Rethinking the Green Revolution

November 27, 2023 11:19 AM

It is often taken for granted that the Green Revolution, which introduced new high yield monoculture crops together with chemical fertilisers, was a huge boost to global food production from which there is no going back. This article in the National Academies of Science ISSUES in Science and Technology by environmental scientists Marci Baranski and Mary Ollenburger discusses and critiques that assumption, in particular discussing both how the increased yields were overstated and fragile, and how the narrative and accompanying policies served and continue to serve USA and multinational corporate dominance and centralisation.
posted by Rhedyn (14 comments total)

Great article and I hope we get a lot more of this. The myth of large scale is better is so prevalent in our western society and the data does not support it when you look close.

" Overall, the Green Revolution did little to reduce food insecurity and actually increased rural inequality, leaving behind the poorest and most vulnerable."

Also reminded of "Farmers of 40 centuries" and How asia works (on bill gates 2014 book list).
"Agriculture: Studwell’s book does a better job than anything else I’ve read of articulating the key role of agriculture in development. He explains that the one thing that all poor countries have in abundance is farm labor—typically three quarters of their population. Unfortunately, most poor countries have feudal land policies that favor wealthy landowners, with masses of poor farmers working for them. Studwell argues that these policies not only produce huge inequities; they also guarantee lousy crop yields. Conversely, he says, when you give farmers ownership of modest plots and allow them to profit from the fruits of their labor, farm yields are much higher per hectare. And rising yields help countries generate the surpluses and savings they need to power up their manufacturing engine."

It's amazing that Gates and many other philanthropers/developers still don't get this small farms work lesson.
posted by danjo at 11:51 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seattle's Community Alliance for Global Justice has an "AGRA Watch" group challenging the Gates Foundation's "Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa", and they have also made a series of short films, Rich Appetites, unpacking how philanthro-capitalism is affecting African food sovereignty.
posted by xueexueg at 12:17 PM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

To start, the contribution of Green Revolution crop varieties to preventing famine is overstated. For example, India’s food production was increasing steadily more than 15 years before Indian farmers started adopting Green Revolution wheat in 1967.

How does the second sentence support the first?

The Green Revolution’s successes were also concentrated among wealthier farmers. This was in part because research organizations directly targeted “successful” farmers to test new technologies, with the idea that best practices would trickle down to poorer farmers. But this often didn’t happen. Poor, smallholder farmers often lacked access to credit, could not afford inputs such as fertilizers, or grew different crops than the ones developed by Green Revolution research. Overall, the Green Revolution did little to reduce food insecurity and actually increased rural inequality, leaving behind the poorest and most vulnerable.

Just because richer farmers benefited more doesn't mean that poorer farmers didn't benefit. I'm just not seeing the evidence that increased aggregate crop yields had no effect on food insecurity.

There were also substantial democratizing effects.:

"Exploiting the timing of the introduction of HYV crops, together with district-level variation in suitability for the new crop technology, instrumental variables analyses show that the green revolution played a pivotal role in the rise of agrarian opposition parties and decline of single-party dominance [in India]."
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:22 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

MisantropicPainforest: the paper you linked is only available as abstract and appears to be a game-theoretic mathematical analysis: "Drawing on a theoretical framework based on models of contests..." , "...instrumental variables analyses show that the green revolution played a pivotal role in the rise of agrarian opposition parties and decline of single-party dominance." Personally that's not a methodology I'd give much weight to.

Here is a detailed discussion of how the Green Revolution played out for Punjab farmers. It seems plausible that agrarian opposition parties arose due to the crises that the farmers found themselves in and their feeling of betrayal by government policy, but that doesn't seem like a point in its favour.
posted by Rhedyn at 12:48 PM on November 27, 2023

Norman "Green Rev" Borlaug is frequently hailed as "The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives", but that's nonsense. He changed the economic, ecological and agricultural conditions in a way that encouraged a billion subsistence farmers in the global south to try for another baby so he is more realistically named "The Man Who Created A Billion Lives", like some super-Shockley sperm-donor. Netto, those farming families are not better off from the process and the planet is measurably depleted. As the article didn't mention the Haber-Bosch nitrogen-fixing protocol [capturing 500m tonnes N each year!], I won't start in on Fritz Haber.
Indeed, ignore my hot take; the article is much more thoughtful, interesting and better informed so TYFS.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:06 PM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here’s a undated link:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2931182

If we’re going to say, “no, I won’t accept any evidence that uses math” then I think that’s the end of the discussion.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:32 PM on November 27, 2023

If we’re going to say, “no, I won’t accept any evidence that uses math” then I think that’s the end of the discussion.

