The Green Revolution is a warning, not a blueprint for feeding a hungry planet
Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm.
- Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm.
- Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.
- Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold.
A triumphal narrative
- Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.
- Borlaug received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is still widely credited with “saving a billion lives.” Indian agricultural scientist M.S.
- Swaminathan, who worked with Borlaug to promote the Green Revolution, received the inaugural World Food Prize in 1987.
Debunking the legend
- The standard legend of India’s Green Revolution centers on two propositions.
- India was importing wheat in the 1960s because of policy decisions, not overpopulation.
- After the nation achieved independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru prioritized developing heavy industry.
- U.S. advisers encouraged this strategy and offered to provide India with surplus grain, which India accepted as cheap food for urban workers.
- They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.
The toll of ‘green’ pollution
- Globally, only 17% of what is applied is taken up by plants and ultimately consumed as food.
- Most of the rest washes into waterways, where it creates algae blooms and dead zones that smother aquatic life.
- In my view, African countries where the Green Revolution has not made inroads should consider themselves lucky.
- In my view, there are many ways to pursue less input-intensive agriculture that will be more sustainable in a world with an increasingly erratic climate.