For centuries, millions of Asian farmers and their families suffered the threat of starvation. Scientists joined to create the Green Revolution to help end this threat.
For centuries, the peoples of Asia and Africa and elsewhere have been subject to the threat of starvation. Millions of subsistence rice farmers have been obliged to rely on providence, as they sought to make sense of the varying patterns of the monsoon, flooding and drought and how these determined whether or not they and their families would be able to eat that year. In the years following World War II, the countries of Asia were variously courted by the capitalist and communist blocs in the effort to gain support and power internationally. One weapon in the fight against Communism was the creation of a Green Revolution, which was aimed at greatly increasing the productivity of existing strains of rice and other cereal products and so ending the threat of starvation. This would not only cause assisted governments to be grateful to the western powers that provided this help but also would help future generations of farmers on a route towards financial independence and strength that would eventually see them taking their place in the international capitalist production-consumption system. Of course, not everyone saw the work they were doing in these terms: most of those involved were simply trying to do a good job and save the lives of thousands of poor people.
One major player in the search for improvement in grain productivity was the International Rice Research Institute, which was established in Los Baños in the Philippines in 1962. some 10,000 different strains of rice from around the world were gathered and cross-bred to determine which might be more productive. A combination of a tall, vigorous variety from Indonesia with a dwarf Taiwanese variety produced the strain known as IR-8, which hugely increased productivity. The use of IR-8, together with other enhanced wheat and rice strains, has significantly reduced the threat of starvation for generations of the poor across Asia and further afield.
Nothing is perfect, of course and the Green Revolution also had some negative effects. Those farmers who have poor land which does not meet the requirements of the imported new rice strains may find their yield reduced rather than increased. Also, the new rice strains are not always as well-adapted to the local conditions as the ones that they replaced and this has also led to some negative outcomes. The attempt to create a ‘miracle rice’ which was resistant to disease and would grow in almost any environment without chemicals or fertilizers has been more or less abandoned because of the wide variety of ground conditions but the Green Revolution as a whole is an example of the power and virtue that can be derived from international scientific collaboration.
References and Further Reading
Dahlberg, Kenneth, Beyond the Green Revolution: The Ecology and Politics of Global Agricultural Development (Springer, 1979).
John Walsh, Shinawatra University, March 2007
