Foiling Thomas Malthus

Part 3 – Saving a billion lives

In the 1950s and 1960s, the international geopolitical situation had placed humanity in a dangerous position. Tensions between United States and the Soviet Union were close to boiling over, and the Cold War drove competition between the two global superpowers in everything from nuclear warfare to art and cultural supremacy. The “Domino Theory” (1) had Western leaders panicking about the spread of Communist ideology, with the USA desperate to retain influence over countries unaffiliated with the Soviet Bloc.

Amidst this turbulent backdrop, scientists were sounding the alarm over a different crisis. Population explosions in poorer regions, particularly in India and Pakistan (2), stoked fears of a looming food crisis and potential for famines and further geopolitical instability. In the 1968 book “The Population Bomb”, biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich warned that exponential population growth around the world could lead to catastrophe. The stark warning was encapsulated in one of the book’s first sentences, which claimed mass famine was an inevitability.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich

The Ehrlichs’ had reason to be worried. Agricultural yields under traditional systems tended to stagnate, or increase linearly, meaning that ever-increasing areas of land had to be converted for agricultural purposes to keep up with the global population’s needs. However, as humanity’s population was increasing at an exponential rate, it was hypothesized that the increase in agricultural activity would not be able to meet these demands indefinitely.

The controversial book claimed that, if the book’s predictions came to pass, societal collapse would result from exponential population increases outstripping the Earth’s agricultural and resource capacity. The Ehrlichs’ argued that the world, particularly developed countries, were rapidly running out of food and time. According to them, the only possible solution to mitigate the risk of total societal collapse was to dramatically reduce the global birth rate. The book’s graphic descriptions of potential consequences of overpopulation, including famine, pollution, and social and ecological collapse led to panic about having children, and governments began considering extreme population control measures. The media amplified these concerns, contributing to a pervasive anxiety about the future of food security.

These ideas were not new. In 1798, English economist Thomas Malthus first proposed that stagnant or declining agricultural unit productivity (the amount of food produced per given area of land) would provide an upper limit to the possible global population. Pointing out that population grew according to geometric (compounding) ratios while food production increased in line with arithmetic (linear) ratios, Malthus predicted the arrival of an intersection wherein population growth exceeded agricultural production to such a degree that the availability of food would form a key limiting factor on human population size. Like “The Population Bomb”, Malthus’ model implied starvation of an unknown number of people would be a necessary part of the dynamic equilibrium between population size and agricultural production. Happily, at least in its short-term predictions “The Population Bomb” turned out to be a dud. Ehrlich’s predictions of mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s did not materialize. The global death rate continued to decline substantially, from 13 per 1000 in 1965-74 to 10 per 1000 from 1985-1990, while the world population more than doubled. Similarly, the advent of the Haber process facilitating mass production of ammonia-based fertilisers helped to ensure agricultural production stayed abreast of population growth, with Thomas Malthus’ gloomy predictions failing to pass. In recent history, the discrepancy between the predictions of Paul Ehrlich and the reality of the subsequent decades can be attributed largely to the Green Revolution, and the scientists responsible for driving it.

You don’t know his name, but he might have saved your life

Norman Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914 in Cresco, Iowa. The son of Norwegian immigrant farmers, Borlaug was immersed in the world of agriculture and enjoyed an outdoors lifestyle from a young age. He began helping with farm chores as a child, feeding chicken, caring for livestock, and engaging in fieldwork when not attending school. (3,4).

Borlaug displayed an early aptitude for education which, combined with an aptitude for wrestling, enabled him to leave Iowa and enrol to study Forestry at the University of Minnesota in 1933. To fund his education, he worked several part-time jobs alongside his studies throughout the Great Depression. He periodically was forced to pause his education due to financial constraints, and in one of the intermediary periods worked as a leader in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Federal government work relief program intended for unemployed men. Many of Borlaug’s colleagues were starving, and later in life he stated that witnessing the impact that poverty and hunger had on people during this period made a great impression on him.

