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Davetech
THE POWER OF DETERMINATION, INNOVATION AND EVIDENCE---4
~0.9 mins read
#CONTINUATION FROM THE LAST SERIES #
But gradually, thanks to Borlaug’s persistence, the dwarf wheats prevailed. The Pakistani agriculture minister took to the radio extolling the new varieties. The Indian agriculture minister ploughed and planted his cricket pitch. In 1968, after huge shipments of Mexican seed, the wheat harvest was extraordinary in both countries. There were not enough people, bullock carts, trucks or storage facilities to cope with the crop. In some towns grain was stored in schools.
In March of that year India issued a postage stamp celebrating the wheat revolution. That was the very same year the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published declaring it a fantasy that India would ever feed itself. His prediction was wrong before the ink was dry. By 1974, India was a net exporter of wheat. Wheat production had tripled. Borlaug’s wheat – and dwarf rice varieties that followed – ushered in the Green Revolution, the extraordinary transformation of Asian agriculture in the 1970s that banished famine from almost the entire continent even as population was rapidly expanding. In 1970 Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
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Davetech
THE POWER OF DETERMINATION, INNOVATION AND EVIDENCE.--2
~0.8 mins read
Five million tonnes of food aid a year from America were all that stood between India and a terrible fate, and those shipments could surely not continue for ever.
Yet even amid such defeatism, India’s wheat production was taking off, because of a sequence of events that had begun more than twenty years before. On General Douglas MacArthur’s team in Japan at the end of the Second World War was an agricultural scientist named Cecil Salmon. Salmon collected sixteen varieties of wheat including one called ‘Norin 10’. It grew just two feet tall, instead of the usual four – thanks, it is now known, to a single mutation in a gene called Rht1, which makes the plant less responsive to a natural growth hormone. Salmon collected some seeds and sent them back to the United States, where they reached a scientist named Orville Vogel in Oregon in 1949. At the time it was proving impossible to boost the yield of tall wheat by adding artificial fertiliser. The fertiliser caused the crop to grow tall and thick, whereupon it fell over, or ‘lodged’. Vogel began crossing Norin 10 with other wheats to make new short-strawed varieties.
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# To be continued.
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