Canadian Journal of Plant Pathology
Revue canadienne de phytopathologie
Published by
Pub/ice par
The Canadian Phytopathological Society
La Societe Canadienne de Phytopathologie
Volume 14(4):253-323, i-xi
NADIANJOUH ALOFPI
NT PATHOLOGY
December
1992
decembre
ISSN 0706-0661
1·U.sJ-~M.IY42
The R. Glenn Anderson Lecture, 1990/La conference R. Glenn Anderson, 1990
R. Glenn Anderson
Norman E. Borlaug
The R. Glenn An.derson Lecture, sponsored jointly by the
Calla dian Phytopathological Society and the American
Phytopathological Society, lVas established to recognize the
contributions made by Dr. Anderson to the security of the
lvorld food supply. The first lecture, entitled World food
security and the legacy of Canadian wheat scientist R.
Gl nn Anderson was presented by Dr. Norman E. BOlo/aug
at a joint meeting of the two societies at Grand Rapids.
Michigan, USA, 6 August ]990.
La conference R. Glenn Anderson, parraimJe conjointement
par /a Societe canadienne de phytopathologie et
l'American Phytopathological Society, fut etablie pour
reconnaitre les contributions du docteur Anderson a la
securite de I'alimentation humaine mondiale. La premiere
conference intitulee World food security and the legacy of
Canadian wheat scientist R. Glenn Anderson, fut presentee
par Ie docteur Norman E. Borlallg lors d'une reunioll
conjointe des dellx societes qui s 'est tenlle aGrand Rapids,
Michigan, E.-u. Ie 6 aout ]990.
253
254 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PLANT PATHOLOGY, VOLUME 14, 1992
World food security and the legacy of Canadian
wheat scientist R. Glenn Anderson
Norman E. Borlaug
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Apdo Postal 6-641, 06600 Mexico D.F., Mexico. Contribution No. 96.
CPS/APS R. Glenn Anderson Lecture, 1990.
Accepted for publication 199207 15
Canadian scientist Dr. Robert Glenn Anderson was a man of unusual intellectual capacity, who had the innate ability to
communicate with all levels of society-from peasant farmers to extension agents and scientists to the upper echelons of
government. He was a "green-fingered" agricultural scientist in the broadest context, having acquired a wide and excellent
education across many agricultural disciplines, being well versed in plant breeding, agronomy, and pathology. Starting in the early
1960s, he was the impetus behind an accelerated wheat improvement program established in India-a collaboration between the
Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the newly formed International Maize and
Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). He was part of the team that sparked India's wheat revolution, which later came to be
called the Green Revolution. During eight years in India, his excellent judgment of human character enabled him to identify
young students with potential-some of CIMMYT's best wheat scientists today-for the tasks at hand. His guidance,
complemented by his infectious enthusiasm and motivation, helped train and stimulate these young wheat scientists whose job it
would be to increase productivity of the vital grain, thereby lessening hunger and suffering for millions. During his service for
eight years as Deputy Director and one and a half years as Director of the CIMMYT Wheat Program in Mexico, he was
instrumental in carrying improved wheat technology to many developing countries, in strengthening CIMMYT's agronomic
research, and in promoting interdisciplinary training. Because of his 57 years of life, the world is a better place in which to live.
But there is still no time for complacency. To achieve a reasonable standard of living for all people-many of whom today live in
abject poverty-without destroying the long-term viability of the planet, will continue to be a formidable task.
Borlaug, N.E. 1992. World food security and the legacy of Canadian wheat scientist R. Glenn Anderson. Can. J. Plant Pathol. 14:
254-266.
Le docteur Robert Glenn Anderson, d'origine canadienne, etait un homme d'une rare intelligence, qui avait Ie don de
communiquer avec toutes les couches de la societe - depuis les paysans jusqu'aux echelons superieurs du gouvernement, en
passant par les vulgarisateurs et Ies scientifiques. II etait un agronome aux "doigts verts", au sens Ie plus large du terme, ayant
re<;;u une solide et riche formation dans une foule de disciplines agricoles, dont l'amelioration et la pathologie des plantes. Au
debut des annees 1960, il a ete l'inspirateur d'un programme d'amelioration acceleree du ble mis sur pied aux Indes - fruit de la
collaboration entre l'Indian Council of Agricultural Research (lCAR), la Rockefeller Foundation et Ie Centre international
d'amelioration du mals et du ble (CIMMYT), qui venait tout juste d'etre cree. II a ete l'un des instigateurs de la revolution du ble,
que l'on appelle aujourd'hui la "revolution verte". Excellent juge de caractere, il a pu, pendant les huit annees qu'il a passe aux
Indes, selectionner des jeunes etudiants prometteurs - parmi Iesquels quelques-uns des meilleurs specialistes actuels du ble du
CIMMYT - pour participer aux travaux en cours. Ses conseils judicieux conjugues it sa determination et son enthousiasme
communicatifs ont contribue it former et it stimuler ces futurs specialistes du ble, qui seraient appeles it accroitre la productivite de
cette cereale vitale de fa<;;on it apaiser la faim et la souffrance chez des millions d'individus. Pendant ses huit annees au poste de
sous-directeur et ses deux annees et demie au poste de directeur du Programme du ble du CIMMYT au Mexique, il a joue un role
de premier plan dans la transmission des techniques ameliorees de culture du ble it une foule de pays en voie de developpement,
dans Ie renforcement des recherches agronomiques du CIMMYT et dans Ie developpement de la formation interdisciplinaire. II a
consacre une bonne partie des cinquante-sept annees de sa vie it ameliorer Ie sort de l'humanite. Mais, iI reste encore beaucoup it
faire. Pour arriver it ce que tous les hommes puissent jouir d'un niveau de vie acceptable - un grand nombre d'entre eux vivent
aujourd'hui dans ta plus terrible indigence - sans mettre en perilla viabilite it long terme de la planete, il faudra continuer de
faire des efforts surhumains.
It is a pleasure for me to participate in this joint meeting of the Canadian Phytopathological Society and
the American Phytopathological Society. Much of the
foundation upon which I have developed my scientific career, attempting to assist food-deficit nations to
increase their food production, comes from my roots
in plant pathology. I have enjoyed and profited
immensely from contacts between many Canadian
and American cereal pathologists beginning when I
was a graduate student at the University of
Minnesota. It is a great honor to be the first invited
speaker for the new Memorial Lecture Series that has
been established by Canadian and American
phytopathological societies, in honor of the late Dr.
R. Glenn Anderson, my former colleague and good
friend.
R. Glenn Anderson: the Man
I first met Glenn Anderson casually at the First
International Wheat Genetics Symposium in Winnipeg
in 1958. At that time, he was a Senior Research
Officer at the Canada Department of Agriculture,
working on the genetics of rust resistance in bread
wheat. I was immediately impressed by his scientific
knowledge and research skills and programs. I was
also taken by his warm friendly personality.
