Borlaug: our unsung saviour
Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug, whose new wheat seed rescued South Asia from a Malthusian disaster, has died in Texas at the age of 95. If ever there was a saviour of the masses, it was this Norwegian with a big heart and the soul of a saint. Because he had worked on the wheat seed as an American, his seed first came to Pakistan, and then went to India, causing a revolution in food production.
When Pakistan was producing 4 million tons of wheat in 1966 and had been food-deficit for over a decade, Borlaug brought in the new seed and technology to boost the production to 6.4 million tons by 1968. Pakistan became food surplus and took the production of wheat to 12.3 million tons in 1983, a fourfold increase in 17 years. Growth in the production of food had outstripped the growth rate of population, thus averting the prediction made by Malthus (1766-1834) that populations will die of starvation because of their geometrical progression.
But Pakistan was blind to the significance of what Borlaug had done. It soon ignored his advice about pricing wheat in such a way as to compensate the input of the farmer. He despaired when he visited Pakistan only to see that the agricultural university in Faisalabad had been taken over by hooligan students selling experimental crops and making the qualified teachers flee Pakistan. On the other hand, he found his successor in Swaminathan in India, the man who made India surplus in food and repeated the wheat miracle with rice in the Philippines.
Pakistan gave Borlaug a Sitara-e-Imtiaz but did nothing to protect his legacy. It violated his cardinal principle of “support price”, failed to store wheat after bumper crops, and allowed large-scale smuggling to offset his miracle. He was thwarted by war when he first came to Pakistan; his legacy too was squandered by a nation constantly thinking of jihad. *
|