vice chancellor believed, South Asians would—and indeed should—reject this alien wheat.
Borlaug dismissed this kind of complaint as nit-picking. In none of his writing have I encountered any suggestion that this kind of “minutia” should be given more than “minor consideration.” Borlaug seems to have viewed himself like a doctor faced with a patient’s arterial bleeding—and a patient who refuses treatment because he objects to the doctor’s nationality or the color of the bandages. That doctor would ignore the complaints and slap on the bandages. As for the farmers, he did not believe that they would refuse to plant more-productive, disease-resistant grain because it had a different color or smell. Nor would hungry people refuse to eat it. The widespread adoption of Mexican wheat varieties in India and Pakistan, in his view, testified to the correctness of this idea.
Women in northern India grinding grain between two circular stones in 1902 Credit 91
Only when I spoke to Swaminathan did I learn of the sequel to the meeting in Pakistan. After the first tests of Mexican wheat, Swaminathan and his associates realized that it would not fit well into South Asian culture for the reasons identified by the Pakistani vice chancellor. Without telling anyone at Rockefeller, they began irradiating the Sonora wheat at the particle accelerator in Mumbai in November 1963, three months before the meeting in Pakistan. Nothing happened the first year. The second year, Swaminathan got lucky. The color of wheat bran, we now know, is mainly controlled by four genes that are in turn switched on or off by a single gene known as R. By chance, the gamma rays passing through the seeds disabled some aspect of this mechanism; the bran color in the next, mutated generation was amber. Miraculously, its yield seemed to be unaffected.