| Meanwhile, back in Mexico, the program that had originally been confined to maize, wheat, and beans, and soon thereafter potatoes, was expanded to include many other crops. Larger numbers of young Mexican scientists were added to the research and training programs. Progress in research was generally good, and the training program also bore fruit. Between the years 1943-1963, a total of 550 interns participated in the overall agricultural research and training programs, of whom about 200 received a Master of Science degree and about thirty the Doctor of Philosophy degree while on fellowships for study abroad. With this corps of trained scientists a new National Institute of Agricultural Research was born in 1961. The Rockefeller Foundation "had worked itself out of a job", which was one of its original objectives. The Mexican experience indicated that one of the greatest obstacles to the improvement of agriculture in the developing countries is the scarcity of trained people. This experience indicated clearly that training is a slow process. Where no corps of trained scientists exists, as was the case in Mexico twenty-seven years ago and remains the case in many countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America today, it requires eighteen to twenty-five years to develop enough competent research scientists and educators to meet a country's needs. So great is the urgency of the food shortage in many underdeveloped and emerging countries that there is not enough time to develop an adequate corps of scientists before attacking food production problems. A shortcut and organizational change had to be invented to meet the needs. And so was born the first truly international research and training institute, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at Los Baños, the Philippines, in 1960, to work exclusively on the regionally all-important but too-long-neglected rice crop. The institute was jointly financed by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in collaboration with the government of the Philippines. The research activities on wheat, maize, and potatoes in Mexico were informally internationalized in 1959 and organized as a second international center in 1963. This International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) is supported also by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in collaboration with the government of Mexico. More recently, additional financial support has been provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.AID), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the Inter-American Development Bank (BID). A third center, the International Center of Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria, the most recent, have been established to study problems and stimulate production of certain tropical crops and animal species, as well as to help train scientific specialists. CIAT is financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and W. K. Kellogg Foundations in cooperation with the government of Colombia. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) are supporting IITA in collaboration with the government of Nigeria. These four international institutes represent a significant but modest start toward the construction of a worldwide network of international, national, and local research and training centers. This network will help solve problems and disseminate the benefits of science to all mankind in the shortest possible time and at minimum cost. The impact of such an integrated approach is already evident in the green revolution. New varieties and the new technologies that make them highly productive have been the thrust behind the green revolution. In the Philippines, Ceylon, Malaysia, and West Pakistan, it was IR8 rice, developed at the International Rice Research Institute. The dwarf Mexican wheat, partly produced by CIMMYT, have provided the thrust in India and Pakistan, and this is now spreading to Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco, and Tunisia. Contributing equally, or perhaps even more, to the evolution of the green revolution was the talented supporting leadership that has been provided by the centers to the national programs through temporary assignments of mature scientists skilled in organizing crop production programs to assist in the development of the national production campaigns. The international centers were developed to supplement national agricultural research, production, and training programs, not to replace them. The centers are but one link in the worldwide network of organizations attacking basic food-crop production problems on a worldwide, regional, national, and local level. The backbone of this network is now and must continue to be the national programs. These must be given greater financial support and strengthened staff-wise to meet the challenge of rapidly expanding food needs for the future. The international centers, however, are in a unique position to assist the national programs. They are independent, nonpolitical international organizations, which, although originally funded by private foundations, now receive support from many diverse sources. Their scientific staffs are also international and comprise outstanding scientists representing the various scientific disciplines affecting crop production. Included on their staffs are a number of crop production experts who have the scientific competence and broad experience to assist national agencies in organizing and launching crop production programs. The centers collaborate not only with the national agencies from many different countries but also with other international organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and international development banks. Each year the centers have been collaborating with an increasing number of countries of all political spectra. I am convinced that the international agricultural research institutes are developing a bond of understanding among nations, based upon the common need for increasing food production. We must all strive to strengthen this bond in the spirit of Alfred Nobel "to promote brotherhood among the nations". The international centers are uniquely equipped to do fundamental, longtime researches of worldwide importance. For example, the opportunity for plant breeders, pathologists, and entomologists to operate on a worldwide basis permits them to develop well-conceived, diverse gene pools of the important crop species. The final crop varieties are not currently generally selected at the centers but sent to collaborators in national programs in many parts of the world, who in turn make the selections that best suit their needs; and many eventually become commercial varieties. Similarly, the centers prepare a series of international crop yield tests, which include representatives of the best commercial varieties from the world and a few of the most promising experimental lines from collaborators. These are sent to collaborators in thirty-five countries for growing at eighty locations. The data from collaborators are returned to CIMMYT for summarizing and for subsequent distribution to scientists in all parts of the world. The data obtained on yield, adaption, disease, and insect resistance in one year in such tests are often more meaningful and valuable to scientists engaged in crop research and production programs than data obtained by independent testing at one location for a period of ten or fifteen years. The international centers also are in a unique position to contribute to practical or internship type of training in all of the scientific disciplines affecting crop production. This type of training is particularly valuable for young scientists from the developing countries because it prepares them for initiating research work upon return to their native country and will also be of value if they subsequently continue their education at the graduate level. In summarizing the accomplishments of the green revolution during the past three years, I wish to restate that the increase in cereal production, rice, maize, and wheat, especially in wheat, has been spectacular and highly significant to the welfare of millions of human beings. It is still modest in terms of total needs. Recalling that fifty percent of the present world population is undernourished and that an even larger percentage, perhaps sixty-five percent, is malnourished, no room is left for complacency. It is not enough to prevent the currently bad situation from getting worse as population increases. Our aim must be to produce enough food to eradicate all present hunger while at the same time striving to correct malnutrition. To eliminate hunger now in the developing nations, we would need to expand world cereal production by thirty percent. If it were, however, as simple as increasing the total world production by thirty percent, regardless of where the production is to be expanded, it could be accomplished rather rapidly by expanding it in the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Russia. But this would not necessarily solve the hunger problem of the developing world because their weak economies will not permit them to expand their food imports by thirty percent. Worse still, even if present production could be expanded rapidly by thirty percent in the developing countries - which I believe is possible based on recent progress of the green revolution - so as theoretically to eliminate hunger, the hunger problem as it now exists still would not be solved. There remains the unsolved social-economic problem of finding effective ways to distribute the needed additional food to the vast underprivileged masses who have little or no purchasing power. This is still the great unsolved problem with which the economists, sociologists, and political leaders must now come to grips. I am convinced that if all policymakers would take sufficient interest in population control and in aggressively employing and exploiting agricultural development as a potent instrument of agrarian prosperity and economic advancement, many of the social ills of the present day could soon become problems of the past. The tropics and subtropics have abundant sunlight and other great biological assets, and it will be criminal to delay further the conversion of these assets into wealth meaningful to the poor and hungry. Some critics have said that the green revolution has created more problems than it has solved. This I cannot accept, for I believe it is far better for mankind to be struggling with new problems caused by abundance rather than with the old problem of famine. Certainly, loyalty to the status quo in food production - when being pressured by population growth - cannot break the chains that have bound the peasant to poverty and hunger. One must ask: Is it just to criticize the green revolution, with its recognized accomplishments, for failure to correct all the social-economic ills of the world that have accumulated from the days of Adam and Eve up to the present? Change we must, or we will perish as a species, just as did the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous. |
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