The Passing of the Father of India’s Green Revolution – But What Did the GR Really Do for India?
Colin Todhunter
M S Swaminathan, widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India, recently passed away (28 September) at the age of 98. An agronomist, agricultural scientist and plant geneticist, Swaminathan played a key role in introducing hybrid high yielding varieties of wheat and rice to India and in encouraging many farmers to adopt high-input, chemical-dependent practices.
The mainstream narrative is that Swaminathan’s collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug helped save India from famine in the 1960s. Following his death, tributes from high-ranking officials, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and commentators have poured in praising his part in (supposedly) saving India from Malthusian catastrophe.
However, there is another side to the story of the Green Revolution, which seldom emerges in the mainstream.
For example, farmer Bhaskar Save wrote an open letter to M S Swaminathan in 2006. He was scathing about the impact of the Green Revolution and Swaminathan’s role in it:
“You, M S Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.”
We will return to this letter later.
To his credit, though, Swaminathan came out against genetically modified organisms in Indian agriculture. In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, along with his colleague P C Kesavan, he provided a wide-ranging critique of genetically modified crops to date, questioning their efficacy and need. Perhaps he had become aware that the introduction of technology without proper economic, social, health and environmental impact assessments would produce a domino effect, like the Green Revolution. Of course, he came under attack from industry mouthpieces and industry-backed scientists in the media for his stance.
In the paper New Histories of the Green Revolution (2019), Professor Glenn Stone debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity and saved India from famine (Professor Stone’s paper is published below – Editors, Janata Weekly). Indeed, although the media in the mid-1960s carried stories about a famine in India, Stone sees no evidence of famine or an impending famine. Stone argues that all the Green Revolution actually ‘succeeded’ in doing was put more wheat in the Indian diet (displacing other foodstuffs). He argues that food productivity per capita showed no increase or even actually decreased.
Renowned campaigner and environmentalist Vandana Shiva says that the Green Revolution saw 768,576 accessions of indigenous seeds taken from farmers in Mexico alone. She regards the Green Revolution as a form of colonisation:
“The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”
This is one aspect of the Green Revolution that is too often overlooked: capitalist penetration of (intact, self-sufficient) peasant economies.
Stone says:
“The legend of the Green Revolution in India has always been about more than wheat imports and short‐stalked grains. It is about Malthusianism, with post‐war India supposedly proving the dangers of population growth outpacing food production. It is also about the Neo-Malthusian conviction that technological innovation is our only hope, capable of saving a billion lives when conditions are right.”
He says that beneficiaries of the legend have bolstered it and kept it alive and well in our historical imagination. According to recent studies and literature, however, a coherent reinterpretation is emerging that, Stone says, knocks out virtually all of the pillars of this narrative.
We must also consider counterfactual scenarios. What would have happened if India had taken a different route? Stone notes that the influential Planning Commission (PC) was trying simultaneously to create a functional state (after centuries of colonial rule), to avoid becoming a prized Cold War client, and to shape the country’s agricultural destiny. India had plenty of rural labour and organic manures and the PC wanted to capitalise on these resources.
The PC was not opposed to chemical fertilisers but regarded them as highly expensive both to the state and to the farmer. It also believed that concentrated fertiliser use had ecological problems too: chemicals should only be used in combination with bulky organic manures to preserve tilth. What if organic ways of farming had received the funding and research and had been prioritised to the extent the Green Revolution had been?
For instance, in the paper ‘Lessons From the Aftermaths of Green Revolution on Food System and Health’ (in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2021) agriculture techniques, such as intercropping, Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) – with essential principles involving the enhancement of nature’s processes – and the elimination of external inputs, can be practised with excellent results. The state government of Andhra Pradesh plans to convert six million farmers and eight million hectares of land under the initiative of Climate Resilient Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) because of the impressive outputs obtained in the ZBNF impact assessments in the states of Karnataka and AP.
Moreover, the Green Revolution deliberately sidelined traditional seeds kept by farmers that were actually higher yielding and climate appropriate. Also, in a 2019 paper, ‘Profiling of Nutritional Traits in Indigenous Wheat Cultivars’, in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, the authors Noushad Parvez and others note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties.
Instead, we are left with a certain model of agriculture that was pushed for geopolitical and commercial reasons and are trying to deal with various deleterious aftermaths.
For example, according to Stone, post-war hand-to-mouth shipments of wheat from the US to India resulted not from Malthusian imbalance but from policy decisions. The ‘triumphs’ of the Green Revolution came from financial incentives, irrigation and the return of the rains after periods of drought, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long‐term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change in India. Stone concludes that the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.
Much more can be said and has been written about the wider politics of the Green Revolution and how it became and remains enmeshed in modern geopolitics: the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan bank, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have facilitated the structural adjustment of national economies and agrarian systems, intentionally creating food insecure areas and dependency for the benefit of Western financial, agricultural trade, seed, fertiliser and agrochemical interests.
