The Green Revolution Revisited

Critique and Alternatives

Bernhard Glaeser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136891625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Green Revolution – the apparently miraculous increase in cereal crop yields achieved in the 1960s – came under severe criticism in the 1970s because of its demands for optimal irrigation, intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides; its damaging impact on social structures; and its monoculture approach. The early 1980s saw a concerted approach to many of these criticisms under the auspices of Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This book, first published in 1987, analyses the recent achievements of the CGIAR and examines the Green Revolution concept in South America, Asia and Africa, from an 'ecodevelopment' standpoint, with particular regard to the plight of the rural poor. The work is characterised by a concern for the ecological and social dimensions of agricultural development, which puts the emphasis on culturally compatible, labour absorbing and environmentally sustainable food production which will serve the long term needs of developing countries.

1
Agriculture between the Green Revolution and ecodevelopment: which way to go?

BERNHARD GLAESER

The Green Revolution in the 1970s

In 1970 the American botanist, Norman Borlaug, Director of the Division for Wheat Cultivation at the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (CIMMYT) in Mexico, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was honoured for having set in motion a worldwide agricultural development, later to be called the ‘Green Revolution’. This development was based on the genetic improvement of particularly productive plants. Borlaug’s so-called ‘miracle wheat’ doubled and tripled yields in a short period of time. Similar increases were soon achieved with maize and, at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, with rice.

The success of the newly developed strains appeared limitless. They were introduced in several Asian countries in 1965, and, by 1970, these strains were being cultivated over an area of 10 million hectares. Within three years, Pakistan ceased to be dependent on wheat imports from the United States. Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and a number of African and South American countries achieved record harvests. India, which had just avoided a severe famine in 1967, produced enough grain within five years to support its population. Even after the 1979 drought, grain imports were not necessary. India had become self-sufficient in wheat and rice, tripling its wheat production between 1961 and 1980. Such has been the success story of the Green Revolution as propagated by its proponents in the mass media (see, among others, Baier 1984).

Despite its obvious successes, however, the Green Revolution came under severe criticism during the 1970s for ecological and socio-economic reasons (see, among others, Pearse 1977). The main criticism directed against Green Revolution successes was that high yields could only be obtained under certain optimum conditions: optimal irrigation; intensive use of fertilizers; monoculture (for the rational use of machinery and agricultural equipment); and pest control with chemical pesticides (also requiring monoculture).

Further, critics claimed that an important prerequisite for the Green Revolution mode of production was rich soil. Hybrid plants would otherwise be choked out by weeds which have adapted to the less favourable soils, and they could not survive the struggle against insect pests. Moreover, farmers living in problem regions were frequently too poor to be able to afford expensive irrigation equipment and the inordinate amounts of pesticides required (Egger & Glaeser 1984).

Newly discovered environmental calamities and health hazards added more dark colours to an already gloomy picture (Redclift 1984). Intensive fertilization resulted in nitration, in turn causing eutrophication of freshwater streams and lakes. Excessive amounts of pesticides, applied irresponsibly over large areas, created health hazards for rural inhabitants. Moreover, the energy necessary for the production of nitrogen-based fertilizers, for running agricultural machinery, for fuel, and for operating irrigation facilities was severely limited, placing further constraints on Green Revolution development potential.

In the social context, another criticism of the Green Revolution was that it favoured so-called progressive farmers—that is, large landholders with Western education. Small landowners were not subsidized and frequently gave up their farms because they could no longer compete. A landless, rural proletariat was subsequently created; income distribution shifted in favour of the wealthy, and class conflicts developed. Traditional social structures disintegrated so that the extended family, for example, could no longer serve its function of providing social security and care for elderly family members. The resulting mass migration of landless poor from rural areas to the cities has led to the development of urban slums.

The Green Revolution ‘revisited’ in the 1980s

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has responded to many of the shortcomings of the Green Revolution. It established the Farming Systems Research (FSR) programme which was designed to cope with the needs of small farmers in particular. Further, it adopted an integrated system of biological pest control; more effort was placed on genetic research as a result of the higher priority given to the pest resistancy of crops, and the efficiency of fertilizers was to be improved. Finally, a number of other new institutes were founded under the auspices of CGIAR, including the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), established in Hydrabad, India, to cope with production problems specific to arid and semi-arid zones.

In light of these more recent developments (see also Mooney 1983), it seems appropriate to ‘revisit’ the Green Revolution after a relatively taciturn period in its history to reconsider and re-evaluate its efforts and achievements since the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1982, the International Institute for Environment and Society of the Science Center Berlin, commissioned Edmund K.Oasa with the task of re-examining the Green Revolution from a social-science perspective. The objective here was to evaluate the policies of the CGIAR system as explicitly stated or implicitly embodied in authentic documents of the Consultative Group (CG).

The critique and evaluation by Edmund K.Oasa (Ch. 2) is eye-opening: the author subjects Green Revolution policy statements to careful scrutiny; the core of Green Revolution policy is called into serious question, and not just those minor deficiencies or shortcomings that could otherwise be attributed to faulty implementation of policy.

Oasa acknowledges that the Consultative Group has taken new steps and undertaken some novel approaches in response to socio-ecological criticisms of Green Revolution policy. For example, it has instituted a number of projects including the Farming Systems Research programme, a system of integrated pest management, and a programme of biological nitrogen fixation, among others, in an attempt to countermand rural proletarianization. Nevertheless, Oasa argues, the general misery of the poor tends to increase, and class lines and conflicts tend to sharpen as a result of inherent contradictions in CG policies and the politically neutral stance that the Group has adopted, at least superficially. The CGIAR, he writes, ‘must take a position of neutrality precisely because it is not neutral’. This implies that

(a) agricultural research develops technology but nothing more;

(b) individual states (countries), not the research institution, are responsible for dealing with internal distribution problems and accompanying inequities;

(c) it is impossible to develop technology exclusively for small farmers; large landowners or corporate farmers will invariably benefit as well.

