Green Revolution

The Green Revolution is the process of technological development of agricultural techniques that began in the northern Mexican state of Sonora in 1944 and has since spread throughout the world. The goal of the Green Revolution was to increase the efficiency of agricultural processes so that the productivity of the crops was increased, and to help developing countries face their growing populations' needs.

Criticisms of the Green Revolution

The Green Revolution has been criticized on several grounds, most prominently by environmentalists and critics of globalization. However it must be mentioned that many of these criticisms could be applied to any form of large-scale agriculture and are not exclusively related to the Green Revolution. These criticisms can be seen in three broad categories: a decline in agricultural quality, concerns about the social implications of the Green Revolution and, finally, a broad set of concerns about the sustainability of Green Revolution agricultural practices.

Related Topics:
Environmentalist - Globalization

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Prominent critics of the Green Revolution include Indian writer and activist Vandana Shiva.

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Agricultural Quality

Critics here focus on whether the Green Revolution's focus on hybrid, genetically modified and high-yield crops have had a deleterious effect on the quality of agricultural production.

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• Loss of biodiversity — The spread of Green Revolution hybrids and the associated techniques have resulted in the cultivation of many fewer varieties of crops. Some crops have seen upwards of a 90% reduction in crop varieties. Dependence on one or a few cultivars of a crop means a greater exposure to famine due to a new crop pest (see Irish Potato Famine), external dependence of the population for other foodstuffs, and an impaired ability to improve crops in the future through breading. External dependence is a problem with modern agriculture that has been solved in rich countries through extensive systems of crop insurance and farm subsidies, but remains a great problem in poorer countries where agricultural output is taxed not subsidised. The lack of crop insurance means that farmers who depend on paying for their basic needs can easily fall victim to predatory lenders when they have the inevitable lean year.
• Health value and food quality — The replacement of multiple staple crops by a single HYV staple crop can mean a less varied diet. In addition, critics argue, many Green Revolution crops are bred for high caloric efficiency, storage longevity, and appearance; but not for health value. As such, many hybrid crops are claimed to be inferior in nutritional value to their ancestors, potentially leading to malnutrition. One reason is an often-overlooked side-effect of Green Revolution crops: due to the increased level of weed control in the crop, wild plants which are occasionally eaten as a vegetable, such as Colocasia ssp. in rice, disappear.

:On the other hand, the replacement of various nutrition sources with a single Green Revolution alternative has led to higher gross nutrition levels and increased caloric intake. According to Green Revolution advocates, these nutritional concerns are being tackled through mechanisms as diverse as the encouragement of vegetable gardens, the development of high-yield varieties with enhanced nutrient content, such as the so-called golden rice with enhanced carotene, and new attention to developing HYV versions of less common agricultural crops such as oca.

Related Topics:
Vegetable - Gardens - Golden rice - Carotene - Oca

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:A side-effect of the pesticides used is that the chemicals have killed not only the pests, but also fish in the paddy fields that they used to eat or sell. Water buffaloes used to plow the land have contracted unknown mouth diseases, lost hooves, and suddenly died. Several villages that have always had enough to eat suddenly experienced severe famine and have not recovered since.

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• Health effects. The chemicals- insecticides and pesticides- needed to protect the HYV crops are not only toxic to insects or pests, but also to humans. People in First World countries may use protection when spraying these chemicals on the plants, but protection is generally not used in Third World countries. Firstly, the people are too poor to buy protective suits. Secondly, they do not trouble to put on protection. They work in the burning sun all day and cannot be expected to wear such protection at risk of getting heat stroke. As a result, their bodies absorb the pesticides and herbicides. They are slowly but surely being poisoned. 80% of deaths from pesticides occur in the Third World.

Globalization and Social Change

Critics here focus on how the Green Revolution changes the structure of rural agricultural societies.

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• Corporate dependence — many hybrid strains are sterile, or are sold on the condition that farmers cannot save their seed. F1 hybrids have a much higher yield due to their very high level of heterozygote alleles than their descendants, which makes the propagation of F1-hybrids by farmers less practical. Critics argue that this helps seed companies maximize their profit at the expense of farmers, who are forced to buy new seed each year. Critics have also pointed out that farmers are compelled for competitive reasons to buy hybrid seed, since non-hybrid seeds are so much less productive.
• Social change — The Green Revolution introduced major changes into a world where the majority of the people still depend on farming for their livelihood. The result of many of these techniques was the encouragement of large-scale industrial agriculture at the expense of small farmers, who were unable to compete with the high-efficiency Green Revolution crops. The result has been massive displacement and increasing urbanization and poverty amongst these farmers, and the loss of their land to large agricultural companies, who are more able to manage the considerable enterprise involved in effectively exploiting Green Revolution techniques.

Sustainability

A final set of criticisms focuses on whether the agricultural practices of the Green Revolution are sustainable.

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• 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, 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. This has raised concerns that a significant decrease in world oil and gas production, and the corresponding price increases, could plunge billions into hunger.
• Fertilizer dependence — Nearly all fertilizers, such as potassium, phosphorus and magnesium, come from limited mineral deposits. (An exception is nitrogen fertilizers, which are produced from inexhaustible atmospheric nitrogen, but which requires methane for production in the Haber process.) High-yielding varieties require an increased nutrient input. The Pacific island of Nauru has been mined for its phosphate deposits, which caused significant ecological destruction.
• Pollution — Fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide runoff continue to be a significant source of pollution, and a major source of water pollution. Although the dangerous, toxic and sometimes cancer-causing pesticides of the early half of the century (like 2,4,5-T and DDT) have mostly been phased out of agricultural usage (although DDT continues to be used in Third-world nations for control of the mosquito which is the transmission vector for malaria), their effects have often not been erased.
• Land degradation — Critics charge that the Green Revolution destroys soil quality over the long term. This is a result of a variety of factors, including increased soil salinity that results from heavy irrigation; erosion of the soil, a decreased flux of organic material to the soil because of lesser allocation of photosynthetical production to stems and roots, and the loss of valuable trace elements. These factors can lead to increased reliance on chemical inputs to compensate for deteriorating soil quality, a process which may ultimately fail.

On the other hand, agricutural techniques may evolve as resource constraints or environmental damages emerge. The emergence of no-till farming, for instance, has reduced erosion. Alternative energy sources, closed nutrient cycles, the development of disease- and pest-resistant crops may help address some of the sustainability issues.

Related Topics:
No-till farming - Closed nutrient cycle

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