The death of Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, on September 12 has generated an outpouring of grief and praise. Could it be that the man widely feted for saving a billion lives is responsible for Pakistan’s current food crisis?

There is no doubt that Borlaug’s work in Pakistan increased short-term food security. The combination of high-yield wheat varieties and mechanisation of farms resulted in immediate results as Pakistan’s wheat output doubled in five years. Borlaug’s principles of concentrating on a relatively few cash crops and devoting substantial farmland to those crops was widely adopted in the country.

Pakistan’s food crisis now is almost as threatening as it was before Borlaug came to the country. A United Nations Food and Agricultural Agency report has named Pakistan among the 37 countries must vulnerable to food riots caused by mass shortages.

How might Borlaug be at fault for this state of affairs?

By far the most harmful — at least in the long run — was Borlaug’s championing of monocropping. In Pakistan, far too much land was used to grow cotton because of its profitability. Extensive monocropping, where land use is restricted to one crop, leads to a depletion of nutrients in the soil, eventually rendering it unusable. Monocropping also requires heavy use of pesticides and other chemicals, which further shortens the life of arable land.

Even worse, monocropping can cause immediate food crises. When you are relying on only one crop on vast tracts of land, adverse weather conditions and disease can cause shortages far worse than those a country practicing multicropping would have experienced. This is what has happened worldwide with the production of sugar this year, leading to extremely high prices and it has been the cause of Pakistan’s many wheat crises over the years.

Borlaug’s farming techniques are also very water-intensive, necessitating the construction of a number of dams. The diversion of water to support these agrarian reforms, along with other factors such as population growth, has led to a decrease in the water available to each Pakistani from 5000 cu/m in the 1950s to 1000 cu/m today.

And what has been the government’s role throughout this period? In 1965, they presented Borlaug with a $100,000 cheque that promptly bounced. Today they find themselves impotent to deal with the sugar crisis. At least some things never change.