I don't think that's the issue people are having with the paper you linked - it just seems more reasonable to leave a question like "did the Green Revolution democratize Indian politics" to a historian rather than a economist. He's doing linear regressions with electoral data and the availability of aquifers, and maybe he's getting at something but I have no idea if it's the democratizing effects of the green revolution. I am not an economist and I don't know if that's how things are generally done in political economy but that's certainly not too much math.
posted by Galimatazo at 3:14 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

MisanthropicPainforest, thanks for the full link. Having skim read the paper, I do not think its model or conclusion support a simple feel good story of "democratizing effects" due to increased farmer wealth. The model the paper seeks to validate by mathematical analysis is that (paraphrased) the new tech made some farmers wealthier, AND it increased their dependence on government subsidy and price control, AND then it endangered them in the face of falling prices and loss of subsidies, leading them to organise politically.

The author even refers to this as "creative destruction". He doesn't mention factors like damage to the water table, increased cancers, and 7000 suicides among farmers since 2000 in Punjab, but his focus is really not on whether the Green Revolution was good, but on whether it's a good case study for a model of how to instigate political change. Probably useful for the CIA, less relevant to the article linked in my OP.
posted by Rhedyn at 3:19 PM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, Norman Borlaug knew exactly what he was doing, and what the consequences would be. He warned of them in his Nobel Peace Price Lecture and acceptance speech:

Malthus signaled the danger a century and a half ago. But he emphasized principally the danger that population would increase faster than food supplies. In his time he could not foresee the tremendous increase in man’s food production potential. Nor could he have foreseen the disturbing and destructive physical and mental consequences of the grotesque concentration of human beings into the poisoned and clangorous environment of pathologically hypertrophied megalopoles. Can human beings endure the strain? Abnormal stresses and strains tend to accentuate man’s animal instincts and provoke irrational and socially disruptive behavior among the less stable individuals in the maddening crowd.

We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care. Unless we can do this, man may degenerate sooner from environmental diseases than from hunger.

I wonder if he'll ever get a movie like Oppenheimer.

Borlaug
posted by MrVisible at 4:12 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

The Wizard and The Prophet, by Charles Mann (1491) does a great job comparing the world views of those who believed, like Borlaug, that we could engineer our way out of all problems, and those like William Vogt, who argued instead for conservation.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:22 PM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

Ooh thanks for that CheeseDigestsAll, 1491 has been a big influence on me and I didn't know about this book. Off to buy it now!
posted by Rhedyn at 4:24 PM on November 27, 2023

Nor could he have foreseen the disturbing and destructive physical and mental consequences of the grotesque concentration of human beings into the poisoned and clangorous environment of pathologically hypertrophied megalopoles. Can human beings endure the strain? Abnormal stresses and strains tend to accentuate man’s animal instincts and provoke irrational and socially disruptive behavior among the less stable individuals in the maddening crowd.

This sounds like some mid-century suburbanist bullshit to me, full of imagery of inner city jungle ghettos overwhelmed by savagery and crime, imagery designed to justify massive investments in car-dependent suburbs while simultaneously hollowing out funding for cities and demonizing the people who lived in them.
posted by clawsoon at 4:38 PM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

clawsoon: Sounds to me like he was a bit overfond of reading HG Wells.
posted by Rhedyn at 4:55 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is very inspiring.
In this country, we need to restructure agriculture, because "green revolution" methods are killing our waters and reducing the biodiversity. I can't speak for other places.
Also, we need to restructure our food habits, because the food that comes out of that green revolution is not good for us. Here, it's mainly grains, pork, dairy and chickens (including eggs). Lovely stuff, but not good if they are the main cheap food sources.
A new/old approach to agriculture will be better for the environment and for our health, but how do we get there?

Legumes, vegetables, fruits and vegetables can be profitable on smaller acreages, but demand a different skill set, which is just barely supported by the existing education system here, which is very much based on the green revolution mindset. Creating the change we need is about change on all levels: education, production, financing, government incentives, distribution and also cooking and teaching and communication about food. Actually probably more than this.
posted by mumimor at 8:25 AM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]