/IPS ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN/ WORLD FOOD SUMMIT: Second Green Revolution: Will it Work?

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dipankar De Sarkar

ROME, Nov 16 1996 (IPS) - Depending whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, a second green revolution will either bring further misery to the poor or deliver food and prosperity to the hungry millions of Africa and Latin America.

Thirty years on since the start of the first green revolution, controversy, debate and sheer muddle continue to hound the 20th century’s major scientific attempt to rid the world of hunger.

The debate is central to the World Food Summit, starting in Rome Wednesday, where world leaders are gathered to adopt strategies to halve the number of hungry people worldwide by the year 2015.

Summit organizers, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), holds that a second green revolution is needed now to bring more food to the two continents that were left out of the first one — Africa and Latin America.

In support of their argument, FAO officials cite what they see as the spectacular success of the first green revolution in doubling –and then tripling — agricultural production in Asia in three decades.

“If you look at the situation from the 1960s, famines didn’t occur in Asia because of agricultural research – the green revolution,” said Dr Stein Bie, Director of FAO’s Research, Extension and Training division.

The most notable success stories cited by FAO are India — where famine and starvation deaths were commonplace before the green revolution — and the so-called Tiger Economies of South East Asia. Now, FAO says, its the turn of Africa and Latin America to follow the Asian lead.

“The historic lessons of Europe and the Asian Tigers, putting agriculture as the basis of economic development, must be learnt,” said Bie. “There is some wisdom in that.”

“National governments must move agriculture up in their list of priorities. Otherwise the second green revolution will fail,” Bie added.

FAO also believed the lead must come from national governments though the signals from the affluent Northern governments have been lukewarm at best – investments in the primary rural industry has fallen from 20 percent of total overseas aid in 1980 to only 10 percent now.

“It is unlikely the international environment will do this on its own if national governments cannot do it,”said Bie.

“Agricultural development must be back on the development agenda — that’s the purpose of this summit.”

But outside the FAO, many questions still are being asked of the green revolution by experts who hold the Asian experience hasn’t been as happy as is believed.

In a recently-published book, Indian agricultural writer Devinder Sharma says though the Indian green revolution greatly succeeded in modernised unproductive farming systems and raised the output of staple grains, it had many major failings.

According to Sharma:

– The impact of the improved technology was felt on only in the “better-endowed regions”;

– It widened the gap between rich and small farmers. According to the then fashionable economic thinking, profits from the green revolution was expected to ‘trickle down’ to the poor farmers after initially benefiting only the rich. But in practice, this did not happen;

– There were enormous environmental costs as the new technology depended heavily on chemicals, fossil fuels and water;

– It was less energy-efficient than traditional farming systems and,

– Monoculture, mechanical ploughing, soil erosion, the extension of crops into forests and pastures all contributed to the general depredation of agricultural land.

Critics of the green revolution contend that it makes little sense to aim at increasing agricultural production – at great environmental costs – if first, there is no socio-economic system in place to ensure everybody has enough to eat.

Before the Summit ends, hundreds of thousands of people will be dead from hunger, starvation and malnutrition – “a majority of them in India,” says Sharma in his book, ‘In the Famine Trap.’

Experts at FAO appear to recognise the force of the political argument. Bie admits that “some people” – mostly marginalised small farmers and women – fell outside the costly and high input- setting of the first green revolution.

“That is the challenge – the socio-economic aspect must be taken into account in the second green revolution,” said Bie.

The problem, according to the many non-governmental organisations (NGO) attending the summit is that cash-strapped national governments find it increasingly difficult to look after their marginalised populations as economic liberalisation widens the gap between the rich and the poor.

Around the world, farmers’ organisations and researchers are countering the conventional wisdom surrounding the green revolution by demonstrating that satisfactory yields can be achieve with low levels of external inputs.

“The different points of view in this debate are reflected within the working of FAO as well,” a well-placed source revealed.

“It’s when certain programmes need funds – that’s when you get out into the big world outside. And that’s when some people in FAO start pushing for high-tech solutions.”