“I saw how food changed them. All this left scars on me”

Norman Borlaug

Borlaug graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1937 with a Bachelor’s degree in Forestry. He planned to enter the US Forest Service as a ranger, but a few weeks prior to his graduation these plans were scuppered by a letter from his supervisor that due to budgetary constraints he would be unable to start work for 6-months. Borlaug delayed his departure from the University and took up some extra classes, one of which included a lecture by Dr. Elvin Stakman. Stakman was the University’s professor of plant pathology, and the focus of the lecture was plant rust, a parasitic fungus that attacks a variety of trees and plants including wheat.

This lecture proved to be a pivotal moment in Norman’s life. He was enraptured by Stakman’s lecture, and ultimately ended up shifting his focus away from forestry and embarking on a Master’s degree in Plant pathology. This was followed immediately by a PhD, which he completed in 1942 at the age of 27.

After graduating, Borlaug worked briefly for DuPont Corporation before being recruited as a researcher of wheat improvement at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cooperative Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) in 1944. The MAP was aimed at increasing the per acre yield of various staple crops, including corn, beans, and wheat, to alleviate the widespread hunger and food poverty experienced across Mexico at the time, and had already made promising headway towards this goal. In 1948, only 4 years after Borlaug joined the program, Mexico had become self-sufficient in corn production using corn varieties developed by MAP scientists (5).

After joining the MAP, Borlaug began working in Mexico with local farmers to improve their wheat crops. The initial focus of Borlaug’s work was wheat rust, the parasitic fungus that had enraptured him in Stakman’s lecture a few years before. In 1944, Mexican farmers were producing less than half of the annual demand for wheat in the country, and their harvests were perennially blighted by rust. Borlaug and his team began to experiment with novel wheat varieties and conduct observational experiments. They observed that foreign wheat varieties were more resistant to rust that Mexican varieties, and that higher-yielding wheat was more susceptible to rust that lower-yielding crops.

Through their work, Borlaug’s team came to several key discoveries. They realised that enhancing soil, particularly using artificial nitrogen fertilizers, could lead to increased yields even with persistent rust problems. Borlaug also conceived of a novel plant breeding methodology called “shuttle breeding”, which involved moving wheat seeds between Chapingo and Sonora. Chapingo had an early growing season, while Sonora had a later growing season, and shuttling seed between the two regions allowed Borlaug’s team to experiment with double the number of new hybrid cross-bred wheat varieties per year. The change in conditions also fostered a variety of wheat plants suitable for Mexico diverse regional climates.

Through this shuttle breeding methodology, Borlaug managed to develop rust-resistant wheat varieties that also exhibited increased yields. However, this did not mark the end of his project, as these varieties suffered from new issues. The plants did not have thick stems capable of supporting the now-heavy heads of grain, and were liable to topple in wind and rain, ruining their ability to be harvested. Borlaug solved this final issue by importing a Japanese wheat variety named “Norin”, which was a dwarf wheat strain with shorter, thicker stems. Borlaug’s team cross-bred their wheat varieties with the imported Japanese strains using shuttle breeding to develop sturdy, high-yielding and rust-resistant crops suited to the complex climate of Mexico.

The shuttle-breeding process developed by Borlaug had cut the time required to cross-breed hybrid wheat varieties in half, and the final varieties showed massive yield improvements. Aided by improved farming practices including the use of fertilizers and irrigation, the Borlaug crop varieties enabled Mexico to reach wheat self-sufficiency in 1956, just 12 years after Borlaug joined the MAP.

Defusing the Population Bomb

While Mexico was the first country to benefit from the Green Revolution unleashed by Borlaug’s research, other countries also saw massive agricultural benefits realised through the adoption of Borlaug’s techniques and crops. In particular, India and Pakistan benefited from quickly realising the potential of the new high-yielding varieties (HYVs).

