Green Revolution

11 Key excerpts on "Green Revolution"

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  Mycoagroecology

  Integrating Fungi into Agroecosystems

  • Elizabeth Gall, Noureddine Benkeblia, Elizabeth Gall, Noureddine Benkeblia(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Repeated food crises and an expanding human population made increased crop production essential, so the ecological concept of sustainability was sacrificed in favor of field expansion and yield improvements. Technologies like hybrid seed varieties, irrigation, mechanization, and artificial fertilizer were adopted around the world to increase production of staple food crops. The agricultural breakthroughs of this century, which significantly increased global food availability and reduced the amount of land required to produce food (Figure 9.1), are jointly referred to as the Green Revolution. FIGURE 9.1 Thanks to many technological advancements and increased input availability, the amount of land required to produce commodity crops (see Chapter 8 in this volume) dropped significantly during the Green Revolutions of the 20th century. (Chart reproduced under the CCBY license from Ritchie, H., and M. Roser. 2019. Land Use. Our World in Data. Global Change Data Lab. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use [accessed March 18, 2022].) Unfortunately, many of these techniques and the policies governing their use led to long-term losses in soil fertility, water cleanliness, and wild habitat quality. Today there are calls for a “Second Green Revolution”, one in which nutritious yields and ecological sustainability will be given equal importance. This chapter outlines some of the historical, social, and economic paths that led to the Green Revolutions of the 20th century. Like many social revolutions, these were multinational and sometimes global movements with no clear beginning or end dates. Some authors consider the process as one long, nebulous Green Revolution. However, in our view, there are two clearly definable movements that produced dramatic increases in yields for the crops considered most vital at the time

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  Technological and Social Dimensions of the Green Revolution

  Connecting Pasts and Futures

  • Pratyusha Basu, Bruce Scholten(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Technological and social dimensions of the Green Revolution: connecting pasts and futures

  Pratyusha Basua and Bruce A. Scholtenb

  a Department of Geography, Environment and Planning, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA;b Science Laboratories, Department of Geography, Durham University, South Road, Durham, UK

  The ‘Green Revolution’, which has been marked by substantial and rapid increases in agricultural productivity from the 1950s onwards owing to high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, large-scale irrigation and mechanization, as well as funding provided by international development aid agencies, is now embroiled in debates over possible pathways towards sustainable agricultural futures. Among the principal reasons for renewed debates is the decline in productivity gains since the 1990s as existing Green Revolution technologies reach their limits. Debates are also more broadly linked to the current financial crisis that has spurred the search for new spaces of accumulation and raised the value of rural resources (Harvey 2003, Moore 2008), and to food shortages that emerged due to the volatility of food prices, partly linked to the utilization of farmland for biofuels (McMichael 2010, Moseley et al. 2010).

  This special issue provides a critical analysis of the technology–society nexus (borrowing from the science–society nexus in Jackson 2005) that characterized the Green Revolution across the Global South. This nexus is approached in terms of its construction, adoption and sustainability, which can also be considered to be the three stages in the evolution of the Green Revolution. The construction of the technology–society nexus is often based on unidirectional flows of knowledge from experts to farmers, and the institutional framework for the origin and spread of the Green Revolution consisted of an internationally coordinated alliance of scientists, governments, corporations and development agencies. Concerns over the control of knowledge have thus accompanied the Green Revolution, becoming more intense due to legally defined ownership of intellectual property in genetically modified organisms, forms of plant and animal species that are part of the new Gene Revolution (Buttel et al

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  Reasserting the Rural Development Agenda

  Lessons Learned and Emerging Challenges in Asia

  • Arsenio Molina Balisacan, Nobuhiko Fuwa(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ISEAS Publishing

    (Publisher)

