Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

DID THE "GREEN REVOLUTION" PREVENT FAMINES?
Assessing the Legacy of Norman Borlaug
http://ww4report.com/node/7980
by Alexis Lathem, Toward Freedom

Following the announcement of the death of Norman Borlaug in September, we 
have been reminded of the sweeping claims that have been made about the 
successes of the green revolution. Borlaug was an agricultural scientist who, 
under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed dwarf varieties 
of wheat and rice that are widely reported to have produced miraculous 
yields, and which “saved the lives of millions of people” in the developing 
world who would otherwise have starved.

"Father of green revolution saved millions of lives" reads one headline. "The 
Nobel winner who fed the world" reads another. It would seem that any claim 
that a single human being could have achieved these miracles, let alone a 
technician—should arouse at least a measure of skepticism. Although some of 
the commentary that appeared following the announcement of Borlaug's death 
admitted that the green revolution has had its critics—it has after all, 
increased poverty in the world, widened the gap between rich and poor, caused 
water tables to drop to dangerous levels, caused widespread chemical 
contamination, and led to staggering losses of topsoil and soil fertility—the 
claim that Borlaug's innovations in plant genetics "saved millions of lives" 
has gone by virtually without challenge.

The moniker "green revolution," which refers to the United States' aggressive 
campaign to "modernize" third world agriculture, has been one of the most 
successful public relations ploys in the history of political marketing. For 
what could be more politically benign than the wholesome images it 
evokes—images of green fields and amber waves of grain—or less objectionable 
than an effort to grow food to feed the hungry and the poor? For all the 
criticisms of the industrial agricultural system that the green revolution 
introduced to India, Pakistan, the Philippines and other countries, these 
concerns must be measured against the claim that "millions of people" would 
otherwise have starved.

What, however, is the basis for the claim that the green revolution saved 
millions of lives? It is repeated often enough, although source documentation 
is never provided—it is as generally accepted as, for instance, the claim 
that the civil war ended the institution of slavery in the United States. No 
source documentation is needed. But how do you measure, scientifically 
speaking, what would have happened? Have the alternatives to the agricultural 
model that prevailed be taken into account? Is it possible—given that the 
predicted famines did not occur—that these projections were flawed? Can we 
assume that there were no alternatives to ramping up food production in the 
industrial style? Is it impossible that there might be another explanation to 
India's avoidance of widespread famines since Independence, other than the 
intervention of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Borlaug's miracle 
seeds?

The persistence of the belief that so-called high yielding seeds (they 
produce high yields only because they are tolerant of large doses of chemical 
fertilizers) saved millions of people from famine, is all the more remarkable 
given that the scholarship has thoroughly discredited it. What is implied 
here is that industrial methods produce more food than small farms that 
integrate a diversity of crops and rely on natural fertilizers and hand 
labor—which has been disproved by innumerable scientific studies.[1]

What is also implied by the argument is the Malthusian logic, which holds 
that famines are a consequence of a lack of food, and a lack a food is a 
consequence of the failure of agricultural systems to produce enough to keep 
up with population growth. Naturally, where there is hunger, we assume that 
there is a lack of food. Historians and economists—most notably Amartya Sen, 
another Nobel laureate, who has examined the causes of hunger and famine in 
dozens of scholarly books—have found that famine and hunger have historically 
been unrelated to food availability.[2] Malthus, in other words, is 
thoroughly irrelevant to any understanding of the causes of hunger in the 
world. What was true in Ireland during the potato famine of 1845-1852 was 
also true in Bengal in 1943, and it remains true today—which is that millions 
died of starvation in the midst of agricultural abundance.

According to the Malthusian view, which Borlaug himself adopted, the world 
had run out of land on which to grow food and the only way to increase food 
production was to find a way to increase the crop yields on any given piece 
of land through technological innovation. Malthus, however, did not take into 
account patterns of land ownership, or issues of who controls the land and 
what it is used for. Neither did Borlaug, who accepted that if there was 
hunger, there must be a scarcity of food. But one cannot, after all, eat 
cotton or jute, nor can one eat coffee or tea, nor for that matter, can a 
poor Indian peasant eat the food that she herself produces, because it is 
destined for export and for the tables of the affluent of distant cities.