India had long been beset by severe food insecurity. Under British colonial rule (1757 – 1947) India experienced 34 major famines, including the 1943 war-induced Bengal famine, which killed 1.5 – 3 million people. The colonial administration often prioritised the production of cash crops like cotton over food production, and taxes forced farmers into debt to the Empire, both of which limited domestic food production. (6) Following India’s independence from British rule in 1947, partition left India with 82% of the pre-partition population but only 75% of the original cereal production. India’s agricultural insecurity was significantly worsened by recurrent droughts and a widespread lack of irrigation. Following the India-Pakistan war of 1965, severe shortages of food led the Indian government to take the unprecedented step of asking citizens to skip meals to save food (7).

Pakistan also suffered similar problems. The colonial legacy of the British Empire and farmers’ low access to agricultural technologies and irrigation made Pakistan heavily susceptible to droughts, such as those experienced by both India and Pakistan in 1964-66. Droughts could cause cascading crop failures, reflected in the low wheat production of approximately 800-830kg/hectare (8,9) in the early 1960s in both countries. This was significantly below production in more advanced economies, which exhibited yields of between 1,500 – 2500kg/hectare (10-12) in the same period. Like India, Pakistan’s problems were compounded by a rapidly expanding population (13,14).

By 1966, India was heavily reliant on imported food to survive, with the government anticipating an annual import requirement of 10 million tons of grain to feed the burgeoning population (15). Under the American PL 480 “Food for Peace” program, India imported large amounts of food in throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, the Johnson administration’s attempt to leverage this aid program as a tool of political coercion against the Indian government’s critical stance on US involvement in the Vietnam war highlighted the unsustainability of India’s reliance on imported food (16).

In light of the significant challenges faced by both India and Pakistan, the countries’ respective governments were keenly aware of the need for agricultural reform. To achieve this aim, the government initiated the Intensive Agricultural Districts Program (IADP) in 1961, which aimed to test the adoption of HYV crops in select districts. In 1963, Indian agricultural researcher M. S. Swaminathan invited Norman Borlaug to survey India’s wheat programs. Borlaug brought with him the semi-dwarf wheat varieties developed in Mexico for experimental planting by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI). Following successful trials, India imported 18,000 tons of the Mexican HYV wheat seeds in 1966, constituting the largest seed purchase in history at that time. M. S. Swaminathan and Chidambaram Subramaniam, India’s Agriculture Minister, encouraged the adoption of the new varieties through the High Yielding Variety Program which provided farmers with HYV seeds, fertiliser, and support for creating irrigation networks with the aim of making India self-sufficient in food production by 1971. The government heavily subsidised fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation equipment to allow low-income farmers to adopt the modern technologies, and relaxed loan mechanisms using cooperative banks to extend credit access and provide the necessary start-up capital.

The impact of these large-scale programs was nothing short of miraculous. Wheat production increased 867%, from 12 million tons in 1965 to 104 million tons by 1971 ending Indian reliance on imports (17,18).

Figure 1: Cereal production (not just wheat) in India following the Green Revolution saw a marked increase. Data taken from World Bank Open Data

Also in 1966, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) released IR8, a semi-dwarf high-yielding rice variety bred using the principles developed by Borlaug’s wheat research (19). This innovation neatly dovetailed with the Indian government efforts to encourage HYV adoption, and in 1967 the High Yielding Variety Program was expanded to include IR8 rice. Rice-growing states including Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab were targeted for rapid scaling, and collaboration between the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the IRRI allowed for the production of IR8-derived HYVs that were resistant to local pests and disease. IR8 coverage grew from 1,000 hectares in 1967 to over 10 million hectares by 1970, with rice production increasing by 20 million tons, from 30 million tons in 1965 to 50 million tons in 1975 (20-22). Combined with the improvements to wheat production, India became a net exporter of cereal crops in the early 1970s, a marked difference from its “ship-to-mouth” existence and reliance of food aid just 5 years earlier. Similar programs allowed Pakistan to dramatically increase wheat and rise production through the leveraging of HYVs and modern agricultural technologies, with the country being the first Asian nation to achieve wheat self-sufficiency in 1968 (23). Despite this achievement, Pakistan’s long-term success proved less robust than its larger neighbours, with population growth and policy gaps eroding the impact of agricultural gains by the 1980s (24). However, while Pakistan is no longer self-sufficient in wheat production, it is inarguable that the advances made during the Green Revolution helped to prevent famine and increase the living standards of farmers throughout Pakistan.