For instance, many countries have been placed on commodity crop export-oriented production treadmills to earn foreign currency (US dollars – boosting the strength of and demand for the dollar and US hegemony) to buy oil and food on the global market (benefitting global commodity traders like Cargill, which helped write the WTO trade regime – the Agreement on Agriculture), entrenching the need to increase cash crop cultivation for exports.
In effect, what we have seen emerge is a model of agriculture that requires hundreds of billions of taxpayer subsidies annually to sustain the bottom line of big agribusiness. One of the not-so-hidden costs of the Green Revolution, of which there are many: degraded soils, polluted water, rising rates of illness, micro-nutrient deficiencies, less nutrient-dense food crops, unnecessary food insecurity, the sidelining of more appropriate indigenous seeds, the narrower range of crops that humanity now depends on due to changed cropping systems, the corporate commodification and pirating of seeds and knowledge, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the devastation of rural communities, farmers’ debt, corporate-market dependency, etc.
So, with the passing of M S Swaminathan, let us return to Bhaskar Save (1922-2015) and his open letter, which touches on many of these issues. Save was not a scholar or an academic. He was a farmer, and his letter was a heartfelt call to action.
M S Swaminathan was at the time the chair of the National Commission on Farmers at the Ministry of Agriculture. Save wanted to bring attention to the devastating impacts of the Green Revolution and to encourage policy makers to abandon their policies of importing and promoting the use of toxic chemicals that the Green Revolution had encouraged.
Below is an abridged version of Bhaskar Save’s open letter
To:
Shri M.S. Swaminathan,
The Chairperson, National Commission on Farmers,
Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India
I am an 84-year-old natural/organic farmer with more than six decades of personal experience in growing a wide range of food crops. I have, over the years, practised several systems of farming, including the chemical method in the fifties – until I soon saw its pitfalls. I say with conviction that it is only by organic farming in harmony with Nature, that India can sustainably provide her people abundant, wholesome food.
You, M.S. Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.
I am sad that our (now greyed) generation of Indian farmers, allowed itself to be duped into adopting the short-sighted and ecologically devastating way of farming, imported into this country. By those like you, with virtually zero farming experience!
For generations beyond count, this land sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth. Without any chemical ‘fertilizers’, pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain, or the new, fancy ‘biotech’ inputs that you now seem to champion. The fertility of our land remained unaffected.
In our forests, the trees like ber (jujube), jambul (jambolan), mango, umbar (wild fig), mahua (Madhuca indica), imli (tamarind) yield so abundantly in their season that the branches sag under the weight of the fruit. The annual yield per tree is commonly over a tonne – year after year. But the earth around remains whole and undiminished. There is no gaping hole in the ground!
From where do the trees – including those on rocky mountains – get their water, their NPK, etc? Though stationary, Nature provides their needs right where they stand. But ‘scientists’ and technocrats like you – with a blinkered, meddling itch – seem blind to this. On what basis do you prescribe what a tree or plant requires, and how much, and when.?
It is said: where there is lack of knowledge, ignorance masquerades as ‘science’! Such is the ‘science’ you have espoused, leading our farmers astray – down the pits of misery.
This country has more than 150 agricultural universities. But every year, each churns out several hundred ‘educated’ unemployables, trained only in misguiding farmers and spreading ecological degradation.
Trying to increase Nature’s ‘productivity,’ is the fundamental blunder that highlights the ignorance of ‘agricultural scientists’ like you. When a grain of rice can reproduce a thousand-fold within months, where arises the need to increase its productivity?
The mindset of servitude to ‘commerce and industry,’ ignoring all else, is the root of the problem.
Modern technology, wedded to commerce… has proved disastrous at all levels… We have despoiled and polluted the soil, water and air. We have wiped out most of our forests and killed its creatures. And relentlessly, modern farmers spray deadly poisons on their fields. These massacre Nature’s jeev srushti – the unpretentious but tireless little workers that maintain the ventilated quality of the soil and recycle all life-ebbed biomass into nourishment for plants. The noxious chemicals also inevitably poison the water, and Nature’s prani srushti, which includes humans.
Is it not a stark fact that the chemical-intensive and irrigation-intensive way of growing monoculture cash-crops has been primarily responsible for spreading ecological devastation far and wide in this country? Within the lifetime of a single generation!
This country boasted an immense diversity of crops, adapted over millennia to local conditions and needs. Our numerous tall, indigenous varieties of grain provided more biomass, shaded the soil from the sun and protected against its erosion under heavy monsoon rains. But in the guise of increasing crop production, exotic dwarf varieties were introduced and promoted through your efforts. This led to more vigorous growth of weeds, which were now able to compete successfully with the new stunted crops for sunlight. The farmer had to spend more labour and money in weeding, or spraying herbicides.
The straw growth with the dwarf grain crops fell drastically to one-third of that with most native species! In Punjab and Haryana, even this was burned, as it was said to harbour ‘pathogens’. (It was too toxic to feed farm cattle that were progressively displaced by tractors.) Consequently, much less organic matter was locally available to recycle the fertility of the soil, leading to an artificial need for externally procured inputs. Inevitably, the farmers resorted to use more chemicals, and relentlessly, soil degradation and erosion set in.
