Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  That conclusion, however, was not shared by Borlaug himself. His Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech ended not in triumph, but with a warning:

  … we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction. Man has made amazing progress recently in his potential mastery of these two contending powers. Science, invention, and technology have given him materials and methods for increasing his food supplies substantially and sometimes spectacularly… Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction…

  There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.

  The Green Revolution, Borlaug often said, essentially bought the world another generation or so to resolve the population problem. For the rest of his life, he served on the boards of population organizations, even as he continued crop research to feed the multiplying millions his work had added to the global census.

  iv. Two Generations Later

  At one end of Norman Borlaug’s spacious former office in the two-story CIMMYT headquarters building, Hans-Joachim Braun perches on the edge of a hardwood conference table, hunting for a PowerPoint slide on a Dell laptop. He sets it in front of Matthew Reynolds. “In the next fifty years,” the screen reads, “we will need to produce as much food as has been consumed over our entire human history.”

  Reynolds nods. No argument.

  Along with this office, Braun has inherited Borlaug’s title, director of CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program. His CIMMYT colleague Reynolds heads an international consortium of geneticists, biochemists, crop breeders, and plant physiologists like himself, racing to improve wheat yields faster than expanding populations can eat them. Borlaug’s semidwarf wheat was a jump of quantum proportions, increasing harvests up to sixfold. Since then, however, gains have slowed dramatically, below 1 percent annually. Meanwhile, world population is still growing faster than that, and not peaking anytime soon: In seven of the new century’s first ten years, more wheat was consumed than produced. To keep up, they figure that somehow they must increase yields 1.6 percent annually by 2020.

  How can they possibly do that? Clearing more forests isn’t an option, if only because when trees go, so does water. Braun is still fuming over a recent meeting at the United Nations. “We talk about global warming, we talk about all the problems, but the underlying, biggest problem—population growth—wasn’t mentioned once.” With his gray-bearded chin, he gestures at the laptop.

  Not that the problems are unrelated. Like most crops, wheat is temperature-sensitive. For every degree Celsius that temperature rises, agricultural scientists calculate, wheat yields drop 10 percent in the Earth’s hotter midriff. Many agronomists (and economists) had speculated hopefully that global warming might actually help yields in cooler regions, but during recent European and Russian heat waves, losses spiked beyond 30 percent. The only thing that indisputably grew with added heat was the population of crop-devouring insects.

  Temperature is rising, Braun and Reynolds agree, because more people are burning fuel and eating food made from it. The number of people is rising because there’s more food available. The Green Revolution’s two biggest success stories are in danger of choking on their good fortune: Before 2025, India will surpass China as the world’s most populous nation. Pakistan is now one the fastest-growing countries on Earth, its numbers tripling since 1970, to 187 million. Unable to generate jobs to keep up, especially for millions of frustrated young men, it’s also among the world’s most unstable places—and happens to be a nuclear power.

  But not just more people: paradoxically, enhanced food production has resulted in a planet with more hungry people than ever before—around a billion. Thanks to agro-technology, the percentage of malnourished humans has dropped, but in creepy echoes of Malthus, the sheer number that survives to reproduce stays ahead of the pace that food reaches their tables.

  “Though I have no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feed the population monster is another matter,” Norman Borlaug said in 1997. “Unless progress with agricultural yields remains very strong, the next century will experience sheer human misery that, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has come before.”

  Unless his successors can do something, fast, both the numbers and the percentage of the world’s hungry will rise, along with their tempers. But there aren’t many tricks left to try. “Reaching the moon was an engineering problem,” says Braun. “To produce the food we need in the next forty years is much more complicated. It will require more investments to solve than what was invested in the Apollo program. And we don’t see enough of them.”

  Especially, they worry, there’s not enough research funding for wheat, which, they argue, with more protein than rice or maize, is the most important food crop. The reason is that, unlike corn, wheat is self-pollinating, so farmers can use their own grain to replant. “There’s five times as much invested in maize,” Reynolds says, “because farmers have to buy maize seed every year. Wheat, they keep the same seed. So it’s not related to food security; it’s related to making money.” His fist hits the table. “If we were taking food security seriously, those numbers would come closer together, wouldn’t they?”

  It exasperates him to think of agriculture’s driving incentive being not to feed, but to profit. Reynolds rises and stalks to the window. Both these men have made their careers here, working alongside Dr. Borlaug, authoring papers with him. A Nobel Peace laureate, and yet money to continue his work on the veritable staff of life that launched human civilization, and on which it still depends, is so damned scarce. Gazing out at the brown December fields, Reynolds pulls his fleece vest tighter. Beyond the test rows of hybrid corn, each with a sign explaining its complex crossbred lineage, a dozen Mexican graduate students in blue CIMMYT caps are assessing a conservation agriculture experiment to produce more food with the least damage.

  What’s being conserved is fertility, and possibly the atmosphere: this is CIMMYT’s version of the recent trend in no-till farming. Usually, farmers burn organic detritus after harvest or feed it to their animals, then plow and harrow to eliminate weeds, mix in fertilizer, and loosen the soil for seeding. Whether by hoe, draft animal, or tractor, this takes time—often, a week or more—and energy. It also destroys soil structure created by worms, insects, and bacteria.

