Billions Served - agronomist Norman Borlaug - Interview

Reason, April, 2000 by Ronald Bailey

REASON Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey met with Borlaug at Texas A&M, where he is Distinguished Professor in the Soil and Crop Sciences Department and still teaches classes on occasion. Despite his achievements, Borlaug is a modest man who works out of a small windowless office in the university's agricultural complex. A few weeks before the interview, Texas A&M honored Borlaug by naming its new agricultural biotechnology center after him. "We have to have this new technology if we are to meet the growing food needs for the next 25 years," Borlaug declared at the dedication ceremony. If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotech, he fears, they may finally bring on the famines they have been predicting for so long.

Reason: What are you currently working on?

Norman Borlaug: Since 1984, I've been involved in the Sasakawa Africa Association. Our program has devised the best package of farming practices we could with the best seed available, the best agronomic practices, the best rates and dates of seeding, the best controls for weeds and insects and diseases, and put them into test plots in 14 countries. We have found that there is a large food production potential in these African countries which are now struggling with food shortages. The package of practices that we have devised uses modest levels of inputs so the cost is not particularly high compared to their traditional ways of farming. The yields are at the worst double, nearly always triple, and sometimes quadruple what the traditional practices are producing. African farmers are very enthusiastic about these new methods.

Reason: Could genetically engineered crops help farmers in developing countries?

Borlaug: Biotech has a big potential in Africa, not immediately, but down the road. Five to eight years from now, parts of it will play a role there. Take the case of maize with the gene that controls the tolerance level for the weed killer Roundup. Roundup kills all the weeds, but it's short-lived, so it doesn't have any residual effect, and from that standpoint it's safe for people and the environment. The gene for herbicide tolerance is built into the crop variety, so that when a farmer sprays he kills only weeds but not the crops. Roundup Ready soybeans and corn are being very widely used in the U.S. and Argentina. At this stage, we haven't used varieties with the tolerance for Roundup or any other weed killer [in Africa], but it will have a role to play.

Roundup Ready crops could be used in zero-tillage cultivation in African countries. In zero tillage, you leave the straw, the rice, the wheat if it's at high elevation, or most of the corn stock, remove only what's needed for animal feed, and plant directly [without plowing],because this will cut down erosion. Central African farmers don't have any animal power, because sleeping sickness kills all the animals--cattle, the horses, the burros and the mules. So draft animals don't exist, and farming is all by hand and the hand tools are hoes and machetes. Such hand tools are not very effective against the aggressive tropical grasses that typically invade farm fields. Some of those grasses have sharp spines on them, and they're not very edible. They invade the cornfields, and it gets so bad that farmers must abandon the fields for a while, move on, and clear some more forest. That's the way it's been going on for centuries, slash-and-burn farming. But with this kind of weed killer, Roundup, you can clear the fie lds of these invasive grasses and plant directly if you have the herbicide-tolerance gene in the crop plants.