THE R. GLENN ANDERSON LECTURE/LA CONFERENCE R. GLENN ANDERSON
I learned to know him better in the early 1960s in
the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico, where he came
to harvest the "off-season" wheat breeding nurseries
of Agriculture Canada. The nurseries were growing
at the Mexican government's CIANO (Northwestern
Agricultural Research Center) experiment station,
near Ciudad Obregon, where I have worked on wheat
improvement for more than 45 years. Thus began a
long and warm friendship and very close scientific
relationship.
Glenn was a natural leader who stimulated others
to do their best. He was a man of unusual intellectual
capacity, who had acquired a broad and excellent
education across many disciplines. Moreover, he had
outstanding motivation and strove to excel scientifically-he had little patience with mediocrity or sloppiness in science. A man of vision, he also had little
patience with the status quo, with bureaucracy, and
lethargy.
In 1964, I had the good fortune of recruiting
Glenn-and his wife, Roberta "Bobbie", and family-to help lead an accelerated wheat improvement
program being established in India. It was a collaboration between the Indian Council of Agricultural
Research (lCAR), the Rockefeller Foundation, and
the newly formed International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which was an outgrowth of the old Mexican Government-Rockefeller
Foundation program (Oficina de Estudios
Especiales). Glenn served as the Joint Coordinator
(with Dr. S.P. Kohli) of the All-India Coordinated
Wheat Program from 1964 to 1971 and is remembered as a giant in India's agricultural research and
production circles. He assumed the scientific and de
facto "esprit de corps" leadership that sparked India's
wheat revolution, which later came to be called the
Green Revolution.
When Glenn arrived in India, the country had a 5
to 8 million-ton wheat deficit that was steadily worsening, as food demand increasingly outpaced supply.
Working closely with Indian wheat scientists under
Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, then head of the Department
of Botany at the Indian Agricultural Research
Institute (IARI) in New Delhi who later became
director of the Indian Council of Agricultural
Research (I CAR) and director general of the
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Glenn
helped to lead a research and production effort that
literally put bread into the mouths of tens of millions.
In 1971 , Glenn was appointed Deputy Director of
the CIMMYT Wheat Program, based in Mexico.
During the next eight years, while he carried the
improved wheat technology to many countries
around the world, I had the privilege of seeing him
evolve, in my opinion, into the best all-around wheat
scientist in the world.
255
When I retired on July 1, 1979, Glenn assumed the
Directorship of CIMMYT's Wheat Program, I had
the satisfaction of feeling the greatest of confidence
that the program was in good hands and would
remain on course, vigorous and highly productive for
the next decade. Glenn brought to the program a rich
experience across all disciplines bearing on wheat
research and production. His interest, experience, and
knowledge transcended wheat as a crop; he was a
"green-fingered" agricultural scientist in the broadest
context. For example, he understood the many indirect values of forests in food production and erosion
control, as a habitat for wildlife and for recreation.
This permitted him to see the "big picture" of how to
best manage the world's land and water resources to
supply human needs on a sustainable basis. Further,
his guidance complemented by his infectious enthusiasm and motivation, would help, train, and stimulate
wheat teams to contribute to increasing wheat production in many parts of the world. By so doing, they
would lessen hunger and suffering for millions.
Then on February 8, 1981, at the age of 57, and
only a year and a half after assuming the leadership
of the program, he was gone! He became ill on a field
mission to Zaire. Evacuated from Zaire to Madrid,
Spain, and then rushed home to Winnipeg, Glenn
died only a few hours after being united with his wife
and five children, whom he adored so much. Glenn's
passing left an unfillable vacuum for family, friends,
scientific colleagues, and organizations around the
world. News of his death provoked hundreds of letters, telegrams, and telexes of condolence and grief
from dozens of countries and led to a period of
mourning among hundreds of agricultural scientists,
extension workers, farmers, and policy makers who
knew him and profited from his talents, wisdom, and
goodness.
Glenn was an ebullient and enthusiastic man, who
transmitted his positive enthusiasm and zest for life
to all who were near him. He was endowed with
ample doses of that rare quality, "common sense",
which served him well in his scientific work, for he
never wasted time in pursuit of uncatchable academic
butterflies. He was an excellent teacher, skilled at
identifying young students with potential and stimulating them to develop their talents. Some of
CIMMYT's best wheat scientists today were identified by Glenn in India as having great potential while
they were still students. These include George
Varughese, associate director of the CIMMYT Wheat
Program; Sanjaya Rajaram, head of CIMMYT's
Bread Wheat Program; Mohan Kohli, CIMMYT
wheat breeder based in Paraguay; and J.T. Srivastava,
until recently the Cereal Program leader at the
International Center for Agricultural Research in the
Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Syria and now with the
256
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PLANT PATHOLOGY, VOLUME 14, 1992
World Bank. Moreover, scores of wheat scientists at
CIMMYT and elsewhere around the world were positively influenced by his scientific leadership and personality, and proudly remember him as one of their
most respected and valued mentors.
Glenn's tenure as Associate Director (1971-79)
and Director (1979-81) of the CIMMYT Wheat
Program was extremely productive and successful.
He played a major role in the strengthening of agronomic research, by posting CIMMYT regional wheat
agronomists in a number of the major wheat-producing areas of the developing world to assist national
programs in improving their efficiency. Glenn was
responsible for launching the research (both breeding
and agronomy) to introduce wheat production into
warmer, more tropical, nontraditional environments
during the relatively cooler winter season, e.g. in
Bangladesh. Glenn helped Bangladeshi national program scientists to spark a wheat revolution in that
country, which resulted in a ten-fold increase in production between 1971 and 1981, from just under
100000 tons to over a million. Since Glenn's death,
CIMMYT wheat scientists and national program colleagues have continued to work on developing
germplasm with greater resistance/tolerance to the
biotic and abiotic stresses found in these warmer
environments. Excellent sources of resistance to
Helminthosporium spp. and Fusarium spp. have been
identified and developed and these materials have
been crossed with CIMMYT high-yielding types.
Prospects are now good for having available new
varieties that can be grown successfully in moist,
semi-tropical environments.
Glenn was also instrumental in establishing the
collaborative research program between CIMMYT
and several Brazilian wheat research institutes
(EMBRAPA, FECOTRIGO, OCEPAR), which have
produced a new generation of wheat varieties with
tolerance to high levels of soluble aluminum for use
in the strongly acidic soils of Brazil. This research is
already paying big dividends. The new aluminum-tolerant varieties outyield the old types by 50 to 100
percent. Glenn also supported CIMMYT's triticale
improvement program and played a role in helping
triticale to become an established crop in Poland,
Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, and Australia.
The Green Revolution
I now will describe some of the key events and
impacts of the Green Revolution of the 1960s and
1970s on the process of agricultural modernization in
developing countries. It was of enormous historical
significance and Glenn Anderson played an instrumental role in bringing it to fruition.
The roots of the so-called "Green Revolution" date
back to the 1940s when the first foreign technical
assistance program was designed and established to
assist a food-deficit developing nation to improve its
food production: the Cooperative Mexican
Government-Rockefeller Foundation Agricultural
Program (OEE). That program was initiated at the
invitation of the Mexican government and launched
in 1943. I joined the program in 1944 as a plant
pathologist and assumed leadership of the wheat program in 1945.