  A combination of high rates of investment in crop research, infrastructure and market development, as well as appropriate policy support, fuelled this productivity growth. These elements of the Green Revolution strategy improved productivity growth despite the increasing land scarcity and high land values (Pingali and Heisey 2001). The Green Revolution transformed global food production systems and, in the process, defied the conventional wisdom that agricultural technology does not travel well because it is either agro-climatically specific, as with biological technology (i.e., seeds), or sensitive to relative factor prices, as with mechanical technology (Byerlee and Traxler 2002). The Green Revolution strategy for food crop productivity growth was explicitly based on the premise that, given appropriate institutional mechanisms, technology spillovers across political and agro-climatic boundaries could be captured. Efforts to develop the necessary institutional capacity, particularly in plant breeding, were a central part of the Green Revolution strategy. Based on the early successes with maize at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, and rice at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was established specifically to generate technological spillovers for countries that underinvest in agricultural research because they are unable to capture all the benefits of their research investments. Over the past decade the locus of agricultural research and development has shifted dramatically from the public to the private multinational sector. Three interrelated forces are responsible. The first is a stronger and evolving environment for protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) in plant innovations.

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  History and Development of Indian Agriculture

  • Bansil, P C(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Daya Publishing House

    (Publisher)

  Basically, the Green Revolution stands for producing more food and other agricultural products from less land. Modernization is one of the main concepts in the Green Revolution. The practices were made up of using high-yielding varieties of seeds, modifying farm equipment, and substantially increasing chemical fertilizers. This allowed growth and sustainability. At the beginning of the Green Revolution, there was a large growth in Indian agriculture however, instability arose and the Green Revolution was on a rapid decline. In the end, it caused a shortage of water. When water is the primary source of survival, life seems difficult when there is a large shortage of the one thing that can make assurance of life. Before the Green Revolution was introduced prior to the 1960s, farmer’s This ebook is exclusively for this university only. Cannot be resold/distributed. main goal was to produce wheat and rice. These varieties had a low yield per hectare, which means that these crops took one year to produce and in order for farmers to increase production, there would have to be a change. The change would have to consist of irrigation facilities, fertilizers, and pesticides. In order for these changes to work properly, there would have to be a sufficient quantity of water and fertilizers. At the beginning, many farmers thought if they could double their production of crops in one season, that they would do whatever they could do increase crop production. Improving high yielding varieties of wheat was a major factor, which finally led to the Green Revolution. The introduction of high-yielding varieties of seeds and the increased use of chemical fertilizers provided the agriculture industry in Indian increase in production. The Green Revolution was thought to pave the way for rapid industrial growth, but in the end it did exactly the opposite.

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  The Economy of South Asia

  From 1950 to the Present

  • Tirthankar Roy(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  7 The Green Revolution If we are looking for overlapping experiences within South Asia, we should look no further than the Green Revolution. Most areas in the Indo-Gangetic Basin straddling four countries took part in the Green Revolution of the 1970s. The outcome was not identical everywhere. The same technology and similar ecology gave rise to larger gains in land yield in some parts and lower yield gains in others. What factors made the revolution possible? Why did the outcomes differ? The present chapter is an exploration into these questions. The story can be told in three stages. Between 1947 and 1966, agricultural growth occurred by extending cultivation in India and Pakistan into newly irrigated areas. This was becoming unsustainable by the mid-1960s in India. The semi-dwarf wheat and rice plants revived growth, and defined the next stage of agricultural change when land yield was the main source of growth, and it was driven by increased application of fertilizer and water. The resultant revolution in agriculture encouraged investment in industry, services, and infra- structure, and thus became the catalyst in a process of structural change. © The Author(s) 2017 T. Roy, The Economy of South Asia, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54720-6_7 155 The time span best suited for studying the structural change is 1966– 1985. A further wave of Green Revolution continued beyond 1985, though the years after 1985 should be appropriately called ‘post-green-revolution,’ because in these years the costs of the strategy in the shape of diminishing returns and ecological stress showed up more clearly than before. I will remark on this phase in the concluding section of the chapter. The Geography of Production Possibility The vast Indo-Gangetic Basin spanning an area of 700,000 square kilometres spread over India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal pre- sents farming with a more or less similar set of challenges and opportunities.

