THE GREEN REVOLUTION

CONTROVERSY

Zegeye Tirfe
What was the original green revolution?
The original green revolution was an introduction of newly developed wh
eat and rice seeds into Latin America and into the irrigated farming lands
of South and Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.

These new seed verities were created by plant breeders working in Mexic
o and Philippines with support from the Rockefeller foundation.

The seeds were capable of producing much higher yields when grown wit
h adequate water and fertilizer.
In Asia overall, rice output had increased at only a 2.1 percent annual
rate during the two decades before the new varieties were introduced
in 1965, but then it grew at a 2.9 percent annual rate for the next two
decades.
The significance increase in Asias capacity to produce basic grains ca
me at a critical time, when rates of population growth were at a peak.
Supporters of these new seeds credit them with saving Asia from wha
t would have been a tragic food crisis.
Why is the green Revolution Controversial?

Some critics feared they would lead to greater income inequality if only l
arger farmers were able to adopt them.

Others worried they would make farmers too dependent on the purchase
of expensive inputs such as fertilizer.

Still others feared environmental damage from excessive fertilizer applic

ation, excessive pumping of groundwater for irrigation, or excessive spra
ying of pesticides.
The new seeds were also criticized on grounds that they would reduce bi
odiversity when uniform monocultures of green revolution crop varietie
s replaced diverse poly-cultures of traditional crop varieties.

At the foundation of much of this criticism is a wide spread social suspi

cion, mostly among non farmers, of new technology that employs scienc
e to alter or dominate the biology of traditional farming.

It is not an accident that green revolution critics also tend to criticize m

ost other 20th-centrury agricultural innovations, including synthetic nitr
ogen fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and of course, genetically engineer
ed seeds.
They favor instead traditional seed varieties developed and selected by fa
rmers themselves based on indigenous knowledge rather than laborato
ry science.

Most of these critics are not farmers themselves, bur they express sympat
hy for the smaller and more diversified farmers of the past who purchase
d fewer inputs and sold their output locally.

Advocates for the green revolution approach look for ways to bring a far
m technology upgrade to sub-Saharan Africa, the one region not reached
by the original green revolution, but they encounter critics arguing agains
t this objective.
When the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Fou
ndation formed a partnership in 2006 called the Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the initiative brought immediate criticis
m from activist groups.

Peter Rosset, speaking for a nongovernmental organization(NGO) in t

he United States named Food First, warned that the most likely result
of the new initiative would be higher profits for the seed and fertilize
r industries, negligible impacts on total food production and a worsen
ing exclusion and marginalization in the countryside.

These dramatically divergent opinions about the green revolution can

also be explained by the divergent performance of the new seeds in As
ia versus Latin America.
People who work in Asia generally like the green revolution, but tho
se who work in Latin America often do not.

This is because the benefits of the new seed varieties in Asia were wi
dely shared by the poor, whereas in Latin America, the poor gained
very little.

Advocates for the green revolution approach usually drawn their arg
uments from the experience of Asia, while critics refer more often to
what went wrong in Latin America.
Did the original green revolution lead to grea
ter rural inequality?

It did in Latin America but not in Asia.

In much of Latin America, the ownership of productive land and acc

ess to credit for the purchase of essential green revolution inputs su
ch as fertilizer tend to be restricted to a privileged rural elite. The in
troduction of green revolution technologies worsened these rural ine
qualities.
In most of Asia , by contrast , access to good agricultural land and cre
dit was not as narrowly controlled , which allowed the uptake of the n
ew seeds to be more widely sheared and brought more equitable gains
in the end.

Critics try to ignore these gains.

Poverty has declined significantly in rural Asia since the green revolut
ion , and farmers have shown no interest in abandoning the seeds, yet
many activists groups remain hostile.
In 1992, long after the results of the green revolution technology were sho
wn in Asia, celebrity activist Vadana Shiva published a polemic titled The
Violence of the Green Revolution depicting the new seeds as a plot by mu
ltinational companies ( the seeds had actually been introduced by philant
hropic foundations and governments) to lure farmers away from growing
traditional crops, destroying their culture and making them poor and dep
endent.

In 2004, a coalition of 670 separate NGOs sent an open letter to the direc
tor general of the UN food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that referr
ed to the green revolution as a tragedy.
Was the green revolution bad for the environment?

Environmental outcomes also differed in Latin America versus Asia.

In Latin America, environmental damage from green revolution far

ming tended to emerge side be side.