  Not plowing, however, keeps the soil and its biological activity intact; by leaving crop residues in place, they become a nutrient sponge that holds water. Theoretically, no-till farming also keeps carbon dioxide bound in the earth.

  In thirty-two CIMMYT no-till test plots, the students measure moisture, crop growth, weeds, earthworms, added benefits of rotation with legumes, and greenhouse gas emissions. Disappointingly, carbon retention isn’t proving significant, although there’s clearly a savings on tractor fuel. Weed control is another problem; without tillage, they’re needing more herbicide. But as in nature, the system is extremely productive: wheat rows sowed with tools they’ve developed to punch seeds through the previous harvest’s litter are twice as lush as the clean, conventionally plowed control rows. It’s not organic cultivation, however; the tools—some hand-operated, some mechanized—also inject nitrogen fertilizer into the soil. No-till helps, but not enough, by their reckoning: With so many people to feed, and with half the world’s calories coming from grains, CIMMYT can’t see how to avoid global chaos without continuing to force-feed crops with chemicals.

  The one bit of magic that might make a difference, the one for which Matthew Reynolds’s worldwide consortium needs money, would be to supercharge the way plants turn air and sunlight into biomass in the first place: photosyn
thesis. Some increases may simply emerge from imaginative physics: Reynolds has a Chinese mathematician studying how light bounces around in a wheat field. “In a forest canopy,” he explains, “light reaching leaves at the bottom is completely different from what a leaf in full sunlight receives. They also get different amounts of nitrogen. A field is a microcosm of that canopy—if we understand it better, we can improve the efficiency of photosynthesis just through better light and nitrogen distribution.”

  But there’s only so far that can go. Borlaug’s improved wheat already captures 90 percent of the solar energy it receives. The only thing left is to tinker with RuBisCO—the enzyme that actually turns atmospheric carbon dioxide into cellulose, lignin, and sugars. RuBisCO,4 in essence, is the basis of all plant and animal life. To ratchet up its carbon-fixing capacity would require genetic modification.

  In the mechanics of photosynthesis, wheat and rice are known as C3 plants—which means that the initial building-block hydrocarbon molecules they make from the CO2 they inhale have three carbon atoms. Corn and sorghum, which evolved later, are C4 plants. At a CIMMYT sister institution, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, plant geneticists are trying to rearrange the cell structure in rice leaves to kick it up from C3 to C4, which could raise its photosynthetic efficiency by up to 50 percent. If they’re successful, CIMMYT hopes that the same ploy will work with wheat. But IRRI scientists expect it will take at least twenty years to produce commercially viable C4 rice. They also have another goal: as well as increase yields, they want to hot-rod rice with enough energy to fix its own airborne nitrogen, to lower or eliminate its dependency on synthetic fertilizer’s costly fossil-fuel feedstock. Adapting any technology IRRI produces to wheat could take even longer, which doesn’t help the immediate problem of feeding more Pakistanis before food wars erupt.

  A British researcher Reynolds knows recently increased biomass growth by 40 percent in a tobacco plant by manipulating a single bacterial enzyme. Learning whether this might work for wheat will also require precious time and funding. Everything does: even introducing a new variety just by crossbreeding plants takes ten to twelve years. To successfully insert genes into wheat would take twice as long and cost between $25 to $100 million—all before facing a gauntlet of international regulation and consumer fears of genetically modified plants.

  The floor-to-ceiling white metal shelves of the Wellhausen-Anderson Genetic Resources Center, CIMMYT’s gene bank of wheat and corn germplasm, contain the largest collection of maize landraces in the world: about twenty-eight thousand, mostly from Latin America, where corn originated. Landraces are varieties that farmers themselves have bred and selected over thousands of years. All trace back to a grassy weed called teosinte, corn’s wild Mexican progenitor, which is also here. The yellow, white, blue, and red maize varieties are stored in plastic jugs. The wheat collection, about a hundred forty thousand modern cultivars and ancient landraces from all over the world, is hermetically sealed in aluminum pouches packed inside long cardboard boxes. Everything is bar-coded and kept at 0°C, and duplicated in a long-term collection a floor below at –18°C.

  An identical set is housed at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation at Fort Collins, Colorado, and yet another goes to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a cavern deep in the Norwegian permafrost: the so-called doomsday repository for the Earth’s botanical diversity, should seed banks elsewhere be lost to disaster or war, or their source varieties succumb to climate change. The purpose of this gene bank is to dole out genetic material, five grams at a time, to breeders developing new strains. But it is also a hedge against emergencies, such as when stem rust, a dreaded wheat fungus, broke out in Uganda in 1999, and CIMMYT air-freighted hundreds of kilos of resistant seed to East Africa.

