This investigation of the impacts of agricultural reform in India, specifically the long-term effects of the “Green Revolution,” a widespread movement that dramatically increased food production in Latin America and Asia, will try and answer the question: To what extent did the Green Revolution benefit India’s farmers from 1985–2000?
The sources which will be evaluated are a detailed analysis of the benefits and limitations of the Green Revolution by Prabhu Pingali, which primarily conclude that the negative impacts of the Green Revolution environmentally pose a significant threat to its long-term sustainability, and a paper for the International Food Policy Research Institute by Peter Hazell, which conclude that the Green Revolution’s effects, even in disputed areas such as the environment or socioeconomics, has been positive.
A. “Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead”
“Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead” is an analysis by Professor Prabhu Pingali at Cornell University working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal in July 2012. Its origin is valuable because it comes from a peer-reviewed journal and is written by an agricultural scientist who is able to take a view of the Green Revolution in 2012, well after its end. Its purpose is valuable because it seeks not to promote any agenda, but to find the best way forward in preventing famine — being funded by a non-profit organization ensures that it does not have any money-making interests. Its content is valuable because it looks specifically at environmental impacts of the Green Revolution, with soil degradation and increased water use associated with high-yielding varieties of crops.
However, it is limited in its origin because the reviewers of the paper were also employed by the Gates Foundation. This opens the process to possible bias. It is limited in its purpose because it targets problems that can be fixed by policy change, since its purpose is to look towards optimizing future agricultural reform, and thus overlooks positive environmental impacts such as decreased land use that does not require reform. It is limited in its content because its environmental analysis does not specifically focus on India, but rather the Green Revolution as a whole, which spanned many areas across the globe.
B. “The Asian Green Revolution”
“The Asian Green Revolution” is a discussion paper by Director at the Agriculutral and Applied Economics Association Peter Hazell published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in November 2009. Its origin is valuable because it is from a respected agricultural scientist and published by an organization that specializes in food policy. It is also peer-reviewed and from a sufficiently far away time period for it to have a full view of the Green Revolution. Its purpose is valuable because it seeks to learn from past successes to inform future decisions. Thus, its purpose is able to find positive aspects of the Green Revolution that may have been overlooked in other publications. Its content is valuable because it looks at the economic and environmental impacts of the Green Revolution, especially some important policy decisions by India’s government, in Asia after the revolution itself.
Its origin is limited because one of its financial contributors is the Indian government. This was one of many contributors, but it does add an element of bias that may explain Hazell’s praise of India’s actions in implementing the Green Revolution. Additionally, the IFPRI is a part of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, which was also the parent organization of the International Rice Research Institute and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, which started the Green Revolution. Its purpose is limited because the “Millions Fed” initiative of which this paper was a part of seeks to “identify interventions in agricultural development that have substantially reduced hunger and poverty,” implying that before writing the paper, they had the idea already that it was successful. Its content is limited because it ignores many detriments caused by the Green Revolution and is overwhelmingly positive, to the point where it leaves out commonly accepted flaws in implementation.
The “Green Revolution” was a term coined by Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development William S. Gaud in 1968 to describe the period of unprecedented growth in crop yields in the developing world, generally accepted to be from 1965–1985 (Gaud). It manifested in the form of technology and policy reform that allowed third-world countries in Latin America and Asia to become sustainable and potentially avoid looming famine (Pingali).
The impacts of the Green Revolution were especially relevant to India, now one of the world’s most populous countries. Malthusian viewpoints began crying that widespread famine was imminent in the 1960s — in particular, The Population Bomb by Professor Paul Elrich at Stanford University in 1968 gave dire predictions about India’s future, predicting the death of hundreds of millions of people, saying “the battle to feed all of humanity is over … I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever.” (40) Despite these doubts, or perhaps because of them, many Asian governments, including India, began to take an active role in launching agricultural programs. According to Director at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Peter Hazell, the solving of “the food problem” was almost miraculous and was completely unprecedented. Not only did the Green Revolution prevent a serious famine in India, but it led to an overall reduction in poverty and to greater economic growth. (Hazell) However, in order to determine its full effects on Indian farmers, three areas must be examined: the prevention of famine, the environment, and socioeconomic status.
In the prevention of famine, the Green Revolution’s effects were certainly positive. The Green Revolution started at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, where researchers worked to improve farming efficiency by breeding genetically modified wheat (Schafer 122). In 1965, India and other Asian nations, which had been plagued by the “spectre of famine” for the first half of the century due to their rapidly growing population, began growing the high-yield wheat from Mexico (Van Der Eng 500). Over the next 30 years, although populations doubled, crop yields more than tripled (Pingali).
With these things in mind, it seems almost impossible to say that the Green Revolution did not unequivocally and positively affect Indian farmers. However, while the immediate effects of the Green Revolution from 1965–1985 were positive and still reach out to today, the post-Green Revolution era from 1985–2000 saw many problems as the sustainability of the boom began to decline and unravel, especially environmentally and socioeconomically.
The Green Revolution has brought about negative environmental consequences. Because of the nature of the genetically modified wheat, fertilizer use per acre grew by 600 percent in India from the beginning of the Green Revolution in India to 2000 (Rosset). Professor Prabhu Pingali at Cornell University argues that not only has excessive water use also been a problem, but soil degradation and chemical runoff quickly became larger problems as they began to hurt the environment beyond the field and yields began to decline (Pingali).
