36 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
the biochemistry,” she continued. “But
I do think along the way we are going
to find things that improve yield and
improve efficiency, even if it’s not the
full shebang.”
A
few days after I spoke to Lang-
dale, three Punjabi villagers were
hit by a truck at the site of a demon-
stration near New Delhi. (The victims
were all women in their fifties and six-
ties.) During the past year, hundreds
of thousands of farmers in India have
protested against the government of
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and
for months tens of thousands have been
camped out along the roads leading
into the capital.
In an immediate sense, the target of
the farmers’ ire is a set of laws pushed
through Parliament by Modi’s party;
these, they fear, could lead to an end
to government price supports. In a
deeper sense, though, the tensions go
back to the Green Revolution. To en-
courage farmers to plant the higher-
yielding, thirstier varieties of rice and
wheat, the Indian government intro-
duced the price-support system, in the
nineteen-sixties. Now the subsidies
have produced gluts of these commod-
ities, even as growing them is deplet-
ing the country’s aquifers, and the gov-
ernment wants to prod farmers to move
away from the crops it once prodded
them to plant. To the country’s mil-
lions of farmers, most of whom own
fewer than five acres, changes in the
status quo seem likely to lead only to
more misery.
“Many people would argue that the
price supports that are currently given
are barely adequate to cover the costs
of production,” Sudha Narayanan, a re-
search fellow at the International Food
Policy Research Institute’s office in
New Delhi, told me. But farmers de-
pend on the supports to at least set a
floor on their incomes: “They are seen
as a kind of insurance.” Late last month,
in a surprise move, Parliament voted
to repeal the laws, but that has not put
an end to the protests; farmers are now
calling for an extension of price sup-
ports to other crops.
How to produce a second Green
Revolution without repeating, or com-
pounding, the mistakes of the first is a
question that dogs efforts to boost
yields, particularly in the Global South.
With climate change, the challenges
are, in many ways, even steeper than
they were in the nineteen-sixties. The
research institutes that helped drive the
original Green Revolution, which in-
clude the International Maize and
Wheat Improvement Center, in Mex-
ico, where Norman Borlaug was sta-
tioned, and the International Rice Re-
search Institute, in the Philippines,
where John Sheehy worked, are part of
a consortium called CGIAR. (The
name comes from the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural
Research.) CGIAR is in the midst of
restructuring itself.
“Fundamentally, the reorganization
is about trying to attack what we call
twenty-first-century problems, paying
attention to the critique of the Green
Revolution,” Channing Arndt, a divi-
sion director at the International Food
Policy Research Institute, which is part
of CGIAR, told me. The Green Rev-
olution “definitely brought a lot of cal-
ories,” he continued. “But it also brought
pollution and other problems, which
we don’t want to repeat.”
One way to look at RIPE and the C4
Rice Project is as efforts to bring twenty-
first-century tools to bear on twenty-
first-century problems. For better or
worse, we now have the ability to tin-
ker with life at the most basic level, and
this opens up all sorts of possibilities,
from treating genetic disorders to man-
ufacturing biological weapons. Crop
plants that make fewer mistakes in pho-
tosynthesis, or that complete the pro-
cess more efficiently, would produce
more food per acre, potentially with
fewer inputs. Not only humans would
benefit; so, too, would the myriad spe-
cies whose habitats would be spared.
“Twenty years from now, this could be
making a major difference,” Edward
Mabaya, a research professor at Cor-
nell, told me.
But, in many ways, the twenty-first
century’s problems are holdovers from
the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, and it’s not clear whether the new
tools are a better match for them than
the old. As Mabaya, who also serves as
the chief scientific adviser for the Af-
rican Seed Access Index, pointed out
to me, researchers have already devel-
oped plenty of improved varieties forsub-Saharan Africa, using conventional
breeding methods.
“Most of the varieties, maybe eighty
per cent of them, just end up on the
shelf,” he said. “They never reach small-
holder farmers.” (The Access Index,
which is working to identify the choke
points in African seed systems, is an-
other group funded, in part, by the
Gates Foundation.)
Vara Prasad, a crop scientist at Kan-
sas State University and the director of
one of its Feed the Future Innovation
Labs, made much the same point to
me: a majority of the smallholder farm-
ers in Africa and South Asia aren’t
planting the improved varieties that
already exist. Sometimes the issue is
cost. For instance, with hybrids, the
seeds can’t be saved, and have to be re-
purchased every year; though the extra
yield should cover the expense, small-
holder farmers may just not have the
cash. Sometimes the obstacles can be
difficult even to identify.
“We always talk about the tech-
nologies, but we ignore the social
piece,” Prasad told me. “We need to
understand the barriers to adoption,
and we don’t have a clear understand-
ing of those.
“I’ve looked at the RIPE project,”
he went on. “Are there anthropologists
on it? Any economists? Any nutrition
folks? Gender-empowerment folks?
We really need to be thinking about
social innovation here, not only bio-
physical innovation—and I’m a bio-
physical scientist.”
Borlaug himself warned against
putting too much faith in technology
to solve society’s ills. In his Nobel
Lecture, in 1970, he called the Green
Revolution a “temporary success”; if
the population continued to climb,
this success, he feared, would prove
“ephemeral.”
“There are no miracles in agricul-
tural production,” he said. And, even if
production could keep up with popu-
lation growth, there would remain the
issue of distribution, of bridging the
great global divide between the haves,
who “live in a luxury never before ex-
perienced,” and the have-nots, who send
their kids to bed hungry.
“It is a sad fact that on this earth at
this late date there are still two worlds,”
Borlaug observed.