When the OEE program was initiated, there were
only a very few scientists who had research experience in Mexico. There was no extension service to
move research findings to farmers' fields. The
Mexican Minister of Agriculture simply said "do
whatever research is necessary to develop a package
of technology capable of increasing yield and production; move it onto the farms; in the process, train a
corps of young Mexican scientists to take over the
program, so you can leave Mexico as soon as
possible."
The shuttle breeding method. The unique broad
adaptation of the Mexican wheat varieties resulted
from the then unorthodox "shuttle breeding" method
that was employed in their development. It was a
method derived out of necessity to meet Mexico's
needs, and was to have an unimaginably profound
impact many years later in India, Pakistan, China,
Turkey, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, Australia,
Brazil, and the USA. The breeding dogma of the era
rejected such an approach since it would not develop
varieties with a good "fit" in specific environments.
The theory implied that the segregating populations
had to be grown and the individual plant selections
made during the season and in the soil and climate
where the variety was to be grown commercially.
With such an approach, only one generation could be
grown and selected each year, meaning that it took a
minimum of 10 years to cross, select, and evaluate
and to begin to multiply seed of a new rust-resistant
variety for release to farmers. Little or nothing was
known then about the importance of photoperiodism
in the adaptation of wheat and other cereal crop
varieties.
Recognizing the frequency and destructiveness of
recent stem rust epidemics to both Mexican farmers
and wheat breeders, it was decided that it was essential to halve the years required to breed a new
improved rust resistant variety. Theoretically, this
was possible by locating two contrasting environments where temperatures were favorable for the
development of wheat plants in two different seasons
of the year. Since we had no greenhouse facilities,
this was achieved by planting at the time the commercial crop was being sown on the Coastal Plain of
Sonora at an elevation of 39 metres and 28°N latitude, in early November, when the days were grow-
THE R. GLENN ANDERSON LECTURE/LA CONFERENCE R. GLENN ANDERSON
ing shorter. Artificial epidemics of stem and leaf rust
were generated and plants with the best agronomic
type, combined with adequate rust-resistance were
selected in April; those with good plump seed were
shuttled to the Toluca Valley, about 700 miles to the
south at ISoN latitude and at an elevation of 2650
metres, where they were planted in early May when
day length was increasing. At this elevation, temperatures are ideal for the development of the wheat plant
during the summer season. Moreover, frequent rains
foster the development of heavy epidemics of stripe,
leaf and stem rusts, septoria leaf blight, fusarium
head blight, barley yellow dwarf virus, and bacterial
black chaff. In October, the best disease-resistant
plants were selected and seed of those with good
plump grain were shuttled back to Sonora for planting in November.
Employing the shuttle breeding method for handling segregating populations, we produced the first
stem rust-resistant varieties in four years. They were
growing in farmers' fields in five years, rather than
the 10 years normally required with conventional
methods. Moreover, it soon became evident that the
varieties developed by employing the shuttle breeding method had unusually broad adaptation and stability of performance. Their enhanced yield dependability simplified seed multiplication and distribution
in Mexico, a mountainous country where the crop is
grown under a wide range of dates of planting, latitudes, elevations, soil types, and moisture regimes.
Many years later, the importance of this unique
breadth of adaptation, combined with a broad spectrum of disease-resistance, permitted the high yielding, dwarf Mexican varieties, after adequate testing,
to be successfully grown commercially in many other
spring wheat regions of Asia, Africa, Europe, the
Americas, and Australia.
Mexico became self-sufficient in wheat production
for the first time in 1956 as the result of the
widespread use of the new high-yielding, stem rust
resistant varieties grown under improved crop management practices (e.g. use of fertilizer, improved
irrigation practices, and weed control), combined
with appropriate credit and pricing policies that stimulated adoption of the new technology.
Breakthrough in genetic yield potential.
Although successful in combining early maturity, disease resistance, and broad adaptation in the improved
tall cultivars, we continued to face the barrier that
lodging was imposing on grain yield. As the use of
nitrogen fertilizers increased, especially in the state of
Sonora, lodging had become the major problem limiting yields. During 1952 and 1953, we made a concerted-but unsuccessful-effort to find suitable
materials with shorter and stronger straw for use as
parents in the breeding program. The entire World
257
Wheat Collection of the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) was screened for straw height
and strength. In late 1952, I learned from Burt
Bayles, then senior wheat breeder for the USDA, of
Orville Vogel's preliminary successes of incorporating into U.S. winter wheats the dwarfing genes from
a dwarf Japanese winter wheat, Norin 10, developed
by Dr. Gonjiro Inazuka. In 1953, Dr. Vogel sent me a
few seeds from three different F2 selections from the
cross Norin 1O/Baart and a few seeds from each of
five superior F 2 plants from the cross Norin
1O/Brevor.
Our first attempts to cross the Mexican materials to
Vogel's materials were unsuccessful. Since the Norin
1O/Brevor F3 plants had a winter habit they were very
late in flowering. Consequently, they were used as
the female parents and, being highly susceptible to all
three rusts, were killed outright without producing
viable F] seed. Using the few remaining seeds, we
made a second successful attempt in 1955. In the F]
and F 2 progeny derived from crosses between
Mexican varieties and Norin lO/Brevor lines, it
became evident that a new type of wheat-much
higher yielding than we had seen before-was forthcoming. In the early generations, however, progeny
derived from the Norin 1O/Brevor//Mexican variety
crosses also had many deleterious genes. The most
obvious and worrisome was the high degree of male
sterility, especially in late tillers, which led to much
promiscuous outcrossing. In fact, the amount of outcrossing in the first two cycles of breeding was so
high, that it cast doubt on the reliability of many of
the pedigrees. The second serious defect was grain
quality. The grain invariably was badly shrivelled,
soft in texture, and had weak gluten. A third serious
defect was the extreme degree of susceptibility to
stem rust and leaf rust introduced into the progeny
from the Norin lO/Brevor parents.
Various types of crosses were made and strong
selection pressure was exerted to overcome these
problems. By 1962, seven years after the first successful crosses, two high-yielding semidwarf Norin
10 derivatives-Pitic 62 and Penjamo 62-with
broad-based rust resistance and adaptation to a range
of production environments, were named and
released in Mexico for commercial production. While
our research objective in using the semidwarf materials was to reduce the incidence of lodging, we
obtained an unexpected benefit of markedly higher
yield potential due to increased biomass and number
of spikes/m 2 (high tiller survival) and partitioning of
more of the total dry matter into grain production.
The newly released semidwarf varieties had yields of
6 to 6.5 t/ha, compared to the 4 to 4.5 t/ha of the tall,
improved Mexican genotypes that were used as parents in these crosses. Apparently, the Norin 10-
258
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PLANT PATHOLOGY, VOLUME 14, 1992
derived dwarfing genes Rht] and Rht 2 imparted
pleiotropic effects or linkage for high yield potential,
while the Mexican germplasm provided valuable
stem rust resistance.