The exotic varieties, grown with chemical ‘fertiliser’, were more susceptible to ‘pests and diseases’, leading to yet more poison (insecticides, etc.) being poured. But the attacked insect species developed resistance and reproduced prolifically. Their predators – spiders, frogs, etc. – that fed on these insects and ‘biologically controlled’ their population, were exterminated. So were many beneficial species like the earthworms and bees.
Agribusiness and technocrats recommended stronger doses, and newer, more toxic (and more expensive) chemicals. But the problems of ‘pests’ and ‘diseases’ only worsened. The spiral of ecological, financial and human costs mounted!
With the use of synthetic fertilizer and increased cash-cropping, irrigation needs rose enormously. In 1952, the Bhakra dam was built in Punjab, a water-rich state fed by 5 Himalayan rivers. Several thousand more big and medium dams followed all over the country, culminating in the massive Sardar Sarovar.
India, next to South America, receives the highest rainfall in the world. The annual average is almost 4 feet. Where thick vegetation covers the ground, and the soil is alive and porous, at least half of this rain is soaked and stored in the soil and sub-soil strata. A good amount then percolates deeper to recharge aquifers, or ‘groundwater tables’.
The living soil and its underlying aquifers thus serve as gigantic, ready-made reservoirs gifted free by Nature. Particularly efficient in soaking rain are the lands under forests and trees. And so, half a century ago, most parts of India had enough fresh water all-round the year, long after the rains had stopped and gone. But clear the forests, and the capacity of the earth to soak the rain, drops drastically. Streams and wells run dry. It has happened in too many places already.
While the recharge of groundwater has greatly reduced, its extraction has been mounting. India is presently mining over 20 times more groundwater each day than it did in 1950. Much of this is mindless wastage by a minority. But most of India’s people – living on hand-drawn or hand-pumped water in villages and practising only rain-fed farming – continue to use the same amount of ground water per person, as they did generations ago.
More than 80% of India’s water consumption is for irrigation, with the largest share hogged by chemically cultivated cash crops. Maharashtra, for example, has the maximum number of big and medium dams in this country. But sugarcane alone, grown on barely 3-4% of its cultivable land, guzzles about 70% of its irrigation waters!
One acre of chemically grown sugarcane requires as much water as would suffice 25 acres of jowar, bajra or maize. The sugar factories too consume huge quantities. From cultivation to processing, each kilo of refined sugar needs 2 to 3 tonnes of water. This could be used to grow, by the traditional, organic way, about 150 to 200 kg of nutritious jowar or bajra (native millets).
While rice is suitable for rain-fed farming, its extensive multiple cropping with irrigation in winter and summer as well, is similarly hogging our water resources, and depleting aquifers. As with sugarcane, it is also irreversibly ruining the land through salinisation.
Soil salinisation is the greatest scourge of irrigation-intensive agriculture, as a progressively thicker crust of salts is formed on the land. Many million hectares of cropland have been ruined by it. The most serious problems are caused where water-guzzling crops like sugarcane or basmati rice are grown round the year, abandoning the traditional mixed-cropping and rotation systems of the past, which required minimal or no watering.
Efficient organic farming requires very little irrigation – much less than what is commonly used in modern agriculture. The yields of the crops are best when the soil is just damp. Rice is the only exception that grows even where water accumulates and is thus preferred as a monsoon crop in low-lying areas naturally prone to inundation. Excess irrigation in the case of all other crops expels the air contained in the soil’s inter-particulate spaces – vitally needed for root respiration – and prolonged flooding causes root rot.
The irrigation on my farm is a small fraction of that provided in most modern farms today. Moreover, the porous soil under the thick vegetation of the orchard is like a sponge that soaks and percolates to the aquifer, or ground-water table, an enormous quantity of rain each monsoon. The amount of water thus stored in the ground at Kalpavruksha, is far more than the total amount withdrawn from the well for irrigation in the months when there is no rain.
Clearly, the way to ensure the water security and food security of this nation, is by organically growing mixed, locally suitable crops, plants and trees, following the laws of Nature.
We should restore at least 30% ground cover of mixed, indigenous trees and forests within the next decade or two. This is the core task of ecological water harvesting – the key to restoring the natural abundance of groundwater. Outstanding benefits can be achieved within a decade at comparatively little cost. We sadly fail to realise that the potential for natural water storage in the ground is many times greater than the combined capacity of all the major and medium irrigation projects in India – complete, incomplete, or still on paper! Such decentralized underground storage is more efficient, as it is protected from the high evaporation of surface storage. The planting of trees will also make available a variety of useful produce to enhance the well-being of a larger number of people.
Even barren wastelands can be restored to health in less than a decade. By inter-planting short lifespan, medium life-span, and long life-span crops and trees, it is possible to have planned continuity of food yield to sustain a farmer through the transition period till the long-life fruit trees mature and yield. The higher availability of biomass and complete ground cover round the year will also hasten the regeneration of soil fertility.
