Green Revolution: A race to fight global hunger

The Green Revolution, or the Third Agricultural Revolution, is the set of research technology transfer initiatives occurring between 1950 and the late 1960s, that increased agricultural production in parts of the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s. The initiatives resulted in the adoption of new technologies, including high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereals, especially dwarf wheat and rice. It was associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization. All of these together were seen as a ‘package of practices’ to supersede ‘traditional’ technology and to be adopted as a whole. The key elements of the revolution include: 1) Use of the latest technological and capital inputs, 2) adoption of modern scientific methods of farming, 3) use of high yielding varieties of seeds, 4) proper use of chemical fertilizers, 5) consolidation of land holdings.

After World War II, newly implemented agricultural technologies, including pesticides and fertilizers as well as new breeds of high yield crops, greatly increased food production in certain regions of the Global South.

Both the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were heavily involved in its initial development in Mexico. One key leader was agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the “Father of the Green Revolution”, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. The basic approach was the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers. The Green Revolution had mixed results. Norman Borlaug blamed its failures on politics. As the development of new cereal varieties through selective breeding reached their limits, some agricultural scientists turned to the creation of new strains that did not exist in nature, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a phenomenon sometimes called the Gene Revolution.

History and Development of the Green Revolution

The beginnings of the Green Revolution are often attributed to Norman Borlaug, an American scientist interested in agriculture. In the 1940s, he began conducting research in Mexico and developed new disease resistance high-yield varieties of wheat. By combining Borlaug’s wheat varieties with new mechanized agricultural technologies, Mexico was able to produce more wheat than was needed by its own citizens, leading to them becoming an exporter of wheat by the 1960s. Prior to the use of these varieties, the country was importing almost half of its wheat supply.

Due to the success of the Green Revolution in Mexico, its technologies spread worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. The United States, for instance, imported about half of its wheat in the 1940s but after using Green Revolution technologies, it became self-sufficient in the 1950s and became an exporter by the 1960s.

In order to continue using Green Revolution technologies to produce more food for a growing population worldwide, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, as well as many government agencies around the world funded increased research. In 1963 with the help of this funding, Mexico formed an international research institution called The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

Countries all over the world, in turn, benefited from the Green Revolution work conducted by Borlaug and this research institution. India, for example, was on the brink of mass famine in the early 1960s because of its rapidly growing population. Borlaug and the Ford Foundation then implemented research there and they developed a new variety of rice, IR8, that produced more grain per plant when grown with irrigation and fertilizers. Today, India is one of the world’s leading rice producers and IR8 rice usage spread throughout Asia in the decades following the rice’s development in India.

Development in Mexico

Mexico has been called the ‘birthplace’ and ‘burial ground’ of the Green Revolution. It began with great promise and it has been argued that “during the twentieth century two ‘revolutions’ transformed rural Mexico: the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the Green Revolution (1950–1970).”

It was on the lead of the Mexican government in 1943, under Presidential order and finance of the Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho, and support of the U.S. government, the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the Rockefeller Foundation. For the U.S. government, its neighbor Mexico was an important experimental case in the use of technology and scientific expertise in agriculture that became the model for international agricultural development. Mexico made a concerted effort to transform agricultural productivity, particularly with irrigated rather than dry-land cultivation in its northwest, to solve its problem of lack of food self-sufficiency. In the center and south of Mexico, where large-scale production faced challenges, agricultural production languished. Increased production promised food self-sufficiency in Mexico to feed its growing and urbanizing population with the increase in number of calories consumed per Mexican. The technology was seen as a valuable way to feed the poor, and would relieve some pressure of the land redistribution process. In general, success of “Green Revolution” depended on the use of machinery for cultivation and harvest, on large-scale agricultural enterprises with access to credit (often from foreign investors), government-supported infrastructure projects, and access to low-wage agricultural workers.

