This suggests there is another way to feed 9 billion people, one that would mean we had more than enough food for everyone, all without the need for rationing or changing eating habits. Indeed, it would make food so abundant that – as with energy, labour and resources – it would become virtually free, with the value emerging more from the informational content than inputs such as land or human efort.
While you may never have heard of him, Norman Borlaug was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. A year after receiving his PhD in 1942 he assumed an agricultural research position in Mexico where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield varieties of wheat – a crop the country was failing to produce in suficient amounts. These modified varieties used most of their energy to grow edible kernels rather than long, inedible stems and had the additional benefit of being disease-resistant. Financed by the UN, various US government agencies and the Rockefeller Foundation, this was the very latest in agronomic research – and more than a decade before we understood how DNA and inheritance actually worked.
Mexican wheat production quickly flourished. By 1956 the country was self-suficient in the crop, and by 1964 it exported half a million tons of it. In the space of two decades the majority of the country’s wheat came from the newer grains bred by Borlaug. But problems with food production extended far beyond Mexico. In a world of nations newly freed of European empires, the spectre of global hunger was more pressing than ever. Economic under-development as a result of colonialism, combined with growing populations and relatively weak state structures, seemed a dangerous mix in an uncertain world.
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