The actual reason for pushing the ‘Green Revolution’ was the much narrower goal of increasing marketable surplus of a few relatively fewer perishable cereals to fuel the urban-industrial expansion favoured by the government.
The new, parasitical way of farming you vigorously promoted, benefited only the industrialists, traders and the powers-that-be. The farmers’ costs rose massively and margins dipped. Combined with the eroding natural fertility of their land, they were left with little in their hands, if not mounting debts and dead soils. Many gave up farming. Many more want to do so, squeezed by the ever-rising costs. Nature has generously gifted us with all that is needed for organic farming – which also produces wholesome, rather than poisoned food!
The maximum number of people can become self-reliant through farming only if the necessary inputs are a bare minimum. Thus, farming should require a minimum of financial capital and purchased inputs, minimum farming equipment (plough, tools, etc.), minimum necessary labour, and minimum external technology. Then, agricultural production will increase, without costs increasing. Poverty will decline, and the rise in population will be spontaneously checked.
Self-reliant farming – with minimal or zero external inputs – was the way we actually farmed, very successfully, in the past. Our farmers were largely self-sufficient, and even produced surpluses, though generally smaller quantities of many more items. These, particularly perishables, were tougher to supply urban markets. And so, the nation’s farmers were steered to grow chemically cultivated monocultures of a few cash-crops like wheat, rice, or sugar, rather than their traditional polycultures that needed no purchased inputs.
(The author is a research associate of the Canada-based Centre for Research on Globalization. Courtesy: Countercurrents.org.)
Commentary: New Histories of the Indian Green Revolution
Glenn Davis Stone
The Green Revolution has few serious competitors as the most discussed chapter in agricultural history. One quickly loses count of the books, articles, proposals, speeches, op‐eds, documentaries, and press releases that cite the legend of input‐ intensive, short‐stalked (“dwarf” or “semi‐dwarf”) wheat and rice varieties spreading through parts of Asia 50 years ago. The tale resonates particularly well because it has a hero (the dynamic, no‐nonsense, Nobel Peace Prize‐winning breeder Norman Borlaug), a villain of sorts (unstoppable population growth), a happy ending (a “billion lives” supposedly saved, and many peasants freed from the drudgery of farming), and an optimistic moral about scientific innovation solving world
problems.
A critical literature has also grown around the Green Revolution, particularly as it unfolded in India. Numerous writers over the years have raised concerns over issues of social equity and capitalist penetration of peasant economies in critiques varying in scholarly rigour. But the past few years have brought a remarkable flush of new, archive‐based, and well documented research on the Green Revolution, mostly from early‐career historians of science. This Commentary synthesises five books/dissertations in history or hybrid science/history that collectively provide an interesting and iconoclastic new understanding of the Indian Green Revolution – including what was driving it, how it reflected and affected key ideas about agriculture, how it shaped food production, and even how important scientific innovation really was.
The door to the new body of work was opened in 2010 by historian Nick Cullather’s The hungry world: America’s Cold War battle against poverty in Asia. That was followed by Saha (2012) State policy, agricultural research and transformation of Indian agriculture with reference to basic food crops, 1947–1975; Subramanian (2015) Revisiting the Green Revolution: Irrigation and food production in 20th century India; Siegel (2018) Hungry nation: Food, famine, and the making of modern India (based on a 2014 dissertation); and Baranski (2015a) The Wide Adaptation of Green Revolution Wheat. Also worth mention, although not specifically focused on India, is Olsson (2017) Agrarian crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (based on a 2013 dissertation).[1] Since the interpretation emerging from this group of historians is so starkly at odds with the conventional legend of the Green Revolution, we need first to consider that legend and its genesis.
Legend Making
The deployment of short‐stalked varieties of wheat in northern India in late 1967 was not the obvious stuff of legend. Such varieties had been growing in Mexico for a decade and had generated few headlines. Developed by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP), the seeds had helped turn Mexico into a wheat exporter while lining the pockets of commercial farmers (Cullather, 2010, p. 68). None of this attracted the level of attention that the crops would attract in India, where several forces converged to generate the legend.
One such force was the modern environmental movement, which was ramping up and developing a fascination with overpopulation in India: notably, in 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s best‐selling The population bomb announced that India could not be saved from falling over a Malthusian cliff. Another force was Borlaug, who used his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech to proclaim a victory in the perpetual war between “two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction” (Borlaug, 1970). Borlaug would spend the rest of his long life burnishing what some have called the Green Revolution brand (Sumberg et al., 2012). US government leaders also had reasons to publicise the adoption of American‐backed agricultural technologies in Asia. Lyndon Johnson posed in a field of dwarf rice in the Philippines and declared that the war on hunger was the only war he sought to escalate; when US AID’s William Gaud coined the name “Green Revolution” he explicitly contrasted it to the red revolution of the Soviets.