Green Revolution in China

China’s large and increasing population meant that increasing food production, principally rice, was a top priority for the Chinese government. Although the land mass of China is large, the areas of significant food production are small. When the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, the Chinese state came to play a major role in agricultural policy and scientific research. It sought to solve China’s food security issues, eliminating hunger and starvation, seeking to transform traditional cultivation of existing strains of rice and to apply new science and technology to agricultural production. Through agrarian reform over the 1950s, it eliminated absentee landlords and created collective farms, which could utilize mechanized cultivation. However, grain production did not increase significantly until the state began promoting state-supported agricultural research and investment in infrastructure. The development of strains of hybrid rice had long been a practice in Chinese agriculture, but in the 1960s, this ramped up through government supported agricultural science. Prominent in the development of productive hybrid rice was Yuan Longping, whose research hybridized wild strains of rice with existing strains. He has been dubbed “the father of hybrid rice,” and was considered a national hero in China. The Chinese government’s policies gave cultivators technical assistance, access to affordable HYVs, fertilizers, and pesticides, and developed infrastructure. Chinese rice production met the nation’s food security needs. In recent years, however, extensive use of ground water for irrigation has drawn down aquifers and extensive use of fertilizers has increased greenhouse gas emissions. China has not expanded the area of cultivable land, but the Green Revolution with high yields per hectare gave China the food security it sought.

IR8 rice and the Philippines

In 1960,Bridgett B the Government of the Republic of the Philippines with the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation established the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). A rice crossing between Dee-Geo-woo-gen and Peta was done at IRRI in 1962. In 1966, one of the breeding lines became a new cultivar: IR8 rice. IR8 required the use of fertilizers and pesticides, but produced substantially higher yields than the traditional cultivars. Annual rice production in the Philippines increased from 3.7 to 7.7 million tons in two decades. The switch to IR8 rice made the Philippines a rice exporter for the first time in the 20th century.

Technologies

The Green Revolution spread technologies that already existed, but had not been widely implemented outside industrialized nations. Two kinds of technologies were used in the Green Revolution and aim at cultivation and breeding area respectively. The technologies in cultivation are targeted at providing excellent growing conditions, which included modern irrigation projects, pesticides, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. The breeding technologies aimed at improving crop varieties developed through the conventional, science-based methods available at the time. These technologies included hybrids, combining modern genetics with selections.

High-yielding varieties

The novel technological development of the Green Revolution was the production of novel wheat cultivars. Agronomists bred cultivars of maize, wheat, and rice that are the generally referred to as HYVs or “high-yielding varieties”. HYVs have higher nitrogen-absorbing potential than other varieties. Since cereals that absorbed extra nitrogen would typically lodge, or fall over before harvest, semi-dwarfing genes were bred into their genomes. A Japanese dwarf wheat cultivar Norin 10 developed by Japanese agronomist Gonjiro Inazuka, which was sent to Orville Vogel at Washington State University by Cecil Salmon, 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”. In the 1960s, when a food crisis happened in Asia, the spread of HYV rice was aggravated intensely.

Production increases

By one 2021 estimate, the Green Revolution increased yields by 44% between 1965 and 2010. Cereal production more than doubled in developing nations between the years 1961–1985. Yields of rice, maize, and wheat increased steadily during that period. The production increases can be attributed roughly equally to irrigation, fertilizer, and seed development, at least in the case of Asian rice.

While agricultural output increased as a result of the Green Revolution, the energy input to produce a crop has increased faster, so that the ratio of crops produced to energy input has decreased over time. Green Revolution techniques also heavily rely on agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants; which, as of 2014, rely on or are derived from crude oil, making agriculture increasingly reliant on crude oil extraction. 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.

Effects on food security

Main article: Food security

The effects of the Green Revolution on global food security are difficult to assess because of the complexities involved in food systems.

The world population has grown by about five billion since the beginning of the Green Revolution and many believe that, without the Revolution, there would have been greater famine and malnutrition. India saw annual wheat production rise from 10 million tons in the 1960s to 73 million in 2006. The average person in the developing world consumes roughly 25% more calories per day now than before the Green Revolution. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by about 160%.

The production increases fostered by the Green Revolution are often credited with having helped to avoid widespread famine, and for feeding billions of people.

There are also claims that the Green Revolution has decreased food security for a large number of people. One claim involves the shift of subsistence-oriented cropland to cropland oriented towards production of grain for export 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.

Writer: Madhav Chaudhary (Student, Bsc. Ag IAAS Paklihawa Campus)