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Unfortunately for the engineers and geneticists who created Jurassic Park, his predictions come true. But the builders of Jurassic Park go for more control even as their system shows sign of cracking. Ian Malcolm, then delirious, laughs in the novel. And I heard his laughter recently, when I read what Norman Borlaug has proposed.
Borlaug is the man who ended many famines by introducing the high yielding variety (HYV) of wheat. In the 1950s, when he was developing the high yielding variety at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, he saw black stem rot, a fungal disease, hit and destroy 40 percent of American wheat production. Eventually he created the disease-resistant high-yielding strain. This achievement won him the Nobel Prize in 1970.
Soon HYV wheat became a mantra to fight famines. Local varieties gave way to HYV wheat, which were fine-tuned to capital intensive input like pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
Ecologists complained about loss of germplasm and bio-diversity, bio-magnification of pesticides in food cycles, etc. But agro-industry has come of age. Yield no longer meant total biomass yield but only grain yield. Even as agricultural lands shrunk yields increased, thanks to HYVs. Everything could be controlled in this system -- either through breeding or through various combinations of chemical input to agriculture. As new pests appeared, new pesticides found their way into our food chains. HYVs spread throughout the developing countries -- from Mexico to Syria to India and Pakistan. There was no stopping the winning HYV super genetic wheat.
Despite occasional warnings, everything went well, with no one bothering greatly about a few million varieties of crops lost throughout the world. Then it happened in the wheat fields of Uganda in 1998. Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (puccinia graminis) was discovered. Before agro-scientists knew, it turned up in Kenya, then Syria -- and now, the way winds blow, it threatens the wheat fields of India and Pakistan.
To Borlaug, who is courageously fighting a personal battle against cancer, this is the return of an old enemy, as he told the "New Scientist" magazine. He attributes this return to the oversight of officials. And the solution he offers is interesting. He wants to create another improved high yielding wheat variety, incorporating a wide spectrum of resistances.
Curiously, the import of black stem rot fungus to tropical wheat fields in itself could have been the result of the spread of the high yielding varieties in the first place. As Borlaug himself points out, forty years ago wheat fields were not irrigated or fertilized as they are now with the high yielding varieties -- creating an ideal situation for the rot fungus attack. But here is Borlaug, who seriously thinks that what we need is further improvement through genetic manipulation of HYV wheat to create a universal super wheat. And here is where I hear Ian Malcolm laugh.
To quote Malcolm: "You create new life forms about which you know nothing at all... You create many of them in a very short time; you never learn anything about them. Yet you expect them to do your bidding, because you made them and you therefore think you own them; you forget that they are alive..."
Agro-ecosystems the world over are complex systems. They have evolved over millennia. Every crop variety has attached to it a formidable eco-dynamic web of relations. Every crop variety carries a myth of its arrival to humanity. Often ignored as superstitions, these myths carry a core truth. There are rituals and local institutions associated with them. They are evolved systems and not complex artificial systems like the HYV. A rapidly built artificial system with more complexities -- like the HYV with wide range disease resistance, as Borlaug dreams -- may exist as a wonder for some time, but will eventually sink, perhaps like the Titanic with heavy human loss.
There are still local varieties that have been conserved, not in seed banks by scientists and governments, but by local communities. Perhaps an answer to the fungus problem may lie in one of them. Perhaps we can still gather the secret from these conserved varieties and think of agrarian community-based breeding programs for new localized disease resistant varieties.
For that, our vision of science and technology and their institutions has to change. The very working of our science establishments will have to change. The top-to-bottom approach of extension work will need to change. That is not easy, but it is perhaps the only way out.
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz.")
