Wikipedia Deep Dive

Green Revolution

12 min read

The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives

Norman Borlaug is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. That's not hyperbole or poetic license. It's a rough but defensible estimate of how many human beings would have died of hunger in the second half of the twentieth century had it not been for the agricultural innovations he helped pioneer. In 1970, he won the Nobel Peace Prize—not for diplomacy or disarmament, but for developing wheat.

How does a plant scientist end up saving more lives than any general, president, or treaty ever has?

The answer lies in a peculiar convergence of American philanthropy, Cold War anxiety, Mexican politics, and the ancient human struggle to coax enough food from the earth. This story is called the Green Revolution, and its consequences—both miraculous and troubling—continue to shape our world today.

The Iowa Farmer and the Mexican Bushel

In 1940, Henry Wallace was about to become Vice President of the United States. Before entering politics, he had founded Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a company that revolutionized the hybridization of seed corn. Wallace understood, in his bones, what modern agricultural science could accomplish.

That year, he took a lengthy trip to Mexico. What he saw appalled him.

At the time, roughly eighty percent of Mexicans lived off the land. A Mexican farmer had to work as much as five hundred hours to produce a single bushel of corn. An Iowa farmer planting hybrid seed could produce the same bushel in about ten hours. The gap was staggering—a fifty-fold difference in productivity.

Wallace persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to fund an agricultural research station in Mexico, focused on developing hybrid corn and wheat varieties suited to arid climates. To lead it, he hired a young agronomist from Iowa named Norman Borlaug.

What Made the Revolution Revolutionary

The Green Revolution wasn't just about better seeds, though that was the foundation. It was a package deal—a bundle of interconnected changes that, taken together, transformed how humans grow food.

At its core were high-yielding varieties of cereals, particularly dwarf wheat and rice. These plants were bred to be shorter and sturdier than traditional varieties, meaning they could support heavier heads of grain without toppling over. They matured faster and responded dramatically to fertilizer.

But the seeds alone weren't enough. To achieve their potential yields, these new varieties required far more fertilizer than traditional crops. They needed reliable irrigation. They demanded pesticides to protect them from insects and diseases. And they worked best with mechanized cultivation and harvest.

This is a crucial point often missed in celebrations of the Green Revolution: it wasn't simply a gift of better plants. It was a fundamental restructuring of agriculture that required credit, infrastructure, chemical inputs, and often the displacement of traditional farming practices. The technology worked spectacularly well—but only within a specific economic and political framework.

Mexico: Birthplace and Burial Ground

Mexico has been called both the birthplace and the burial ground of the Green Revolution. The phrase captures something essential about this transformation.

When Borlaug's team began their work in the early 1940s, Mexico couldn't feed itself. The country imported half its wheat. The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 had broken up the great haciendas and redistributed land to peasant farmers called ejidatarios, but this reform—whatever its social justice merits—had not increased agricultural productivity. By the 1940s, yields were declining.

The results came astonishingly fast. Within eight years of Wallace's visit, Mexico no longer needed to import food—for the first time since 1910. Within twenty years, corn production had tripled. Wheat production increased fivefold. By 1964, Mexico was exporting half a million tons of wheat annually.

But here's where the story grows complicated.

The Green Revolution worked best on large-scale farms with access to credit, often from foreign investors. It required government infrastructure for irrigation. It depended on low-wage agricultural workers. The full package of inputs—new seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, reliable water—was often beyond the reach of small-scale farmers.

And the pesticides could be deadly. Workers handling chemicals without proper protection faced health hazards. Waterways became contaminated. The local ecology suffered damage that would take decades to understand fully.

The Green Revolution fed Mexico. It also transformed Mexican agriculture into something that looked increasingly like industrialized American farming—with all the attendant consequences for rural communities, small farmers, and the environment.

Miracle Rice and the Asian Transformation

In 1960, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations joined with the Philippine government to establish the International Rice Research Institute, known as IRRI. Rice, not wheat, is the staple food for most of Asia. If the Green Revolution was going to matter globally, it needed to work for rice.

In 1962, researchers at IRRI crossed two rice varieties: one called Dee-Geo-woo-gen and another called Peta. The breeding line that emerged from this cross became, in 1966, a new cultivar called IR8.

IR8 was extraordinary. Under optimal conditions, it could yield almost ten tons per hectare—roughly ten times what traditional rice varieties produced. People started calling it "Miracle Rice."

The numbers from India tell the story. In the 1960s, Indian rice yields averaged about two tons per hectare. By the mid-1990s, they had risen to six tons per hectare. The price of rice fell dramatically: from around five hundred fifty dollars a ton in the 1970s to under two hundred dollars a ton by 2001. India transformed from a nation dependent on food imports to a major rice exporter, shipping nearly four and a half million tons in 2006.

Similar transformations occurred across Asia. The Philippines, home to IRRI, increased its annual rice production from 3.7 to 7.7 million tons in two decades. For the first time in the twentieth century, the Philippines became a rice exporter—though, it should be noted, imports still exceeded exports over this period.

China's Parallel Path

China's version of the Green Revolution took a different route. When the People's Republic was established in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party made agricultural development a top priority—but they didn't simply import the American model.

Instead, China developed its own approach, combining government-sponsored agricultural research with peasant knowledge and feedback, drawing on earlier international research, and incorporating nature-based pest control alongside more industrial methods. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1950 ended private land ownership and redistributed land to peasants—a very different political context than the Green Revolution's operations elsewhere.

The pivotal figure was Yuan Longping, who developed productive hybrid rice by crossing wild strains with existing varieties. He has been dubbed "the father of hybrid rice" and was considered a national hero in China. His work is credited with saving at least as many lives as Borlaug's.

