LECTURE GEOG 270 Fall 2007 November 9, 2007 Joe Hannah, PhD Department of Geography University of Washington

Critiques of the Green Revolution

Last Time ► Green revolution to “beat Malthus” – increase agricultural productivity ► Scientific Approach – through plant breading ► Goal was High Yield Varieties of staple food crops – hybrids ► HYVs required far more inputs than traditional crops ► Top-down project from Western governments and Western foundations

Displaced Local Food Crops ► New varieties replaced local varieties ► Monoculture replaced multi-cropping – some secondary food crops disappeared

Environmental Effects: Water Pollution ► Increased chemical fertiliser led to leaching of nitrates into local water supplies ► When nitrates are ingested can be reduced to nitrites. High levels of nitrites in babies (whose haemoglobin is particularly susceptible to oxidation) can cause a fatal condition: methaemoglobinaemia

► Eutrophication: the excessive dosing of lakes, irrigation reservoirs and canals with nitrogen and phosphate. ► This leads to population explosions of algal plants beyond the capacity of the ecosystem and the death of animal and plant life ►  Reduced fish consumption in SE Asia Environmental Effects: Water Pollution II

Environmental Effects: Farming ► Vandana Shiva argued that Green Revolution led to  decline in soil fertility,  a decline in genetic diversity, and  the replacement of traditional drought-resistant crops by ‘thirsty’ new varieties.

Shiva (2004) “The Green Revolution replaced indigenous agriculture with monocultures. Dwarf varieties replaced tall ones, chemical fertilizers took the place of organic ones, and irrigation displaced rainfed cropping. As a result, soils were deprived of vital organic material, and soil moisture droughts became recurrent.”

Employment Effects ► During the first phase – not yet mechanized – demand for labour increased  This led to rise in wage rates in some areas  But may have increased peaks and troughs in demand and therefore workers’ vulnerability (and food security) ► During second - mechanised - stage demand for labour declined, wages declined ► Landless farmers most vulnerable

Equity: Access to Technologies ► Small farmers often could not afford the inputs required (cannot use only part of the “technological package”) ► Subsistence farming more difficult in marketized, monetized economy ► Secondary crafts surplanted by manufactured goods ► Poor got poorer, more vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition

Equity: access to GR technologies ► 1970s: gap in wealth between rich and poor had increased ► In India GR often occurred in areas of profound inequality in access to land, credit and education and often increased those inequities

Equity: Land Tenure Consolidation ► Large plots more conducive for mechanized and high-input farming practices ► Large farms more profitable ► Debt and “selling green” ► Loss of smallholdings – major changes in rural social relations with increasing wealth gaps

Borlaug’s Nobel Acceptance Speech “Never before in the history of agriculture has a transplantation of high-yielding varieties coupled with an entirely new technology and strategy been achieved on such a massive scale, in so short a period of time, and with such great success.”

Effects on Social Relations ► Disruption in community relations:  no longer based on cooperation and mutual obligation;  now rooted in adversarial relations of economic interest (Frankel, quoted in Shiva 1991) ► Increasing conflicts:  water rights,  pauperization of small farmers,  decline in wages for agr. Labor,  decreasing profitability of agriculture  Ethnic and communal violence (Shiva 1991)

Was it really that bad? ► Later Studies – benefits of the green revolution maybe not only for rich: “ But by early 1990s new set of revisionist studies suggested that the poor had benefited: as farmers, labourers, and (especially) as consumers” Dr. Craig Jeffery, UW Geography

Recent Studies Claim ► Small farmers benefited as much as the rich ► Small farmers could use a range of survival strategies – such as sharecropping ► Labourers gained from rise in real wage rates ► Price of purchased food fell ► Scale of productivity gains became clearer, eg wheat output in Punjab rose from 2.4 mn tonnes to 10.2 mn ► India became self-sufficient despite 390 mn addition to population

Defeating Hunger? ► Claims that the Green Revolution would eliminate hunger did not materialize ► However, some countries (like India) are more self-sufficient in food than previously ► Why then does hunger persist – and is still pervasive – years after the Green Revolution?

Technocratic change: Revolutionary enough? “The most plausible explanation for the failure of the Green Revolution to reduce hunger is that it put technology at the centre of ambitions to bring about changes which needed to be of a fundamentally social and political nature.” (Abraham, 1991)