More recently, agri‐biotechnology interests have zealously promoted the Green Revolution legend to help frame genetically modified (GM) crops as key to feeding the global South (Glover, 2010; Stone, 2002). Thus a Monsanto chief recounts visiting an aging Borlaug, who teared up because he had lived through the Green Revolution but would not see the Gene Revolution (Gillam, 2009). The early 2000s have also brought calls for a new “Green Revolution for Africa” (Schurman, 2018), reliably larded with allusions to averted famines and depictions of hunger as an apolitical technological problem (Cullather, 2010, pp. 264–265).
All of this has kept alive the seed‐centric narrative in which Borlaug bred innovative high‐yielding dwarf wheat that was adopted after he brushed aside the backward‐looking traditionalists in the Indian establishment. Joined by dwarf rice and powered by chemical fertilisers and expanded irrigation, these seeds are supposed to have revolutionised agriculture in the developing world and averted famines – especially in overpopulated India, which had been kept alive in the 1960s only by shiploads of American wheat.
As noted, this narrative has been the subject of challenge and critique. Important early concerns were raised about the wheat programme being focused on India’s largest and wealthiest farms. Saha (2012) unpacks the work of the influential Planning Commission (PC), the members of which were not the tradition‐bound Luddites of the legend; they were trying simultaneously to create a functional state (after centuries of colonial rule followed by the horrors of partition), to avoid becoming a prized Cold War client, and to shape the country’s agricultural destiny. India was short on manufactured inputs and long on rural labour and organic manures, and the PC sensibly wanted to capitalise on these resources. They were not opposed to chemical fertilisers, but regarded them as highly expensive both to the state and to the farmer. Concentrated fertiliser use also had ecological problems: they cited research indicating that chemicals should only be used in combination with bulky organic manures to preserve tilth – a position that many in India today wish had been followed (Anand, 2011). Borlaug branded these views as obstacles to innovation and progress, and as the legend of averted famines took on the appearance of fact, Borlaug’s opponents were largely relegated to the dustbin of agricultural history.
Critiques of socio‐economic impacts also began early, with development scholars documenting a widening gap between rich and poor farmers as soon as the new seeds spread (Frankel, 1971; Glaeser, 1987; Ladejinsky, 1969; Pearse, 1980). The inequity of the country’s wealthiest farmers enjoying a state‐subsidised windfall (as they had in Mexico before), while many poor farmers could not afford inputs for the new seeds, is omitted in popular retellings of the Revolution, but the problem was eventually acknowledged even by the Rockefeller Foundation itself (Conway, 1997). Vandana Shiva’s The violence of the Green Revolution (1991) offered a scathing analysis of the agro‐ecology of the new crops and a wide‐ranging critique of the revolution’s underlying political projects; although widely read, many scientists have seen Shiva’s attacks more as activism than scholarship, and even historians have distanced themselves from it (Siegel, 2018, p. 186). John Perkins’ Geopolitics and the Green Revolution (1997) gained more scholarly traction with its analysis of the political underpinnings of the agricultural changes. His recasting of the Green Revolution as a political Cold War project, in contrast to Borlaug’s apolitical vision of agricultural science versus population, invited a re‐framing that encouraged the new body of research.
New Histories
Although not focused on India, Olsson’s book provides fascinating context by showing how the MAP was inspired by Rockefeller programmes for poor tenant cotton farmers in the US South. Those programmes had promoted small farmer independence from the market, judicious use of on‐farm resources, and increased production of subsistence crops to foster independence from creditors (Olsson, 2017, p. 106; also Harwood, 2009) – an ironic start for a programme that would send input‐intensive seeds to well off Indian commercial farmers. But as Cullather shows, the MAP’s focus quickly evolved from helping Mexican smallholders to using Mexico as a laboratory for experiments in agricultural development – particularly for Asia, which was believed to suffer from population/food disparities (Cullather, 2010, p. 44). Mexico actually had no food/population gap; it had rural poverty but was exporting cattle, vegetables, fruit, and coffee (Cullather, 2010, pp. 43–44). Still, the MAP fixated on raising crop yields, which was “a solution in search of a problem” (Cullather, 2010, p. 45). Borlaug may have seen his work as part of a primal clash between world hunger and agro‐industrial science, but he was actually an agent in a set of interlocked political and economic projects driven by then‐fashionable development theories. Many mid‐century thinkers saw population growth as simply adding superfluous bodies to the countryside beyond the fixed numbers of hands needed to plough, plant, and harvest. Moving excess rural labour to work in urban factories was actually expected to raise agricultural output (Cullather, 2010, p. 147).