Laying the ground work for revolutionizing
wheat production in Asia. By the late 1950s, it was
evident that the food situation in Asia was becoming
more and more critical. Anticipating a forthcoming
crisis in Asia, the late Dr. J.G. Harrar, then the
Rockefeller Foundation's Director of Agricultural
Sciences (and later to become its President in 1961),
and Dr. F.F. Hill, Vice President of the Ford
Foundation, took the initiative to establish the
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the first
truly international agricultural research center
(IARC), established and financed by the two foundations in collaboration with the Philippine government
in 1960. Today, there are 13 (18 as of July 1992)
such international institutes in the world, including
CIMMYT.
During 1960, under the joint sponsorship of the
Rockefeller Foundation and the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO), I visited
all the nations of North Africa, the Middle East, and
South Asia to observe wheat production problems
and to try to determine whether the Mexican wheat
research experience and genetic materials might be of
some value for increasing production in those countries. I traveled with the late James Harrington of
FAO, who had been a former professor of both Glenn
Anderson and Frank Zillinsky (retired CIMMYT triticale breeder) at the University of Saskatchewan. One
of the first things that became apparent in all of the
countries that we visited-with the exceptions of
India and Egypt-was an extreme shortage of trained
wheat scientists. Moreover, the few available scientists were generally ineffective because of poor
research orientation and inadequate financial and
organizational support.
Even in India and Egypt, where there were a considerable number of well trained scientists, most were
working on theoretical problems only remotely related to solving their country's wheat production problems. Much of the varietal improvement work was
concentrated on mutation breeding methods that were
being promoted by the International Atomic Energy
Commission. Almost everywhere I visited, and especially in India, Pakistan, and Egypt, I thought I saw
opportunities to effectively utilize the Mexican wheat
varieties and research experience to increase
production.
At the end of the trip, I recommended that FAO
and the Rockefeller Foundation jointly sponsor a
scholarship program to train young wheat scientists
from North African and Near and Middle Eastern
countries in Mexico under my supervision. As part of
the proposal, I also suggested that we organize a
cooperative Near and Middle East-Mexican Spring
Wheat Yield Nursery to be grown in a number of
locations in all countries of the region, as well as in
Mexico. The Nursery was to include the principal
commercial wheat varieties from each country in the
region, as well as the best commercial Mexican
varieties and the most promising Mexican experimental lines. It was to be prepared in Mexico as a
training exercise under my supervision. The proposal
was accepted and the first group of trainees came to
Mexico in the spring of 1961. Little did I imagine
that the establishment of this interdisciplinary
("hands-on-intern") training and nursery project
would have a tremendous impact on wheat production in a number of Near and Middle East countries
within the next seven years.
In 1966, the Middle East-Mexican Nursery was
expanded and renamed the International Spring
Wheat Yield Nursery, which has been grown for the
last 25 years by cooperators in more than 75 locations
around the world. It has provided a wealth of useful
information on the adaptation of wheat varieties and
new experimental lines to different soils and climates, and on their reactions to diseases and insect
pests. It has also served as a vehicle for distributing
new germplasm to cooperators everywhere. Most
important of all, however, it has become an effective
scientific bond of understanding and friendship that
has linked together wheat scientists around the world.
The internship training program was initiated in
Mexico in early 1961 (three years before the establishment of CIMMYT), with young wheat scientists
from seven North African and Middle East countries
participating. Among the group were young scientists
from Pakistan and Turkey, two of the first countries
to launch revolutions in wheat production based on
the Mexican semidwarf varieties and improved production management technology.
In 1963, I was invited by the Government of India
to visit its wheat research program. By then, the success story of the dwarf Mexican wheat varieties had
spread to many countries in the Near East by the
young scientists returning from Mexico. M.S.
Swaminathan at IARI had obtained seed of five of the
first semidwarf Mexican wheat lines through the
USDA International Wheat Stem Rust Nursery and
was intrigued by their potential for increasing Indian
wheat production. He wanted my opinion on whether
these lines might be useful in the Indian breeding
program. Since these lines were "obsolete", I was
reluctant to voice an opinion without seeing their performance in the field.
As luck would have it, before returning to Mexico,
I was invited by the Director of Research, senior
wheat scientists, and the Minister of Agriculture of
THE R. GLENN ANDERSON LECTURE/LA CONFERENCE R. GLENN ANDERSON
Pakistan to review their wheat breeding nursery at
Lyallpur (now Faisalabad). This gave me an opportunity to see the how the lines were performing in the
region. Accompanying us as we visited the experimental plots were the two young Pakistani scientists
who had been in the training program in Mexico. I
was disappointed to see the performance of the
Mexican semidwarf wheats in the demonstration and
breeding plots. They were inferior to the Pakistani
wheats under the conditions of the tests. However, I
could see that these wheats had not been properly fertilized and irrigated, consequently I was sure that the
methods used in growing the demonstrations were
not optimum for the Mexican wheats under Pakistan
conditions.
The next morning, I was awakened by the two
young wheat scientists (Mansur Bajwa, now Director
of Ayub Agricultural Research Institute, and Nur
Chaudry, now Senior Wheat Breeder) who had
accompanied us the day before. We walked to a
remote corner of the research station where they
showed me four superb plots of Mexican semidwarf
wheats that had received appropriate agronomic care
and were growing as beautifully as if they were
growing in their native home in the Yaqui Valley
halfway around the world.
So, after returning to Mexico, I wrote a report to
the Government of India informing them that the
Mexican semidwarfs could indeed play an important
role in increasing wheat production in both India and
Pakistan. Within a few weeks, many additional small
experimental samples of Mexican wheats were sent
to both Pakistan and India and the race was soon on
between scientists in the two countries to find out
whether Mexican wheat varieties, employing
improved agronomic management practices, could
contribute to increasing food production in their
respective countries.
The foreign financial and administrative support
for the wheat program in Pakistan, beginning in
1964, was provided by the Ford Foundation under the
visionary leadership of (now the late) Haldore
Hanson, later to become Director General of CIMMYT. Ignacio Narvaez from Mexico was contracted
in 1964 by the Ford Foundation to serve as Joint
Coordinator with SA. Qureshi and S.M. Munshi for
the Pakistan National Wheat Program.
The expatriate support for the Indian wheat program was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The program was attached to the Rockefeller
Foundation Indian Agricultural Program, under the
effective dynamic leadership of Ralph Cummings.
India's Accelerated Wheat Improvement
Program. In December 1963, Dr. Cummings asked
me to search for a well qualified wheat
geneticist/pathologist to meet their needs. My choice
259
was Glenn Anderson, who joined the Rockefeller
Foundation staff in August 1964 and left for India.
After reviewing the Indian research information,
Glenn imported via airfreight 100 kg of seed of each
of the then best commercial Mexican semidwarf varieties: Sonora 64, Sonora 63, Mayo 64, and Lerma
Rojo 64. He used this seed to initiate on-farm evaluation/demonstration trials. In the fall of 1964, Glenn,
Swaminathan, and S.P. Kohli began a few on-farm
demonstrations, involving research scientists and
employing Mexican varieties with appropriate agronomic production technology.
