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green revolution


n.

A significant increase in agricultural productivity resulting from the introduction of high-yield varieties of grains, the use of pesticides, and improved management techniques.


 
 
Geography Dictionary: green revolution

The development and use of high-yielding crops (HYVs) in conjunction with improved agricultural technology. New breeds of crops have been developed to increase yields two to four times, to shorten the time required for growth such that more than one crop a year can be produced, and to produce a plant which can withstand extremes of climate or disease. The use of Mexican wheat has doubled yields in the Punjab, and HYV rice has been used to such effect in the Philippines that imports are no longer necessary. The green revolution has had most impact in South and East Asia, and in South America, but has not been taken up to the same extent in sub-Saharan Africa.

There have been drawbacks, however. The grain may not be as palatable or as attractive in appearance as the grain it replaces, and it may use up more energy to process. Seeds have to be bought, as the hybrids are not self-fertile, and some varieties are less resistant to drought and disease. Heavy applications of expensive fertilizers and insecticides are required and these are often made from non-renewable resources.

Herbicides are required because the fertilizer stimulates weed growth as well as crop growth. The high yields and reliance on artificial fertilizers can lead to impoverished soils. Traditional rice exporters, like Burma, have seen the collapse of their markets. Increased yields mean that landowners can use their holdings more profitably and this often means that tenants are dispossessed. Copious, but strictly regulated, irrigation is required.

The green revolution has benefited the most prosperous farmers in the most prosperous areas but its price is too high for many of the peasants who need its help. To that extent, it has only been a partial success.

 
Political Dictionary: Green Revolution

In the early 1960s developments in agricultural production, sponsored by international funding agencies, led to what came to be called the Green Revolution. These developments emphasized hybrid seeds, mechanization, and pest control as answers to the agricultural backwardness of the Third World. High-yielding varieties were promoted, as was the use of pesticides, and economies of scale of production, which could be successful only through mechanization of agriculture. This initiative did result in much better production figures across a range of countries. However, the Green Revolution has been criticized by environmentalists and others for resulting in environmental disasters in the countries where it was most effective. Mechanization of agriculture, where successful, led to changing work and social patterns, an exacerbation of class divisions in society, and the displacement of minority groups like tribal peoples and politically marginalized groups such as women from agricultural production. Further, new types of crops were not resistant to local diseases and required high levels of pesticides which polluted the local waterways, impoverished the land, and also increased the dependency of many Third World countries on the West with import of pesticides. Moreover, the commercialization of agriculture led to the exporting of food out of the local areas, increasing the dependence of producers on market forces that did not always benefit the majority of producers.

— Shirin Rai

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: green revolution

Great increase in production of food grains (especially wheat and rice) that resulted in large part from the introduction into developing countries of new, high-yielding varieties, beginning in the mid-20th century. Its early dramatic successes were in Mexico and the Indian subcontinent. The new varieties require large amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce their high yields, raising concerns about cost and potentially harmful environmental effects. Poor farmers, unable to afford the fertilizers and pesticides, have often reaped even lower yields with these grains than with the older strains, which were better adapted to local conditions and had some resistance to pests and diseases. See also Norman Borlaug.

For more information on green revolution, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Green Revolution,
term referring mainly to dramatic increases in cereal-grain yields in many developing countries beginning in the late 1960s, due largely to use of genetically improved varieties. Beginning in the mid-1940s researchers in Mexico developed broadly adapted, short-stemmed, disease-resistant wheats that excelled at converting fertilizer and water into high yields. The improved seeds were instrumental in boosting Mexican wheat production and averting famine in India and Pakistan, earning the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for American plant breeder Norman E. Borlaug, leader of the Mexican wheat team. Significant though less dramatic improvements followed in corn. The Mexican program inspired a similarly successful rice-research effort in the Philippines and a network of research centers dedicated to the important food crops and environments of the developing world. By 1992 the system included 18 centers, mostly in developing countries, staffed by scientists from around the world, supported by a consortium of foundations, national governments, and international agencies. Recent research responds to criticism that the Green Revolution depends on fertilizers, irrigation, and other factors that poor farmers cannot afford and that may be ecologically harmful; and that it promotes monocultures and loss of genetic diversity.