But these theories of agricultural growth were being up‐ended just as the Green Revolution crops were being deployed. In 1964, economist Theodore Schultz’s Transforming traditional agriculture held that peasant farmers were efficient, although in need of external industrial inputs to raise production. In 1965, economist Ester Boserup’s The conditions of agricultural growth showed that rural societies put people to work on crowded landscapes through labour‐based intensification without recourse to external technologies: fallows shortened, added labour went into fertilising, tilling and weeding, and output per unit area and per unit time rose. This was even happening in India: indeed that is where Boserup’s initial insights came from (Boserup, 1999, p. 20). Green Revolution enthusiasts have generally ignored this research and dismissed those who “romanticise” small‐scale farms (Borlaug & Dowswell, 1995, p. 123), but there is nothing romantic about the rigorous empirical research on Boserupian intensification (e.g., Boserup, 1970; Netting, 1993; Stone, 2001; Turner & Ali, 1996). The agricultural development projects based on mid‐century theories were propelled by Cold War anxieties about rural poverty breeding communist insurgency. This was particularly true in India, with its enormous size, its history of colonial‐era famines, and its Communist influences (Saha, 2012). But a more important cause of rural distress in India was Prime Minister Nehru’s insistence on developing heavy industry at the expense of agriculture. The US government encouraged the urban industrial priority (Cullather, 2010, p. 230), with the US farm lobby blocking any “real effort to boost the agricultural output of one of the United States’ major surplus importers” (Siegel, 2018). The PL‐480 Food Aid programme became central to India’s food policy and the primary vehicle for dumping US surplus. Like Perkins, Cullather sees American grain shipments not as having remedied India’s 1960s grain shortages, but rather causing them by discouraging investment in food production (Cullather, 2010, p. 144).
But while India’s economic policies undermined wheat production, they encouraged the growing of non‐food cash crops. Where Borlaug saw a simple Malthusian inability to grow enough food, millions of acres were being switched from rice to jute production. Indian agriculture even enjoyed an export boom in the mid‐1960s; most of the jute went to the US, where it made seats for the tractors that produced the grain, and also the sacks that held the grain being shipped to India (Cullather, 2010, p. 181).
But, as Siegel shows, by the mid‐1960s India was ready for a rethinking of the proper economic arrangements of post‐colonial life: land reform had petered out, efforts to control market players had stalled, and the Nehruvian ideology was fraying. Then in 1965 fate intervened in the form of a drought, which leads Cullather to an insightful dive into the timing, meaning, and consequences of famine and famine narratives. He writes that the “capacity to declare an emergency confers substantial power, and for that reason states, politicians, and factions vie for the authority to predict, define, and explain famine,” and our historical memory of the Green Revolution emerged from just this struggle (Cullather, 2010, p. 206). US President Lyndon Johnson, who was struggling to get Congress to pay for stepped‐up food aid, led the charge in establishing a narrative of famine – to the surprise of the Indian agriculture minister, who called it scaremongering (Cullather, 2010, p. 223). In 1966, US headlines announced famine in the Indian state of Bihar, although British journalists who knew India better were circumspect (Dunn, 1966). But when the drought stretched into a second year, Malthusian alarms went off and pundits warned that Indians could soon be feeding on each other. But “[i]nconveniently, Indian officials declared the famine a sham,” and reporters searched in vain for starving peasants (Cullather, 2010, p. 223). Even in Bihar, demographic analyses would later find scant evidence of excess mortality (Cullather, 2010, p. 223; Maharatna, 1992, pp. 353–354). To be sure, it was a hard year for the Bihari poor – Prime Minister Gandhi had found it expedient to invoke India’s “famine codes” – but the problem had not been population outpacing food production, but rather farm work drying up when commercial crops like jute and sugarcane failed. But these events of 1966–1967 would morph from an overblown story of starvation in Bihar into a harrowing fantasy of India having passed a Malthusian point of no return.
The drought provided what Borlaug called the “opportune moment”; it started just as Borlaug and his Indian collaborator MS Swaminathan began multiplying the Mexican seeds in northern India, and conveniently ended just before the new seeds’ first big year. Then, with good rains on top of ample irrigation, the 1967–1968 winter season brought a bumper wheat crop. The Mexican seeds claimed credit, yet “yields of nearly every crop – cotton, tea, jute – were at record levels,” even in countries like China where no Green Revolution grains had been planted (Cullather, 2010, p. 233).
All of the new histories delve into not only what happened in the test plots and farmers’ fields, but also into how the Green Revolution changed thinking about agricultural research and innovation. Baranski examines how basic philosophies of crop improvement became enmeshed in politics within the breeding world. She focuses on the concept of “wide adaptation” (WA); that is, plant breeding that purportedly maximises yields across a wide range of growing conditions, rather than for specific macro environments. Breeders on Indian agricultural stations tout the trait as ideal, but most ecologists consider it dubious, as did many Indian agricultural scientists in the 1960s (Baranski, 2015a). The rise of this philosophy of crop improvement is less a story of agronomic superiority than of personality, politics, and publicity.