However, other researchers, like Mark Lynas, author, journalist, and visiting fellow at Cornell University, argue that the Green Revolution, despite this, has improved the environment. Using the technology available in 1961, Indian farmers alone would have to cultivate 65 million extra hectares in order to feed themselves, an area of land the size of France. This is not an amount of land that India has to spare. (Lynas) Environmental damage would have spread to protected woodlands, marshes and other sensitive habitats (Hazell).
Socioeconomic concerns about the Green Revolution began to rise in India during the mid-1970s. Doctor of anthropology Anna Marie Nicolaysen argues that the Green Revolution was detrimental to Indian farmers, the majority of which were poor. In order to access the large amount resources for irrigation and fertilizer needed, only those farmers who could receive credit could afford to farm, and in the 1980s and 1990s, one third of Punjab’s (a prominent agricultural region in India) farmers were in poverty. She claims that without the economic and technical resources required, debt held by Punjabi farmers was almost four times the national average, and because of these debts, small farmers ended up having to sell their farms to their wealthier neighbors, creating an unhealthy economic climate. From 1990 to 2000, the number of small farms declined by 41 percent. (Nicolaysen) Professor Emeritus at Cornell University Donald Freebairn adds to this. Although per capita income increased by 82.2 percent between 1970 and 1995, his meta-analysis of 307 studies on income inequality revealed that 80 percent of studies that had conclusions showed that income inequality increased because of the Green Revolution (Freebairn).
However, Director at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Peter Hazell disagrees. He points out that the government subsidized fertilizer, power, and water, and intervened in markets to make sure that small farmers were able to keep up with larger farms. The Indian government set up in the mid-1960s the Intensive Agricultural District Program (IADP) and established the Food Corporation of India. In order to aid poorer farmers, the IADP poured money into the distribution and acquiring of subsidized supplies, while the Food Corporation of India bought surplus crop at a fixed price in order to avoid inflation and to guarantee profits. In fact, small farms were more efficient than larger ones in Asia. He argues that while poverty still existed in Punjab, reduction of poverty was “significant,” and Punjab grew to be one of India’s most productive sectors, despite only composing 1.5 percent of India’s land. (Hazell) In fact, Freebairn’s analysis also found that Asian-oriented authors, particularly those in India or Pakistan, were more likely to connect inequality with the Green Revolution (Freebairn).
Overall, there are three main factors that must be considered when examining the effect the Green Revolution on India’s farmers from 1985–2000: the prevention of famine, the environment, and socioeconomic status. The mitigation of famine is less important, as the brunt of that occurred during the actual Green Revolution itself in 1965–85. However, the Green Revolution in this aspect has had an undeniably positive effect. Environmentally, the use of fertilizers and other chemical aids did increase dramatically; however the prevention of an equally great or even greater environmental disaster has overall netted a positive benefit for Indian farmers, who are now able to live comfortably without further overcrowding. Economically, poverty still existed in India for farmers. However, Nicolaysen’s argument against the Green Revolution economically do not account for the fact that poverty significantly declined as a result of the reforms, even though it still higher than the rest of India. Freedbairn does not look at India specifically, and instead at all of the Green Revolution. This is flawed, since, as Hazell points out, India passed significant reforms in order to help potentially lagging small farmers.
The Green Revolution, on balance, benefited Indian farmers, rich and poor, through all three factors: prevention of famine, environment, and socioeconomic status, even after the actual Green Revolution had stagnated in 1985–2000.
Determining the effects of any action goes far beyond the effect itself. Especially for the Green Revolution, figuring out the long-term effects of widespread technology advances throughout history is incredibly important to adjust current actions and ensure that future disasters can be avoided, either through mimicry, if the results are good, or with revisions, if the results are bad. Agriculture is an issue that affects every human on Earth.
However, while the knee-jerk reaction is to characterize the Green Revolution as a good thing, historians must take care to analyze the effects from a balanced perspective. Historians have always struggled with characterizing something as a correlational or causational link. In the case of famine prevention, socioeconomic, and environmental effects, it is difficult to say how much of a role an increase in agricultural technology has affected these things with respect to other factors such as weather, tax reform, or the growth of industry, for instance.
Thus, historians must be able to think holistically and ensure that each element is accounted for when drawing conclusions. As a historian, I read studies that addressed external factors, firsthand accounts of poverty, speeches, lectures, and books that analyzed the Green Revolution and how it may have affected policy and people from every angle.
There is another moral and ethical element that gives challenge to studying agriculture and famine prevention. If you find that the Green Revolution has done more harm than good, it would be easy enough to understand intellectually, but much harder to comprehend and act emotionally. A historian who is studying the effects of famine prevention, especially in reading firsthand accounts, would be hard-pressed as a human being to look a malnourished child in the eye and say they would be better off starving. But remember, negative effects can only be solved once they have been discovered. Thus, historians must be very careful to not let themselves be emotionally biased when examining the extent of negative consequences of famine prevention, so that in the future, we can find solutions to these problems together.