SPEAKING FREELY The father of 'miracle rice' turns 100
By Sarah Whalen
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The old warrior turned 100 years old last week, and he sat, propped up in bed
on a dais, to better see the more than 100 dedicated followers who celebrated
his birthday and the revolution
he helped start in the Philippines in 1966 - a revolution that spread to India,
Pakistan, Indonesia and across all of Asia.
But it's nothing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who's entreated
Indonesians and other Asian Muslims to "actively
confront terrorists ... like Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah", should worry
about. The secretary's last name says it all - Rice.
The warrior's weapon is known best by its code name, IR8. The revolution he
helped start with it was the Green Revolution in rice, and the enemy at which
he aimed IR8 was starvation. And unlike America's "war on terror" in
Afghanistan and Iraq, warrior Henry "Hank" Monroe Beachell won his war.
A Nebraskan corn and wheat farm boy who graduated from college as an agronomist
in 1930, Beachell "wanted to work with wheat", he once confessed, "but all the
jobs were in rice". So Beachell joined the US Department of Agriculture in
Texas.
Texas is mostly hot and dry, but rice grows to a luxuriant vermilion in
irrigated fields throughout the steamy, coastal south near Beaumont where
Beachell (then working for Texas A&M University) set up a rice research
center.
Then as now, the mission of agronomists was to feed the world. And the world
was growing. Climbing birthrates in developing countries were predicted to soon
outstrip the world's food supply, and economists and demographers predicted
global hunger and instability on a scale not seen since the Irish potato famine
of 1845 when over a million men, women and children starved to death, and
another malnourished million fled the country.
Asia faced serious famine after World War II, and only massive US grain imports
prevented widespread starvation. American plant geneticists serving in General
Douglas MacArthur's occupation army in Japan developed new rice varieties with
higher yields, so that more people could be fed.
But higher yields mean a heavier plant as the rice ripens, and the traditional
tropical rice varieties were tall with long, weak stems that fell over when
fertilized. Such fallen plants then rotted in the water, or were eaten by rats.
Agronomists started searching for smaller dwarf and semi-dwarf rice varieties
that would not collapse in order to double the food supply.
The rice detectives built on similar research already done in dwarf sorghum and
wheat, as well as some dwarf rice cultivation developed in China decades before
Henry Kissinger and US president Richard Nixon ever came. By 1949, the
United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization experimented with crossing
short rice varieties and planted them throughout India.
By 1960, Rockefeller Foundation scientists in India found a Taiwanese variety
with a high yield, but also with a high susceptibility to pests. That same
year, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations pooled resources and set up a new
research center, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the
Philippines.
IRRI hired a Taiwanese plant geneticist, Te Tzu Chang, to study the variety's
genes, and the American scientists made numerous crosses, creating a new
generation of plants that eventually produced a dwarf variety.
Two years later, IRRI hired Beachell, who then selected plants resulting in a
semi-dwarf rice, IR8 - a "super" rice that could be grown not only in many
latitudes but at almost any time of the year.
IRRI sent IR8's seeds all across Asia. "IRRI's policy was free access to all of
our genetic material," Beachell recalled. "It was made available to the world."
Trials showed that while average Philippines rice yields were 1 ton per
hectare, IR8 yielded an average of 9.4 tons.
"No kidding?" then-president Ferdinand Marcos reportedly exclaimed.
Sample yields in Pakistan were as high as 11 tons per hectare.
They called it "miracle rice". Then US president Lyndon B Johnson, a Texas
native, visited IRRI in 1966 and passionately declared: "If we are to win our
war against poverty, and against disease, and against ignorance, and against
illiteracy, and against hungry stomachs, then we have got to succeed in
projects like this, and you are pointing the way for all of Asia to follow."
Shortly thereafter, Beachell moved to IRRI's station in Indonesia, and
increased rice yields there by 100%.
Beachell won the 1996 World Food Prize, which he shared with his Indian
colleague Gurdev Khush. Beachell has received numerous other honors. But these
pale against the real achievements of millions of lives saved, not lost, in
freedom's name.
Sarah Whalen is a US-based writer and an expert in Islamic law.
(Copyright 2006 Sarah Whalen.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
confront terrorists ... like Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah", should worry
about. The secretary's last name says it all - Rice.