Wide adaptation was the conceptual handiwork of Borlaug, whose trademark “shuttle breeding” – planting winter crops in the northern Mexican desert and selecting seeds to plant as summer crops in the central mountains – selected for the WA trait of photoperiod insensitivity. WA also selected for fertiliser responsiveness, for reasons that grew out of the particular historical moment. In the 1940s, few food crops were heavily fertilised and breeders were not selecting for response to intensive chemical fertilising, but with war‐time nitrogen‐fixing munitions plants proliferating, nitrogen fertiliser was bound to become more plentiful (Baranski, 2015a, p. 12). Borlaug began to breed wheats for the growing class of capitalist farmers in Mexico who could afford chemical fertiliser and who enjoyed state‐subsidised irrigation. That these seeds were “wide adapted” was true only in a deceptive sense: they could thrive in a wide range of soils and latitudes, but only with ample fertiliser and irrigation.
But India was not Mexico; it was a much larger country with enormous variation in agricultural economy and ecology, being torn by major tensions between capitalist and communist, industrial/urban, agricultural/rural, and among differing regional interests. Providing seeds and subsidised resources for wealthy commercial irrigated wheat growers in the North would be a nettlesome problem (Saha, 2012, pp. 98–99). Borlaug’s team therefore claimed that the Mexican seeds would thrive even with low fertility and limited irrigation: they “respond to but do not necessarily require irrigation and extremely heavy fertilization” (emphasis original) (Baranski, 2015a, p. 104). They also proposed that varieties developed in ideal environments could perform well in marginal environments, but not vice versa (Baranski, 2015a, p. 138). Baranski shows the claim to be a fiction (as does Subramanian, citing different data): Borlaug’s flagship varieties out‐yielded indigenous tall wheats only when at least 80 kg/ha of fertiliser was applied (Baranski, 2015a, p. 179; 2015b; Subramanian, 2015, p. 55). Indian breeders had developed their own dwarf wheat varieties but did not release them for this reason, preferring to improve local varieties adapted to actual availability of inputs. However, following the Green Revolution’s claims of averted famine, WA became the dominant breeding strategy in India.
The new histories also raise troubling questions about the claims of averted starvation. Subramanian in particular upends thinking not only on the causes of rising wheat yields, but whether overall food production rose at all during the Green Revolution. His study sidesteps the usual (deceptive) comparison between the drought years (1966–1967) and 1968, instead comparing pre‐drought, Green Revolution, and post‐revolution periods. To do this he combines his own analysis with production figures that have been hiding in plain sight in a historical blind spot (perhaps because they are so discordant with the Green Revolution legend). Following Sarma and Gandhi (1990, p. 17), Subramanian (2015, p. 44) finds that the real breakthroughs in Indian food‐grain production began around 1950, while the mid‐1960s actually marked the start of “a decade and a half of relative slowdown in the growth of production and yields of foodgrains” (emphasis added) (Subramanian, 2015, p. 9). Wheat yields did indeed rise after 1967 (Table 1), but wheat was only India’s third crop behind sorghum and far behind rice. For the paramount food crop of rice, the growth rates in both yields and area planted actually slowed during the Green Revolution years; thus overall rice production, which had been growing at 3.5% annually, slowed to a 1.9% growth rate, a 46% drop (Table 1). Total food‐grain production, which had been growing at 2.8% annually, slowed to a 1.9% growth rate during the Green Revolution years, a 32% drop.
Moreover part of the price for the shift to wheat was paid by the pulses that were vital to both nutrition (due to their high protein) and agricultural ecology (as nitrogen fixers) (Saha, 2013, p. 300): pulse yields had been growing at 1.2% annually but declined during the Green Revolution (Subramanian, 2015, p. 43). (Other analyses have made different but consistent points; for instance Byerlee [(1992), p. 478] lumps production by decade, finding that yields for rice, coarse grains, and all cereals rose more slowly in the 1960s than before or after.)
Since these data contradict the legend of India’s Green Revolution years so conspicuously, let us augment Subramanian’s periodised breakdown with a graphic analysis of long‐term patterns in Indian food production. Figure 1 shows a strongly linear trend in growth of food‐grain production during the last half of the twentieth century. Note in particular that after the production slump during the two‐year drought just before the Green Revolution, production returned to its earlier trend with no sign of “revolution.”
Table 1: Adjusted annual growth rates for wheat, rice, and food grains
before, during, and after the Green Revolution years
Figure 1: Trends in production of the major categories of food crops in India during the last half of the twentieth century. Data are from the India Department of Agriculture & Co‐operation at http://agricoop.nic.in and http://eands.dacnet.nic.in/latest_20011.htm.
But since the Indian Green Revolution is always framed in Neomalthusian terms, we have to look at growth of production vis‐à‐vis population. Figure 2 shows that, while the first harvest of Mexican wheat did coincide with the end of the “opportune” two‐year drought, it did not mark a change in the steady linear rise in per capita food‐grain production India has enjoyed since the mid‐century.