This understanding of the lack of a relationship between food scarcity and 
hunger, although it has been deepened by the work of Sen and other scholars, 
it is not new; the Royal Commission of Famines established by the British in 
India in the nineteenth century understood it—namely, that hunger and famine 
under its rule were not a consequence of a scarcity of food. In the year 1880 
the Commission found that:

    The effect of drought is to diminish greatly and at last to stop, all 
field labor, and to throw out of employment the great mass of people who live 
on the wages of such labor …distress arises, not so much from an actual want 
of food, as from a loss of wages – in other words, money to buy food…as a 
general rule, there is an abundance of food procurable, even in the worst 
districts and the worst time; but when men who at their best, live from hand 
to mouth, are deprived of their means of earning wages, they starve, not from 
the impossibility of getting food, but for want of the necessary money to buy 
it.[3]

Later, in its report on the Bengal famine of 1943 (the last major famine to 
occur in India, which claimed one and a half a million lives) the Commission 
also attributed other factors—namely greed and opportunism—as causes of the 
disaster: "Enormous profits were made out of this calamity, and in the 
circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the 
community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much 
indifference in the face of suffering."[4]

Historians who have examined the periodic famines that plagued India during 
the colonial and modern periods have concurred with the Famine Commission 
that occurrences of famine were not a function of food scarcity, nor were 
they a result of a Malthusian imbalance between the size of India’s 
population and the food producing capacity of the land. Under British rule, 
the commercialization of agriculture that would be stepped up in the late 
twentieth century had already begun, with an emphasis on industrial and 
export crops over food crops, as Daniel and Alice Thorner describe in their 
1962 book, Land and Labor in India:

    Wheat poured out of the Punjab, cotton out of Bombay, and jute out of 
Bengal. As commercial agriculture and money economy spread, the older 
practices associated with a self-subsisting economy declined... In some 
districts the peasant shifted over completely to industrial corps... 
villagers sent to market the cereal reserves traditionally kept for poor 
years... Years of successive droughts in the 1870s, and 1890s led to great 
famines and agrarian unrest. [5]

The landless laborers who lived "from hand to mouth" could scarcely feed 
themselves even in a good harvest year. As one agricultural laborer from 
Bihar, India put it, "If you don't own any land, you never get enough to eat, 
even if the land is producing well." [6]

It was the Malthusian argument however, that framed the justification for an 
aggressive intervention in the agricultural economies of developing nations 
that we call the green revolution. India, it was predicted in the 1960s, 
faced widespread food shortages and famine. What was the basis for this 
projection? The prediction of widespread famines, which gained such currency 
through in the popular books Famine—1975! by William and Paul Paddock and The 
Population Bomb by Paul Erlich, had its genesis in a 1959 Ford Foundation 
report prepared by an Agricultural Production team from the United States, 
that examined demographic trends and food production in India and predicted 
widespread famines would occur in the year 1967. Given that India did not 
experience the massive die-offs that were predicted, we might allow that, 
quite possibly, the predictions were based on a flawed analysis. This was the 
conclusion of the economist Daniel Thorner, who examined the statistical 
methods of the 1959 report and judged that "this is the sort of jugglery that 
gives statistics a bad name."

Noting that the report's authors found it necessary to project their panic 
into the future, Thorner wrote: "The fuss and the furor, the 'crisis of 
overwhelming gravity'...are not a matter of 1959, but of 1966... one wonders 
whether an ominous crisis came to India along with the team..." [7]

If the threat of famine looming over the horizon was not what motivated the 
United States to invest billions of taxpayer dollars into revitalizing 
agriculture in the third world, there was a very real menace, which was the 
growing social unrest among the rural populations and a very real potential 
for communist insurgencies. Peasants all over the world were demanding land. 
"If in 1945," wrote Ford Foundation chair Paul Hoffman in a letter to the 
Unites States ambassador to India, "we had embarked on such a program and 
carried it on a cost of not over 200 million a year, the end result would 
have been a China completely immunized against the appeal of the Communists. 
India, in my opinion, is today what China was in 1945." [8]

After two billion dollars in aid from the United States over ten years, India 
had established an industrial agriculture system with a complex of dams, 
irrigation systems, roads, grain elevators, and petrochemical plants. India 
became one of the leading wheat producers in the world. What remains 
invisible behind the statistics of its enormous wheat production is the 
enormous social, economic and ecological disruption that this transformation 
had caused, and which, in fact, increased poverty and hunger rather than 
reduced it. "The food systems that have maintained humankind through most of 
its history are disintegrating," wrote Andrew Pearse, the author of the 
United Nation's 15-nation study of the results of the green revolution, who 
concluded that "emergence of more capital intensive farming" and the 
"dissolution of self provisioning agriculture" were the leading causes of the 
"crisis of livelihood"—in other words, poverty—in the developing world. [9]

Prior to the green revolution, wheat had never been an important crop in 
India, and it was not a staple of the Indian diet. What does it mean to boast 
that India increased its wheat yields under the green revolution other than 
to say that it grew more wheat in place of traditional cereal crops—at the 
insistence of the United States? Crops produced by subsistence farms are 
statistically invisible, and so too are the declines in the production of 
traditional food crops as a consequence of the commercialization of its 
agriculture.

