Biography Norman Borloga

For some time the center grew cattle, sheep and pigs, as well as oranges, figs and grapefruit. But by the year of the field, the thickets, the fences collapsed, and the windows were broken. There she found Norman Borloga from the Rockefeller Foundation, trying to grow wheat, which could withstand the grain rust - a disease that destroyed many crops. Here he planned to use the climate features in order to sow in the fall, and to harvest in the spring.

However, the fund had no permission to work in this region, so officially it could not be there. This meant the lack of technology and any help to make this place suitable for life. But he still left his wife Margaret and daughter Jenny in Mexico City and came here. Unhealthy food has at least one serious advantage, but it was full of desire to solve the problem of hunger, which he saw with his own eyes.

Katie has mercy on a young man - she taught him the Spanish language, shared food, gave the opportunity to wash and wash his clothes. He later said that he would not survive without her help. She also drove him to the nearest city, Syudad -Obregon, where - 23 years later - the main street was renamed his honor. In the same year, Stanford Biologist Paul Erlich and his wife Ann, who was not indicated by the author, published a book that had the effect of the bomb.

In the work called "Population Bomb", they noted that in poor countries such as India and Pakistan, the population grew faster than food production. They suggested that in the X -year "hundreds of millions of people would die of hunger." Later, Borlougu was awarded the Nobel Prize of the world over the years that he spent between Mexico City and the Yaki Valley, growing thousands and thousands of wheat varieties, and carefully noting their features: this variety opposed one type of grain rust, but not another; The second variety gave good crops, but poor bread came out of it; and so on.

He could not explore the DNA of wheat to find out what genes were responsible for what qualities, because before the development of this technology there were still decades. But he could cross the varieties that had certain good characteristics, and hope that any of the new varieties received will have all good qualities and not a single bad one. It was a painstaking work, but in the end she had fruit.

Borloug developed new varieties of the "dwarf" wheat, which was resistant to grain rust, brought good crops, and - most importantly - had short stems, so they did not break in the wind. By M years, Borloga had already traveled around the world in order to disseminate knowledge about his research. It was not easy. In Pakistan, the director of the research institute said that they tried to grow his wheat, but the yield was small.

Borlog soon realized why. Ignoring his instructions, they planted plants too deep, too far from each other, as well as without feeding and weeding. The man answered in surprise: "But this is how they plant wheat in Pakistan." Many could not imagine that the revolution is possible. For about half a century, the yield of Pakistani wheat was stable: never higher than kg per acre. Mexican farmers have now received three times large crops.

So, perhaps, it is worth trying to adopt agricultural methodology from Mexico? No, the outstanding academician said: "These numbers prove that wheat productivity in Pakistan will never grow! In India, he entered the skirmish with the deputy prime minister. In the end, his ability to argue helped. Developing countries began to import the seeds and methods of Borlog.

And from for a year their yield of wheat tripled. Similar work was about corn and rice. This process was called the "green revolution." Erlich foresaw mass hunger, but the population of the world has more than doubled, and the production of food continued to grow with it. Nevertheless, excitement about overpopulation never disappeared. This is one of the oldest questions in the economy, which was asked by the first professor of "political economy" by Maltus.

In the year, Maltus published a “Essay on the principle of population”, in which he made a simple observation: the population increases exponentially - two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty -two. The production of food is not. Fortunately for us, it turned out that Maltus underestimated the fact that when people become richer, they usually have fewer children, so the population growth slowed down.

In fact, the year when Paul Erlich made his terrible forecasts is also a year in which the global growth in the population began to slow down. Maltus and Erlich were also underestimated by the embodiment of which Borlog became: human ingenuity. But despite the fact that the population growth has slowed down, the UN still assumes that by the end of the century we will add several more billions.

Some experts fear that the productivity of products does not increase quickly enough to correspond to this pace.Progress has slowed down, and the number of problems is growing: climate change, water lack, fertilizer pollution and pesticides. These are problems that the green revolution itself has only aggravated. Some say that it provokes poverty, thanks to which the population continues to grow: fertilizers and irrigation are worth money, which many peasant families do not have.

Perhaps if Maltus was still alive, he would say the same. But can human ingenuity again become an answer to these new questions? Since genetic modification has become possible, it is mainly about resistance to diseases, insects and herbicides. Although this increases productivity, it has never been an ultimate goal. And the agronomists are just beginning to explore the CRISPR genes editing tool, which can do what Borlog did at one time - only much faster.

As for Borloga, he saw that his work led to problems that he could not manage to cope with, but put a simple question - is it better to have imperfect ways to grow more food or better so that people die from hunger? We may ask this question in subsequent decades. Follow our news on Twitter and Telegram, read the same.