Conclusion

While the arguments proposed by Thomas Malthus and, to a lesser extent Paul Ehrlich, were logically sound, they failed to account for a critical factor – human technological ingenuity. Well-funded public research and implementation programs allowed Mexico, India, Pakistan, and many other countries to significantly increase their agricultural output and diverted the horrific mass famines predicted in “The Population Bomb”. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the grim predictions contained within the book could never become a reality.

Just because humanity defused the population bomb doesn’t mean we can afford to relax. Indeed, as we will explore in future articles, the Green Revolution may not have turned out to be quite so “green” after all. Ecological impacts of extensive fertiliser and pesticide use continue to be felt today, and it is clear that future agricultural revolutions will have to consider their wider environmental impacts if we want to avoid damaging ecosystems and protecting human health.

The impacts of climate change will also present massive agricultural challenges in the short and medium term. As the example of Pakistan indicates, just reaching self-sufficiency in agricultural production once isn’t enough. There must be sustained political, economic, and scientific efforts made to maintain agricultural gains, which are naturally eroded by population growth and market dynamics over time. As countries around the world start experiencing the extreme weather patterns associated with our heating planet, crop failures and famines become increasingly likely, and increasingly threatening to national and international security. In worst-case scenarios, mass famines and conflicts over scarce natural resources (including clean water) could result in massive displacement of refugees, placing huge strains on all nations involved.

However, it’s also important to recognise that problems that seem impossible have been solved before. We can’t give in to apathy arising from a feeling of overwhelming climate doom. Scientists, policymakers, economists, investors – all of us have strong moral, economic, and security incentives to ensure that the countries most impacted by climate change continue to be able to feed themselves. While the slow rate of progress on climate change mitigation activities, particularly at an international political level, can inspire despair and hopelessness, it is essential for the survival of our societies not to give up hope.

Even Thomas Malthus recognised this himself, highlighting this necessity for action in the face of adversity at the end of his 1798 essay. The final paragraph reads:

“Evil exists in the world, not to create despair, but activity. We are not patiently to submit to it, but to exert ourselves to avoid it. It is not only the interest, but the duty of every individual, to use his utmost efforts to remove evil from himself; and from as large a circle as he can influence; and the more he exercises himself in this duty, the more wisely he directs his efforts, and the more successful these efforts are; the more he will probably improve and exalt his own mind, and the more completely does he appear to fulfil the will of his Creator.“

An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus

While systemic change requires large-scale action, history has shown us that individual actions can and do have outsized impacts. The work of scientists like Norman Borlaug and M. S. Swaminathan alone is not sufficient to avert the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. However, it’s also clear that it would not have been possible without their work.

The Malthusian trap is not the only existential-level threat humanity faces or has faced. Our societal escape from it should act as both a beacon of warning, and a ray of hope, as current and future generations consider the climate crisis, and the individual contributions they can make to solve it. It is better to be the Borlaug than the Ehrlich.

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.“

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Foiling Thomas Malthus

Part 3 – Saving a billion lives

You don’t know his name, but he might have saved your life

Defusing the Population Bomb

Conclusion

Bibliography

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Part 3 – Saving a billion lives

You don’t know his name, but he might have saved your life

Defusing the Population Bomb

Conclusion

Bibliography

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