Why India’s Green Revolution isn’t a blueprint to feed a hungry planet Premium

An expert looks at new analysis that has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.

Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.

The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain exports, and fertilizer prices have surged because of trade sanctions on Russia, the world’s leading fertilizer exporter.

Amid these challenges, some organizations are renewing calls for a second Green Revolution, echoing the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of supposedly high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice into developing countries, along with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold.

But anyone concerned with food production should be careful what they wish for. In recent years, a wave of new analysis has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.

Also Read | M.S. Swaminathan: A timeline of the Father of the Green revolution

As I explain in my book, The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, the Green Revolution does hold lessons for food production today – but not the ones that are commonly heard. Events in India show why.

There was a consensus in the 1960s among development officials and the public that an overpopulated Earth was heading toward catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.