The Toxic Consequences of the Green Revolution

The Toxic Consequences of the Green Revolution

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Starting in 1965, India's Green Revolution transformed the country's few fertile regions into veritable breadbaskets, quadrupling India's output of wheat and rice. The revolution brought new irrigation techniques, hybrid seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and mechanization. Punjab's farmers became heroes of a self-sufficient India no longer dependent upon shipments of foreign grain and making a clean cut with a past full of mass starvation and food aid from the United States.

Times have changed, says Prof. R. K. Mahajan, an agricultural economist at Punjabi University. "The Green Revolution is not as green as it was earlier—it has now become brown and pale," he says. "The profit margins have skewed to the minimum."

The Green Revolution hardly seems to have made much of an impact in terms of well-being here. Rural poverty abounds, malarial mosquitoes breed in stagnant pools of water, and bullock carts far outnumber motor vehicles.

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The "Green Revolution"... how many times have we heard that term used in connection with environmentally friendly actions and supposedly positive changes? Even today the Gates Foundation pumps millions of dollars into this system and heralds it as a responsible use of our resources and step towards self sufficiency.

Either the article has blamed the revolution unfairly, or else the public has been grossly mislead.

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