 
Food & Culture Encyclopedia: Green Revolution

The Green Revolution was the notable increase in cereal-grains production in Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and other developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s. This trend resulted from the introduction of hybrid strains of wheat, rice, and corn (maize) and the adoption of modern agricultural technologies, including irrigation and heavy doses of chemical fertilizer. The Green Revolution was launched by research establishments in Mexico and the Philippines that were funded by the governments of those nations, international donor organizations, and the U.S. government. Similar work is still being carried out by a network of institutes around the world.

The Green Revolution was based on years of painstaking scientific research, but when it was deployed in the field, it yielded dramatic results, nearly doubling wheat production in a few years. The extra food produced by the Green Revolution is generally considered to have averted famine in India and Pakistan; it also allowed many developing countries to keep up with the population growth that many observers had expected would outstrip food production. The leader of a Mexican research term, U.S. agronomist Norman Borlaug, was instrumental in introducing the new wheat to India and Pakistan and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Borlaug (b. 1914) was hired in 1944 to run a wheat-research program established by the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico in an effort to make that country self-sufficient in the production and distribution of cereal grains. Borlaug's team developed varieties of wheat that grew well in various climatic conditions and benefited from heavy doses of chemical fertilizer, more so than the traditional plant varieties. Wheat yield per acre rose fourfold from 1944 to 1970. Mexico, which had previously had to import wheat, became a self-sufficient cereal-grain producer by 1956.

The key breakthrough in Mexico was the breeding of short-stemmed wheat that grew to lesser heights than other varieties. Whereas tall plants tend both to shade their neighbors from sunlight and topple over before harvesting, uniformly short stalks grow more evenly and are easier to harvest. The Mexican dwarf wheat was first released to farmers in 1961 and resulted in a doubling of the average yield. Borlaug described the twenty years from 1944 to 1964 as the "silent revolution" that set the stage for the more dramatic Green Revolution to follow.

In the 1960s, many observers felt that widespread famine was inevitable in the developing world and that the population would surpass the means of food production, with disastrous results in countries such as India. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization calculated that 56 percent of the human race lived in countries with an average per-capita food supply of 2,200 calories per day or less, which is barely at subsistence level (cited by Mann, p. 1038). Biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb that "hundreds of millions" would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s "in spite of any crash programs embarked upon" at the time he wrote his book (Ehrlich, p. xi).

In 1963, just such a devastating famine had threatened India and Pakistan. Borlaug went to the subcontinent to try to persuade governments to import the new varieties of wheat. Not until 1965 was Borlaug able to overcome resistance to the relatively unfamiliar crop and its foreign seeds and bring in hundreds of tons of seed to jump-start production. The new plants caught on rapidly. By the 1969–1970 crop season—about the time Ehrlich was dismissing "crash programs"—55 percent of the 35 million acres of wheat in Pakistan and 35 percent of India's 35 million acres of wheat were sown with the Mexican dwarf varieties or varieties derived from them. New production technologies were also introduced, such as a greater reliance on chemical fertilizer and pesticides and the drilling of thousands of wells for controlled irrigation. Government policies that encouraged these new styles of production provided loans that helped farmers adopt it.

Wheat production in Pakistan nearly doubled in five years, going from 4.6 million tons in 1965 (a record at the time) to 8.4 million tons in 1970. India went from 12.3 million tons of wheat in 1965 to 20 million tons in 1970. Both nations were self-sufficient in cereal production by 1974.

As important as the wheat program was, however, rice remains the world's most important food crop, providing 35–80 percent of the calories consumed by people in Asia. The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines was founded in 1960 and was funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the government of the Philippines, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. This organization was to do for rice what the Mexican program had done for wheat. Scientists addressed the problem of intermittent flooding of rice paddies by developing strains of rice that would thrive even when submerged in three feet of water. The new varieties produced five times as much rice as the traditional deepwater varieties and opened flood-prone land to rice cultivation. Other varieties were dwarf (for the same reasons as the wheat), or more disease-resistant, or more suited to tropical climates. Scientists crossed thirty-eight different breeds of rice to create IR8, which doubled yields and became known as "miracle rice." IR8 served as the catalyst for what became known as the Green Revolution. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 60 percent of the world's rice fields were planted with varieties developed by research institutes and related developers. A pest-resistant variety known as IR36 was planted on nearly 28 million acres, a record amount for a single food-plant variety.

