"If the crop variety is susceptible to rust fungi and moisture is there and the temperature is right, it's like lighting a fire. It just destroys crops," said Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, to me in a Reason interview back in 2000. "One thing that I hope to live to see is somebody taking that block of rust-resistance genes in rice and putting it into all of the other cereals." Borlaug was a big supporter of using modern biotechnology to speed up the development of higher-yielding disease-resistant crop varieties.
As it turns out, plant breeders associated with the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI), initiated in 2005 by Borlaug himself, were able to create "super wheat" rust-resistant varieties by 2011 using slower conventional breeding techniques. BGRI researchers pursued conventional breeding, at least in part, because of the fierce opposition to so-called genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by influential anti-technology activist organizations.
