The 'Green Revolution' is a term used to describe the worldwide transformation of agriculture that led to significant increases in
agricultural production between the 1940s and 1960s. This transformation occurred as the result of programs of agricultural research, extension, and infrastructural development, instigated and largely funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation, along with the
Ford Foundation and other major agencies.
[1] The Green Revolution in agriculture helped food production to keep pace with worldwide
population growth.
The term âGreen Revolutionâ was first used in 1968 by former
USAID director William Gaud, who noted the spread of the new technologies and said, "These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent
Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a
White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution."
[2]
The Green Revolution has had major social and ecological impacts, which have drawn intense praise and equally intense criticism.
International spread of the Green Revolution
With the experience of agricultural development judged as a success by many of the powerholders involved, the Rockefeller Foundation sought to spread the Green Revolution to other nations. The Office of Special Studies in
Mexico became an informal international research institution in 1959, and in 1963 it formally became
CIMMYT (The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center).
The second nation to which the Green Revolution spread was
India. The Ford Foundation had a presence in the nation, and their social scientists had decided that the technological development of agriculture was important to the future of India . At the same time
C.Subramaniam, the former Indian Minister of Steel and Mines, became Minister of Food and Agriculture. The Foundation and Indian government collaborated to import a huge amount of wheat seed from CIMMYT. India then began its own Green Revolution program of plant breeding, irrigation development, and financing of agrochemicals. By the late 1970s, the Green Revolution raised rice yields in India by 30 percent and bought India the vital time to curb its population growth without suffering a recurrence of the devastating
famines of the 1940s.
[2]
The Rockefeller and Ford Foundation jointly established
IRRI (The International Rice Research Institute) in the
Philippines in 1960. HYVs (high yielding varieties) spread throughout that country,
Indonesia,
Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, and other non-Soviet bloc countries throughout Latin American, Asia, and North Africa. USAID became involved in subsidizing rural infrastructure development and
fertilizer shipments.
In Mexico
The Green Revolution began in 1943 with the establishment of the Office of Special Studies, which was a venture that was a collaboration between the Rockefeller Foundation and the presidential administration of
Manuel Avila Camacho in Mexico. While Camacho's predecessor
CĂĄrdenas promoted peasant subsistence agriculture through policies of land reform, Avila Camacho's primary goal for Mexican agriculture was to aid in the nation's industrial development and economic growth.
[3] US Vice President
Henry Wallace, who was instrumental in convincing the Rockefeller Foundation to work with the Mexican government in agricultural development, saw Camachoâs ambitions as beneficial to U.S. economic and military interests.
[Wright 2005. pp. 171 â 173]
J. George Harrar, who would later become president of the Rockefeller Foundation, headed the Office of Special Studies. Its lead scientists included
Norman Borlaug, Edwin Wellhausen, and William Colwell. Researchers from both the
United States and
Mexico were involved in this program. The main initiative of the Office was the development of high-yielding maize and wheat varieties. Borlaug received the 1970
Nobel Peace Prize for his work on wheat breeding.
The Mexican national government invested heavily in rural infrastructure development, and the adoption of new seed varieties became widespread. Mexico became self-sufficient in wheat production by 1951 and began to export wheat thereafter. In 1900, the
Mexican population was 13.6 million; by 2005, it had increased to 103.3 million.
[4]
Agricultural production and food security
Technologies
The projects within the Green Revolution spread technologies that had already existed, but had not been widely used outside of industrialized nations. These technologies included pesticides,
irrigation projects, and synthetic nitrogen
fertilizer.
The novel technological development of the Green Revolution was the production of what some referred to as âmiracle seeds.â
[ Brown, 1970. ]
Scientists created strains of
maize,
wheat, and
rice that are generally referred to as HYVs or â
high yielding varieties.â HYVs have an increased nitrogen-absorbing potential compared to other varieties. Since cereals that absorbed extra nitrogen would typically lodge, or fall over before harvest, semi-dwarfing genes were bred into their genomes.