If the commercialization of agriculture increased poverty in India rather 
than alleviated it, we must look elsewhere to explain the avoidance of 
famines since the middle of the last century. In 1947, India won its 
independence from Britain and became a democracy, and democracies do not 
allow millions of people to drop dead on the streets from hunger where food 
is available. In an exhaustive study of the occurrence of famines in India 
over the last two hundred years, Jean Druze offers an alternative explanation 
to the appearance of miracle seeds for the avoidance of famines in India 
since Independence, which is political and administrative rather that 
technological or even agricultural. If the food-to-head ratio had remained 
steady, as Druze found, what had changed since Independence was development 
of an effective emergency relief system and a commitment on the part of its 
leadership to avoid famines that has amounted, in Druze's words, to a 
"political compulsion." [10]

If India's food situation was precarious in the middle of the last century, 
which it was, we might ask if there were alternatives to the 
industrialization of its agriculture. Paul Erlich, typically, suggests that 
what the "under producing" countries of the world needed was the interference 
of more agricultural scientists from the West—however, maybe what they needed 
was to be left to continue the agricultural practices that had served them 
for millennia. Maybe what they needed was access to lands that had been taken 
from them by European colonizers and their descendants. What might have been 
the result if the United States had directed its two billion dollars in 
subsidies toward a peasant-based, labor-intensive agriculture, rather than 
for the purchase of machines and agro-chemicals that displaced human labor 
and the more sophisticated agricultural wisdom that had served Indian farmers 
for centuries?

There was an alternative, and it had its proponents, besides the peasants 
themselves. Sir Albert Howard, an agricultural officer with the British 
colonial government, who is considered to be the grandfather of the modern 
organic farming movement, published An Agricultural Testament in 1943, which 
was based on his years of patient observations of traditional faming in 
India. "Instead of breaking up the subject into fragments," he wrote, "and 
studying agriculture in piece meal fashion by the analytical method of 
science, appropriate only to the discovery of new facts, we must adopt a 
synthetic approach and look at the wheel of life as one great subject and not 
as if it were a patchwork of unrelated things." [11] But it would be the 
reductionistic model that would prevail, and that is still misunderstood to 
be more "efficient" and superior, although it is based on an outmoded 
mechanistic model rather than on a scientific understanding of the complexity 
of biological systems.

While an industrial system of monocultures, mechanical tilling, and 
over-fertilization is ill-suited to any ecological—or social—environment, it 
is particularly ill-suited to a tropical environment, and the environmental 
consequences of introducing this technology to the tropics has been 
devastating. Today, as a consequence of technologies introduced by the green 
revolution, India loses 6 billion tons of topsoil every year. Ten million 
hectares of India's irrigated land is now waterlogged and saline. Pesticide 
poisoning has caused epidemics of cancers. Water tables are falling by twenty 
feet every year. The soil fertility and water resources that had been 
carefully managed for generations in the Punjab were wasted in a few short 
years of industrial abuses. [12]

If India's masses have avoided starvation, they have endured chronic and 
debilitating hunger and poverty. Over 200 million people in India are hungry, 
according to the 2008 Global Hunger Index, although India is a leading food 
exporter. The ongoing commercialization of agriculture in India continues to 
this day, and the result—which is exacerbated by climate change—is a swelling 
slum population that is growing at 250 times the rate of population growth. 
[13]

The alternative, as proposed by Howard, and as practiced for thousands of 
years by Indian farmers, is a multi-tiered system of agro-forestry that is 
capable of supplying food, fuel, and fiber needs, while providing year-round 
employment, and a surplus, over the long term. [14]

In addition to these benefits there are those that are impossible to quantify 
because the values are immeasurable—the value of clean water, meaningful 
work, biological diversity, and the cultural, social and physical vitality of 
thriving farming communities.