During his first wheat crop season in India, Glenn
traveled to all of the major wheat producing areas of
the country to discuss wheat production problems
with the scientists of the many government organizations and universities engaged in wheat research and
to learn of the nature and scope of their programs. He
found there was a serious lack of communication
between scientists in different disciplines and that
agronomic research was inadequate for the new types
of wheat. He encouraged and participated in strengthening the investigation in this discipline and also initiated disease surveys in the commercial wheat growing areas. He also encouraged broadening the conventional breeding programs to bring them into better
balance with the mutation genetics breeding method
that had been given great emphasis in the late 1950s
and early 1960s. To help overcome problems of poor
communication and poor treatment of extension
workers, all wheat researchers in India during the
first two seasons of the Accelerated Wheat Program
were required to manage demonstration plots in at
least one village. This was done for three reasons: 1)
to broaden the scientists' horizons beyond a narrow
disciplinary focus, 2) to make them aware of the difficulties under which the extension personnel were
forced to work, and 3) to help train extension workers
in the new semidwarf wheat production technology
and in management of the field testing and demonstration program.
The first on-farm demonstrations in the 1964-65
season were very promising, with yields that were
two to four times greater than ever obtained with the
old, tall wheat varieties grown with traditional agronomic practices. During the summer of 1965, India's
food shortages and hunger had worsened; government leaders were desperate for a strategy to reverse
these trends; it was time for action. A decision was
made in India to import 250 tons of seed of Lerma
Rojo 64 and Sonora 64 from Mexico. About the same
time, Pakistan decided to import 300 tons of Penjamo
62 and Lerma 64. Soon thereafter our troubles began!
The Mexican government seed corporation had difficulty in supplying the seed; there were tangles with
customs officials and bureaucrats on both sides of the
260
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PLANT PATHOLOGY, VOLUME 14,1992
US-Mexico border; the Watts racial riots resulted in
the slowing of all highway traffic into the Los
Angeles area, which delayed for two days the fleet of
20 trucks carrying the seed from Mexico to Los
Angeles docks for shipment to India and Pakistan;
and, because of three misspelled words in the
$100,000 check from the Pakistan government, a
Mexican bank refused to honor it. Finally, despite
this array of obstacles, the seed was on its way to
Asia.
But our problems were far from over. The seed for
both countries was on the same freighter, and war
had broken out between Pakistan and India the day
after the freighter left Los Angeles. About a week
later, I received a cable from the Minister of
Agriculture of Pakistan saying, "I'm sorry to hear
you are having trouble with my check-but I've got
troubles too, bombs are falling on my lawn. Be
patient, the money is in the bank, give us some time
and the error will be corrected;" and it was. The
freighter carrying the seed to India and Pakistan was
re-routed to Singapore, and the seed transferred to
separate freighters. As a result of the war, disruption
in ocean transport, bottlenecks and congestion in
ports, the seed arrived in Bombay and Karachi a
month late-in mid November instead of early
October. The wheat teams in India and Pakistan performed superbly in obtaining port clearance and railroad cars to move the seed to the interior for making
thousands of half-hectare demonstrations and for
multiplying the remainder on government seed farms.
We were soon visited with a new disaster. Because
of the late arrival of the seed in both countries, there
was no time to conduct germination tests and plantings started immediately. In Pakistan I began to
inspect plantings in Sind Province, a week after they
had begun, moving northward toward Multan, while
Narvaez made field inspections in Punjab Province,
moving southward from Lahore to Multan. When we
met in Multan we both had reached the same shocking conclusion:' something was wrong with the germination and, as a result, stands of seedlings were less
than half of what they should have been.
We informed Minister of Agriculture Malik Khuda
Baksh Bucha that the seed had poor germination and
asked him to send telegrams to all locations where
plantings were being made to double the rates of
seeding.
All communications between Pakistan and India
were cut off because of the war. There was no
recourse except to wire from Pakistan our office in
Mexico to in turn telegraph Glenn in India that he,
too, probably had defective seed and to double seeding rates. Fortunately, he had spotted the trouble with
the seed early and had also given orders to double the
seeding rate. Subsequent germination tests in Mexico
on seed samples taken from the same warehouse
revealed germination ranging from 10 to 30%; it had
been damaged by over-fumigation with methyl
bromide.
Anderson, Narvaez and I were aware that the entire
future of the potential wheat revolution in Asia hung
in the balance: unless adequate stands of seedlings
were obtained, the semidwarf Mexican varieties
would be unable to express their high genetic yield
potential and would be discredited. However, by the
end of December, with the doubled seeding rates,
generous topdressing with nitrogenous fertilizer, and
good irrigation management, the semidwarf wheats
were tillering profusely and the outlook for a satisfactory harvest was improving daily.
Then came still another setback. A report reached
the Rockefeller Foundation headquarters in New
York stating that the Mexican semidwarf wheats in
India were being seriously attacked by rust. This set
off a flurry of nervous international telephone calls
and telegrams trying to check on the validity of the
accusation. Finally, two wheat rust specialists, Harry
Young of Oklahoma State University and the late
Joseph Rupert, Director of the Rockefeller
Foundation's agricultural program in Chile, were sent
to India to find out whether the charges were true.
For three weeks, they travelled widely throughout the
major wheat regions of India tracing down all reports
of rust. Wherever rust was found, it was on old
Indian varieties. The Mexican wheats were rust-free.
I visited both India and Pakistan again in early
March, as the wheat crop approached harvest. It
appeared yields would be better than any that had
been harvested before. Nevertheless, Anderson
believed the yield would be 20% less than would
have been obtained had there been no problem with
germination. Even with mixed yield results caused by
the poor germination, the Indian Minister of Food
and Agriculture, Shri C. Subramaniam, following
harvest in early May, made a very courageous and
historic decision: to import 18000 tons of Lerma
Raja 64 seed from Mexico, against the advice of several of his senior scientists. This was, by far, the
largest purchase and import of seed of any crop in
world history up to that time. It preceded by one year
an even larger Pakistan semidwarf wheat seed import
of 42000 tons and a Turkish import of 21 000 tons.
Such enormous seed imports unleashed a flood of
criticism from many academicians in the affluent
countries from around the world, saying we were
"playing with the lives" of millions of innocent peasant farmers.
In the fall of 1966, approximately 240000 hectares
were planted with seed of Mexican varieties in India.
Before the plantings were made, a great controversy
developed with the economists from the Ministry of
THE R. GLENN ANDERSON LECTURE/LA CONFERENCE R. GLENN ANDERSON
Agriculture, the Planning Commission, and the
economist of the Rockefeller Foundation, on one side
of the issue, and Glenn Anderson and me, on the
other. The economists insisted that we should cut
back the fertilizer application from 120-40-0 kg/ha of
N-P-K, to 40-20-0 so that three times more area and
families could share the benefit of fertilizer. We
argued loudly and heatedly that this scale-back in fertilizer recommendations was premature for we had
not yet overcome the skepticism and psychological
barriers of on-lookers. Glenn and I stood our ground
and won the argument and the 120-40-0 fertilizer rate
was applied on the 240000 hectares. The yield
results were excellent, but the area grown was still
too small to have any highly conspicuous, convincing
impact on national production.
