It seems an unbridgeable distance from Washington’s grandest ballroom-the crystal-chandeliered and silk-brocaded Benjamin Franklin Room atop the State Department-to the muddy fields of hungry West Africa and the “hungry ghosts” who struggle for sustenance on crowded Asia’s marginal croplands.
Yet, on April 2, the flossy ballroom was the setting to announce this year’s World Food Prize; and, the dignitaries and experts gathered were helping channel concern, money, and expertise from the overfed First World to the still-hungry Third World.
The headliner at the Franklin Room was Dr. Norman Borlaug, who 34 years ago won the world’s penultimate honor (the Nobel Peace Prize) for his part in breeding the high-yield cereals of the 1960s’ Green Revolution. The ballroom ceremony also featured U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf.
With Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, they jointly announced that the World Food Prize for 2004 goes to two Third World rice breeders who are definitely not household names: Yuan Longping of China and Monty Jones of Sierra Leone in West Africa.
Dr. Longping invented hybrid rice-a tough challenge with a naturally self-pollinating cereal plant. (Hybrid corn was far easier, because it has male and female plants.) Hybrid vigor raises rice yields by 20 percent, which feeds 60 million previously hungry people without clearing any more cropland.
Dr. Jones melded genetic material from high-yielding Asian rice and stress-tolerant African rice to produce the first high-yielding rice for Africa. Until Dr. Jones’ success, Africa had been the only continent left without Green Revolution crops. Now the food needs of emaciated African children clash less desperately with the needs of the continent’s wildlife and wildlands.
Both of the prize-winning rice breeders built on seed breeding work done by other researchers over the past 150 years: Genetic observations, recorded in the 1850s by the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel; plant breeding techniques, developed with public funding at U.S. land grant universities; private investment, at multi-national seed companies; germ plasm gathered globally over the past 50 years, with donor funds for the seed banks of the Third World’s FutureHarvest research network.
The Nobel prizes, the World Food Prize, and the dignitaries all help to strengthen a gigantic network that ties together the experiences of millions of farmers, rich and poor; hundreds of thousands of scientists all over the globe; and billions of dollars in research funding, mostly from affluent national governments and the World Bank.
There were no placard-bearing activists picketing the State Department during the World Food Prize announcement. Harassing a Nobel Peace Prize winner-on his 90th birthday-is a bit much even for Greenpeace. The activists deplore the Green Revolution, however. They claim that the world would be better off today with half as much food, grown organically, from traditional seeds, with low-yield farming systems.
But which half of humanity would have to disappear if the world’s crop yields were cut back by two-thirds, to match their level in 1960? Which wildlands would have been plowed by the hungry if food supplies were one-third of present levels?
Nor does more food mean more human overpopulation. The world’s human population is now quickly stabilizing-and will actually start to decline after 2040. Affluent urban couples average only 1.7 children, and virtually the whole world is becoming affluent and urban.
Activists scorn research by big universities and corporations as “trickle-down” prosperity. But over the last 50 years, the broad gains of modern research, investment and trade have turned the trickles into flowing rivers of abundance. These rivers of abundance produce well-being and hope for more people than ever before in history, even as the higher farm yields protect the habitats of wild creatures.
The applause in the Franklin Room was genuine.