Norin 10 wheat, a variety developed by
Orville Vogel from Japanese dwarf wheat varieties, was instrumental in developing Green Revolution wheat cultivars. IR8, the first widely implemented HYV rice to be developed by IRRI, was created through a cross between an Indonesian variety named âPetaâ and a Chinese variety named âDee Geo Woo Gen.â
[ Rice Varieties: IRRI Knowledge Bank. Accessed Aug. 2006. [3] ]
With advances in molecular genetics, the mutant genes responsible for ''reduced height(rht)'', ''gibberellin insensitive (gai1)'' and ''slender rice (slr1)'' in Arabidopsis and rice were identified as cellular signaling components gibberellic acid (a phytohormone involved in regulating stem growth via its effect on cell division) and subsequently cloned. Stem growth in the mutant background is significantly reduced leading to the dwarf phenotype. Photosynthetic investment in the stem is reduced dramatically as the shorter plants are inherently more stable mechanically. Assimilates become redirected to grain production, amplifying in particular the effect of chemical fertilizers on commercial yield.
HYVs significantly outperform traditional varieties in the presence of adequate irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers. In the absence of these inputs, traditional varieties may outperform HYVs. One criticism of HYVs is that they were developed as
F1 hybrids, meaning they need to be purchased by a farmer every season rather than
saved from previous seasons, thus increasing a farmerâs cost of production.
Production increases
World production of coarse grain, 1961-2004, compared with area harvested over the same period.
Cereal production more than doubled in developing nations between the years 1961 â 1985.
[ Conway, 1997 chpt. 4. ]
Yields of rice, maize, and wheat increased steadily during that period.
[ Conway, 1997 chpt. 4. ]
The production increases can be attributed roughly equally to irrigation, fertilizer, and seed development, at least in the case of Asian rice.
[ Conway 1997 chpt. 4. ]
Some, however, have challenged the purported production increases of Green Revolution agriculture. Miguel A. Altieri, for example, writes that the comparison between traditional systems of agriculture and Green Revolution has been unfair, because Green Revolution agriculture produces
monocultures of cereal grains, while traditional agriculture usually incorporates
polycultures.
[ Altieri 1995. ]
Additionally, some traditional systems of agriculture that were displaced by the Green Revolution such as the
chinampas in Mexico or raised-field rice farming in Asia are known to be very highly-productive.
[Wright, 2005. pp. 158.]
Effects on food security
Main articles: Food security
The effects of the Green Revolution on global
food security are difficult to understand because of the complexities involved in food systems.
The production increases fostered by the Green Revolution are widely credited withhaving helped to avoid widespread
famine, and it is often claimed that Green Revolution agriculture is responsible for feeding billions of people.
[5] These assertions generally assume some variation of the
Malthusian principle of population. Such concerns often revolve around the idea that the Green Revolution is unsustainable
[6][7][8], and argue that humanity is currently in a state of
overpopulation with regards to the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth.
Malthusianism has been evident throughout the history of the Green Revolution. The team sent to survey Mexican agriculture in 1941 for the Rockefeller Foundation cited the
high birth rate and relative inadequacy of its agriculture as a cause for concern.
[ Wright 2005, pp. 174.]
In 1959, the Ford Foundation carried out a study in
India that stated the nationâs population would outstrip its food supply by 1966, although validity of its methodology was a subject of criticism.
[ Ross 158]
At Borlaugâs Nobel acceptance speech he stated, â...we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction.â
[ Norman Borlaugâs Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, 1970. [5]]
The
world population has grown by about four billion since the beginning of the Green Revolution and most believe that, without the Revolution, there would be greater
famine and
malnutrition than the UN presently documents (approximately 850 million people suffering from chronic malnutrition in 2005). The average person in the developing world consumes about 25% more calories per day now than before the Green Revolution.
[ Conway, 1997 chpt. 4. ]
Increasing food production however is not synonymous with increasing food security, and is only part of a larger equation. For example,
Amartya Senâs work has found that large
historic famines have not been caused by decreases in food supply, but by socioeconomic dynamics and a failure of public action.