On the best lands controlled by politically favored plant breeding, a

tremendous onslaught on fragile lands and forecast margins has bee
n avoided.
Why did the original green revolution not reach Af
rica?
Green revolution farming has not yet reached deeply into sub-Saharan Afri
ca.
Efforts were made to introduce green revolution seed varieties into Africa i
n the 1960s and 1970s, but there was little adoption because the internatio
nal assistance agencies introducing the varieties had tried to shortcut the
time-consuming process of identifying and using locally adapted plants as t
he starting point for breeding improvements.
Varieties not suited to Africa conditions were brought in from Latin Americ
a and Asia, and African farmers did not like them.
This problems was belatedly addressed through breeding programs that
were more location specific beginning in the 1980s, but by that time , inte
rnational assistance for such programs had begin to decline because the s
o-called world food crisis of the 1970s was deemed by rich donor governm
ents to be over.

African farmers also failed to take up the new seed varieties because they
had a more complex mix of agro-ecologies, and a smaller share of their la
nd was suited to conventional irrigation.
Access to farmland is generally more equitable than in either Latin Ameri
ca or Asia, but only 4 percent of agricultural land in Africa is irrigated.
This forces farmers to relay on uncertain rainfall and weakens their ince
ntive to invest in improved green revolution seed, which only do well wit
h adequate moisture.

In addition, the dominant food crops in the region included root crops li
ke sweet potato and cassava, or tropical white maize, rather than the lea
ding green revolution cereal crops such as wheat, rice, and yellow maize.

Critical as well, most farmers in Africa are women, lacking the political v
oice needed to demand government investments in rural education, roa
d infrastructure, and electrical power of the kind that were essential to t
he earlier uptake of the technology in Asia.
What approaches do green revolution critics favor?

They prefer farming models based on agro-ecology, an approach that f

avors small diversified farms over large specialized farms, poly-cultur
es over monocultures, biological controls for pests rather than chemic
al controls, crop rotations and manure to replace soil nutrients rather
than synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, mulching and water harvesting syst
em over large-scale irrigation ,and community-based or indigenous k
nowledge over laboratory science.
Agro-ecology advocates believe efforts to engineer natural biological
systems will always produce unintended consequences, many of the
m bad.

Instead of trying to dominates nature, farmers should be learning fr

om and even imitating nature.

Agro-ecology advocates promote the enhancement of traditional or i

ndigenous knowledge systems as an alternative to exotic, reductioni
st approaches. The greatest strength of this work is its effort to balan
ce a search for short-term productivity with an insistence on long-te
rm stability, social equity, and sustainability.
Green revolution advocates would counter that their approach can also be s
table , equitable, and sustainable, assuming equal access to land and credit
plus continuing research investments to develop new seed varieties so as to
stay ahead of evolving pest and disease pressures.

Advocates for agro-ecology have gained prominent endorsements for their

approach. For example an international assessment of agricultural knowled
ge, science and technology for development (IAASTD) COMPLETED IN 20
08 warned that relying on science and technology to increase agricultural p
roductivity would bring too many unintended social and environmental co
nsequences.

This assessment, conducted under the auspices of the World Bank and the
United Nations, asserted that the model of innovation that drove the origin
al green revolution requires revision.
It called for more emphasis on agro-ecological approaches, organic appr
oaches, and the incorporation of traditional and local knowledge.

This assessment was rejected by green revolution advocates, who compl

ained it had been too heavily shaped by non-scientists, including enviro
nmental advocates from NGOs such as Greenpeace International, Frien
ds of the Earth International, and the Pesticide Action Network.

The best approach is usually to combine agro-ecological insights with gr

een revolution seeds and off-farm inputs.
How have green Revolution critics shaped internat
ional policy?
Political controversies over green revolution farming continue to rage in a num
ber of important settings among foreign aid donors and within intergovernmen
tal organizations.

In such settings, nongovernmental organizations that reject the green revolutio

n fight hard to promote agro-ecological and organic approaches to farming and
to block green revolution approaches that relay on purchased inputs and mode
rn agricultural science.

In the 1980s, this kind of political advocacy against the green revolution began
to have an impact on the foreign assistance policies of donor countries.

Assistance to promote irrigation, new seed distribution, and access to chemical

fertilizers was cut back.
This withdrawal of donor support had little effect in Latin America and
Asia, where agricultural modernization was already successfully under w
ay, but it left the aid-dependent governments in Africa without enough e
xternal support to begin a confident move down a green revolution path.

Later in the 1990s, one of the architects of the original green revolution i
n Asia, Gordon Conway, tried to rescue Science-based farming from its c
ritics by calling for research investments in a double green revolution t
hat would increase yields while at the same time protect the environmen
t and ensure benefits for the poor, but support for international agricultu
ral research continued to fall.

The green revolution is highly controversial in elite circles, especially am

ong environmentalists in rich countries, yet it remains firmly established
as the approach of choice among most farmers and agricultural policy le
aders, including those in the developing world.
 End
Thank you!