In addition to Mexico, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines, countries benefiting from the Green Revolution included Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, China, Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, Malaya, Morocco, Thailand, Tunisia, and Turkey. The Green Revolution contributed to the overall economic growth of these nations by increasing the incomes of farmers (who were then able to afford tractors and other modern equipment), the use of electrical energy, and consumer goods, thus increasing the pace and volume of trade and commerce.

As successful as the Green Revolution was, the wholesale transfer of technology to the developing world had its critics. Some objected to the use of chemical fertilizer, which augmented or replaced animal manure or mineral fertilizer. Others objected to the use of pesticides, some of which are believed to be persistent in the environment. The use of irrigation was also criticized, as it often required drilling wells and tapping underground water sources, as was the encouragement of farming in areas formerly considered marginal, such as flood-prone regions in Bangladesh. The very fact that the new crop varieties were developed with foreign support caused some critics to label the entire program imperialistic. Critics also argued that the Green Revolution primarily benefited large farm operations that could more easily obtain fertilizer, pesticides, and modern equipment, and that it helped displace poorer farmers from the land, driving them into urban slums. Critics also pointed out that the heavy use of fertilizer and irrigation causes long-term degradation of the soil.

Proponents of the Green Revolution argued that it contributed to environmental preservation because it improved the productivity of land already in agricultural production and thus saved millions of acres that would otherwise have been put into agricultural use. It is estimated that if cropland productivity had not tripled in the second half of the twentieth century, it would have been necessary to clear half of the world's remaining forest-land for conversion to agriculture (Brown, Eco-Economy).

However, the rates at which production increased in the early years of the program could not continue indefinitely, which caused some to question the "sustainability" of the new style. For example, rice yields per acre in South Korea grew nearly 60 percent from 1961 to 1977, but only 1 percent from 1977 to 2000 (Brown et al., State of the World 2001, p. 51). Rice production in Asia as a whole grew an average of 3.2 percent per year from 1967 to 1984 but only 1.5 percent per year from 1984 to 1996 (Dawe, p. 948). Some of the leveling-off of yields stemmed from natural limits on plant growth, but economics also played a role. For example, as rice harvests increased, prices fell, thus discouraging more aggressive production. Also, population growth in Asia slowed, thus reducing the rate of growth of the demand for rice. In addition, incomes rose, which prompted people to eat less rice and more of other types of food.

The success of the Green Revolution also depended on the fact that many of the host countries—such as Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and China—had relatively stable governments and fairly well-developed infrastructures. These factors permitted these countries to diffuse both the new seeds and technology and to bring the products to market in an effective manner. The challenges were far more difficult in places such as Africa, where governments were unstable and roads and water resources were less developed. For example, in mid-1990s Mozambique, improved corn grew well in the northern part of the country, but civil unrest and an inadequate transportation system left much of the harvest to rot (Mann, p. 1038). According to the report by David Gately, with the exception of a few countries such as Kenya, where corn yields quadrupled in the 1970s, Africa benefited far less from the Green Revolution than Asian countries and is still threatened periodically with famine.

The Green Revolution could not have been launched without the scientific work done at the research institutes in Mexico and the Philippines. The two original institutes have given rise to an international network of research establishments dedicated to agricultural improvement, technology transfer, and the development of agricultural resources, including trained personnel, in the developing countries. A total of sixteen autonomous centers form the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which operates under the direction of the World Bank. These centers address issues concerning tropical agriculture, dry-area farming, corn, potatoes, wheat, rice, livestock, forestry, and aquatic resources, among others.