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  Reorienting Indian Agriculture

  Challenges and Opportunities

  • Raj S. Paroda(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • CAB International

    (Publisher)

  The third phase consisted of appropriate government policies to support technology. The interaction of technology and public policy is now related to input–output and procurement pricing as well as storage and public distribution. Furthermore, it is only assured and remunerative marketing that can help farmers to take an interest in technology. However good the technology is, if the net income is not high, farmers will not take to it. In this third phase many changes took place – much more interest in technology, seed production and the distribution of inputs like fertilizers, seeds etc. As a result, in 1968, wheat production went up to 17 million t from about 7 million in 1947. Between 1964 and 1968 more wheat was added and the wheat revolution was now underway. Since then, the country has never looked back; wheat production is now 97.11 million t (2017–2018). Farmers have tried to do their best under difficult circumstances. Scientists also have been continuously producing new varieties with more resistance to pests and diseases, particularly the three rusts – stem, stripe and leaf. All three are now under control, but stem rust could become a threat again because of climate change. The story of the Green Revolution is condensed in the period 1950–1970 largely because of a new kind of plant architecture. The Green Revolution may be defined as an increase in production through productivity improvements. Hybrid corn of the USA would qualify as the starting point of the Green Revolution, as it was the exploitation of hybrid vigour in corn that started the high-yield movement. But whatever the factors that caused increased production, the Indian Green Revolution was unparalleled. The Green Revolution was the beginning of a new era in agriculture. The reasons for its success were many – technology, public policy, farmers’ enthusiasm and assured and remunerative marketing. When all these came together, India made significant progress. Now we talk of the ‘EverGreen Revolution’, i.e. increase in productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm. We need to see a hunger-free India, an India that will not go with a ‘begging bowl’ or exist hand-to-mouth.

  The term Green Revolution was first coined in 1968 by William S. Gaud, an administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), at a meeting of the Society for International Development, to describe the remarkable increases in cereal crop yields achieved in developing countries during the 1960s. The keys to this revolution were new plant varieties that fully utilized improved fertilizers and other new agrochemicals that had become available during the period. When planted using improved irrigation and crop management techniques, these new varieties gave dramatic increases in yield. The success of the Mexican programme prompted the setting up of a similar programme for rice at IRRI in the Philippines, funded jointly by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.

  Prior to the 1960s, India struggled with feeding its increasing population, and famine was a regular feature (e.g. great Bengal famine of 1942–43), resulting from meagre food production, poor distribution, droughts and floods. Two consecutive droughts in the mid-1960s led to a famine situation, which was averted by substantial foodgrain imports from the USA under its Title I Public Law 480 (PL 480) scheme. Foodgrain import steadily rose from 1.5 million t in 1946 to 4.8 million t in 1950, peaking at 10.4 million t in 1966. While branding India with epithets like the ‘begging bowl’ and ‘ship-to-mouth’, it was predicted that Indians would die in their millions by 1975 and that no food aid could save them (Paddock and Paddock, 1967

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  Reorienting Indian Agriculture

  Challenges and Opportunities

  • Raj S. Paroda(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • CAB International

    (Publisher)

  Constraints of Technologies and their Implementation The Green Revolution strategy for food crop productivity growth was overtly based on the hypothesis that, given appropriate institutional mechanisms, technology spillovers across polit-ical and agroclimatic boundaries could be captured (Pingali, 2012); and although Green Revolution technologies averted a famine-like scenario in India, avoiding the conversion of thousands of hectares of land for agricultural cultivation, they also spurred unintended nega-tive consequences. The way in which Green Rev-olution technologies were applied gave rise to many challenges, not because of the technolo-gies themselves but because of the policies that were used to promote them. A few of these are described below. Impact of Technologies in Selected Regions One downside of the Green Revolution was selec-tivity in impact, remaining confined to the well- endowed, well-irrigated and high-rainfall areas. This was in spite of the fact that international breeding programmes had aimed to provide broadly adaptable germplasm for cultivation in a wide range of geographies; but adoption was highest in favoured areas. Many of the agricul-tural technologies were not suitable for, or adopted by, small and marginal farmers, espe-cially those in rainfed ecologies. For example, high-yielding varieties (HYV) of wheat provided yield gains of 40% in irrigated areas with mod-est use of fertilizers, while in dry areas the gains were often no more than 10%, and the technolo-gy adoption was strongly correlated with water supply (Pingali, 2012). Inter-regional disparities widened, as did the gap between rich and poor farmers. Technologies in the Green Revolution period did not focus on the constraints to produc-tion in more marginal environments, especially tolerance to stresses such as droughts or floods.

