Food's Frontier: The Next Green Revolution - Softcover

Manning, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520232631 ISBN 13: 9780520232631

Publisher: University of California Press, 2001

Synopsis

Food's Frontier provides a survey of pioneering agricultural research projects underway in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, China, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru by a writer both well-grounded technically and sensitive to social and cultural issues. The book starts from the premise that the "Green Revolution" which averted mass starvation a generation ago is not a long-term solution to global food needs and has created its own very serious problems. Based on increasing yields by extensive use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and monoculture--agribusiness-style production of single crops--this approach has poisoned both land and farm workers, encouraged new strains of pests that are resistant to ever-increasing amounts of pesticides, and killed the fertility of land by growing single crops rather than rotating crops that can replenish nutrients in the soil. Solutions to these problems are coming from a reexamination of ancient methods of agriculture that have allowed small-scale productivity over many generations. Research in the developing world, based on alternative methods and philosophies, indigenous knowledge, and native crops, joined with cutting edge technology, offer hope for a more lasting solution to the world's increasing food needs.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Manning is an environmental journalist and author. Among his books are Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie (1995), A Good House: Building a Life on the Land (1994), and Last Stand: Logging, Journalism, and the Case for Humility (1991). His reporting has received the Audubon Society Journalism Award, the R. J. Margolis award, and three C. B. Blethen awards.

From the Back Cover

"Food's Frontier sets a new intellectual standard for placing genomics, biotechnology, and food security into the lives of ordinary people. Richard Manning takes the reader on a worldwide tour of agriculture, displaying both its science-rich and resource-poor systems. His volume combines complex scientific principles with a remarkably accessible style. Above all, Manning demonstrates the shortage of human capital in poor countries and the need for much greater support for Third World scientists."--Paul Ehrlich, author of Human Natures

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Food's Frontier

The Next Green RevolutionBy Richard Manning

University of California Press

Copyright © 2001 Richard Manning
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520232631

Chapter One

The Seed

The Case for a Second Green Revolution

* * *

Conditions of life are forcing a fundamental shift in the nature ofagriculture. A generation ago, some advances?largely in plantbreeding?produced a quantum leap in food production, especiallyin the developing world, averting worldwide famine. We feed ourselveslargely on those earlier gains, which we call the Green Revolution.Now we are in need of another such leap, but we lack thetechnology to effect it. This is the dilemma that frames all the effortsand debates this book will follow.

    A forecast of famine is nothing new. Since the time of ThomasMalthus, who gave his name to the whole enterprise of consideringdoom, supposedly ironclad calculations have demonstrated the onsetof worldwide famine?and many times, they have ultimately provedincorrect. The most famous of these in modern times came from therespected biologist Paul Ehrlich, who in 1969 forecast a starvingJapan and China invading Russia in a food war within a decade.Driving his conclusion was the seemingly inexorable collision courseof two graph lines: it seemed certain that humanity would outbreedany possible gains in agricultural production. Ehrlich's scenario didnot foresee a remarkable blip in one of those lines?the Green Revolution.

    Ehrlich didn't know about Norman Borlaug's work, by then alreadytwenty-five years old. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation,Borlaug had been working in Mexico to breed high-yielding strainsof wheat resistant to fungus and vast diseases. The experimentworked so well that wheat heads became top-heavy with fat kernelsand toppled over, a problem called "lodging." More breeding, thistime with a dwarf Japanese variety to prevent lodging. More breeding,to improve nitrogen use. More tweaking of fertilizers, and so onand so on with this wheat, with parallel work in rice and corn.("Corn" is the Old English word for grain in general, now applied inthe United States to what is more properly called maize. I use theterms "corn" and "maize" interchangeably.) Wheat, rice, and maizeare the big three, the trio of grasses that were domesticated in separateparts of the world?rice in south China, wheat in the MiddleEast and Southwest Asia, maize in central Mexico?and now providemore than half the energy humans consume, in the dense, storablepackage of carbohydrates that is grain. The net result of the workBorlaug inspired was an average annual increase in harvests of2.1 percent a year between 1950 and 1990, the compounding growthcurve that led to a tripling of harvests during that period. The collisionEhrlich had predicted was avoided.