Such a system of small holdings would have required land reform, and it would 
have done little to feed the larger industrial economy; although it may have 
benefited the rural poor in India, it would not have helped the economic 
security of the United States, which benefited greatly from the sales of 
fertilizers and machinery as a result of the green revolution. If the green 
revolution failed as a humanitarian program, it succeeded as an economic 
stimulus plan for the United States by creating unprecedented opportunities 
for western capital.

The industrialization of agriculture has never been a means of meeting human 
needs, but of feeding the demands of an industrial economy, which requires 
cheap grain and a cheap pool of surplus labor. Malthus originally wrote his 
essay as an argument against the poor laws; Malthusian arguments about ratios 
of population growth and food production have always been ideologically 
motivated, and have been used to advance the view that hunger in the world is 
"natural," deflecting criticisms away from the inequalities of colonial or 
capitalistic systems and onto the poor themselves. [15]

While these considerations may be important to correct the historical record, 
they are more than of academic interest. The same justifications for a 
second-generation green revolution are being advanced in the promotion of 
genetically modified crops, to the detriment of the world's small farmers but 
to the benefit of companies like Monsanto. ("Nine billion people. A Changing 
climate."—we have all seen the advertisements.) In cooperation with the World 
Food Program, well-meaning philanthropic organizations, like the Bill and 
Melinda Gates Foundation, are subsidizing the purchase of agro-chemicals and 
hybrid and GM seeds for small farmers in Africa, where agriculture is in dire 
need of support and development. But is this the most suitable form of 
agriculture for Africa? The world has at least grown wiser from the lessons 
of the green revolution. Or has it?

Discussions about the legacy of Norman Borlaug—saint or sinner?—over-estimate 
his contribution on both sides of the debate. To misunderstand this is to 
exaggerate the importance of the genetics of crops, which has so perilously 
little to do with the persistence of hunger in the world. Borlaug's seeds are 
the equivalent of the proverbial stone in the soup—for what would these seeds 
have meant without, not just the technological package of machines and 
agrochemicals, but the entire ideological package that constituted the green 
revolution? As much as the "red" revolution it was designed to contest, the 
green revolution was ideologically inspired; it was a form of social and 
political engineering necessary for the global triumph of industrial 
capitalism. This was no miracle, and there was no wizardry involved. Our 
culture is all too easily seduced by the make-believe of technological magic, 
and our faith that technology will solve our problems is as irrational as it 
is dangerous. Behind the curtain, as it turns out, there is only a little old 
man with a cook stove.

Notes

1] See, for instance, Lappé, Francis Moore, et al. World Hunger: Twelve 
Myths, 2nd ed. Grove Press, New York 1998; Johda, N.S., "Famine and famine 
policies: some empirical evidence," International Crops Research Institute 
for Semi-Arid Tropics 1975; Rosset, Peter, "The Multiple Functions and 
Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture," Policy Brief N. 4, Institute for Food 
and Development Policy, 1999.

[2] Sen, Amartya. "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and 
Deprivation," Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982.

[3] Quoted in Dreze, Jean. "Famine Prevention in India," in The Political 
Economy of Hunger, Jean Drèze, Amartya Sen, and Athar Hussain, eds., 
Clarendon Press 1995. p. 92.

[4] Quoted in Lappé, Frances Moore, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, 
Balantine 1978. p. 80.

[5] Quoted in Ross, Eric. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and 
Population in Capitalist Development, Zed Books, London 1998. p.49-50.

[6] Quoted from the New York Times in Lappé, Food First, p. 147.

[7] Thorner, Daniel and Alice, Land and Labor in India, Asia Publishing 
House, London 1962. p. 114.

[8] Quoted in Ross, p. 153.

[9] Pearse, Andrew, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want: Social and Economic 
Implications of the Green Revolution, United Nations Research Institute for 
Social Development, Clarendeon Press, 1980. p. vii

[10] Druze, Jean. Famine Prevention in India, United Nations University, 
Helsinki

[11] Howard, Sir Albert, An Agricultural Testament, Oxford University Press, 
1943.

[12] Rathindra, Nath Roy, "Trees: Appropriate tools for Water and Soil 
Management," in The Green Revolution Revisited: Critique and Alternatives, 
Bernhard Glaeser, ed., Allen & Unwin, London, 1987.

[13] Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, 2006.

[14] Rathindra, Nath Roy, "Trees: Appropriate tools for Water and Soil 
Management," op cit

[15] See Ross, Eric, The Malthus Factor, op cit