Chemical

Green Revolution

The major change in the mode of production of crops post war has been called the ‘Green Revolution’. By 1980 most developed countries had farm systems that could feed themselves - a bit too much, as the EU and US discovered. It was the push of these new technologies across the world that led to the term ‘Green Revolution’. First applied to just wheat and rice developments, it has become a term for a much wider range of crops, although similar systems.

Both the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were heavily involved in its initial development in Mexico, and by co-incidence this new method of farming depended on large machines (thanks to Ford) and heavy doses of fertilisers, driven by oil energy and chemicals derived from oil (thanks to Rockefeller). The basic approach was to developed high-yielding varieties of cereal grains. It took a thousand years to increase wheat production from 05tons/ha to 2 tons, but within 10 years they produced 7tons. Who could argue with that? In order to produce these yeilds there was an, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, more sophisticated machinery, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers, and then reach the maximum improvement possible through selective breeding and  genetic modification technologies. Most of these deveoplements were driven by the corporations, with the state becoming less involved.

One key leader was agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the "Father of the Green Revolution", who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.Likewise was Yuan Longping, whose work on hybrid rice varieties is credited with saving at least as many lives.

But is has changed the growing relationship on the land. Much more investment and inputs come onto the land from afar. Many farm systems across the world are more heavily dependent on external organisations, mainly massive multinational companies providing the inputs, at ever increasing prices.

These changes to farming need to be recoginised in terminology. We often hear people talk about ‘industrialised’ agriculture. Yet this Green Revolution(GR) in farming, depending more on chemical inputs and outside investment, should be called ‘capital-led’ agriculture in order to distringuish it from the sort of ‘industrialised’ agriculture that existed 150+ years ago.

These developments co-incide with the rapid rises in global warming, evidenced by NASA data we saw earlier. Notice, we can’t say that capital-led farming causes global warming, although there is a clear casual relation as global warming rose as the farming changed. There is a coincidence between the rise of capital-led farming and global warming which should be enough to call for more investigation.

These new farming methods demand more return from the soil all the time. The main effects of the Green Revolution on soils are due to the increased use of chemicals, including fertilisers and pesticides, to boost crop yields. This led to the build-up of salts and chemicals in the soil. It also caused soil erosion because it led to increased mechanization of agriculture, and increasing heavy use of machinery. There has also been a loss of soil organic matter because of the use of high-yielding crop varieties and more of each crop taken away and an increase in soil acidification, due to increased use of N - nitrogen-based fertilizers, and phosphate water pollution due to  P - phosphate fertilisers.  Water depletion is increasingly a problem as GR’s high-yield crop varieties require more water than traditional varieties, leading to increased water depletion in some regions.