HENRY “Hank” Monroe Beachell turned 100 in Alvin, Texas last week, and he sat, propped up in bed on a dais, to better see the more than 100 dedicated followers who celebrated his birthday and the war he helped start in the Philippines in 1966 — a war that spread to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and across all of Asia.
And unlike America’s war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, warrior Henry “Hank” Monroe Beachell won his war.
A Nebraskan corn and wheat farm boy who graduated from college as an agronomist in 1930, Beachell “wanted to work with wheat,” he once confessed, “but all the jobs were in rice.” So Beachell went to the US Department of Agriculture in Texas.
Texas is mostly hot and dry, but rice grows to a luxuriant vermillion in irrigated fields throughout the steamy, coastal south near Beaumont where Beachell (then working for Texas A&M University) set up a rice research center. Then, agronomists’ mission was to feed the world.
And the world was growing. Climbing birthrates in developing countries were predicted to soon outstrip the world’s food supply, and economists and demographers predicted global hunger and instability on a scale not seen since the 1845 Irish potato famine.
Asia faced serious famine after World War II, and only massive US grain imports prevented widespread starvation. American plant geneticists serving in US Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s occupation army in Japan developed new rice varieties with higher yields, so that more people could be fed. But higher yields meant a heavier plant, and traditional tropical rice varieties had long, weak stems that “lodged,” or fell over, when fertilized. They rotted in the water, or were eaten by rats. Agronomists searched for smaller, “dwarf” and “semi-dwarf” rice varieties that would not collapse, and double the food supply.
The rice detectives built upon similar research already done in dwarf sorghum and wheat, as well as dwarf rice cultivation developed in China decades before Kissinger and Nixon ever visited. By 1949, the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization crossed short rice varieties and planted them throughout India.
By 1960, Rockefeller scientists in India found a high-yield Taiwanese variety. That same year, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations pooled resources and established the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. IRRI hired a Taiwanese plant geneticist, Te Tzu Chang, to study the variety’s genes, and American scientists made numerous crosses, creating from seed a new generation of plants that eventually produced a dwarf variety.
IRRI then hired Beachell, who selected plants resulting in a semidwarf rice, IR8 — a “super” rice that could be grown not only in many latitudes, but at almost any time of the year.
IRRI sent IR8’s seeds all across Asia. “IRRI’s policy was free access to all of our genetic material,” Beachell recalled. “It was made available to the world.” Trials showed that while average Philippine rice yields were 1 ton per hectare, IR8 yielded an average of 9.4 tons per hectare.
“No kidding?” then-President Ferdinand Marcos reportedly exclaimed.
Sample yields in Pakistan were as high as 11 tons per hectare. They called it “miracle rice.”
Shortly after 1966, Beachell moved to IRRI’s station in Indonesia, and increased rice yields there by 100 percent. He won the 1996 World Food Prize and has received numerous other honors. But these pale against the real achievements of millions of lives saved, not lost, in freedom’s name.
