How to make the Green Revolution Sustainable

During the middle of the 1960’s in India there was a massive food shortage with predictions of mass deaths due to starvation throughout the country. Western countries tried to help by sending in wheat and other crops and they thought that India would never be able to become self-sufficient. There were several options that could have been undertaken at that point which included a dependency on imports, a focus on traditional agricultural and farming social systems but the plan that the government decided to go with was what became known as the Green Revolution. As was stated in the Swaminathan article “The new agricultural strategy of the 1960s and 1970s focused on regions well-endowed in terms of irrigation, on a few crops (particularly wheat and rice) and on farmers who could mobilize the investment necessary for new farming practices”. This caused a doubling in wheat production in five years and by 1972 had gone from being an importer of 10.3 million tons of grain to being a strong exporter. But what is especially important was that the rate of food grain production exceeded the rate of population growth (Swaminathan, Population and Food Security, 2010).

But these great achievements in food production that were made in the 1960s and 1970s have somewhat plateaued in recent years, party due to the liberalizing of the economy in India that began in 1991 and production rates have dipped back down below population growth rates (which are less than in the 1960s and 1970s). The new trade rules that were put in place with many of the new deregulations that were implemented with the liberalizing of the Indian economy including the removal of restrictions on imports and reductions in tariffs, has lead to major price changes for both the purchaser and the supplier related for domestically produced products (Swaminathan, Population and Food Security, 2010). If this continues to be the case and food production rates do not again lead ahead of population growth there is a sting possibility that India could lapse back into the food shortage patterns of their past (Swaminathan, Beyond the Green Revolution: Food for All for For Ever, 2010).

Yet in the last few years many measures have been initiated to attempt to reverse this trend. There has been an increase in the development of rural infrastructure, plans such as the National Food Security and Horticulture Missions to promote and spur on food production and the enablement of rural farmers to go back to a formal credit system through loan waivers. But if this is to be a sustainable venture, it needs to become what the authors we have been reading from have called an “Evergreen Revolution” which is when farm productivity is improved permanently without environmental degradation and harm (Swaminathan, Beyond the Green Revolution: Food for All for For Ever, 2010).

            In an article published in the Sociologia Ruralis  journal by Sally Brooks titled “Biotechnology and the Politics of Truth: From the Green Revolution to an Evergreen Revolution” it is discussed that biotechnology, if properly implemented and understood, could be a great way of making the Green Revolution sustainable and become “Evergreen”. But the main problems that exist with that are that many developing countries are reluctant to grow any GMOs because of the growing opposition among consumers in many European countries to genetically modified agricultural products. This means that India has to make sure that they have a large enough base to invest in and buy their test products without risking the need to export them to create a profit. So the acceptance of GMOs by the populace of India is very important for the global biotech industry as a whole when related to agriculture. The use of biotechnology would also be a very capitalistic driven venture towards sustaining the Green Revolution while the movement in the first place was pushed by and implemented by the government of India which could cause problems with corporations wanting to make a profit more than wanting to feed the hungry in India (Brooks, 2005).

This table from the article is very helpful in showing how the introduction of biotechnology will continue some of the same trends that were introduced with the onset of the Green Revolution but there would also be many changes. The changes, as mentioned earlier would revolve around the movement to the private sector, which changes both ownership and the range of people who will be influencing policy and implementation practices (Brooks, 2005). Though I do not believe that the only way to sustain India’s Green Revolution is through biotechnology, it seems like further research in the field, especially in modifying grains to carry more nutrients and require fewer pesticides is a good starting point.

Bibliography

Brooks, S. (2005). Biotechnology and te Politics of Truth: From the Green Revolution to an Evergreen Revolution. Sociologia Ruralis , 45 (4), 360-379.

Swaminathan, M. S. (2010). Beyond the Green Revolution: Food for All for For Ever. In From Green to Evergreen Revolution: Indian Agriculture: Performance and Emerging Challenges. New Delhi.

Swaminathan, M. S. (2010). Population and Food Security. In Handbook of Population and Development in India (pp. 50-56). Oxford University Press.