    Asia, the predicted "basket case," became a bread basket thatnow mostly feeds itself, as does much of Latin America. Periodicpockets of famine remain, but by and large, the world is less hungrythan it was a generation ago. When Ehrlich wrote The PopulationBomb, 56 percent of the world's population lived in nations that providedless than 2,200 calories of food per day per person, a subsistencediet. In its 1992-94 report, the UN's Food and AgriculturalOrganization estimated that number had dropped to 10 percent. Indeed,a revolution. Hungry people still exist in the world, but proportionatelyfewer than a generation ago. So why not ride the happyresults of this into the future and call the problem solved?

    A fitting person to answer this might be Timothy Reeves, directorgeneral of CIMMYT, which is the acronym in Spanish for theInternational Center for the Improvement of Wheat and Maize.CIMMYT evolved like modern wheat from Borlaug's work and, togetherwith the IRRI, the International Rice Research Institutebased in the Philippines, institutionalized the Green Revolution.Borlaug himself still maintains an apartment and offices at CIMMYT'sheadquarters just outside Mexico City.

    Reeves, an Australian, articulate, confident, and direct, sits in hiscampus-like office building amid the experimental fields of wheatand looks across the brown haze toward Mexico City a half houraway. He's just back in Mexico after visiting state-of-the-art farmersin Nebraska and Australia.

    "The thing that really alarms me is I feel most people have underestimatedthe task," he says. The task he refers to has a simplenumber attached to it: population growth will double demand forfood as soon as the year 2020, by some estimates.

    "There's an additional one of those Mexico Cities being addedevery twelve weeks," he says, "If you tell farmers in Australia or Nebraskathat they have to double production in twenty years, they'restopped in their tracks, because ... all they know is it's going to takenew technology, but they can't think about what it would be ... Thatgives you some idea of what has to be done in developing countries,if the cutting edge has no idea of what needs to be done."

    From the beginning, the Green Revolution has had its critics, especiallythose who have suggested that its heavy reliance on high inputsof water, capital, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides aresimply not sustainable. Reeves himself voices the critics' chief concern:"In feeding ourselves, are we starving our descendants?"

    The sense of discomfort with the Green Revolution is no longerlimited to its critics. There is consensus that the techniques that havebrought us this far will not be able to sustain us in the future. Productionis leveling off. Since 1989-90, world grain harvests haverisen on average only .5 percent a year, a quarter of the rate of theGreen Revolution boom years. Changed political circumstances, particularlythe collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting economicchaos in one of the world's most important grain-producing regions,offer partial explanations, but there are signs that, politics aside,Green Revolution techniques are approaching the limits of what theycan produce.

    If that's true, not only will supply be constricted but the demandside of the equation will also be thrown into flux. From the beginning,agriculture has been the primary engine of human populationgrowth; the dense package of storable carbohydrates that grainsprovide allows mobility, cities, hierarchy, technology, medicine,longevity. We count on more agriculture to provide food for ever-growingnumbers of people, the solution to the population problem.We forget that the relationship is circular, dynamic, and not at allsimple.

    Overall, a veneer of good news shines on the population front,what demographers sometimes call a "reproductive revolution," amirror image of the Green Revolution that has given the planet somerespite from the population bomb. What they mean is that, for a varietyof reasons like birth control and increased prosperity, fertilityworldwide has dropped to an overall annual growth rate of 1.5 percentnow, compared to 2 percent in the 1960s. Indeed, in much ofthe developed world, especially Europe, population growth has stabilized.

