32 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
and “game-changing discoveries that
will lead to better harvests.”
One of the opportunities that Long
identified in his 2006 paper involves a
process known as nonphotochemical
quenching, or N.P.Q. Obviously, plants
need light, but, like us, they can suffer
from too much of it. N.P.Q. enables
them to protect themselves by dissipat-
ing excess light as heat. The problem is
that N.P.Q. is sluggish; once initiated,
it’s slow to stop, even as light conditions
change. Long’s model suggested that
some clever genetic modifications could
make the process nimbler.
Researchers at RIPE set about test-
ing this proposition on tobacco plants,
which are sort of the lab rats of the ag
world. They inserted three extra genes
into the plants, then raised them in
greenhouses. The modified plants did,
indeed, outperform ordinary tobacco
plants—they grew faster and put on
more weight. The team then ran field
trials. Long nervously awaited the out-
come. The results were even better than
he’d hoped: the modified plants outper-
formed the control plants by up to
twenty per cent.
When the resulting paper was pub-
lished, in Science, it made news around
the world. “Genetic breakthrough,” the
BBC declared. Long was interviewed
by the Big Ten Network, which, in ad-
dition to airing the con-
ference’s sporting events,
sometimes does features on
Big Ten professors. He told
the interviewer that the day
the results of the field tri-
als came in was one of the
most exciting of his life.
“Don’t tell my wife that,”
he added. The network
showed the clip on the jum-
botron during a University
of Illinois football game. Long and
his wife, Ann, were watching at home.
“I got an elbow in the ribs for that,”
he recalled.
I
n 1967, two sober-minded men pub-
lished a book with a sensational title:
“Famine—1975!” The authors, William
and Paul Paddock, were brothers; Wil-
liam was an agronomist, Paul a retired
Foreign Service officer. “A collision be-
tween exploding population and static
agriculture is imminent,” the Paddocks
wrote. They declared, “The conclusion
is clear: there is no possibility of im-
proving agriculture ... soon enough to
avert famine.”
Many experts shared their anxiety.
In the mid-sixties, the global popu-
lation was growing by more than two
per cent a year, which is believed to
be the highest rate in human history.
In a number of developing countries—
Brazil and Ethiopia, for instance—
the annual rate was closer to three per
cent. Agricultural production wasn’t
keeping up.
“The world food situation is now
more precarious than at any time since
the period of acute shortage immedi-
ately after the second world war,” the
director-general of the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization,
Binay Ranjan Sen, wrote. He warned
that unless dramatic action was taken
“Malthusian correctives” would “inex-
orably come into play.”
“Famine—1975!” was followed by
“The Population Bomb,” by the Stan-
ford biologist Paul Ehrlich, published
in 1968. Ehrlich, too, declared disaster
unavoidable. “The battle to feed all
of humanity is over,” he wrote. “In the
1970’s the world will undergo famines—
hundreds of millions of people are going
to starve to death in spite of any crash
programs embarked upon now.” Ehr-
lich became a regular guest
on the “Tonight Show,” and
“The Population Bomb”
sold more than two mil-
lion copies.
The catastrophe failed
to materialize. Ehrlich and
the Paddocks were wrong
about the future of agri-
culture. Even as they were
writing, the seeds—both
literal and metaphorical—
were being sown for what would be-
come known as the Green Revolution.
At the vanguard of the revolution was
Norman Borlaug, a plant pathologist
who worked for the Rockefeller Foun-
dation at an agricultural-research station
in Mexico. By painstakingly breeding
wheat over the course of two decades,
he developed a series of highly produc-
tive, disease-resistant varieties. The va-
rieties were unusually stocky—they’d
been bred using dwarf strains—and this
allowed them to put more energy into
their kernels and less into their stalks.
As the varieties were adopted, yields shot
up; in the two decades following the
publication of “Famine—1975!,” wheat
production in Mexico nearly doubled.
During the same period in India, it more
than tripled.
Building on Borlaug’s work, breed-
ers in the Philippines created high-yield,
semi-dwarf strains of rice, which led to
similar productivity increases. This work
was motivated as much by political im-
pulses as by humanitarian ones; boost-
ing rice output might be described as
the “hearts and bellies” approach to
fighting Communism in Asia.
For his efforts, Borlaug was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. “More
than any other single person of this age,
he has helped to provide bread for a
hungry world,” the chairwoman of the
Norwegian Nobel Committee stated.
Like most revolutions, the green one
had unintended consequences. The
new, high-yield varieties were needy;
to realize their full potential, they re-
quired plenty of fertilizer, pesticides,
and water. These “inputs,” in turn, re-
quired money. The bulk of the bene-
fits thus accrued to those with resources.
Farms became bigger and more mech-
anized, developments that often cost
the very poorest agricultural workers
their livelihoods. Research suggests that
the new varieties, combined with the
agricultural practices they promoted,
exacerbated inequality.
“The availability of 60% cheaper rice
would be little consolation to someone
who had lost 100% of their income as
a result of the Green Revolution,” Raj
Patel, a research professor at the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin, has written.
The ecological costs, too, were high,
and by many accounts these are still
growing. Fertilizer runoff has filled riv-
ers and lakes with nutrients, producing
algae blooms and aquatic “dead zones.”
Increased pesticide use has had the per-
verse effect of doing in many of the ben-
eficial insects that once kept pests in
check. The demands of irrigation have
emptied aquifers. In the northern In-
dian state of Punjab, an early center of
the Green Revolution, groundwater is
being pumped out so much faster than
it can be replenished that the water table
is falling by about three feet a year. Ex-
perts have warned that, if current rates