During the next wheat crop cycle (1967-68), outlook and attitudes had changed completely. Early in
March 1968, when it was evident that the wheat crop
would be a huge success, Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi issued a new postage stamp commemorating
the Wheat Revolution. Euphoric "wheat fever" had
infected farmers-large and small-scientists, extension workers, professors, and politicians, and even a
few of the immutable bureaucrats.
Then, our next brush with potential disaster
occurred. The Government of India still had not
established the needed economic policies to sustain
the wheat revolution and, to make matters worse,
Food and Agriculture Minister Subramaniam had lost
his seat in Parliament. However, before leaving office
on March 31, 1968, he made an appointment for Dr.
Swaminathan, Glenn, and me to see Deputy Prime
Minister Mehta the following afternoon. At that
meeting, I came straight to the point with Mr. Mehta:
"Unless changes in agricultural and economic policy
are forthcoming soon, the enthusiasm and expectations of hundreds of thousands of farmers will change
to frustration and give rise to social and political disorder." I stated bluntly, "if this happens, you Mr.
Minister, will not occupy the chair of the Chairman
of the Planning Commission, nor that of Deputy
Prime Minister next year. Rather, you will be ousted.
Moreover, the Congress Party will go down to
defeat." He reacted indignantly. For several minutes,
there was chaos, with both of us talking in loud voices at the same time. A flood of angry words were
emitted until we both ran out of breath and began to
talk in rational tones once again.
The Deputy Prime Minister insisted that India did
not have the foreign exchange to greatly expand fertilizer imports, much less capital to invest in large
fertilizer industry complexes. I countered that the
development of a fertilizer industry was of a higher
order of importance to the economy of the country
than the large capital investments being made in cer-
261
tain other industries, since fertilizer is essential for
increasing food production. Moreover, I emphasized
it was a risk for India to continue to rely, for a large
amount of its essential food, on imports under concessional sale PL480-type contracts. These types of
contracts could be cut off either by unavailability or
shortages by supplier, or by shifts in political winds.
Before leaving, I reiterated that I was fully convinced
that if a new economic policy was adopted by the
government that would stimulate the adoption of the
new production technology, there would be a surge in
wheat production. By the time we said good-bye, I
believed we had re-established mutual respect, if not
mutual friendship.
The hour I spent with Deputy Prime Minister
Mehta was probably the most productive hour of my
career, for it apparently contributed to changing government policies on several fronts, especially on fertilizer availability and prices for grain at harvest. The
government began to greatly increase fertilizer
importation for the short-term. It also embarked on a
dynamic program to expand domestic fertilizer production, which continues to the present. The
increased use of fertilizer contributed greatly to the
increase in food production. The government drastically changed its grain pricing policy. Farmers began
to receive for their grain at harvest a price approximately equal to the price on the international market,
rather than 50% of the international price as had prevailed previously.
Indian wheat production sparks the Green
Revolution. When Glenn Anderson, S.P. Kohli, M.S.
Swaminathan, and I travelled through the major
wheat-producing areas of India in March 1968, a few
weeks before harvest, we recognized that we were in
the midst of a revolution in wheat production. At harvest, there was labor shortage for: 1) harvesting (all
the harvesting was done by sickle and it takes three to
four times longer to harvest a 5 t/ha crop than a
800 kglha crop), 2) carrying or hauling wheat to the
threshing floor, 3) threshing and winnowing the grain,
and 4) loading bagged wheat on trucks and railroad
cars. But it was not only labor that was in short supply. There was shortage of space on the threshing
floors, shortage of bullock carts to move harvested
sheaves to the threshing floor and bagged grain to
market, shortage of bullocks, shortage of jute bags,
shortage of trucks, shortage of railroad cars and, worst
of all, shortage of grain storage warehouses.
But there was no shortage of the greedy "grain
buyer-money lenders", who, with many local markets
temporarily flooded with grain, found better opportunities than ever before to beat down the prices paid to
the farmer. Fortunately, this temporary local glut and
the abuses in many local markets, forced the government to launch for the first time an aggressive pro-
262
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PLANT PATHOLOGY, VOLUME 14, 1992
Table 1. Comparison of South Asian wheat economies for two
periods 1964-65 and 1989-90'
1964-65
Indicator
1989-90
635
16200
900
15800
0.5
4
20000
100
50
Population, '000,000
Production, '000 t
Yield, kg/ha
Total area,'000 ha
Semidwarf area,'OOO ha
Fertilizer use, kg/ha
Tractors
Threshers
Wheat scientists
1 LOO
72000
2100
31500
27500
85
950000
380000
800
'Includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal; India and
Pakistan account for 95% of total area.
Source: CIMMYT Wheat Program.
curement program to stabilize the market and protect
the farmer.
Moreover, the unexpected inopportune early onset
(2 to 3 weeks earlier than normal) of the monsoon in
1968 worsened the situation, resulting in chaos. In
some areas where the harvests were the best, considerable unthreshed grain that was still on the threshing
floors when the monsoon began was damaged or lost.
When the rains commenced in some areas, there were
enormous mountains of bagged grain outside under
the skies waiting to be shipped. Local governments in
some areas were forced to close schools temporarily
and use them for grain storage.
When the dust of the harvest had settled, and when
the final tally of the harvest had been made, it
became clear an unexpected 5 million tons more
wheat than ever harvested before had been dumped
into the market. No one was prepared for it, least of
all the Planning Commission. It was a pleasure to see
them finally tear up their obsolete plans and rush to
the drawing boards to draw up new plans: for fertiliz-
(000 Ions)
60.000r---........- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ,
er imports and factories for domestic production, for
credit, for pricing of grain at harvest, for procurement
of grain for regulating market price fluctuations, for
storage and transport, and for marketing facilities.
By mid 1968, the changes that had taken place in
wheat and rice production in India and Pakistan had
echoed around the world. In late 1969, William
Daud, Administrator of USAID, wrote in the annual
report that something important was apparently happening to spectacularly increase yield in wheat and
rice production in Pakistan and India: "Apparently a
'Green Revolution' is evolving." And so, the cliche
Green Revolution was born and we have been saddled with it ever since.
Wheat self-sufficiency. The dramatic changes in
wheat and rice production in India culminated in the
achievement of self-sufficiency in wheat in 1972 and
in all cereal production in 1974. Moreover, since then,
the Government of India has maintained a policy of
maintaining a large buffer stock of wheat and rice
grain (domestically produced) as a hedge against
years of poor harvest. Twice within the last 13 years
(1975 and 1987), when the monsoons failed, causing
poor harvests, these stocks protected India from serious food shortages. In early 1986, India even made a
gift of 100 000 tons of wheat to famine-plagued
Ethiopia. Who would have thought this possible during the depth of the 1965-66 Indian food crisis? The
people of India and their Government have not forgotten the horror of famine.
The changes that have occurred in wheat technology in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh over the past
25 years have been astounding (Table 1; Figs. 1-4).