    This overarching trend, however, masks some problems embeddedin the numbers. First, as with much that happens in the world,the trend is geographically lopsided. Large parts of the developingworld, precisely the areas least able to grow their own food, still havehigh birth rates. Even with Green Revolution gains, regions of Africahave more than offset increased crop yields with increased population.Food production per person actually decreased in thirty-one offorty-six African countries in the decade beginning in 1985.

    Probably these statistics mask an even greater food crisis, inthat an undeniable effect of the Green Revolution has been to displacerural people through mechanization and larger-scale, capital-intensivefarms. This occurred in both the developed and lessdeveloped world, but in the latter the people displaced were oftensubsistence farmers, Their produce often doesn't show up in yieldstatistics, but it used to feed people. Displaced to the cities, this classof people no longer feed themselves.

    Meanwhile, there is a well-established correlation between an increasein income and declining birth rates, to the point that developmentaccounts for much of the reproductive revolution. But there isalso a correlation between increased income and consumption ofmeat, which in turn greatly ratchets up the demand on grain. (Ittakes about seven grams of grain to make a gram of beef.) Forecastersexpect demand for grain for human food to increase by 47 percentin the developing world by the year 2020. At the same time,demand for grain for livestock is forecast to jump 101 percent duringthe same period.

    Finally, the current low birth rate is only one factor determiningpopulation growth. Another factor is the bulge of people of reproductiveage who were themselves the result of the earlier boom. Alower birth rate applied to a higher base still yields a lot of newmouths. UN projections say there will be 8 billion humans by 2025.This is what drives the sense of urgency among agronomists and agriculturaleconomists.

    According to projections by the International Food Policy ResearchInstitute, there will be 150 million malnourished children underthe age of six among us in the year 2020. That is a decline fromthe present percentage, but one out of four children on the planetwould still be malnourished, with the heaviest concentration inSouth Asia and Africa. These projections are based on an agriculturethat continues along the curves carved by the Green Revolution, anassumption perhaps more responsible for the uneasiness among expertsthan the raw numbers of people.

Begin by considering the United States, which represents the cuttingedge of agricultural productivity. Average grain yields in 1960 were45 percent higher than in 1950. During the decade 1960-70, the increasewas 43 percent, then 20 percent during the next decade, and10 percent during the next.

    During the same period, the United States and the rest of theworld increased harvests by boosting yield per acre, and also bybringing more land under production. At present there is no moreuncultivated land to be converted to crops. In some areas, the supplyof arable land is decreasing, especially in the United States, whereurbanization continues to chew up farms. In the 1970s, the UnitedStates brought into cultivation about 50 million hectares (a hectare is2.5 acres) of land considered "highly erodable" and was forced to retireit a decade later, after it was found to be losing more than thirtytons of topsoil per year per hectare to erosion. The land was seededback to grass. Furthermore, much of the yield increase came aboutby increasing irrigation, yet supplies of fresh water are rapidly beingexhausted. Much of the United States' prime grain lands overlay theOgallala Aquifer that lies under parts of Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas,New Mexico, Kansas, South Dakota, and Colorado. This fossil wateraquifer has been pumped to depletion in some irrigated areas, andwill be entirely depleted at current rates in a few decades.

    Much of the gain in yields came through increased use of fertilizer,yet fertilizer application rates have reached their maximum inthe developed world, the point of diminishing returns. Any more fertilizersimply couldn't be absorbed by the crops and therefore wouldnot bring a corresponding increase in yields. Farmers know this andare already starting to cut back.

    Gain also came through improved crop varieties, yet this strategy,too, has an upper limit. Increasing yield is really a matter of coaxingplants through selection to adopt a strategy that favors seed over allother plant parts: roots, leaves, and stems. Agronomists measure theimprovement with something called the harvest index, the weight of'grain a plant produces compared to the weight of everything else. Atthe beginning of this century, grain crops typically had harvest indicesof .25, a quarter of a plant's total bulk. The Green Revolution'splant breeders brought the index to about .50. There is some moreyield to be gained this way, researchers think, but they also believethe maximum index possible is about .60. Beyond that, in a mannerof speaking, there is no blood in the turnip.