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  Europe's Green Revolution and its Successors

  The Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant Breeding

  • Jonathan Harwood(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 The Green Revolution and its critics

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203118047-7

  After 1945 the Central European movement for peasant-friendly plant breeding, in Germany at least, went into gradual decline. And by the 1950s in both North America and Western Europe it was becoming clear that in agriculture small was not beautiful. ‘Get bigger or get out’ was the slogan of the day. While state efforts to foster agricultural change in the developed world from the 1950s were particularly intense, intervention as such was nothing new. As we saw in Chapter 1 , it had been going on in Europe since the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, over the same period ‘development’ was under way in various colonial empires as European powers sought to boost production, usually focusing upon cash crops designed for markets in the ‘mother country’ but sometimes including staple crops with an eye to improving the standard of living of the indigenous population (Rist 2008 : 56–58; Cooper 2010 ; Unger 2010b ). After the war ‘development’ resumed in European colonial empires, taking the form of large-scale state-led projects (Bonneuil 2001 ) which proved popular with some post-colonial elites (Speich 2009a ). Emerging from the war both economically and politically stronger, the United States greatly expanded its development activity. Central to this was a series of agricultural programmes which eventually became known as the ‘Green Revolution’. Devised initially by US foundations and complemented by US government initiatives, these programmes sought to stimulate economic development in Latin America and Asia under the banner of ‘modernization’.

  The term ‘Green Revolution’ is generally thought to have been coined in the late 1960s by an official in the U.S. State Department who suggested that Green Revolutions could be a non-violent way to avert ‘red revolutions’ among Third World peasants (Gaud 1968 ). Since then a surprising number of commentators have misleadingly claimed that the Green Revolution as an undertaking originated during the 1960s. It is quite clear, however, that the GR programmes in Asia of the 1960s were modelled in large part upon similar programmes in Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s. Since then, in its basic features the Green Revolution has remained largely unchanged right into the present. All GR programmes old and new, for example, have sought to improve agricultural productivity not through fundamental socio-political change (e.g. land reform) but via institutional reform and ‘getting the technology right’. Nevertheless, the Green Revolution has also undergone significant changes since the beginning which are important in what follows. In this chapter and the next, therefore, I will distinguish between a first, second and third generation of Green Revolutions. By the ‘first generation’ I mean the programmes of the 1940s through 1960s whose principal aim was to boost production in suitable regions with little concern for the social consequences of the intervention. The transition to the next phase was marked by a wave of criticism of the Green Revolution around 1970 which left its impact upon the ‘second generation’ of programmes during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. These programmes were much more concerned with poverty alleviation, focusing especially upon the needs of small farmers and the rural population. The transition to the ‘third generation’ (dating roughly from 2000) has been marked by the emergence of the new biotechnology which proponents of the Green Revolution now claim provides a necessary foundation for all future programmes. And as I will argue in chapter 7

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  Indian Agriculture after the Green Revolution

