Bellagio 1969: The green revolution

Abstract

In late April 1969, I took a taxi up a narrow, winding road outside Bellagio on Italy’s Lake Como, to a meeting called by the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, George Harrar. My destination was the foundation’s conference centre at Villa Serbelloni, one of the most spectacular settings in the world. The con- ference had just one aim: to help solve the world food crisis. As we came in sight of the build- ing, with its immaculately landscaped grounds set against snow-capped mountains, I knew I would remember the view, but had little inkling that the conference would have such a profound and lasting impact on world hunger. The world food situation was becoming ever more precarious. Populations in developing countries were growing rapidly, and traditional farming systems were not producing enough to feed them. Two years before, the brothers William and Paul Paddock had published their 470 best-seller Famine — 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (Little, Brown), predicting among other things that India would never feed its booming population. In both 1964 and 1965, the US Food for Aid Program had shipped 5 million tonnes of wheat aid to India. Many commentators thought the situation hopeless and famine inevitable. At the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, we were more optimistic. We already had ten years’ experience of collaborating with partners in developing countries in scientific efforts to accelerate food production. One reason that Harrar had called the Bellagio conference was to help agricultural aid organizations under- stand why and how science — and not food shipments — was a more sustainable way to deal with world hunger. Our thinking was that if the aid groups could grasp more fully the progress being made, they could mobilize the resources needed from governments and other donor organizations. Together, a sustained assault