Which is why in 1961, as India stood on the brink of famine, Borlaug was invited to apply his skills beyond central America. There the region of Punjab had been selected to experiment with recently developed crops created by the new International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Just as with Mexico, India would subsequently make huge leaps forward as a result of its own programme of plant breeding, irrigation development and use of agrochemicals. Arguably, however, it was the adoption of the IR8 rice variety – a semi-dwarf grain developed by the IRRI – which proved decisive. Findings published in 1968 showed it to yield five tons per hectare without fertiliser, and almost ten tons under optimal conditions – a 900 per cent increase on traditional rice varieties in the country. That same year, the biologist Paul Ehrlich published the best-selling The Population Bomb which detailed how famine, particularly in India, would kill hundreds of millions over the following decades. With unremitting certainty, he wrote, ‘I don’t see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.
Except it did, and all while life expectancy doubled and a country historically plagued by colonially-imposed famine became the world’s leading exporter of rice by the early twenty-first century. Such unexpected success was the legacy of Borlaug, the IRRI and the Green Revolution more generally, the central principle of which was that food is ultimately information.
And, as we know, any information can be reprogrammed.
Completing the Green Revolution
Much of the Green Revolution, which transformed Asian agriculture in particular, involved spreading techniques and infrastructure already common to the industrialised nations.
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