Past Successes 303with house repairs. In return, landlords helped with rice or money at times of eco-
nomic hardship, providing a degree of protection against the outside world.^29 With
the advent of the Green Revolution, this relationship became more commercial.
Both sides benefited: yields on tenant farms rapidly increased as farmers gained
from the landlord’s better access to technical information, machinery and inputs.
But the inputs had to be paid for and in bad years there was no longer any latitude.
Credit repayments under the government scheme were due on schedule and
defaulters were punished. The banks were less accommodating than the land-
lords.
Governments usually intervened directly to assure the supply of inputs.
Demand for fertilizers grew rapidly in the early years, sometimes outstripping sup-
ply and forcing up prices.^30 The response was to fix prices and provide generous
subsidies. Under the BIMAS programme in Indonesia, quotas were awarded to
licensed importers, prices were fixed and distributors and retailers appointed right
down to the cooperatives at village level. By the mid-1980s the subsidy for fertiliz-
ers had reached 68 per cent of the world price, for pesticides 40 per cent and for
water nearly 90 per cent. Such high levels of subsidy created serious environmental
problems. Also because the distribution of subsidized inputs tended to remain in
the hands of government or quasi-government agencies, corruption became wide-
spread and, in some situations, institutionalized. This has been most evident in
government irrigation schemes.^31
Pest and disease outbreaks have been an especially severe consequence of the
Green Revolution.^32 In some cases the cause-and-effect relationship is simple. Pest
populations have grown in response to higher nitrogen applications and diseases
have become more prevalent in the microclimate created by the densely leaved,
short-strawed wheats and rices. But often it is a combination of factors – higher
nutrient levels, narrow genetic stock, uniform continuous planting and the misuse
of pesticides – that have created conditions which encourage pest and disease
attack.
According to some critics of the Green Revolution, the growth in production
owed little to the new varieties, and was primarily due to agricultural expansion,
arable cultivation moving on to increasingly marginal lands. But the evidence is
otherwise: although area increases were important in the 1950s, the subsequent
gains were largely derived from increasing yield per hectare. Other commentators
claim the growth in production has been due to infrastructural and institutional
change rather than the specific technical innovations, pointing to the lack of signs
of the impact of the new varieties in the regional data.^33 But this is because the
individual country take-offs, so clearly indicated in the graphs in this chapter, were
staggered and hence are masked when aggregated together.
Nevertheless, the yield growth was not solely attributable to the new varieties.
They were necessary but not sufficient alone for success. Their potential could
only be realized if they were supplied with high quantities of fertilizer and pro-
vided with optimal supplies of water. As was soon apparent, the new varieties
yielded better than the traditional at any level of fertilizer application, although