The Green Revolution refers to the major breakthroughs of the middle twentieth century which helped to increase agricultural yields and efficiency, thus allowing millions more people to receive the food and nutrition they need to live healthy lives. This revolution was the culmination of years of scientific effort, but even though it achieved amazing results, not all of the consequences of the Green Revolution have been positive. In order to understand the advantages and the disadvantages of it, eve must first understand what this huge change in agriculture entailed.
Norman Borlaug is described as the “Father of the Green Revolution” and received the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his efforts to help developing countries achieve higher crop yields. As B. H. Farmer explained in 1986, the Green Revolution produced “new, high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereals, especially dwarf wheats and rices, in association with chemical fertilizers and agro-chemicals, and with controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and new methods of cultivation, including mechanization.” These technologies could be woven together as an agricultural “package” that farmers could adopt to dramatically increase their yields and thus produce more food on the same amount of arable land. The Green Revolution is believed to have saved the lives of one billion people who would otherwise have been at risk of starvation had their tried to subsist on traditional farming practices and agricultural techniques. As a result, the Green Revolution has been heralded as a modern miracle.
However, the benefits of the Green Revolution have not been felt evenly around the world. The change in agriculture produced notably positive results in Mexico and in Asia, particularly India, but in Africa the effort to improve agricultural yields stalled. The Green Revolution sputtered out in Africa due to a range of factor. Experts attribute this failure to political corruption, political and social instability, and a lack of infrastructure to support new agricultural techniques. As a result, large parts of Africa remained vulnerable to famine, such as the infamous famine that swept Ethiopia in the 1980s. At the same time, when there is a combination of political will and financial support, the Green Revolution can still achieve powerful outcomes in Africa. Malawi famously introduced modern corn-growing methods in 2005 and within a few years had produced enough food to feed itself, with a surplus left over.
The benefits of the Green Revolution are therefore obvious: When there is more food, people are more secure. Food security increased as a result of these changes, meaning that the average person in the developing world now has more reliable access to food than at any time in the past. In fact, the average person living in the developing world now consumes one-fourth more calories per day than his or her counterpart consumed before the launch of the Green Revolution. Consequently, malnutrition has been greatly reduced around the world, and the diseases associated with insufficient nutrition have been reduced as well. A healthier, more stable population produces a healthier, more stable society. However, there is some evidence that the Green Revolution actually weakened support for socialist policies as populations sought capitalist and technocratic solutions to problems.
At the same time, however, the Green Revolution has had negative consequences for the environment. The pesticides needed to achieve higher crop yields, for example, can be quite toxic, and the amounts used around the world to generate the kinds of yields needed by a population that now exceeds seven billion can be damaging to the environment, particularly waterways. Pesticides often run off fields into waterways, where they can damage the water supply for humans and animals alike. Industrial agriculture is also blamed for an increase in some greenhouse gases. There is also concerns that the Green Revolution has reduced the quality of the average person’s diet by overemphasizing cheap staple grains such as wheat, rice, and corn over more nutritious traditional foods, such as ancient grains, vegetables, and fruits.
However you choose to look at the Green Revolution, there is no denying that it has dramatically changed our relationship to the land and how we relate to food and those who produce it. Whether the advantages or the disadvantages predominate depends on your perspective and your values.
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