India's Green Revolution Success or Folly?

It is ironic that India's agricultural revolution was labeled 'green' since it involved techniques that we now recognize were distinctly not environmentally friendly.

The Green Revolution was a response to famine, once believed to be cyclical in inevitable, in India such as the 1943 Bengal Famine which killed 4 million people alone in eastern India (that included today's Bangladesh). The belief was that these famines were linked to acute shortfalls in food production, and the solution to such cycles of famine was to increase food production.

Using techniques first implemented in Mexico and the Philippines, the Green Revolution imported agriculture techniques which involved the use of 'high yielding' hybrid seeds, chemical pesticides and chemical fertilizers. It was deemed a success in that since the implementation of the Green Revolution India has no longer suffered from cycles of famine.

There are many who argue that this success label is questionable.

To begin with, this type of farming requires immense amounts of capital each year to purchase equipment, fertilizers and seeds. And because the shift in focus was away from subsistence agriculture to commodity agriculture it leaves farmers subject to the vagaries of the international marketplace. Consequently, many farmers are now locked into a cycle of debt when one bad crop leaves them unable to pay off their loans each year.

In addition by focusing on a handful of crops it has subjected Indian to all the problems of conventional agriculture: reduced genetic diversity, increased vulnerability to pests, soil erosion, reduced soil fertility, micronutrient deficiencies, along with a host of other problems including rural impoverishment and further entrenching the divide between the haves and the have nots.

Additionally, the crops require so much water that water tables in some regions of India have dropped drastically, causing salinization of the soil, and some fear, pushing India on the precipice of desertification. The entire situation calls into question whether India's green revolution is in any way sustainable.

As Vanda Shiva illustrated in her seminal piece The Green Revolution in the Punjab:

The distinguishing feature of the (high yielding) seeds, however, is that they are highly responsive to certain key inputs such as fertilizers and irrigation water. The term "high responsive varieties" is thus more appropriate.

In the absence of additional inputs of fertilizers and water, the new seeds perform worse than indigenous varieties. The gain in output is insignificant compared to the increase in inputs. The measurement of output is also biased by restricting it to the marketable elements of crops. But, in a country like India, crops have traditionally been bred to produce not just food for humans, but fodder for animals and organic fertilizer for soils. In the breeding strategy for the Green Revolution, multiple uses of plant biomass seem to have been consciously sacrificed for a single use.

In other words, the improved efficiency and increased yield of the Green Revolution is less a case of outright improved yield and more of selective accounting.