The ranks of Nobel peace laureates are packed with politicians and campaigners. On the few occasions when scientists have entered the ranks, it is usually nothing to do with their research: Arctic explorer and researcher Fridtjof Nansen (1922) got it for inventing refugee travel documents; Chemist Linus Pauling (1962) and physicist Joseph Rotblat (1995) both won for their campaigning work against nuclear weapons.
Among this distinguished company, the biologist Norman Borlaug, who died earlier this month, stands out as an exception – or so it seems – because when he won the peace prize in 1970, it was for the work he did as a scientist rather than any political action he took part in on the side. It’s hardly surprising there aren’t more like him – after all, the Nobel Peace Prize is a political one above all else.
Borlaug’s work on developing new varieties of wheat was directly responsible for the “green revolution” which massively increased food production across the world. Arguably, it did more to prevent starvation than any humanitarian effort in history, even if the environmental impacts have been mixed.
The extent and speed of change brought about by the green revolution dwarfs anything we can comprehend in the west. The agricultural and industrial revolutions of 18th century England – perhaps the closest equivalent in our history – did not take place within living memory and, in any case, happened over a period of decades. Borlaug’s wheat and the introduction of chemical fertilisers transformed the economic and social outlook of the third world in just a few years. The increase in food production was so rapid and so unexpected that India and Pakistan ran out of sacks to carry the wheat, railway carriages to transport it and warehouses to store it.
Borlaug began working on crops in Mexico in 1944, initially developing disease resistant crops, before moving onto the problem of breeding more productive varieties of grain.
He realised that crossing wheat varieties to increase the amount of grain they produced would eventually hit a natural barrier – the ability of the stalk to carry the weight of the grains on the tip. High-yield varieties of the time, when combined with powerful fertilisers, had a tendency to fall over and die because they were so top-heavy.
His elegant solution to the problem was to create varieties of wheat with shorter and stiffer stems, which were better able to support their own weight.
Wheat fields, as a result, look quite different from those of a century ago – Borlaug’s dwarf wheat and its successors, which overwhelmingly dominate worldwide agriculture, are little more than half the height of the crops we used to grow.
Once the crops themselves were developed, Borlaug threw himself into promoting them, most notably by travelling to India and Pakistan during their 1965 war, distributing and planting the grain on both sides of the frontlines.
Alongside the new varieties, mechanisation of agriculture and new artificial fertilisers transformed third world subsistence agriculture into a mass producer of food and, unimaginable a few years earlier, cash crops too: by 1974, less than a decade after Borlaug’s visit, India was self-sufficient in grain.
This achievement has been widely discussed and some have argued that the green revolution saved as many as a billion people from starvation. It’s always hard to know what to make of what-if scenarios such as this one – and biographies and obituaries of Borlaug have, for obvious reasons, tended towards hagiography. But what is beyond question is that in Mexico, India and Pakistan, the decade following the introduction of high-yield dwarf wheat saw production nearly double. Famine, once common on the Subcontinent, has not returned since.
The green revolution transformed agriculture in negative ways, too – monoculture, the loss of genetic diversity, over-exploitation of water resources, heavy reliance on mechanisation and a thirst for synthetic chemicals that would make the Soil Association break into sweat. But Borlaug, to his credit, never denied this, simply pointing out that the criticism of poor countries trying to feed themselves tended to come from the rich and well-fed.
He defended his work on environmental grounds as well. Intensive agriculture and genetic modification, Borlaug argued, are actually good for the environment. They allow more food to be produced on less land saving forests from being chopped down and habitats from being destroyed – a point which deserves more exposure than it gets in discussions over the merits of organic farming.
If there’s one other thing Borlaug’s life and work should teach us, it is that his Nobel win was perhaps not quite as unusual as it might seem. Yes, unlike Nansen, Pauling and Rotblat, he won the award because of the work he did in his job as a scientist. But the motivations, objectives and results of Borlaug’s work were nothing if they were not political.