Future advances in agricultural productivity depend on the development of new varieties of plants such as sorghum and millet, which are mainstays in African countries and other less-developed areas, and on the introduction of appropriate agricultural technology. This will probably include biotechnology—the genetic alteration of food plants to give them desirable characteristics. For example, farmers in Africa are plagued by hardy, invasive weeds that can quickly overrun a cultivated plot and compel the farmer to abandon it and move on to virgin land. If the plot were planted with corn, soybeans, or other crops that are genetically altered to resist herbicide, then the farmer could more easily control the weeds and harvest a successful crop. Scientists are also developing a genetically modified strain of rice fortified with vitamin A that is intended to help ward off blindness in children, which will be especially useful in developing countries. While people have expressed concern about the environmental impact of genetically modified food plants, such plants are well established in the United States and some other countries and are likely to catch on in the developing world as well.

Bibliography

Borlaug, Norman. "The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity." Nobel Lecture. Delivered 11 December 1970. Available at http://www.nobel.se.

Brown, Lester R. Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth. New York: Norton, 2001.

Brown, Lester R., et al., eds. State of the World 2001: A World-watch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. New York: Norton, 2001.

Dawe, David. "Re-Energizing the Green Revolution in Rice." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 80 (1998): 948–953.

Easterbrook, Gregg. "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." TheAtlantic Monthly 279, no. 1 (January 1997): 75–82.

Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. Revised and expanded. New York: Sierra Club / Ballantine, 1971. A reprint of the 1968 edition.

Gately, David. "Backgrounder: The Past 25 Years: Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned in Feeding the World." International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C., 2001. Available at http://www.ifpri.cgiar.org/2020/backgrnd/25years.htm.

Lappé, Frances Moore, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset. WorldHunger: 12 Myths. New York: Grove Press, 1998.

Mann, Charles. "Reseeding the Green Revolution." Science 277 (1997): 1038–1043.

Walsh, John. "The Greening of the Green Revolution." Science 242 (1991): 26.

—Richard L. Lobb

 
Science Dictionary: green revolution

The increase in the world production of cereals such as wheat and rice during the 1960s and 1970s because of better seed and new agricultural technology.

  • The green revolution greatly increased the availability of food and confounded predictions of worldwide famine that had been made in the early 1970s.

    •  
    Wikipedia: Green Revolution
    This article is about the Green Revolution of the 20th century. For the earlier medieval Green Revolution, see Muslim Agricultural Revolution.

    The Green Revolution was 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. It has had major social and ecological impacts.

    The term "Green Revolution" 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]

    History

    Mexican roots

    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 Cárdenas 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 Camacho’s ambitions as beneficial to U.S. economic and military interest.[4]

    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 1901, the Mexican population was 13.6 million; by 2005, it had increased to 103.3 million.[5]

    Indian success

    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. [5]

    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.

    CGIAR

    An international group coordinating the efforts of the local groups was formed in 1971 under the urging of the Rockefeller Foundation. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, 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.[6] 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.

    Problems in Africa

    There have been numerous attempts to introduce the successful concepts from the Mexican and southeast Asian projects into Africa. These programs have generally been less successful, for a number of reasons. Among these is widespread corruption, insecurity, a lack of infrastructure, and a general lack of will on the part of the governments.

    A recent program in western Africa is attempting to introduce a new high-yield variety of rice known as "Nericas". Nericas yields about 30% more rice under normal conditions, and can double yields with small amounts of fertilizer and very basic irrigation. However the program has been beset by problems getting the rice into the hands of farmers, and to date the only success has been in Guinea where it currently accounts for 16% of rice cultivation.[7]

    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 “miracle seeds.”[8]

    Scientists created strains of maize, wheat, and rice that are generally referred to as HYVs or “high-yielding varieties.” 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 “Peta” and a Chinese variety named “Dee Geo Woo Gen.”[9]

    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 signalling 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.