[ Drezé and Sen 1991 ]
There are several claims about how the Green Revolution may have decreased food security for some people. One such claim involves the shift of subsistence-oriented cropland to cropland oriented towards production of grain for export and/or animal feed. For example, the Green Revolution replaced much of the land used for pulses that fed Indian peasants for wheat, which did not make up a large portion of the peasant diet.
[ Spitz, 1987 ]
Also, the
pesticides involved in rice production eliminated fish and weedy green vegetables from the diets of
Asian rice farmers.
[ Conway 1997 pp. 279. ]
Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed
agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by
fossil fuels in the form of
fertilizers (natural gas),
pesticides (oil), and
hydrocarbon fueled
irrigation.
[9]
David Pimentel, professor of ecology and
agriculture at
Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro, senior researcher at the National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition (INRAN), place in theirs study ''Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy'' the maximum
U.S. population for a
sustainable economy at 200 million. To achieve a sustainable economy and avert
disaster, the
United States must reduce its population by at least one-third, and
world population will have to be reduced by two-thirds, says study.
[10]
The authors of this study believe that the mentioned agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050. The oncoming
peaking of global oil production (and subsequent decline of production), along with the peak of North American
natural gas production will very likely precipitate this agricultural crisis much sooner than expected. Geologist
Dale Allen Pfeiffer claims that coming decades could see spiraling
food prices without relief and massive
starvation on a global level such as never experienced before.
[7][8]
Social changes
Political impacts
A major critic of the Green Revolution, the US investigative journalist Mark Dowie, writes that the primary objective of the program was a
Cold War geopolitical one: providing food for the populace in underdeveloped countries which thus brought social stability and weakened the fomenting of
communist insurgency. Citing internal Foundation documents, he states that the Ford Foundation had a greater concern than Rockefeller in this area.
[13]
It is also maintained elsewhere that there is a significant amount of evidence suggesting the Green Revolution had the effect of weakening
socialist movements in many nations. In countries like India, Mexico, and the Philippines, technological solutions were sought as an alternative to expanding agrarian reform initiatives, the latter of which were often linked to socialist politics.
[ Ross 1998. Chpt. 5. ]
Socioeconomic impacts
The transition from traditional agriculture in which inputs were generated on-farm to Green Revolution agriculture, which required the purchase of inputs, lead to the widespread establishment of rural credit institutions. Smaller farmers often went into debt, which in many cases result in a loss of rights to their farmland.
[ Oasa 1987 ] The increased level of mechanization on larger farms made possible by the Green Revolution removed an important source of employment from the rural economy.
[ Oasa 1987 ] Because wealthier farmers had better access to credit and land, the Green Revolution increased class disparities. Because some regions were able to adopt Green Revolution agriculture more readily than others (for political or geographical reasons), interregional economic disparities increased as well.
The new economic difficulties of small holder farmers and landless farm workers led to increased
rural-urban migration. The increase in food production led to a decrease in food prices for urban dwellers, and the increase in urban population increased the potential for industrialization. However, industry was unable to absorb all of the displaced agricultural labor and some cities grew at unsustainable rates.
[ Wright 1985 ]
Globalization
In the most basic sense, the Green Revolution was a product of
globalization as evidenced in the creation of international agricultural research centers that shared information, and with transnational funding from groups like the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and USAID. Additionally, the inputs required in Green Revolution agriculture created new markets for seed and chemical corporations, many of which were based in the United States. For example,
Standard Oil of New Jersey established hundreds of distributors in the Philippines to sell agricultural packages composed of HYV seed, fertilizer, and pesticides.
[ Brown 1970 ]
Ecological change
Pesticides
Green Revolution agriculture increased the use of pesticides, which were necessary to limit the high levels of pest damage that inevitably occur in monocultures.
Organochlorides, a chemical group of pesticides including
DDT and
dieldrin that spread with the Green Revolution, does not easily break down in the environment and therefore accumulates through the
food chain and spreads throughout
ecosystems. Other problems with pesticides include the poisoning of farm workers, the contamination of water, and the evolution of resistance in pest organism populations.
[ Conway 1997, chpt.11 ]
Water issues
Irrigation projects have created significant problems of
salinization,
waterlogging, and lowering of
water tables in certain areas.
