In 1961-1962, Borlaug's dwarf spring wheat strains were sent for multilocation testing in the International Wheat Rust Nursery, organized by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. In March 1962, a few of these strains were grown in the fields of the
Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Pusa, New Delhi, India. In May 1962,
M. S. Swaminathan, a member of IARI's wheat program, requested of Dr B. P. Pal, director of IARI, to arrange for the visit of Borlaug to India and to obtain a wide range of dwarf wheat seed possessing the Norin 10 dwarfing genes. The letter was forwarded to the Indian Ministry of Agriculture headed by Shri
C. Subramaniam, which was arranged with the Rockefeller Foundation for Borlaug's visit. In March 1963, the
Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government sent Borlaug and Dr Robert Glenn Anderson to India to continue his work. He supplied 100 kg (220 lb) of seed from each of the four most promising strains and 630 promising selections in advanced generations to the IARI in October 1963, and test plots were subsequently planted at
Delhi,
Ludhiana,
Pant Nagar,
Kanpur,
Pune and
Indore. Anderson stayed as head of the Rockefeller Foundation Wheat Program in New Delhi until 1975. During the mid-1960s, the
Indian subcontinent was at war and experienced
minor famine and starvation, which was limited partially by the U.S. shipping a fifth of its wheat production to India in 1966 and 1967. In 1965, after extensive testing, Borlaug's team, under Anderson, began its effort by importing about 450 tons of Lerma Rojo and Sonora 64 semi-dwarf seed varieties: 250 tons went to Pakistan and 200 to India. They encountered many obstacles. Their first shipment of wheat was held up in Mexican customs and so it could not be shipped from the port at
Guaymas in time for proper planting. Instead, it was sent via a 30-truck convoy from Mexico to the U.S. port in Los Angeles, encountering delays at the
Mexico–United States border. Once the convoy entered the U.S., it had to take a detour, as the
U.S. National Guard had closed the freeway due to the
Watts riots in Los Angeles. When the seeds reached Los Angeles, a Mexican bank refused to honor Pakistan's treasury payment of
US$100,000, because the check contained three misspelled words. Still, the seed was loaded onto a freighter destined for
Bombay, India, and
Karachi,
Pakistan. Twelve hours into the freighter's voyage, war broke out between India and Pakistan over the
Kashmir region. Borlaug received a
telegram from the Pakistani minister of agriculture,
Malik Khuda Bakhsh Bucha: "I'm sorry to hear you are having trouble with my check, but I've got troubles, too. Bombs are falling on my front lawn. Be patient, the money is in the bank..." The initial yields of Borlaug's crops were higher than any ever harvested in
South Asia. The countries subsequently committed to importing large quantities of both the Lerma Rojo 64 and Sonora 64 varieties. In 1966, India imported 18,000 tons—the largest purchase and import of any seed globally at that time. In 1967, Pakistan imported 42,000 tons, and Turkey 21,000 tons. Pakistan's import, planted on 1.5 million acres (6,100 km2), produced enough wheat to seed the entire nation's wheatland the following year. The use of these wheat varieties has also had a substantial effect on production in six
Latin American countries, six countries in the
Near and
Middle East, and several others in Africa. Borlaug's work with wheat contributed to the development of high-yield semi-dwarf
indica and
japonica rice cultivars at the
International Rice Research Institute and China's Hunan Rice Research Institute. Borlaug's colleagues at the
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research also developed and introduced a high-yield variety of rice throughout most of Asia. Land devoted to the semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties in Asia expanded from 200 acres (0.8 km2) in 1965 to over 40 million acres (160,000 km2) in 1970. In 1970, this land accounted for over 10% of the more productive cereal land in Asia. His speech repeatedly presented improvements in food production within a sober understanding of the context of
population. "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise, the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral. "Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the "Population Monster"[...] Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth [...]"
Borlaug hypothesis Borlaug continually advocated increasing crop yields as a means to curb deforestation. The substantial role he played in both increasing crop yields and promoting this view has led agricultural economists to call this methodology the "Borlaug hypothesis," namely that
increasing the productivity of agriculture on the best farmland can help control deforestation by reducing the demand for new farmland. According to this view, assuming that global food demand is on the rise, restricting crop usage to traditional low-yield methods would also require at least one of the following: the world population to decrease, either voluntarily or as a result of mass starvations; or the conversion of forest land into cropland. It is thus argued that high-yield techniques are ultimately saving
ecosystems from destruction. On a global scale, this view holds strictly true
ceteris paribus, if deforestation only occurs to increase land for agriculture. But other land uses exist, such as urban areas, pasture, or fallow, so further research is necessary to ascertain what land has been converted for what purposes, to determine how true this view remains. Increased profits from high-yield production may also induce cropland expansion in any case. As world food needs decrease, this expansion may decrease as well. Borlaug expressed the idea now known as the "Borlaug hypothesis" in a speech given in Oslo, Norway, in 2000, upon the occasion of the 30th anniversary of his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize: "Had the global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, we would have needed nearly 1.8 billion ha of additional land of the same quality – instead of the 600 million that was used – to equal the current global harvest."
Criticisms and his view of critics Borlaug's name is nearly synonymous with the
Green Revolution, against which many criticisms have been mounted over the decades. Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition from nonscientists who consider genetic crossbreeding unnatural, and therefore, those who inherently dislike the unnatural criticized such crossbreeding. These farming techniques, in addition to increasing yields, often reaped large profits for U.S.
agribusiness and
agrochemical corporations and were criticized by one author in 2003 as widening social inequality in the countries owing to uneven food distribution while forcing a capitalist agenda of U.S. corporations onto countries that had undergone
land reform. Other concerns include the crossing of genetic barriers; the inability of a single crop to fulfill all nutritional requirements; the decreased biodiversity from planting few varieties; the environmental and economic effects of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides; the side effects of large amounts of herbicides sprayed on fields of herbicide-resistant crops; and the destruction of wilderness caused by the construction of roads in populated third-world areas. Borlaug refuted or dismissed most critiques of his critics but did take certain concerns seriously. He stated that his work has been "a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia". Of environmental lobbyists opposing crop yield improvements, he stated, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the
Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are
elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in
Washington or
Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." Borlaug cautioned, "There are no miracles in agricultural production. Nor is there such a thing as a miracle variety of wheat, rice, or maize which can serve as an elixir to cure all ills of a stagnant, traditional agriculture." The journalist John Vidal, writing in
The Guardian, commented that the plaudits and honors heaped on Borlaug present him as a "saint or even the god of American farmers", ==Later roles==