In July 1998 reports of famine in Sudan became widespread, as didreports of the collapse of grain prices in the United States, a falldominoed off the collapse of the Asian economy and its markets forgrain. The Clinton administration quickly announced a major purchaseof grain for famine relief to Sudan. Arguably it was sheer coincidencethat the United States was but one month later firingmissiles at Sudan, but nonetheless a somewhat dramatic illustrationthat food aid is more related to propping up U.S. grain prices than togenuine aid, and that it more often than not precipitates unrest.Aside from those selling the grain, few engaged in international foodissues believe massive food aid?some call it dumping?does verymuch more than torpedo prices and undermine farmers' income inthe countries receiving the aid.

    "The biggest disincentive [to promoting food production] wehave seen has been the dumping of low-cost grain," says CIMMYT'sTimothy Reeves. "It tears the guts out of farmers, and it takes allthe political resolve out of the government that they might have forfarming."

    Nor is helping simply a matter of good intentions. Take an examplefrom Mozambique in the mid-nineties, typical of a phenomenonrepeated through the Green Revolution. Researchers attackedhunger in Mozambique not by dumping grain but with fertilizer andimproved maize varieties that led to a fivefold increase over traditionalyields. Scientific American reported: "The poor conditions oflocal roads prevented farmers from transporting their produce. Thenorthern area (of Mozambique) ended up awash in maize, withstockpiles rotting, and prices fell to a ruinous $40 per ton."

    Failure can be even more finely tuned.

    John Axtell is a genial man, a professor of agronomy at Indiana'sPurdue University. From this base deep in the U.S. corn belt, he hasspent a career tinkering with the mechanics of the Green Revolution,especially with sorghum in North and East Africa. Sorghum,now an important cereal crop worldwide, originated in the center ofagriculture in Africa along a long, dry arc that extends from Nigerand Sudan in the northeast through Ethiopia and south along theeast edge of the continent. From this region Axtell has gathered a seriesof anecdotes to school some humility into students learningabout what is known about food security?the effort to ensure an adequatelong-term global food supply.

    The Western agronomists who went to help these farmers foundthem using antiquated threshing techniques that involved spreadingthe grain on the ground on a pad and walking livestock over it, aproblem fixed simply by replacing cow hooves with modern combines.Except that these people, who used traditional methods, didnot suffer from iron deficiencies, while those eating a similar diet inIndia did. Their "old-fashioned" threshing methods were addingenough iron from the soil to compensate for the deficiency in thesorghum.

    Through much of this region, farmers grow a dark sorghum,largely, researchers once believed, because they don't know aboutthe more nutritious varieties of lighter sorghum. Sorghum's shade ofbrown deepens according to the amount of tannin it contains, andtannin, in addition to being bitter, blocks the human digestive systemfrom processing the protein naturally available in the sorghum. Labanimals fed a diet of dark sorghum will waste away. The researchersurged farmers to adopt the light varieties.

    There is, however, a common bird in the sorghum belt of Africa,the quelea, that likes sorghum and hates tannin, so the light varietiesof sorghum hauled in by well-meaning developed-world agronomistswent to the birds. Which is why the farmers of the region growbrown, high-tannin sorghum. The practice co-evolved with birds as adefense mechanism. Axtell says the final piece of the sorghum puzzlefell into place when a student at Purdue whose father was a chief inUganda asked villagers about the processing of sorghum. He foundthey always soaked brown sorghum in wood ash before cooking it.The ashes removed the tannin. This bit of information led to aprocess that now helps U.S. growers raise high-tannin sorghums.

