Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Past Successes 305

Uptake was fastest and most dramatic in those lands such as Sonora in Mexico,
Luzon in the Philippines, the lowlands of Java, and the Punjab of India and
Pakistan where irrigation was already well developed and where farmers, often
larger than in the rest of the country, had good access to credit, had a greater
propensity to take risks and were likely to be rapid adopters. Most important,
innovation and adoption there was supported by governments willing and able
to make and direct the necessary investments, including the necessary research
structure which could take and adapt the new varieties to local conditions. These
lands, scattered through Asia and Latin America, became the so-called Green
Revolution lands.
In summary, the Green Revolution succeeded because it focused on three
interrelated actions:

• breeding programmes for staple cereals to produce early-maturing, day-length-
  insensitive and high-yielding varieties;


• the organization and distribution of packages of high-pay-off inputs, such as
  fertilizers, pesticides and water regulation;


• implementation of these technical innovations in the most favourable agrocli-
  matic regions and for those classes of farmers with the best expectations of
  realizing the potential yields.

In many ways this was a triumph for technology, rather than science. The dwarfing
genes had been known for decades in China and Japan and most of the breeding
techniques were well established. What made the difference was the investment, in
China and independently in the rest of the developing world, in institutions and
in the organization of delivery of the inputs necessary to make the science produc-
tive.
The success is undisputed, but it has been a revolution with serious limita-
tions. In particular:

• its impact on the poor has been less than expected;


• it has not reduced, and in some cases it has encouraged, natural-resource deg-
  radation and environmental problems;


• its geographic impact has been localized; and


• there are signs of diminishing returns.

Notes

1 H Hanson, N E Borlaug and R G Anderson, 1982. Wheat in the Third World, Boulder, CO,
Westview Press
2 The basis for determining who is ‘hungry’ has changed over time, and the figure would probably
be lower if the current method of determining ‘chronic undernourishment’ was used. See D
Grigg, 1993. The World Food Problem (2nd edn), Oxford, Blackwell