292 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
From their analyses, Cornelius de Wit and his colleagues of the University of
Wageningen in the Netherlands conclude this transition occurs when cereal yields
reach about 1700kg/ha. Below the take-off point yield increases are of the order of
17kg/ha per year; afterwards they are 50–85kg/ha. There are, of course, excep-
tions: some countries (China is an example) experienced take-off from much lower
yield levels, others, such as Britain and Japan, produced several spurts of growth
with relatively low rates in between. Selection of indigenous rice varieties in Japan,
coupled with increased irrigation, resulted in a yield increase between the 1880s
and the First World War of about 40kg/ha per year.^5 Yields grew more slowly
between the wars and then took off again after the Second World War, with annual
yield growth of 75kg/ha per year.
In most developed countries the take-offs occurred soon after the end of the
Second World War. High-yielding varieties, new fertilizer formulations and more
effective pesticides came on the market, together with machinery that permitted
more timely agricultural operations. Economic incentives, which included guaran-
teed prices, deficiency payments and other forms of subsidy, made sure the new
technologies were widely adopted. Thereafter, growth in production was nearly
entirely due to yield increase; in most developed countries the cropped area has
declined since 1950.
The take-offs in the developing countries mostly occurred at the end of the
1960s as the new varieties produced by the Green Revolution began to be widely
adopted. William Gaud, the administrator of USAID, first coined the name ‘Green
Revolution’.^6 At the time it was an appropriate description of a momentous event.
Today ‘Green’ signifies the environment; then the image it conveyed was of a
world covered with luxuriant and productive crops – the green swathes of young
wheat- and ricefields. It was truly also a revolution in the scale of the transforma-
tion it achieved although, as we shall see, it did not go nearly far enough.
The origins of the revolution lay in a joint venture, the Office of Special Studies,
established by the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture and the Rockefeller Foundation
in 1943.^7 At the time, Mexican grain yields were very low, maize averaging about a
quarter of US yields and wheat yielding less than 800kg/ha, even though most of the
wheatland was irrigated. The Office was headed by George Harrar, with Edwin Well-
hausen, a maize breeder, Norman Borlaug, a plant pathologist, and William Colwell,
a soil scientist. Eventually the office was to have 21 US and 100 Mexican scientists,
mostly working at an experiment station at Chapingo on the rain-fed central plateau.
Its remit was to improve the yields of the basic food crops, maize, wheat and beans.
The research programme concentrated first on maize, the mainstay of the
Mexican diet, consumed in the form of the thin, flat, unleavened bread called the
tortilla. Mexican agronomists had already discovered that most strains of maize
grown in the US were not well adapted to Mexican conditions, so the programme
set out to try to duplicate the US achievement of breeding high-yielding, hybrid
maizes but using indigenous varieties as a basis. Maize is a cross-pollinating crop,
so that the seed collected by the farmer from his or her crop at the end of the sea-
son is usually highly variable. More uniform and higher-yielding hybrids can be