  Over the coming years, CIMMYT intends to genetically classify its entire germplasm collection. Along with historic strains, it holds seeds that Norman Borlaug archived during all the steps that led to his Green Revolution varieties, believing that eventually biotechnology would allow them to see exactly what they did to improve wheat over the last few decades. They’ll begin with several thousand lines whose useful traits—high yield; resistance to disease or drought—have already been identified. Taking seeds from each, they’ll grow at least one plant apiece in a greenhouse, then send fresh leaves to a genotyping service, to extract DNA and produce genetic sequences for every line.

  Their hope is that decoding this vast genetic heritage will reveal how, whether through transgenics or more ingenious hybrids, to keep increasing global yields without putting any more of the planet’s land under cultivation. That is a widely shared ecological urgency, but at CIMMYT it’s also a point of pride. The oft-repeated rejoinder here to environmental outrage over the Green Revolution’s fossil fuel gluttony, its river-fouling fertilizers, its drug dependence on poisons, and its monocultural menace to biodiversity is that without improved crop varieties, billions more acres of the world’s forests and grasslands would have been plowed to keep everybody fed.

  It’s a claim that recognizes that a world losing its trees and other native flora is a world on the brink, yet one that neglects CIMMYT’s own responsibility for the surfeit of hungry humans whose existence threatens them. Saving more lives than anyone in history also means there are more lives, period—which then beget even more. CIMMYT’s dilemma is a microcosm of the world’s: how to keep growing even more, in a space that does not grow.

  Each new success only squeezes things tighter, and heightens the demand for still more. Even the elegant mathematics of genetic sequencing can’t square a vicious circle.

  More than thirty years have passed since Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos turned their donated hacienda in the Mexican state of Morelos into a home and a Green Revolution farm to feed orphan children. Father William Wasson has passed on as well, in 2006, at age eighty-two—but not before founding more branches of their family in Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Peru. Many of the fifteen thousand children he raised now help run these new homes.

  The original home in Mexico is still the biggest, but its population has dropped from a high of twelve hundred to around eight hundred. This change reflects Mexico’s own demographic shift, from a country doubling every twenty years when Wasson took in his first homeless boy in 1954, to its current annual growth of less than 1 percent. If that pace continues, Mexico will double again in seventy-one years, but the rate of increase, now barely above replacement, is still falling. As planificación familiar became established in Mexico, women chose to have fewer babies, and their daughters have had fewer still. Most Mexicans now live in cities, where they don’t need extra hands to tend flocks or fetch firewood. Most Mexican women want or need to work, and can’t be tied down to eight kids at home.

  Even though they mostly stop at two, their grandmothers didn’t, and the rural villages surrounding the orphanage’s hacienda are now overlapping towns. The hacienda’s former sugarcane cribs are now dormitories, and a primary and secondary school have been added. Across the lawn from where children play volleyball is a life-sized bronze of three figures by sculptor Carlos Ayala, who grew up here: a seated Father Bill, talking with a boy and girl.

  Behind the dormitories are the fields. Next to a galvanized steel silo, five girls shuck ears atop a mound of white corn. In the silo are a few bags of nitrogen fertilizer, the gift of a German donor. Sheep graze around fish ponds and a tilapia hatchery. There are pig pens and a chicken house. In a newly donated greenhouse, a dozen children are sowing two varieties of winter tomatoes. A drip-irrigated vegetable patch produces beets, watermelon, cabbage, lettuce, chili peppers, cauliflower, and carrots; a different child is in charge of planting and weeding each furrow.

  Luis Moreno, the veterinarian in charge of the farm, inspects an ear of corn. He’s grateful that the yield this year from the eight hectares they still have planted of the original forty was decent. Still, the twelve-ton h
arvest will provide for just one hundred days of tortillas. It’s a good thing that the population is dropping, because when he arrived three years earlier, he was shocked at the condition of the soil. Decades of intensive chemicals had left fields “looking like they’d been napalmed.” In some places, not even weeds grew. It reminded him of reading about the Oklahoma dust bowl in the 1930s. He could barely believe the neighbors and older children who told him how much corn used to grow here.

  He’s switched to no-till cultivation, and smaller plots. The owner of a nearby fertilizer plant, who underwent a sort of agro-religious conversion, now sells them organic nutrients titrated with beneficial bacteria and fungi, which Luis is applying in a fifty-fifty mix with synthetic nitrogen. In the greenhouse and truck garden, they’re trying to go all organic.

  “Someday I hope we’re completely natural. Manure is slower, but it’s long-term. Chemical fertilizer is gone in twenty days, and leaves everything saline.” Slowly, by spreading animal and corn wastes, they’re letting the rest of the land recover. Birds and earthworms are returning.

  He looks at the girls, filling plastic pails with white corn kernels. “We don’t want more dust bowl children.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Carrying Capacity and the Cradle

  i. God, Country, and Mrs. Sanger

  In 1948, José Figueres Ferrer executed what may be the most original coup d’état in world history. In the aftermath of a stolen presidential election, Figueres, a coffee grower who stood all of five foot three, cobbled together an army of seven hundred irregulars that overthrew Costa Rica’s government. Then, as the leader of the new ruling junta, his first act as commander in chief of the military was to abolish it.