Introduction: The Future

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by W. David Hopper

This is the wind-up section of the volume, in which we will try to take a look at the future. Food is a central component of man's history--indeed, one of the most important human inventions was the discovery that food could be produced from filling the soil and planting seeds for a future harvest. For many of the ethnic divisions of Homo sapiens, agriculture was the most significant step from being small tribes dependent for food supplies on hunting and gathering to being farmers whose food production provided the foundations for the emergence of civilizations. We have dealt with the early history of agriculture and where we're going with some of this history; we have dealt with biotechnology and the issues of industrial agriculture, which have penetrated deeply into our farm production systems. Missing, perhaps, from the discussions up to this point, are the questions of post-harvest technology: food storage, processing, marketing, international trade and the flow of food around the globe. So this final section will focus on a few of these matters as we try to peer into the future of food.

If one wanted to trace the foundations for a Nobel Prize in modern agricultural science, it probably would begin with Mendel and his pioneering work in the plant genetics of peas--a wonderful example of observational science. As a practical matter, however, it was many years before his observations contributed to the food abundance of mankind. I think the first real breakthrough to increasing the global supply of food would likely be dated from the First World War, when the German government diverted ammonium nitrate from military explosives to the fields of turnips and potatoes, seeking higher yields that would ease the impact on the population of an Allied sea blockade on food imports. In fact, the post-war world of the 1920s saw German universities as the major world centers of post-graduate research and training in agriculture. It was no accident that the German pattern of coursework, research, and examination became the adopted system for the awarding of Ph.D.s in the American Land Grant College system for training agricultural scientists.

In the United States, during the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the work of scientists at these colleges added immensely to our understanding of the applied technologies of higher productivity farming. Because of a depression in farm prices during most of these two decades, however, few of these new methods of food production were used by farmers. The real payoff for twenty years of agricultural research awaited the Second World War, when, in five years, the United States increased its food and fiber output from its farms by more than 45%. Canada also benefited from the transfer of these technologies north. By the end of the War, the United States and Canada had become the global bread-basket. In fact, for the next forty years, farming the fields of Kansas and Saskatchewan virtually eliminated mankind's long history of famine from natural causes.

By the 1950s, it was clear that death rates were dropping in many tropical nations as modern medicine became more widely available worldwide. Birth rates, being culturally rather than medicinally determined, remained high. The resulting increases in population, especially in South Asia, posed a deep concern for demographers and agriculturists that the twin blades of the food-population scissors would close, and famine would, again, be the painful fate of many millions of earth's inhabitants.

At first, the answer seemed simple: Send agriculturists and, even, farmers from Kansas and Saskatchewan, Iowa, and New York, to teach others the technologies of high yield cropping. This was done, but to the surprise of those who went, and the consternation of those who sent them, yields of food per hectare did not move significantly higher. The leadership of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations mounted a mission in the late 1950s to examine rice production methods and technologies in tropical Asia and to recommend, what, if anything, might be done to increase the yields per hectare of this staple cereal grain in the span of nations from Pakistan to the Philippines. After visiting research centers and talking with food and agricultural specialists and with farmers throughout the region, the team found that the high yield farming technologies which gave bountiful harvests in the temperate areas of the world, were not suited to the Asian tropics. The mission members recommended the establishment of an international rice research institute in the Philippines to develop new rice varieties and new production methods that would enhance rice production in tropical Asia. IRRI opened in 1962 as part of the Los Banos campus of the Philippines College of Agriculture.

Prior to the ceremonial opening of the new institute, IRRI scientists laid our four demonstration plots, each planted to the same local "superior" variety of rice. One plot was cultivated with the good farming techniques of the ordinary Filipino farmer; the cultivation of the second plot followed the recommendations of the College of Agriculture on how farmers should be farming rice; the third plot was farmed with the best practices used in the high yield rice farm of Texas; and, the fourth plot was the "baby" of IRRI's new Research Director, who was determined to show the yield potential of tropical rice by applying heavy fertilizer applications, carefully controlled cultural methods, and stringent pest and pathogen control techniques, in other words: lots of plant nutrition and "bug-dust."