SPEAKER: Hello, everyone, and welcome and congratulations.
So I said that I would do two experiments or two lessons
to learn from Mexico.
I might only have time for one.
So I want you to pay attention to this image because when you see this image,
you'll see it again during my talk.
But I want you to think, history is going to be one of my favorite classes
that I take at Harvard.
And if that wasn't the case in high school, maybe, and just maybe
it's because you didn't have a great high school history teacher.
So how do we narrate histories of science and why does it matter?
Why does it matter that we understand our past?
History is one of the most politicized disciplines.
There is a reason why politicians are constantly
debating what should be taught in the classrooms
and what should be part of the curriculum
because if we don't understand our past or how our past is framed,
it impacts the decisions in our present and in the future.
So I'm going to quote from one of my favorite historians.
He's a Haitian, or was a Haitian historian, Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
who wrote Silencing the Past, the Power and the Production of History.
And he said this about a particular event,
"This is a story within a story so slippery at the edges
that one wonders when and where it started and whether it will ever end."
He was talking about the US invasion of Mexico in 1846.
After that war ends, the United States takes 52% of Mexico's territory.
And the configuration that we have today is
the result of that treaty of so-called peace between our two nations.
What if we began history lessons learning
that our current geographic configuration is
a result of an invasion of war?
So when we begin our stories, and where we begin, is very important.
We need to change our perspectives and flip the world
to find new ways of thinking about where we live.
So the when is really important but also is the where.
As a historian, I begin my search for those answers in archives.
So some archives look like this one in Mexico City, which
is the foreign relations archive.
And it's extraordinary.
You have some of the best minds collecting and working
on those archives.
Other archives look like this.
This is the ministry of agriculture, livestock, rural development, fisheries
and food in Mexico as well, not far from the other one.
Now, which stories do you think will be easier to emerge?
But hidden in here are some extraordinary histories
that we may never get to know, simply because of where they
are located and so difficult to attain.
As Harvard students, I will challenge you
to reframe your questions to think of them differently and think
about accessing these stories.
And with that, we go back to this picture.
Well, not yet.
In the mid-20th century, when we were at war in the 1940s, in the United States
there was a big concern.
It was about national security, but not national security
as you might understand it.
There was a real concern that we might run out of food.
We saw this during the COVID pandemic, that with trade disrupted,
it was difficult to bring food in.
So an idea was thrown out.
What if we create with our allies on the Western hemisphere
a way of thinking about producing more food by genetically engineering plants,
but also by applying scientific ideas to the fields?
And where will we begin those experiments?
In the fields of Mexico.
So it will be Mexico that will help us feed the world.
When we think of who feeds the world, we don't immediately
think of Mexico, or for that matter, the countries of the Global South.
But we should.
So in the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation, here in the United States,
and the Mexican government come together and they
devise what will be called the MAP, or Mexican Agricultural Program,
applying science to crops to produce more food.
The idea it was a problem of yield.
If we could yield more crops, we would be able to feed the world.
And it wouldn't matter if we were at war.
The Western hemisphere would be safe.
So if you see, this is the first image that you saw.
And this is an experiment station in Mexico.
What you see here, and as far as the horizon goes,
these are all the experimental wheats that were
devised in this one experiment station.
There are so many that more than 60% of the world's wheat--
let me repeat that.
More than 60% of the world's wheat is derived
from varieties that were designed in this experiment station.
That means that wheat in African nations, in Southeast Asia,
in the Middle East can trace their varieties to one experimental station.
Now, why haven't we learned about this, that more than 60% of the world's wheat
was designed in one experimental station that traces its origins to that 1940s
program that was a collaboration between the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Mexican government?
So let's learn a little bit about that.
In the 1940s, as I told you-- and here you
have bureaucrats from the Rockefeller Foundation
who are designing this idea of how can we feed the world?
How can we transform the food supply?
So this question of food supply issues is not a new one.
We've been dealing with this for decades.
So they decide that they're going to create
focusing on wheat, corn, and beans.
But wheat wins out.
And they're going to focus all of their scientific energies
in producing a better variety of wheat, one that produces more, more grain.
And when they're planting it in the outskirts of this experimental station
for over a decade, in the mid-1960s around the world,
there is a famine happening primarily in India and Pakistan.
What they're going to do is those experimental seeds
will be put on trucks-- this is in Mexico.
And those trucks are heading to the port, where
they will be shipped to South Asia.
And the idea is that these Mexican seeds, which
were called miraculous seeds, would be planted in Indian soil
and in Pakistani soil.
And they would produce more wheat, stopping the famine that
was affecting so many people.
And it was incredibly successful.
These seeds are what launched what we now call the Green Revolution.
And the Green Revolution, which was major use of fertilizers,
of irrigation, of insecticides and pesticides,
transformed how we do agriculture today.
But not only did it transform how we produce agriculture,
it also, within one generation, we realized we
were polluting our ecology by using too many pesticides,
too much irrigation from groundwater.
So in that decade, what seemed to be an amazing scientific solution
turned out to be a problem for today.
The solution, which seemed accurate and necessary at that time,
has created a series of ripple effects, not just on the human body,
but on non-human animals and the environment.
So out of that collaboration, today we have
something that's called the International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center, which is headquartered in Mexico City.
But it has research arms in 22 other nations.
And it is a network of researchers and scientific ideas about how to farm.
The main concerns today are biosafety.
What are we going to do with diseases that can cross borders so easily?
This is a picture from 2013.
And what you have there are, at the time,
the two richest men in the world, Carlos Slim, from Mexico, and Bill Gates.
And what they were doing at Cimmyt, they were inaugurating that biosafety lab
that you just saw because they realized that we're in another era,
that we need new seeds.
Just as that issue in 1943, where you needed
to create a new plant, a new seed, we're in a different stage.
And what we have is a new coming hunger, a famine
that will emerge not because of war, but because of climate change.
So what kind of seeds will be needed?
What kind of seeds will be designed?
And guess what?
It's happening again in Mexico.
So when we think about where seeds and seed research is being done,
yes, we have that network of seeds, of plant and crop research.
But we also have one of the largest seed banks outside of Mexico.
So what does that mean in my remaining minute?
In my own research, I knew that story.
But I knew that there was more.
And I needed to go to India to find the connecting story.
What I found there was that similarly, once those Mexican seeds in the 1940s
made it to India, they were researched on
and developed new types of varieties.
But we still don't have full answers because we still
have hunger in our world.
And I said, how is it possible that we don't understand these histories
or that we don't know about them?
It turned out when I went to that initial research station,
the stories of farmers, of Mexican scientists, were not found.
Rather, what was known, was the story of Norman Borlaug, whom we
might know from the Green Revolution.
And he's considered the father of the Green Revolution.
By understanding the stories of the farmers, of the scientists,
and of the research station, we gathered a new understanding.
And it's with the farmers that the answers lay,
a collaboration between the farmers and the scientist
and not just a focus on the science.
And here, as my departing message, I just
want to show you what the farmers have done.
They have created a 365, seven days, 24 hour a week.
What they're doing there is mapping the amount of water in the valley.
They have designed to the litre the amount of water
that is needed to produce more crops because this valley is found
on the outskirts of the Sonoran Desert.
So they have had to use 22nd century technology
in order to envision a future that came too early.
They were designing seeds for a warming climate.
And the climate has changed so quickly that the seeds
that they were designing, they have to rethink what they're doing now.
So my last words is think about that field, how you frame
questions, how you think about history.
When we think we have the answer, the impact and the ripple effect
might be more different than you thought Thank you so much.