In food crisis, Mexico offers lesson

60 years ago, millions saved from starving with 'green revolution'

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CIUDAD OBREGON, Mexico -- On the walls of some farmhouses here, a photo of a one-time Iowa farm boy hangs along with a portrait of the pope. The American long ago wrought a kind of miracle in the wheat fields of this valley, one that today's world hungers for anew.

After the pioneering agronomist, Norman E. Borlaug, introduced his "green revolution" of hardier seeds and chemicals in northern Mexico's soil more than 60 years ago, he was credited with saving hundreds of millions from starvation worldwide.

Today, in a global food crisis of lagging productivity and punishing prices, world leaders are calling for a second revolution.

"These are life-and-death matters that we must confront," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says.

But Borlaug's scientific heirs say it won't be so easy this time, especially in Africa, where food production is growing only 2 percent a year, while population expands by 3 percent.

Even here in Mexico, in this vibrant wheat belt crisscrossed by tractors and crop dusters, farmers are in a daily struggle. Climate change is blamed for more frequent droughts, hotter temperatures and the spread of new plant diseases. The cost of fertilizers has tripled, and their overuse has depleted soils, spewed more greenhouse gas into the skies and polluted water with farm runoff.

"It was a clearer agenda when Dr. Borlaug was here: The goal was to produce more food, period," said Tom Payne of the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

Matthew Reynolds, a wheat physiologist at the center, said the next green revolution needs to mix tried-and-true technologies with sustainable practices, or the world will be fighting famine again in another 50 years.

"We applied the Industrial Revolution model to the green agricultural revolution and we went a little bit too far in that direction, and now we have to back off a bit and respect the fact that the plants and the soil are biological," he said. "They are not engineering problems. They're more complex."

Borlaug-inspired programs

The center in Texcoco, near Mexico City, was the outgrowth of Borlaug's work here in Sonora state's Yaqui Valley, where he developed his seed varieties and launched his revolution, giving farmers in the developing world 20th-century technology -- disease-resistant crops, fertilizers, fungicides.

His innovations were credited with staving off Asian famine in the 1960s and allowing harvests to outpace population growth for 40 years, and won the Iowa-born plant breeder, now 94 and ailing, the Nobel Peace Prize.

That first revolution targeted large-scale growers like those in the Yaqui and in India, so the world could double its food production quickly by blanketing fields with high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice.

Today's crisis epicenter lies instead in the countless small subsistence farms of sub-Saharan Africa, where peasants grow corn, a sensitive crop, on rain-fed plots.

Borlaug-inspired programs are trying to lift those farmers' productivity, but resources are short, and roads and other infrastructure weak. Meanwhile, global grain prices that skyrocketed in the past two years have pushed millions more Africans below the hunger line. Since midyear, those prices have declined, but they remain at historically high levels and many food items -- from the Philippines to east Africa to Central America -- have become prohibitively expensive.

Oil prices, market speculation, bigger appetites in China and other industrializing nations all contributed to that price spike. But experts looking ahead see further trouble globally: the lag in growth of per-acre farm output, water shortages, shifts in agricultural zones and rainfall patterns because of global warming

Meanwhile, seeds of the latest disease-resistant wheat varieties developed in Mexico are being shipped worldwide as another catastrophic pathogen, UG99, threatens to devastate the world's second-most important food source after rice.

Shuttle breeding

New varieties are developed using Borlaug's technique of "shuttle breeding." Researchers first grow prototypes in central Mexico in the summer and then rush those seeds to the Yaqui Valley for the winter, squeezing two growing seasons into one year and halving the time it takes to develop hybrids.

It's a conventional process that differs from the advanced, controversial techniques of genetic engineering.

About 184,000 unique corn and wheat seeds are stored in refrigerated vaults at the research center, giving the world access to a vast library of plant genes to mix and match in search of increasing yields. Researchers found the UG99-resistant varieties by studying a random selection of 4,000 unique seeds.

But scientists worry they are hitting limits to raising yields through improved seeds. Over four decades, growth in cereal yields has slackened from 3 percent annually to about 1 percent a year. And international support for such research has been dropping.

"Now more than ever, we are remembering what Dr. Borlaug did here and watching how history is repeating itself," said Homero Melis, head of the Association of Farmers' Organizations in Southern Sonora State. "We've simply got to produce more."

Nonetheless, many remain true believers in Borlaug's science-based agriculture. Yaqui Valley producers gave $600,000 to agricultural research this year after rains replenished the irrigation dams and they harvested a record 1.2 million tons of wheat.

"To us, researchers are like family," says farmer Jorge Orozco, pulling up a photo on his BlackBerry of Borlaug standing in front of Orozco's waist-high golden wheat during a visit to the valley last year.

Orozco, 57, is part of a new wave of farmers trying to make the valley's green revolution more sustainable. He's in a pilot project using the GeenSeeker, a computerized sensor that scans plants' leaves to determine how much nitrogen they need, to avoid over-fertilizing.

It may save him $10,000 on fertilizer for his 250 acres, and researchers hope it eventually will cut nitrogen runoff by as much as 90 percent.