    The base of Axtell's respect for the traditional wisdom of farmerswas built in 1973, when a survey of 20,000 varieties of sorghum fromthroughout the world identified two with a very high protein content.The two varieties had been collected by the Rockefeller Foundationfrom the same area of Ethiopia, so Axtell went there and askedaround. Everyone knew exactly what he was talking about. "Kidsthere know their cereal varieties the way our kids know cars andbaseball," he says. One of the varieties was called wetet begunche, or"milk in my mouth." The other's name translated as "honey squirtsout of it," because it was eaten as a sort of snack or treat, but an importantone. The latter variety was generally the first harvested at theend of the dry season, the hungry season, and was roasted for a shotof protein just when hungry people needed it most. The names indicatethat people somehow knew the protein was there.

    The lesson Axtell takes from these stories is that securing a foodsupply rests on more than just boosting yield. Both varieties citedhere produced less than others, yet local farmers preserved thesesorghum strains, even when higher-yielding varieties were available.Survival in a difficult place demanded it.

    The Green Revolution at its most fundamental level treated allthe world the same, but the lessons being learned in agriculture noware local. A practice, a variety, a people, and a crop endure in a placebecause selection has finely tuned them to survival. They haveevolved alone with local conditions, and the path to a sustainable futurerequires some respect for the results of that process. Food securitydebates often began, as this one did, by pointing to Paul Ehrlich'sfailed prediction, but too often we forget that Ehrlich, along withPeter Raven, hatched the concept of co-evolution, an idea that will havemuch to say about where we go from here.

It is no stretch to say that Don Duvick owes his comfortable suburbanhome on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, to the Green Revolution.He is a retired senior vice president for research at PioneerHi-Bred International, Inc., a lifelong plant breeder with a giantseed company pivotal in the development of industrial agriculture.He is also an affiliate professor of plant breeding at Iowa State University.But we can also understand some deeper layers of his loyaltyto agribusiness by noting that the acre or so in front of his house?thespot usually devoted to clipped bluegrass lawns in these reachesof middle America?is given over to a restored tallgrass prairie, theecosystem that row-crop agriculture eradicated here in Iowa.

    Duvick speaks more like a professor than a retired executive. Hisconversation is thoughtful, measured with lots of alternatives modulatingthe even flow of his ideas. Like many in agribusiness in hisgeneration, Duvick began life on a small Midwestern farm, an experiencethat no doubt laid some of the foundation for a journal articlehe published in 1995:

Small farms and small towns are not necessarily a superior source of societal and environmental virtues. Small farmers supported by small towns despoiled their own countryside in the 18th and 19th centuries. The farms were then abandoned, and the despoilers went west to states such as Wisconsin where the cycle was repeated, inspiring Aldo Leopold to his monumental work on behalf of the environment. Small farmers supported by small towns in the Great Plains despoiled the grasslands of Oklahoma and Kansas in the late 19th and early 20th century, giving rise to the famous Dust Bowl in the drought years of the early 1930s. In our own time I read every day in my local newspaper of the crimes that abound in small towns and on small farms in Iowa. They are as ferocious and as perverted as in any metropolis.

    This recounting does not prove that small farms and small towns are worse than the rest of the nation in civic virtue or reverence for the environment. Nor does it say that large farms or large business firms are likely to be superior in these regards. It merely says that no group has a monopoly on virtue or vice, on wisdom or folly, on generosity or greed. To assume otherwise, to assign a class uniformity where one does not exist, will put needless roadblocks on the path to the solution of the real problems facing U.S. agriculture. We must look for solutions where we can find them.

    Duvick's pragmatism is deep-seated and channeled by his particularsmall-farm experience in the 1930s. It is at the same time typicalof a whole generation of people his age whose careers played out inagribusiness. That is, they grew up on tough, hand-to-mouth farmswhen a single event brought some prosperity, enough to send themoff to a land-grant school someplace for an education that gave thema shot at a white-collar job. That single event, he says, was the comingof hybrid seed. It transformed Duvick's own life and those ofmany like him.