Production has grown four and a half times; yields
have increased nearly two and a half times; fertilizer
use has expanded more than 20-fold; the number of
tractors has grown 48 times; and the amount of irriga(I/ha)
2.5
r-------------------.....,
0.5
~
ro
n
N
R
R
M
~
~
00
~
Years
Figure 1. Impact of improved technology on India's wheat production. Source: Indian Ministry of Agriculture.
~
ro
n
N
n
R
W
~
~
00
00
Years
Figure 2. Impact of improved technology on India's wheat yield.
Source: Indian Ministry of Agriculture.
THE R. GLENN ANDERSON LECTUREILA CONFERENCE R. GLENN ANDERSON
(000 tons)
(000 Ion.)
15,000
1,500
12,500
1,250
10,000
1.000
7,500
750
5,000
500
2,500
250
w
ro
n
263
I
I
I
o~~~~--~~-~~-~-"-~~~~
M
M
M
M
~
~
00
Years
1975 76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
Years
84
85
86
87
88
89
Figure 3. Impact of improved technology on Pakistan's wheat production. Source: Pakistan Ministry of Agriculture.
Figure 4. Wheat production in Bangladesh. Source: Bangladesh
Ministry of Agriculture.
tion water flowing onto wheat and rice land has more
than tripled. In India alone, the increased wheat production over this period is sufficient to supply 314
million adults with 65% of their minimum daily
dietary requirement of 2350 calories (Fig. 5).
The high-yielding semidwarf spring wheat varieties, which were a catalyst for many of these production changes, spread across South Asia like a brush
fire. In 1964-65, there were fewer than 500 hectares
planted to the high-yielding varieties; in 1989-90,
there were 27.5 million hectares, two-thirds of the
region's total wheat area.
Continued diffusion of semidwarf wheat varieties
and improved crop management practices. Since
the Green Revolution days in South Asia in the mid- to
late-1960s, improved wheat germplasm has gone
around the world. More than 1300 high-yielding
semidwarf wheat varieties derived, at least in part,
from crosses made at CIMMYT have been released in
some 50 countries. The area in which these semi-dwarf
varieties have demonstrated superior yield performance is vast: 50 million hectares, half of the tetal
wheat area in the developing world excluding China.
Their derivatives also occupy vast areas in the developed nations, perhaps an additional 20 million
hectares. These materials, in general, have much better
disease resistance than the local varieties that they
have replaced. They also produce more grain than
local materials under low fertility conditions and have
the capacity to yield up to three or four times as much
as traditional varieties when grown under optimum fertilizer and moisture conditions. The materials developed in Mexico had considerable disease resistance,
early to intermediate maturity, daylength insensitivity,
and other agronomic characters that made them adapted to a very broad range of production conditions.
I would be remiss if I did not emphasize that it was
the package of improved agronomic management
practices-good seedbed preparation, proper rates and
dates of sowing, proper fertilizer practices, proper irrigation and/or moisture conservation practices, and
timely and effective weed control-which permitted
the disease-resistant semidwarf Mexican wheat varieties to express their high genetic yield potential.
Moreover, the wheat revolution in India and Pakistan
would not have happened had government policy makers not made the key decisions to make inputs and
credit available on time and to provide remunerative
economic incentives to encourage widespread adoption of the new technology by farmers.
The Green Revolution debate. Despite the
tremendous production gains achieved in many
developing countries in a very short time, Green
Revolution technologies have been the subject of
intense controversy since their introduction. Many
initial reporters chose to depict the new wheat and
rice technologies as a wholesale transfer of highyield, temperate-zone farming systems to peasant
farmers in developing countries. In reality, this was
not the case. More accurately, the term "Green
Revolution" symbolized the beginning of a new era
for agricultural research, extension and rural development in developing countries, one in which modern
principles of genetics/plant breeding, agronomy,
plant pathology, entomology, and economics have
been applied to develop indigenous technologies
appropriate to the conditions of local farmers.
The really important attributes of the new Green
Revolution technologies were that they were costefficient, yield-increasing, and land-augmenting.
Supported by favorable economic policies, farmers
had incentives to produce surplus production for
commercial sale. Not only did these innovations
increase income levels for farmers, but they helped to
lower production costs per unit of output. These more
productive farming systems led to the development of
264
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PLANT PATHOLOGY, VOLUME 14, 1992
(MillIon of persons)
350 , . . . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ,
300
250
200
150
100
50
o I---,,-..._.....,......,.._~....-...,...-_ _,.......,....:...,......,......,..-;....-'-T-~
1967
69
71
73
75
v::rs
79
81
83
85
87
Figure 5. Additional adults provided with 65% of daily calories as
a result of increased Indian wheat production. Source: CIMMYT
Wheat Program.
new rural industries and new sources of employment.
Consumers, however, were the major absolute beneficiaries, especially the urban and rural poor, whose
diets rely heavily on cereals. Per capita production
increases in wheat, rice and maize, have considerably
dampened the rate of increase in food prices. This has
permitted improved nutrition, and thus, improved
welfare, for hundreds of millions of low-income
people.
Various criticisms have been levelled against the
Green Revolution technologies. In the initial years,
there were the population doomsayers who said that
it was already too late in the over-populated developing countries, that the situation in countries such as
India and Bangladesh was hopeless, and that the rich
nations would only make things worse in the long run
by trying to alleviate suffering in the short run. I
share the concern about the high rates of population
growth in many developing countries and the negative effects that this growth has had on economic
development, standards of living, and environmental
quality. But the affluent nations cannot turn their
back on the developing nations. If widespread
famines occur in developing countries, I believe the
ensuing social upheavals will spill over to other
countries and threaten the future of world civilization
and the environmental health of the planet.
Another major line of Green Revolution criticism
argues that the introduction of the new seed-fertilizer
technology would only worsen the distribution of
income and wealth, unless redistribution of production occurred first. Critics in this school labelled the
high-yielding wheat and rice technologies as being
suited only to the rich landowners who could afford
the seed, fertilizer, and irrigation needed to obtain
maximum yield potential. It was, of course, true that
the new technologies increased production costs per
unit of cultivated area. What seems to have been
ignored in this equation, however, was the fact that
the new technologies increased output proportionally
more than the cost of the inputs and were adopted by
both large and small farmers. The fact is that most of
the increase in wheat production in India during the
Green Revolution was from small farms of 2 to 5
hectares.
Feeding the Future: the Challenges Ahead
Twenty years ago, in my acceptance speech for the
Nobel Peace Prize, I said that the Green Revolution
had won a temporary success-one battle-in
humankind's war against hunger. If fully implemented,
it could provide sufficient food supplies through the
end of the 20th century. But I warned that unless the
frightening power of human reproduction was curbed,
the success of the Green Revolution would be
ephemeral. In retrospect, it appears to me that mankind
has done little to slow the relentless advance of the
population monster during the past two decades.
Until the 20th century, expanding food demand
had historically been met by increasing cultivated
area. The world's cultivated cropland approximately
doubled between 1850 and 1950, to about 1.2 billion
hectares. Between 1950 and 1985, world croplands
expanded by another 300 million hectares, to 1.5 billion ha, and have more or less stabilized since then.
These new croplands came at the expense of prairies
and rangelands, forests, and woodland areas. The size
of cropland areas has stabilized in most geographic
regions, and has even started to decline in some.