[ Conway 1997, pp. 253 ]
Biodiversity
The spread of Green Revolution agriculture affected both agricultural
biodiversity and wild biodiversity. There is little argument that the Green Revolution acted to reduce agricultural biodiversity, as it relied upon just a few varieties of each crop. This has led to concerns about the susceptibility of a food supply to pathogens that cannot be controlled by agrochemicals, as well as the permanent loss of many valuable genetic traits bred into cereal varieties over thousands of years. To address these concerns, massive seed banks such as CGIARâs
International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (now
Bioversity International) have been established.
There are varying opinions about the effect of the Green Revolution on wild biodiversity. One hypothesis speculates that by increasing production per unit of land area, agriculture did not need to expand into new, uncultivated areas to feed a growing human population. A counterhypothesis speculates that biodiversity was sacrificed because traditional systems of agriculture that were displaced have often incorporated practices to preserve wild biodiversity, and because the Green Revolution expanded agricultural development into new areas where it was once unprofitable or too arid.
Nevertheless, the world community has clearly acknowledged the negative impacts of agricultural expansion as the 1992 Rio Treaty, signed by 189 nations, has generated numerous national
Biodiversity Action Plans which assign significant biodiversity loss to agriculture's expansion into new domains (Whether the habitat used was an arid region or an uninhabited
bog, biotic impacts can be extensive.)
Legacy of the Green Revolution
IRRI and CIMMYT became a part of the
CGIAR which was established in 1971. Since that time, CGIAR has added many research centers throughout the world.
CGIAR has responded, at least in part, to criticisms of Green Revolution methodologies. This began in the 1980s, and mainly was a result of pressure from donor organizations.
[ Oasa 1987 ]
Methods like Agroecosystem Analysis and Farming System Research have been adopted to gain a more holistic view of agriculture. Methods like Rapid Rural Appraisal and Participatory Rural Appraisal have been adopted to help scientists understand the problems faced by farmers and even give farmers a role in the development process.
Bibliography
★ Altieri, M. A. ''Agroecology: The science of sustainable agriculture''.
Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1995. Revised and expanded edition.
★
Brown, Lester. ''Seeds of Change''. New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1970.
★ Cleaver, Harry. ''The Contradictions of the Green Revolution''.
American Economic Review, Vol. 62, Issue 2, May, 1972, pp.177-86. Available on the author's website.
★ Conway, Gordon. ''The Doubly Green Revolution''. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998.
★
Dowie, Mark. ''American Foundations: An Invesigative History''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
MIT Press, 2001.
★ Dreze, Jean and Sen, Amartya. ''Hunger and Public Action''. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991.
★ Oasa, Edmud K. ''The Political Economy of International Agricultural Research in Glass'', Bernhard, ed., 1987. The Green Revolution Revisited, pp. 13â55.
★ Ross, Eric B. ''The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development''. London:
Zed Books, 1998.
★
Shiva, Vandana, ''The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological degradation and political conflict in Punjab'', Zed Press, New Delhi, 1992
★ Spitz, Pierre. ''The Green Revolution Re-Examined in India in Glass'', Bernhard, ed., 1987. The Green Revolution Revisited, pp.57â75.
★
Wright, Angus. ''Innocence Abroad: American Agricultural Research in Mexico'', Jackson, Wes, ed., 1985. Meeting the Expectations of the Land pp.124 â 138.
★ Wright, Angus. ''The Death of Ramon Gonzalez''. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2004.
Notes
1. Defining the Green Revolution
2. Speech by William S. Gaud to the Society for International Development. 1968. [1]
3. Wright, 2005. pp. 171 â 173.
4. 100 Years of Mexican Migration Policies
5. http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/311.html
6. [4]
7. Peak Oil: the threat to our food security
8. Agriculture Meets Peak Oil
9. How peak oil could lead to starvation
10. Eating Fossil Fuels | EnergyBulletin.net
11. Peak Oil: the threat to our food security
12. Agriculture Meets Peak Oil
13. Primary objective was geopolitical - see Mark Dowie, ''American Foundations: An Investigative History'', Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001, (pp. 109-114)
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