Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a father of the Green Revolution, joined a few hundred agricultural scientists here June 15-17 to honor the late Robert F. Chandler Jr., a professor of forest soils at Cornell. Borlaug spoke at the symposium sponsored by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Borlaug, Chandler and many other agriculturists nurtured the famed Green Revolution in the 1960s, a revolution that fed millions of people. The Nobelist explained that he first met Chandler in 1947. Soon, Chandler took a leave of absence from Cornell, going to Mexico as a soil scientist with the Mexican Government-Rockefeller Foundation Agricultural Program.
"I was quickly impressed with [Chandler's] intellectual and leadership skills. It was in Mexico, I believe, that he became convinced of the need, urgency and challenge of assisting developing nations improve their agriculture and food supply," said Borlaug in the symposium's keynote address in David L. Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall.
Borlaug won his Nobel in 1970 for his research into growing wheat, a staple food throughout the world.
In 1959, Chandler was asked by the Rockefeller Foundation to establish the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and he served as its first director general until 1972. The institute performs research to improve rice production in developing countries. Chandler continued with the Rockefeller Foundation for another three years, and he was given a special assignment to establish and serve as the first director of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center in Taiwan.
"[His] legacies as a research manager and institution builder are many," said Borlaug.
With the Green Revolution fading into the history books, Borlaug said he is dismayed with today's global agricultural problems and he took the opportunity to take aim at the developing world's international agricultural policies.
"Clearly, our objective should be to establish the policies and institutions that will make it profitable for small-scale farmers to undertake modernizing investments to increase the productivity of agriculture. Much yet needs to be done on the policy-making front," said Borlaug, whose only graduate student was Ronnie Coffman, now the associate dean of research in Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
"How can African agriculture modernize, for example, with fertilizer [costing] three to five times higher than the world price and grain prices one half the world price? What incentive would any farmer have to buy these inputs at such prices? Why are we just accepting horrendous market failures such as these? Where is our righteous indignation?" Borlaug asked.
"Let there be no mistake about it, unless small-scale farmers see the possibility to make substantially better incomes from agriculture in the future and also to reduce the terrible drudgery that traditional agriculture entails, they will abandon farming by the millions," said Borlaug. "They will migrate to the cities to join the battalions of unemployed urban poor. The social, political and human health meltdowns that could ensue from such a chaotic exodus might well threaten human civilization."
Borlaug explained more about Chandler and others like him who contributed their careers to helping others eat.
"Few scientists think of agriculture as the chief, or the model science. Many, indeed, do not consider it a science at all," he said, paraphrasing from a story. "Yet it was the first science -- the mother of all sciences. It remains the science which makes life possible and it may well be that, before the century is over, the success or failure of science as a whole will be judged by the success or failure of agriculture."
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |