Think Again: The Green Revolution

"Asia Could Have Fed Itself Without the Green Revolution."

Hardly. Critics of the Green Revolution question whether technologies such as new seeds, irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizer were really needed to feed Asia. They claim that indigenous technologies in combination with good policies would have been sufficient.

It is true that food production was growing before the Green Revolution -- mostly through expanding crop areas. But yields were increasing at too low a rate to keep up with the surge in population that followed decades of improvements in public health. By the early 1960s, famine was looming across much of Asia, and the continent's farmers were ill-equipped to meet the challenge. Asia was running out of suitable agricultural land, and increased productivity looked unlikely. Despite government investment in irrigation and fertilizer, most farmers still relied on traditional crop varieties and low-input, low-output farming practices. As the food balance deteriorated, chronic poverty and hunger worsened, and it only took a poor monsoon, which came in 1964, to tip millions of people into famine. Major catastrophes were only averted in the early 1960s with the help of food aid from abroad, especially from the United States.

Only when the new high-yielding wheat and rice varieties developed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug and others came along did crops really take off. The new varieties were much more responsive to fertilizers and irrigation, and many farmers doubled or tripled their yields. Borlaug's seeds also grew faster and were insensitive to daylight length, enabling more crops to be grown each year on the same piece of land. The result was the doubling of cereal production in Asia between 1970 and 1995, from 310 million to 650 million tons per year. Although the population increased 60 percent over the same period, the rise in food production was so great that cereal and calorie availability per person actually increased nearly 30 percent, and wheat and rice became cheaper.

1234NEXT