Hey readers,
I was picking through some old tabs in my phone’s browser the other day and happened upon a great paper from January measuring the impact of the Green Revolution.
The Green Revolution is one of those things that, depending on your college major and/or professional background, either you've never heard of it, you think it’s the most important event in modern history, or you think it’s a travesty.
So, for the benefit of the first group: the "revolution" was a widespread global agricultural shift in the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged by US-based foundations like Ford and Rockefeller and implemented by the governments of countries in Asia and Latin America, toward higher-yield varieties and cultivation methods for rice, wheat, and other cereals. (Disclosure: The Rockefeller Foundation was an early funder of Future Perfect.)
Those innovations had a tremendous impact on global agriculture (which I’ll get to below), and by extension the lives of billions of people — hence, a “revolution.”
An important piece of background context is that at the time, the world population was growing dramatically, especially in the Global South. It took millions of years for humanity to reach nearly 1 billion people in 1800; it took another 128 years to reach 2 billion in 1928; it took 32 years to reach 3 billion in 1960; and it only took 15 years to reach 4 billion in 1975.
As this massive acceleration was happening in the 1960s, policymakers and scientists began panicking: How in the world were they going to feed all these people? Stanford scientists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in their 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, predicted that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
That didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen more or less because of the Green Revolution.
Ford/Rockefeller-funded institutions like the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines and the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) in Mexico set about developing high-yielding varieties of those crops, varieties that with the benefit of nitrogen-based fertilizers and modern cultivation techniques would be capable of feeding a rapidly growing world population.
Once developed, these crops and methods were widely adopted across the Global South, to dramatic effect.
How the Green Revolution transformed poor countries
The new paper, from economists Douglas Gollin, Casper Worm Hansen, and Asger Wingender and set to be published in the influential Journal of Political Economy soon, estimates what the effects of delaying the Green Revolution by 10 years would have been. IRRI started breeding rice crops in 1965, so in this counterfactual the revolution would have begun in 1975 instead.
They estimate that such a delay would have reduced GDP per capita in countries analyzed by about one-sixth; worldwide, the cost to GDP would total some $83 trillion, or about as much as one year of world GDP. And if the Green Revolution had never happened, GDP per capita in poor countries would be half what it is today.
They also estimate that the revolution dramatically reduced death rates, but it reduced fertility rates by more, such that a 10-year delay would have added 223 million people to the developing world. People worried about population growth should be fans, and those of us who are less worried can be grateful the remaining people had better lives than they would’ve otherwise.
The revolution also had environmental benefits in that it reduced the amount of land needed for staple crops, reducing deforestation and lowering carbon emissions.
If you come from a particular intellectual background, one that views the Green Revolution as a modern miracle and Norman Borlaug, one of its most influential scientists, as a kind of secular saint, this is all unsurprising.
The case against the revolution
But readers with a different background will be shaking their heads. There’s another intellectual tradition, with roots in Global South farmer organizing, anti-GMO activism, and the anti-globalization movement, that views the Green Revolution as a kind of disaster.
The most influential advocate of this view is probably Indian activist Vandana Shiva, who has argued that the revolution led to “reduced genetic diversity, increased vulnerability to pests, soil erosion, water shortages, reduced soil fertility, micronutrient deficiencies, soil contamination” and on and on.
Some of these critiques have real weight. Nitrogen-based fertilizer really does cause run-off that damages the environment; pesticides really can be hazardous to human health. One recent study estimates that unintentional pesticide poisoning (mostly from pesticides not common pre-Green Revolution) kills some 11,000 people per year.
But “on the one hand, on the other hand” equivocating about a complex social phenomenon like the Green Revolution has frankly been a disservice — and really downplayed how massively consequential it was for billions of people.
Some 3-6 million children’s lives are saved every year by the Green Revolution’s expansion of food security. And that’s not counting the adult lives saved either. The benefits don’t just outweigh the costs; they completely swamp the costs.
A lot of popular considerations of the revolution almost dutifully summarize its impact as “mixed.” Sometimes it feels like the conventions of journalism demand anything that isn’t a Pareto improvement — anything that doesn’t make some people better off without making anyone or any other problem worse off — as at most half-good.
But that’s a dereliction of duty, for reasons this new study underlines. As noted above, the authors roughly estimate that on a per capita basis, the developing world would be half as well off if the Green Revolution had never happened.
The typical Nigerian or Bangladeshi’s life would be half as good, or twice as bad, as it is now, at least economically. Half! Oh yeah, and death rates would be massively higher.
Sure, that’s not an unqualified improvement; it came with costs in nitrogen runoff and pesticide poisoning, among other problems. But it also doubled the living standards of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Yes, the Green Revolution had a few downsides. But the upsides have been so overwhelming that, really, it’s okay to say it was nothing less than a big step forward for human progress.
—Dylan Matthews, @dylanmatt
How stressed out are factory-farmed animals? AI might have the answer. John Locher/AP The promise and perils of using facial recognition technology on animals. Read more. What the Novavax vaccine means for the global fight against Covid-19 Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images The biotech firm said its Covid-19 vaccine showed 90 percent efficacy in clinical trials. Read more.
Access the web version of this newsletter here.
This email was sent to paulr99@gmail.com. Manage your email preferences, or unsubscribe to stop receiving all emails from Vox. If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring contribution.
View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.
Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036. |