    The term for the magic of hybrids is "heterosis," hybrid vigor. Hybrids,which are sterile crosses of plants that do not normally cross,yield far more than either parent, the grip on the bootstraps that hasboosted most of our yield gains in corn during the past thirty years.Wheat does not readily lend itself to hybridization, but plant breeding,conventional crosses, has created a parallel process. Hybrid orotherwise, new varieties have fueled the revolution.

    Duvick, who sits on the board of the International Rice ResearchInstitute, says the early high-yielding rice varieties produced aboutten tons per hectare, and subsequent varieties have raised even thatbar. But those same early varieties grown today yield only aboutseven tons per hectare. Cotton breeders report a similar phenomenon."People are really scratching their heads, saying, Do we have torun this fast in order to stand still?" says Duvick.

    He believes that growing conditions are deteriorating, probablybecause of microbial reactions in the soil, that resistance to disease isdeclining, and insect damage is on the rise. So far, breeding has morethan offset the resulting losses. But breeding has its limits.

    For instance, an agronomist in Nebraska has researched corncontest records for fifty years and found that there has been no realincrease in the prizewinning yields, which represent a sort of theoreticalmaximum. True, average yields have increased, but the overallincrease has been the result of latecomers, farmers finally adoptingwhat is essentially old technology. The yield has a ceiling.

    During this breeder's career, the critical past thirty years, cornyields have tripled. So can the next generation of breeders matchthat performance to meet projected increases in demand?

    "I don't think so," Duvick says.

The more we chase our basic human desire to understand how theworld works, the more we reveal our ignorance. People in agriculturemight agree with this but are just as likely to say we are most ignorantabout social systems, not science. We think we have thetechnical ability to deal with the problems of producing food, but wefail because of lack of knowledge about such areas as markets andgovernment. True enough; our ignorance in these areas is vast, yetit is equally formidable concerning the raw science?for instance,knowing the workings of a single square foot of soil.

    Dr. Eugene Kroonin of the National Center for Biotechnologysummarized the situation for The New York Times: "Five years ago,we were very confident and arrogant in our ignorance. Now we arestarting to see the true complexity of life."

    There is a glimpse of this complexity in Robert Goodman's labgroup at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where a grad studentmight buttonhole you and insist that microbes rule the world.She will explain something of the recent work of microbiologists thathas redrawn the tree of life.

    Humans launched their first forays into the microbial world in theseventeenth century, with Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's invention ofthe microscope. That instrument, coupled with the capability to culture,grow, and compare colonies of microbes in the lab, produced aflourishing field of knowledge on which much of modern sciencerests. Like most tools, though, culturing of microbes obscured asmuch as it illuminated. Microbiology took a look at the universe bysampling it onto petri dishes and assumed incorrectly that what grewwas what the world held. New tools, like techniques for sampling andcataloging DNA, are showing us some signatures not seen before.Now we are beginning to understand that culturing revealed somethingless than 1 percent of microbial life, leaving a rich world hiddenin the shadows.

    This new view, spelled out by Carl Woese, of the University ofIllinois, in the mid-seventies, showed something even more profound,that the old picture missed a major branch on life's tree?that,earlier, life was plants and animals, fungi and bacteria, but now life iseukarya, bacteria, and the new stuff: the frontier, a whole new categoryof life, the archaea. In this scheme, most of life we know?visiblelife, plants, animals, and fungi?fall on the branch called eukarya,meaning organisms built from cells with nuclei. Both archaea andbacteria are prokaryotes, without nuclei. The implication of thisgrouping is that the latter two, co-equal branches on the tree, harborthe same degree of complexity and diversity as the eukarya. Themore we come to understand about 'all this, the more this impressionis justified.