Oasa argues further that through research’s ‘inaction’, that is, neutrality towards fundamental questions, the objective correspondence between programmes of the state and international agricultural research will become apparent: the predominant, extant class structures will be endorsed and preserved. Unless the state chooses to impose an agrarian-centred development strategy based on small-farm technology, and unless it can provide the capital necessary to accommodate employment for the landless, social tensions are bound to rise, and these could eventually evolve into a national class struggle with redistribution of landholdings at its heart.

In his case study on India, Pierre Spitz (Ch. 3) examines some of India’s food systems and discovers that the Green Revolution in India was mainly a ‘wheat revolution’, patterned after the agricultural models of the industrialized countries. Pierre Spitz questions the appropriateness of this model for India. He makes a plea for ‘alternative technologies which could ensure a less uneven development between crops, regions and social groups—reducing disparities between them as well as between seasonal income, employment and year-to-year production’. Thus agricultural research and extension should respond to the ‘unverbalized needs of the majority and not only to the effective social demand of the few’. This means that special measures should be taken to eliminate seasonality as a negative factor influencing peasant incomes and the (un)employment of the rapidly growing rural class of landless poor. Spitz suggests that efforts should be made to guarantee cultivation the year round, for example, through dry farming, relay-cropping, or intercropping. This would require some form of institutional support to enable local peasants to organize, not only for confronting technological problems, but also for dealing with issues over land tenure and credit.

Alternative policies

Criticism of the Green Revolution and, in particular, CGIAR’s policies—no matter how powerful and convincing the arguments—nevertheless represents only a partial solution directed towards improving the lot of the rural poor in developing countries. The question inevitably arises: is Green Revolution strategy as it is elaborated by the Consultative Group the only direction the alleviation of rural poverty can take? Are there not alternative strategies which have the same end but which employ other means to it?

In the search for alternative strategies, several experts were summoned and challenged to respond to the critiques of Edmund Oasa and Pierre Spitz from their own work and experiences in developing countries on three continents: South America, Asia and Africa. As contributing authors to this volume, each of these experts is in some way or another committed to the concept of an ‘ecodevelopment’ strategy as a viable alternative. An ecodevelopment strategy is one that (a) is oriented towards fulfilling the basic needs of the poor; (b) promotes self-reliance in agriculture; and (c) strives for environmental compatibility in production methods (see Glaeser 1984).

Ademar Ribeiro Romeiro (Ch. 4) examines development problems in Brazil, where he claims that adherence to the Green Revolution’s principles of high-input and labour-saving technology has further aggravated the already existing social inequalities and that new disruptions to the ecology have occurred. The net result of this has been food scarcity and severe rural unemployment in a country whose agricultural area of 323 million hectares (1975) represents 2.5 times the area available for agriculture in India and three times that in China, but whose population is equivalent to only about one-fifth that of India and one-tenth that of China. The author attempts to account for why the country with the biggest agricultural area in the world is unable to feed its own people, yet is extremely dynamic in developing export crops.

The extremely low wages paid to Brazilian workers, caused, in part, by the weakness of the labour unions, is the main cause of insufficient food production. Agricultural policy has played an important role in weakening the workers’ capacity to fight for better wages by forcing so many rural inhabitants out of the fields, away from the countryside, and into the cities. Poor living conditions for the urban masses are further aggravated by excessively high prices for food, driven up by a class of extremely powerful and well-organized speculators.

The inability of agriculture to absorb labour results mainly from speculating with the available land rather than using it for production. This is clearly reflected in the high concentration of property in the hands of the few and the waste of much of the available farmland. Most of the land available for agriculture is used as extensive grazing land for cattle. This is the traditional method used to control large areas of land with very little labour input. Often enough, available land is simply abandoned or left totally unused while the landholders wait for prices to rise.

As criteria for selecting an alternative technology, Romeiro proposes that (a) the technology should be compatible with available labour, (b) that it should be energy saving, and (c) that it shall encourage or promote ecological sustainability. This does not imply the return to traditional agricultural practices as such, but it does imply a return to the rationale behind them. The individual production function must be changed in such a way that the production factor of ‘capital’ can be substituted for by labour and ecological know-how. An abundance of land must be provided for agriculture. Modifications in the production structure must be supplemented with additional economic measures; the purchasing power of peasants and the mass of urban poor must be increased in real terms, and the profits of middlemen and land speculators must be restricted. In short, Brazil’s agricultural policy must ensure that ecologically sustainable production patterns are adopted and that the bulk of the ‘excess’ labour force is absorbed.

In his contribution, R.N.Roy (Ch. 5) claims that ‘lndia’s water scarcity and soil erosion problems stem from intensive cropping using unsuitable imported agricultural technology, and from the country’s socio-politico-economic reality which has mortgaged long-term sustainability and development for short-term profit involving exploitation of the masses who work on the land’. As an alternative solution for both the socio-economic and the...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of tables
• 1 Agriculture between the Green Revolution and ecodevelopment: which way to go?
• PART I The Green Revolution: policy and implementation
• PART II Alternative approaches in three continents
• PART III Outlook
• Contributors
• Index