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The Green Revolution

If you had to name the problems that need to be solved most, what would it be? Many people would say world hunger is among the most pressing problems that need to be solved; and numerous people have indeed tried to solve it. In the 1960s, in fact, several specialists in science and agriculture (specifically, a communication specialist, an agronomist, a potato specialist, and two maize specialists) came together to address the hunger problem. What is amazing is that, even though we still have world hunger, the men involved in this project were able to increase grain production so much that the lead scientist (named Norman Borlaug) “has been credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.” How did they do it? They did it with genetic engineering. They saw that a certain type of grain would yield a lot of rice, wheat, or maize; but they also knew that these types of grains also fell over before harvest time because they became too tall. What the scientists did to solve this was they bred into the grains a “semi-dwarfing gene” from other grains. This meant that these high-yielding plants would stay short enough so that they wouldn’t fall over and be ruined, and still produce a higher amount of grain. They also made the grains resistant to disease. The result was that a number of countries that had formerly been short of food were now actually exporting food (Mexico and India are examples).

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