    Within the archaea there are forms of life as unrelated to eachother as humans are removed from mushrooms. Archaea were theside of life missed by culturing. These are, like bacteria, single-celledorganisms, but live by managing their DNA differently. Put in simplerterms, they are just plain weird. The initial work found archaeain places like hot pools at Yellowstone National Park and around volcanicvents along ocean floors. These are the thermophiles, or heat-lovingarchaea, that probably hold the key to the origins of life. Atfirst it was generally believed the archaea were odd forms evolved tooccupy the extreme niches, but then people started looking in ordinaryplaces. Goodman's lab found them in soils and more recently insurprising abundance on the roots of plants. It is not known whatthey are doing there, but Goodman suspects they are mediatingthe flow of minerals and nutrients, especially nitrogen, wardingoff pathogens, coupling with other microbes to create the unseenecosystem that is the basis of agriculture. The archaea may have begunall of life, taking energy from volcanic vents, yet it maybe equally true that the archaea continue to sponsor the exchangebetween elemental and sentient, which is to say, food.

    Jeff Dillen is an engaging young man who was working toward alaw degree at the University of Wisconsin when I met him. At thesame time, he became an accomplished microbiologist just for themental exercise, the way some students would take up weight liftingin their spare hours. Like all the rest in Goodman's lab, he is animatedby a sense of the frontier; the researchers' slides of the barcode-like registers of patterns in DNA are a window to somethingheretofore unseen. Dillen did an interesting and straightforwardthing: he sampled soil from an organic farm and compared it to soilfrom one using Green Revolution methods. The archaeal microbeswere present in the organic soil but not in the samples from the industrialag land. We don't know what the archaeal bacteria have to dowith the health of crops, but this simple result indicates we should.

    Goodman's analogy is to the spotted owl, the endangered speciesof the Northwest rain forest that signals not so much its own peril asthe status of the ecosystem it represents and, by extension, the humansthat depend absolutely on its health. Can we know what dangerour methods pose to an ecosystem when we don't know how it works,or even what is in it, for that matter?

Vern Ruttan is an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota,a self-described, unreconstructed Green Revolutionary. Hesays, "There are no revolutions in the offing. We'll be fighting in thetrenches. The gains in the future are likely to come harder and besmaller."

    Ruttan was at a meeting in Wayzata, Minnesota, an event that becameknown as the Spring Hill Conference, named for the place thatheld it. Goodman, Duvick, and Axtell were there as well, along withmore than a dozen agricultural researchers from around the globe.In addition to the brain trust, James M. and Patricia S. Bingerrepresented the board of directors of the McKnight Foundation,along with executive vice president Michael O'Keefe. William M,McKnight, then chairman of the 3M Company, set up the foundationin 1953. Forty-five years later, it was giving away $76 million annuallyto a variety of causes, one of which is securing international food supply.McKnight organized the conference in Wayzata spearheaded byO'Keefe and Goodman. The idea was to use McKnight's money as alever and the gathered expertise as a fulcrum against the loomingproblem. But money and brains had been pitted against this problembefore, much larger sums of money than a small Midwestern foundationcould muster. Primarily, the conference was looking for a placeto begin, a crack in the face of the problem that might yield a purchasepoint for the lever.

    The conference decided to take advantage of some factors alreadyin place. World food aid is not a new thing. Since WorldWar II, the United States has been actively involved, first by attemptinga direct export of technology, which largely failed becausemuch of it was inappropriate for the developing world. Then theUnited States exported institutions to mirror the extension service, anetwork connecting farmers to expertise at U.S. land-grant universities.This also failed to take root. More recent efforts have centeredon building intellectual capacity within developing countries. Thislast phase has taken a generation, but it has shown results. There aretrained agricultural scientists throughout the developing worldnow?assets in place.

    Clearly, the developing world is where the gains are to be made.That's where yields lag, despite a range of available technologies;where the effort is frustrated by a variety of failures of social institutions.Any gains to be made now will have to face social questions.These factors point to a position for the lever, but only point. Preciselocation can be identified only locally, within the specific context ofspecific developing-world nations.