Subramanian goes even further, making a case that the primary cause of the wheat boom was not Borlaug’s seeds or even the subsidised fertiliser, but the massive surge in private tube well construction (2015, pp. 9, 182–233). Again the accidents of timing proved crucial. In 1965, a World Bank mission had just convinced India to adopt an irrigation policy based on private tube wells; the goal was not so much to produce more food – more irrigation from dams or collective/public tube wells probably would have been better at that – but to promote “high‐input, high‐output agriculture” (Subramanian, 2015, pp. 192, 210–211). Propelled by government loans, subsidies, and rural electrification (in part to run the tube‐well pumps), by 1969 there were almost a quarter of a million private tube wells in operation and the state had spent Rs 5.5 billion on minor irrigation and rural electrification (Subramanian, 2015, pp. 192–193). Farmer adoption of the new seeds and increased fertiliser hinged on whether or not they had tube wells (Subramanian, 2015, p. 200).
Figure 2: Trend in India’s total food‐grain production divided by population.
The data sources are the same as for Figure 1.
Tube wells were also key to rice production, which boomed in the mid‐1970s as tube wells proliferated on rice farms. The wells not only provided more water but freed farmers from the monsoon cycle (Subramanian, 2015, p. 37). As with wheat, the role of the dwarf rice seeds has been overstated.
Subramanian marvels that the Green Revolution’s fans and critics alike have agreed on a “seed‐centric narrative,” even if they took opposite positions on the seeds’ impacts (2015, p. 38). His analysis negates the seed narrative as well as the fetishising of agri‐scientific innovation in general: irrigation after all is an ancient agricultural practice, and the spread of tube wells was not prompted by any breakthrough in technology but by a change in state policy (Subramanian, 2015, p. 12).
Take‐ Aways
The legend of the Green Revolution in India has always been about more than wheat imports and short‐stalked grains. It is about Malthusianism, with post‐war India supposedly proving the dangers of population growth outpacing food production. It is also about the Neo-Malthusian conviction that technological innovation is our only hope, capable of saving a billion lives when conditions are right. Scholars may have destabilised some elements of the legend, and activists may have scorned it entirely, but beneficiaries of the legend have bolstered it and kept it alive and well in our historical imagination. The new histories discussed here provide a serious scholarly rethinking. Historically detailed and carefully documented, sometimes agreeing and sometimes complementing each other, these works constitute a coherent reinterpretation that knocks out virtually all of the pillars of the earlier legend. Wheat imports resulted not from Malthusian imbalance but from policy decisions, and they were as much a cause of underproduction as a remedy. The legendary wheat‐field triumphs came from financial incentives, irrigation, and the return of the rains, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long‐term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change, although the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.
The legend is also about India waking up to bold new ways of thinking about crop breeding, but the new research shows that Indian agricultural scientists were already developing technologies according to philosophies that made as much sense as that with which they were replaced during the Green Revolution.
The rethinking of what happened in India in the late 1960s is timely indeed. Today the world’s largest charity is pouring money into a new Green Revolution for Africa and into public relations on the wonders of agricultural technologies. As Cullather points out at the end of his book, promotion of a new revolution is heavily dependent on invoking the Neo‐ Malthusian legend of the old one as a pure technological triumph. One wonders if the new wave of historical scholarship will make a dent in a reawakening of these debates today.
Endnote
1. My focus on this set of books by historians is not intended to diminish the importance of shorter recent writing such as Patel (2013).
References
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In another article, “Myths About the Green Revolution”, Bharat Dogra writes (extract)
In agriculture the period after mid-sixties is generally regarded as the ‘green revolution’ phase of Indian agriculture. The most important feature of this is the introduction of green revolution seeds or GR seeds (mainly dwarf, non-lodging varieties which gave high yields when fed by high doses of chemical fertilizers). Along with the spread of G.R. seeds, as a part of the ‘package deal’, the use of chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides and agriculture machinery increased greatly. To spread and strengthen the new technology, investment in farm research, education and extension tuned to the new technology also increased rapidly and new agricultural universities for this purpose were opened one after the other generally on the American model..
An overview of the situation of farm productivity before and after green revolution is provided in the 12th Plan document in an important table (See Table below). Here we can see clearly that despite the much higher use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides etc. in the green revolution phase and the rise of other related expenditure as well, the growth of farm yield on the whole in the green revolution phase was in fact lower than in the previous phase, despite the fact that in the earlier phase India had faced several serious constraints and problems and had a much lower farm budget.
Table 1: Average Annual Growth Rates in Yields per Hectare
| Crop | Pre-Green Revolution | Green Revolution |
| 1951-52 to 1967-68 | 1968-69 to 1980-81 | |
| Wheat | 3.7 | 3.3 |
| Rice | 3.2 | 2.7 |
| Jowar | 3.4 | 2.9 |
| Bajra | 2.6 | 6.3 |
| Maize | 4.8 | 1.7 |
| Coarse Cereals | 2.6 | 1.5 |
| Pulses | 2.3 | -0.2 |
| Oilseeds | 1.3 | 0.8 |
| Cotton | 3.0 | 2.6 |
| Sugarcane | 1.6 | 3.1 |
(Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Save the Earth Now. His recent books include ‘India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food’, ‘Man over Machine’ and ‘Planet in Peril’.)
