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But today, the man known as the father of Green Revolution says conventional science is not enough to keep an explosive world population fed. “When I was a boy, the world population was about 1.6 billion,” the 90-year-old Borlaug told an Auburn audience earlier this year. “Today we’re at 6.3 billion, and we’re adding 80 million more each year—most in countries that are the least capable of providing them with food. “There is no magic in high-yielding varieties alone,” he said. “We’ve got to have plants that have built-in resistance to diseases and pests and that have improved nutritive value.” The challenge is to produce more food per acre because, Borlaug said, “there is no new land to be brought into production. All food that is produced must come from the land already in production.” Borlaug was in Auburn as part of the E.T. York Distinguished Lecture Series. A standing-room-only audience of faculty, students and members of the general public packed the Auburn University Hotel and Dixon Conference Center Auditorium to hear Borlaug’s visionary speech, “From the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution: Our 21st Century Challenge.” While the Green Revolution is most often hailed for its role in saving human lives, the environmental benefits of habitat preservation and more efficient farming practices it has wrought should not be overlooked, Borlaug said. He gave as one example his childhood home, around the Turkey River system in Iowa. Despite the river’s name, he said, there had been no turkeys there in either his father’s or his grandfather’s lifetime. “Today there are wild turkeys everywhere, because their habitat has been restored and there’s an abundance of food,” Borlaug said. Borlaug has dedicated his life’s work to improving agricultural techniques and food production in Mexico, Africa, Asia, Pakistan, India, Brazil and Australia. He said that in 1950, before the Green Revolution, world cereal production was at 650 million metric tons. In 2000, production was at 1,900 million metric tons — a nearly threefold increase with only a slight expansion in cropland to grow the additional food. Biotechnology, in the way of soil fertility methods, irrigation and fertilization, has helped the acid soils of the Brazilian Cerrados, an area for centuries that was never cultivated and leached of many nutrients, become the second biggest producer of soybeans in the world. During the public lecture, as well as during a presentation Borlaug made to Auburn High School science students the afternoon preceding the lecture, the Nobel laureate said he has two “biotechnology dreams”: that scientists will discover ways, first, to transfer rice’s immunity to rusts into other cereals such as wheat, maize and sorghum, and, second, to transfer bread wheat’s proteins into other cereal crops, especially rice and maize. “And I hope it will be one of you, in this audience, that will succeed in making my dreams a reality,” he said. Borlaug ended his speech with a quote from fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner John Boyd Orr, the first director general of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, who said, “You cannot build peace on empty stomachs.” “And to that, I would add, ‘and human misery,’” Borlaug said. Introducing Borlaug to the public lecture audience was E.T. York Jr., who, with his wife, Vam, established the E.T. York Distinguished Lecture Series at Auburn University in 1981. York, who retired in 1980 as chancellor of the State University System of Florida, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at AU and served as director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service from 1959 to 1961. << top |
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