    The conference set up a way to do that. A plan evolved to awarda series of grants to specific projects in the developing world.McKnight committed $12 million over six years. The specifics of theprojects would be hatched by each nation's scientists identifying theirparticular nation's needs, but each program would be required toform a partnership with an American university and American scientistsin order to provide the scientific firepower of the developedworld, and also to provide some further training for national scientists.Just as important, the partnerships were to open a reciprocalflow of information such as Axtell outlined above in the case ofsorghum.

    Finally, it was clear that any program would have to be interdisciplinaryto bring a broad range of ideas to bear on the broad base ofthe problem. It would involve not only agronomists and plant breedersbut economists and anthropologists, ethnobotanists and evenecologists.

    McKnight put out a call for proposals. There was an immediateand overwhelming response from around the world. Goodman hadfigured on getting about 100 applications. Instead, 450 arrived.

    "When the deluge hit, it was quite a shock," he says. McKnighttook it as a sign that they had identified a major need.

    Goodman had already set up an oversight committee, the skeletonof which came from the Wayzata conference. It included himselfas chair; Axtell; Almiro Blumenschein, a Brazilian plant geneticist;Duvick; and Ruttan; and added to that base Sandra Batie of MichiganState University; Jojah Koswara, a professor and director ofresearch for the Directorate General of Higher Education in Indonesia;Molly Kyle Jahn, a professor of plant breeding at Cornell;Alison Power, an ecologist from Cornell; Mandivamba Rukuni, a professorof agricultural economics at the University of Zimbabwe; UshaVijayraghavan, a microbiology professor at the Indian Institute ofScience; and Qifa Zhang, a professor of crop genetic improvement atHuazhong Agricultural University in the People's Republic of China.

    The board winnowed the applications to nine projects and beganfunding them in 1995. Like the problem itself, they are diverse.Goodman acknowledges taking a sort of portfolio concept, balancingsome risky, high-tech ventures with some that seemed likely to produceimmediate gains.

    I owe the reader a disclosure at this point. The McKnight Foundationhired me to write this book and paid for my research expenses.That is a slippery slope for a journalist, made less slipperybecause this project is run by a group of independent scientists, eachwith separate biases. For the same reason that they are an asset tothe project, they are also assets to this book: they bring to the projectsome critical intellectual power that will help reveal the story in a varietyof lights. At the same time, the committee is a buffer: its independencewas extended to include mine. The foundation explicitlygranted me editorial control over this project, a license to arrive atand write my own conclusions. I was never denied access to a singlemeeting, document, or source. I was, in fact, granted access to severalmeetings where touchy allegations were made and dirty laundryaired. Still, I was never asked to avoid a topic or line of questioning,nor did I hear the phrase "off the record."

    Still, McKnight did pay for the research that made this book possible.It is not the sort of work that publishers are eager to underwrite. (In my more cynical moments, I think that it would be far easierto sell a book about a single celebrity missing lunch than theprospect of a quarter of the world's children being malnourished.)The financial basis on some level opens the project to some criticism.Perhaps it will come from independent journalists in the employ ofDisney, Time-Warner, or Knight-Ridder.

Now we travel: to Ethiopia, where developed-world science is beingapplied to a traditional cereal called tef; to Uganda, where sweet-potatoresearch rests on human capacity decimated by conflict; toZimbabwe, where work on tannins in sorghum is under way: to India,where a range of tricks from traditional plant breeding to geneticengineering is being applied to chickpea improvement; to China, tosee if transgenic bugs can prevent a rice virus disease and if wild relativesof wheat can prevent rust; to Brazil and Chile, for an advancelook at some new potatoes free of insecticides; to Mexico and themilpa system that fed the Aztecs; and to Peru's highlands, where indigenoustubers are the center of village life.

    The program has not solved the world's problems, nor is it the lastword in food security. A whole range of institutions, foundations, andorganizations is chipping away at the problem. It is, however, a windowinto what the world is doing about agriculture, and what urgentlyneeds to be done.

Continues...

Excerpted from Food's Frontierby Richard Manning Copyright © 2001 by Richard Manning. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520232631
• ISBN 13: 9780520232631
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240