    Production increases

    Cereal production more than doubled in developing nations between the years 1961 – 1985.[10] Yields of rice, maize, and wheat increased steadily during that period.[10] The production increases can be attributed roughly equally to irrigation, fertilizer, and seed development, at least in the case of Asian rice.[10]

    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.[11] 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.[12]

    Fossil fuel dependence

    While agricultural output increased as a result of the Green Revolution, the energy input into the process (that is, the energy that must be expended to produce a crop) has also increased at a greater rate,[13] so that the ratio of crops produced to energy input has decreased over time. Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, some of which must be developed from fossil fuels, making agriculture increasingly reliant on petroleum products.[14] Proponents of the Peak Oil theory fear that a future decline in oil and gas production would lead to a decline in food production or even a Malthusian catastrophe.[15]

    Effects on food security

    Main article: 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.[16] 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[17][18][19], 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.[20] In 1959, the Ford Foundation carried out a study in India that stated the nation’s population would outstrip its food supply by 1966, although validity of its methodology was a subject of criticism.[21] At Borlaug's Nobel acceptance speech he stated, "...we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction."[22]

    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 currently documents (approximately 850 million people suffering from chronic malnutrition in 2005). India saw annual wheat production rise from 10 million tonnes in the 1960s to 73 million in 2006.[23] The average person in the developing world consumes about 25% more calories per day now than before the Green Revolution.[10]

    Increasing food production however is not synonymous with increasing food security, and is only part of a larger equation. For example, Amartya Sen's 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. [24] 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.[25] Also, the pesticides involved in rice production eliminated fish and weedy green vegetables from the diets of Asian rice farmers.[26]

    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.[27]

    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.[28]

    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 could 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.[29][30]

    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.[31]

    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.[32]

    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.[33] The increased level of mechanization on larger farms made possible by the Green Revolution removed an important source of employment from the rural economy.[34] 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.[35]

    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.[36]

    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.[37]

    Water issues

    Irrigation projects have created significant problems of salinization, waterlogging, and lowering of water tables in certain areas.[38]

    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 in to cereal varieties over thousands of years. To address these concerns, massive seed banks such as CGIAR’s 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 counter-hypothesis 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.)

    See also

    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. 13–55.
    • 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.57–75.
    • Wright, Angus. Innocence Abroad: American Agricultural Research in Mexico, Jackson, Wes, ed., 1985. Meeting the Expectations of the Land pp.124 – 138.
    • Wright, Angus. The Death of Ramon Gonzalez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

    References

    1. ^ Defining the Green Revolution
    2. ^ Speech by William S. Gaud to the Society for International Development. 1968. [1]
    3. ^ Wright, 2005. pp. 171 – 173.
    4. ^ Wright 2005. pp. 171 – 173
    5. ^ 100 Years of Mexican Migration Policies
    6. ^ Oasa 1987
    7. ^ In Africa, Prosperity From Seeds Falls Short, New York Times, 10 October 2007
    8. ^ Brown, 1970
    9. ^ Rice Varieties: IRRI Knowledge Bank. Accessed Aug. 2006. [2]
    10. ^ a b c d Conway, 1997 chpt. 4.
    11. ^ Altieri 1995.
    12. ^ Wright, 2005. pp. 158.
    13. ^ Why Our Food is So Dependent on Oil
    14. ^ Fuel costs, drought influence price increase
    15. ^ Rising food prices curb aid to global poor
    16. ^ http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/311.html
    17. ^ [3]
    18. ^ Peak Oil: the threat to our food security
    19. ^ Agriculture Meets Peak Oil
    20. ^ Wright 2005, pp. 174.
    21. ^ Ross 158
    22. ^ Norman Borlaug's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, 1970. [4]
    23. ^ The end of India's green revolution?
    24. ^ Drezé and Sen 1991
    25. ^ Spitz, 1987
    26. ^ Conway 1997 pp. 279.
    27. ^ How peak oil could lead to starvation
    28. ^ Eating Fossil Fuels | EnergyBulletin.net
    29. ^ Peak Oil: the threat to our food security
    30. ^ Agriculture Meets Peak Oil
    31. ^ Primary objective was geopolitical - see Mark Dowie, American Foundations: An Investigative History, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001, (pp. 109-114)
    32. ^ Ross 1998. Chpt. 5.
    33. ^ Oasa 1987
    34. ^ Oasa 1987
    35. ^ Wright 1985
    36. ^ Brown 1970
    37. ^ Conway 1997, chpt.11
    38. ^ Conway 1997, pp. 253

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