  • Binoy Goswami, Madhurjya Prasad Bezbaruah, Raju Mandal(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction After independence in 1947, Indian agriculture experienced two phases – the successful Green Revolution, which made the nation food grain self-sufficient during 1968–1978, and more significantly, the agrarian crisis after economic liberalization. On the eve of independence, the country was suffering from food shortages, particularly due to poor productivity. The Green Revolution initiated in India in 1964–65 aimed mainly at achieving self-sufficiency in food grains. Initially, the success of the Green Revolution was observed most notice-ably in the highly irrigated areas of India, especially in Punjab and Haryana in the northwestern region. The success of the Green Revolution was made pos-sible by the introduction of high-yielding varieties of seeds, increased use of chemical fertilizers, irrigation and other modern farming methods. This crop revolution 1 spread to other regions of the country over time and resulted in a spectacular growth of major cereals like wheat and rice at the expense of coarse grain and pulse crops during the late 1960s and early 1970s (Gulati and Kel-ley, 1999). However, Indian agriculture faced several problems starting from 1980s in the form of degradation of natural and environmental resources like soil and water, rising cost of cultivation and declining profitability, dwindling of farm productivity and so on. The extreme manifestation of the crisis was a spate of farmers’ suicides (Bezbaruah, 2014). Neo-liberal economic reforms which India initiated in 1991 and the new environment after the establish-ment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 brought both new challenges and opportunities for the agriculture sector. While adjusting to such changing circumstances, Indian agriculture has experienced changes in many dimensions. This chapter gives an overview of the performance of the agriculture sector in India after the Green Revolution.

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  The Vandana Shiva Reader

  • Vandana Shiva(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  It was a choice not to start by developing seeds bet- Science and Politics in the Green Revolution 31 ter able to withstand drought or pests. It was a choice not to concentrate first on improving traditional methods of increasing yields, such as mixed cropping. It was a choice not to develop technology that was productive, labour-intensive, and independent of foreign input supply. It was a choice not to concentrate on reinforcing the balanced, traditional diets of grain plus legumes.” 16 The crop and varietal diversity of indigenous agriculture was replaced by a narrow genetic base and monocultures. The focus was on interna- tionally traded grains and a strategy of eliminating mixed and rotational cropping and replacing diverse varieties with varietal simplicity. While the new varieties reduced diversity, they increased resource use of water and boosted the employment of chemical inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers. The strategy of the Green Revolution was aimed at transcending scar- city and creating abundance. Yet it put new demands on scarce renew- able resources and generated new demands for nonrenewable resources. The Green Revolution technology required heavy investments in fertil- izers, pesticides, seed, water, and energy. Intensive agriculture generated severe ecological destruction, created new kinds of scarcity and vulner- ability, and resulted in new levels of inefficiency in resource use. Instead of transcending the limits imposed by natural endowments of land and water, the Green Revolution introduced new constraints on agriculture by wasting and destroying land, water resources, and crop diversity. The Green Revolution had been offered as a miracle, yet, as Angus Wright has observed: “One way in which agricultural research went wrong was pre- cisely in saying and allowing it to be said that some miracle was being pro- duced.

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  World Economic and Social Survey 2011

  The Great Green Technological Transformation

  • (Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • United Nations Publications

    (Publisher)

  91 Towards a truly Green Revolution for food security In countries like Brazil, China and India, whose Governments had chosen to prioritize poverty reduction and food security, dynamic innovation systems emerged in support of agricultural development. In other instances, the scaling up of innovative practices—inter alia, for rice intensification, for farmers’ training and in the case of India, for the watershed initiative mentioned above—was possible through the endorsement by international organizations, national non-governmental organizations and local govern- ments of new practices in support of dissemination of knowledge, greater participation by and capacity development of farmers, building of missing infrastructure and improving access to credit, information and other supportive services. National strategies for food security and sustainable agriculture need to explicitly recognize the politico-economic obstacles to inducing a radical transformation in agriculture that is focused on improving the productive capacity of small-scale food producers. Gender-sensitive agricultural innovation Unless policies to promote innovation in agriculture have an explicit gender focus, women will continue to be disadvantaged with respect to accessing new technologies and sup- portive services. Women in rural areas face major labour constraints as a result of their multiple responsibilities: besides providing traditional family care, rural women are typi- cally responsible for fetching water and firewood, tending animals and farming the house garden and often engage in wage employment. Simple labour-saving tools (including green cooking stoves and appropriate tools for planting and weeding) and better access to water for house consumption would help ease their time constraints. It is important in fostering the creation of a dynamic innovation system that addresses women’s needs, to grasp the impact of the institutions and local values that define their role.

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