The results have been remarkable. In 1979, four hundred ninety million Chinese people lived in poverty. By 2014, that number had fallen to eighty-two million. Half of China's population had once been hungry and impoverished; by 2014, only six percent remained so.

But this success has come with costs. Extensive use of groundwater for irrigation has drawn down aquifers. Heavy fertilizer use has increased greenhouse gas emissions. The food security China achieved has not come free.

Brazil and the Acid Soil

Brazil's contribution to the Green Revolution story is often overlooked, but it's fascinating in its own right.

The cerrado—Brazil's vast inland savanna region—was long considered unfit for farming. The soil was too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Norman Borlaug himself acknowledged this limitation.

The solution was brute-force chemistry. Starting in the 1960s, Brazilian farmers began pouring pulverized limestone onto the soil to reduce its acidity. The effort continued for decades. By the late 1990s, Brazil was spreading between fourteen and sixteen million tons of lime on its fields annually. By 2003 and 2004, that figure had reached twenty-five million tons—roughly five tons of lime per hectare.

The transformation was dramatic. Brazil became the world's second-largest soybean exporter. Because soybeans are widely used in animal feed, this soy production fueled Brazil's rise to become the world's largest exporter of both beef and poultry.

Argentina followed a parallel path, experiencing its own boom in soybean production. South America became, in effect, the protein factory for much of the world.

Africa's Elusive Revolution

The Green Revolution's successes in Latin America and Asia naturally prompted attempts to replicate them in Africa. These efforts have generally been far less successful.

Why?

The explanations are multiple and contested. Some point to corruption, political instability, and lack of infrastructure—the absence of the roads, irrigation systems, and credit networks that made the revolution possible elsewhere. Others emphasize environmental factors: Africa's high diversity of slopes and soil types within small areas, the unreliable availability of water for irrigation.

There's also a deeper question embedded here. The Green Revolution wasn't simply a technological fix. It required specific political, economic, and ecological conditions. It worked where governments had the capacity and will to support it, where credit was available, where infrastructure could be built, and where environmental conditions permitted intensive monoculture farming.

Not all these conditions exist everywhere. Perhaps they shouldn't.

The Ledger

What did the Green Revolution actually accomplish? Studies show it contributed to widespread eradication of poverty and averted hunger for millions. Incomes rose. Infant mortality declined. Fewer people starved to death than would have otherwise.

But the ledger has two columns.

The revolution increased greenhouse gas emissions—from fertilizer production, from farm machinery, from the transformation of agriculture into an increasingly industrial process. It reduced land use for agriculture in some places, which might seem environmentally beneficial until you consider that it did so by intensifying production on the remaining land, with all the chemical inputs that entailed.

It favored large-scale farming over small-scale. It often left poor farmers in debt while enriching larger landowners. It replaced diverse traditional agricultural systems with monocultures dependent on external inputs.

The Green Revolution fed people. It also created new dependencies and new vulnerabilities.

Why "Green"?

The term itself is worth examining. William Gaud, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, coined it in a speech on March 8, 1968. His framing was explicitly political:

These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.

The color wasn't chosen for its environmental connotations—this was before "green" became synonymous with ecological consciousness. Gaud was positioning agricultural technology as an alternative to communist revolution. Feed people, the logic went, and they won't turn to Marxism.

This Cold War context shaped the revolution's implementation. The countries that received the most support—Mexico, the Philippines, India—were all places where American policymakers worried about communist influence. The Green Revolution was, in part, a geopolitical strategy.

The Father of Hybrid Rice and the Father of the Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug and Yuan Longping never collaborated directly, but their parallel achievements bookend the Green Revolution story. Borlaug developed the dwarf wheat varieties that transformed agriculture in Latin America and South Asia. Yuan developed the hybrid rice that helped feed China and much of Southeast Asia.

Both were working scientists who spent decades in fields and laboratories, breeding plants generation after generation. Both achieved results that shaped the lives of billions. Both received extraordinary recognition—Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize, Yuan the status of national hero.

And both understood the complexity of what they had accomplished. Borlaug, in his later years, warned that the Green Revolution's gains were temporary unless population growth slowed. The same technologies that had averted famine could enable continued population growth, which would eventually outstrip even enhanced agricultural capacity.

He also understood that the revolution had environmental costs. More fertilizer meant more runoff. More irrigation meant depleted aquifers. More monoculture meant less biodiversity and greater vulnerability to disease.

Beyond the Revolution

As crops began to reach the maximum improvement possible through traditional selective breeding, scientists developed genetic modification technologies to allow continued efforts. This transition—from the Green Revolution to the age of genetically modified organisms—raises new questions about the relationship between technology, food, and human welfare.

The Green Revolution's central promise was that scientific expertise could solve the problem of hunger. In many ways, it delivered on that promise. In other ways, it created new problems while solving old ones.

Perhaps the deepest question the Green Revolution raises is this: when we transform nature to serve human needs, what do we give up in the process? The revolution traded diverse traditional agricultural systems for more productive but more vulnerable monocultures. It traded local knowledge for external expertise. It traded self-sufficient farming for dependence on global markets in fertilizer, pesticides, and credit.

Whether those trades were worth making depends on how you weigh the lives saved against the systems transformed—and on what you think the long-term consequences will be for both human societies and the ecosystems they depend upon.

A billion people didn't starve who otherwise would have. That's not nothing. It may be the single greatest humanitarian achievement of the twentieth century.

But the story isn't over. The aquifers are still being drained. The fertilizer is still producing greenhouse gases. The agricultural systems the revolution created still depend on inputs that may not be sustainable indefinitely.

The Green Revolution bought time. What we do with that time remains an open question.