During the past several decades, we have had no
choice but to depend upon increasing yields to meet
the growing world food demand. These productivity
gains have been attained through a combination of
irrigation, improved varieties, improved agronomic
practices including the use of higher rates of fertilizers, and the use of pesticides as needed within integrated pest management schemes that also include
crop rotations and improved tillage measures.
But even with a concerted effort, using the best
available technologies, for how long can we sustain
increasing yield per unit of crop land? Does the land
have a "carrying capacity" threshold beyond which
its long-term viability is imperiled? Theoretically,
there must be a limit to how much we can increase
production from a single hectare of good cropland, if
we are to believe the economist's law of diminishing
returns. Central to any discussion on the sustainability of the world's agricultural resource base-and one
that seems to be frequently overlooked-is the question of sustainability: for how many people?; at what
standard of living and for what period of time? In
fact, in my lifetime of 76 years, world population has
grown from 1.6 billion to 5.3 billion people, more
than a three-fold increase.
THE R. GLENN ANDERSON LECTURE/LA CONFERENCE R. GLENN ANDERSON
The United Nations estimated in 1988 that 950
million people, mostly living in low-income countries, had food intake below the critical minimum
level for adequate health, despite spending 50-70% of
available family income on food. In contrast, in the
industrialized developed countries-home to 1 billion
people-the average daily per capita food supply was
132% of the recommended requirement and obesity
was becoming an increasing health problem.
Had the world's food supply been distributed evenly during 1988, it would have provided an adequate
diet (2350 calories, principally from grains) for 6 billion people-nearly I billion more than the actual
population. However, had the people in developing
countries attempted to obtain 30% of their calories
from animal products-as in the USA and EEC countries-a world population of only 2.5 billion people
could have been sustained-half of those who were
alive. Poverty and lack of purchasing power, resulting from unemployment and underemployment,
rather than shortage of food supply, are the principal
causes of the inequities of food distribution and
hunger in the world at the present time.
The U.N. Population Agency's medium projection
is for world population to reach 6.1 billion by the
year 2000 and about 8.2 billion by 2025, before stabilizing at about 10 billion toward the end of the 21st
century. As in the past, it is likely that about 98% of
the increased food supply needed to feed these growing human numbers must come from the land, and
especially from the cereal grains, such as wheat, rice,
and maize. Even if current per capita consumption
stayed constant, population growth will require that
annual world food production expand by 70% over
the next 37 years. However, if diets improved among
the poor and undernourished, annual world food
demand by 2025 could be as great as 9 billion tons,
more than double the 1988 harvest.
About 80% of the projected 3 billion additional
people on the Earth in 2025 will reside in what are
now low-income, food-deficit nations of Africa, Asia,
and Latin America, which already face agricultural
land shortages, limited water supplies, depleted forest
resources, and degraded soils. These low-income
countries will not have the foreign exchange to
depend on food imports, even if such quantities of
food were available. Consequently, they must largely
rely on themselves for food self-sufficiency.
Fortunately, there are many improved agricultural
technologies that can be employed in future years to
raise crop yields in most low-income, food-deficit
developing countries. Yields can be profitably
increased by 50-100% in many farming areas of Asia
and Latin America and by 100-200% in much of subSaharan Africa. To capitalize on this unexploited
agricultural potential, however, far greater invest-
265
ments will be needed in future years in agricultural
research and technology generation and delivery,
water resource development, input production and
distribution and storage systems, agricultural education and farmer training, and public health.
To attain needed productivity gains, a combination
of factors constraining yield must be manipulated and
overcome in an efficient and orchestrated manner.
These include: 1) restoration and management of soil
fertility, 2) development and use of improved crop
varieties and animal breeds, combining higher genetic yield potential and yield dependability with
improved disease and insect resistance, 3) improved
crop management practices, including integrated pest
management and soil fertility management programs,
and 4) investment in infrastructure (e.g. irrigation
systems).
Given current scientific knowledge, it is my belief
that the judicious use of agricultural chemicalsespecially chemical fertilizers-is absolutely essential to produce the food needed to feed today's population of 5.3 billion, which is increasing currently at
the rate of 88 million per year. Lest I be misunderstood, I want to stress that agricultural chemicals and
fertilizers are like medicines: when used appropriately they are beneficial; but when used without the
proper caution they can be harmful and even deadly.
Seventy to 90 years ago, in both the United States
and Canada, virtually all of the technological delivery
(extension) system was in the public sector. Whereas
currently, the dynamic and efficient technology delivery systems in the United States, Canada, and other
developed market economies-in which private sector organizations now playa major role in supplying
information, inputs and services to farmers-have
produced high payoffs from investments in agricultural research. In contrast, most developing nations
have tried to rely exclusively on publicly-funded
organizations to deliver improved technologies to
farmers, without much success. Plagued by bureaucratic inefficiencies, public sector organizations have
failed to deliver improved seeds, fertilizers, and other
inputs effectively. Today, there is disenchantment
everywhere with "big government" and I see hopeful
signs in many developing countries that governments
are looking for ways to get out of the business of supplying inputs, machinery and other services to farmers and turn these responsibilities over to private sector entrepreneurs, subject to the controls imposed by
an open market and competition.
The environmentalist attack. Science and technology are under growing attack today by environmentalists, mainly from the affluent, developed
nations, who claim that the consumer is being poisoned out of existence and who advocate that we
abandon the current high-yielding agricultural sys-
266
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PLANT PATHOLOGY, VOLUME 14, 1992
terns and revert back to more "sustainable" loweryielding technologies. Certainly, environmentalists
and agriculturalists have a professional and moral
obligation to warn the political, educational, and religious leaders of the world about the magnitude and
seriousness of the arable land, food, and population
problems. But we must also realize that we cannot
turn back the clock to the "good old days" of the
early 1930s, when world population stood at two billion people and few agricultural chemicals and little
chemical fertilizer were used. What would we do to
provide the food, without the use of fertilizer, for 3.3
billion additional people who were not present in
1930? World peace will not be built on empty stomachs. Deny farmers today the use of fertilizers and
other chemical aids and the world will be doomednot from poisoning, as some say-but from
starvation.
R. Glenn Anderson's Legacy
Dr. Robert Glenn Anderson lit the sparks of agricultural change in Asia and later in many other parts of
the developing world. It is for those who remain to fan
these sparks into other new revolutions in food production. Because of Glenn's 57 years of life, the world is a
better place in which to live. But there is still no time
for complacency. To achieve a reasonable standard of
living for all of the world's people, many of whom
today live in abject poverty, without destroying the
long-term viability of the planet Earth is a formidable
task. But I believe, as Glenn did, that this goal is
achievable, and that science and scientists will make
the difference between success or failure. Today, more
than ever, the world needs venturesome scientists and
leaders like Glenn Anderson, who are capable of integrating new research findings into sustainable yieldincreasing, productivity-enhancing technology, and
who have the courage and charisma to make their case
with political leaders to bring these research advances
to fruition. ThIne is no time for complacency on the
food front-or on the population front!
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