From Green Revolution to Green Evolution: A
Critique of the Political Myth of Averted Famine
Roger Jr. Pielke and Björn-Ola Linnér
The self-archived postprint version of this journal article is available at Linköping University Institutional Repository (DiVA):
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-160605
N.B.: When citing this work, cite the original publication. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com:
Pielke, R. J., Linnér, B., (2019), From Green Revolution to Green Evolution: A Critique of the Political Myth of Averted Famine, Minerva, 57(3), 265-291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-019-09372-7
Original publication available at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-019-09372-7
Copyright: Springer Verlag (Germany)
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From Green Revolution to Green Evolution: A Critique of the Political Myth of Averted Famine
Roger Pielke Jr. University of Colorado and Björn-Ola Linnér Linköping University 1 March 2019 Abstract
This paper critiques the so-called “Green Revolution” as a political myth of averted famine., A “political myth,” among other functions, reflects a narrative structure that characterizes understandings of causality between policy action and outcome. As such, the details of a particular political myth elevate certain policy options (and families of policy options) over others. One important narrative strand of the political myths of the Green Revolution is a story of averted famine: in the 1950s and 1960s scientists predicted a global crisis to emerge in the 1970s and beyond, created by a rapidly growing global population that would cause global famine as food supplies would not keep up with demand. The narrative posits that an intense period of technological innovation in agricultural productivity led to increasing crop yields which led to more food being produced, and the predicted crisis thus being averted. The fact that the world did not experience a global famine in the 1970s is cited as evidence in support of the narrative. Political myths need not necessarily be supported by evidence, but to the extent that they shape understandings of cause and effect in policy making, political myths which are not grounded in evidence risk misleading policy makers and the public. We argue a political myth of the Green Revolution focused on averted famine is not well grounded in evidence and thus has potential to mislead to the extent it guides thinking and action related to technological innovation. We recommend an alternative narrative: The Green Evolution, in which sustain improvements in agricultural productivity did not necessarily avert a global famine, but nonetheless profoundly shaped the modern world. More broadly, we argue that one of the key functions of the practice of technology assessment is to critique and to help create the political myths that accompany technologies in society.
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Introduction
In recent decades the calls for a “new Green Revolution” or “second Green Revolution” have surged.1 A simple Google search for the two phrases gives more than 170,000 results.2 Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates are among those who have called for a “second Green Revolution.”3 To understand what is implied in calls for this much-anticipated second Green Revolution it is important to understand what meaning is embodied by the notion of the first Green Revolution.
When we look closely at the many calls for a new or second Green Revolution, we see vastly different hopes and expectations conveyed by the phrase. For instance, some anticipate new technologies of agricultural biotechnology necessary to feed the world.4 Others envision a more sustainable or equitable approach to agricultural production.5 Still others see the need for a Green Revolution through the lens of growing global population or climate change.6 In this paper we argue one of the leading stories that we tell about the Green Revolution – what it was or is and what it signifies for the future – is an example of “political myth,” which shapes not just how we view history, but how we associate the lessons of that history with contemporary policy action. Political myth is a long-standing, theoretical concept of the social sciences. Political myths are central to collective action, as they shape how issues are framed, and in particular, they provide a narrative basis for explaining in simple terms the cause and effect relationships that comprise policy. The narrative underlying a political myth provides a social group an account of past, present, and anticipated political events (Flood 2002, Clark 2002). The concept of political myth is thus useful to making sense of the simplified stories that we tell about history and its significance 1 See for example: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=second+green+revolution%2C+new+green+revolution&y ear_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=5&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csecond%20gree n%20revolution%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cnew%20green%20revolution%3B%2Cc0 2 www.google.com, search terms ”new Green Revolution” and ”second Green Revolution”, 25 September 2017. 3 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Modi-presses-for-second-green-revolution-in-Bihar/articleshow/7612745.cms, 4 http://www.wsj.com/articles/growing-a-second-green-revolution-1416613158 5 http://www.thehindu.com/business/budget/aim-a-second-green-revolution/article6198871.ece 6 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11216988/Population-growth-is-clearly-our-planets-number-one-problem.html
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for policy in the present and future. In particular, the details of a particular political myth serve to elevate certain policy options (and families of policy options) over others. As such, we argue that the construction and critique of political myth is a particularly important aspect of technology assessment.
Our analysis proceeds in five parts. Part one provides an overview of the concept of “political myth” as a theoretical heuristic underpinning the subsequent analysis. Part two documents the emergence of the Green Revolution as a potent political myth focused on a brief period of agricultural innovation in the 1950s and 1960s as a central causal factor in averting a looming global catastrophe, expected in the 1970s. Part three critiques that political myth, arguing that the narrative of averted famine does not have strong grounding in evidence. Part four explores the mechanisms of political myth making in this instance, to explain factors underlying the Green Revolution’s political myth of averted famine. Part five concludes the paper by suggesting a remaking of the political mythology of the Green Revolution towards one more consistent with both history and contemporary understandings of innovation policies.
Political Myth as a Theoretical Heuristic
Political myth, and specifically the conception that we utilize in this analysis (Lasswell and Kaplan 1950, Lasswell et al. 1952), provides a systematic lens through which to understand the stories that we tell ourselves about historical occurrences. Such stories shape how we think about not only the past, but also the present and the future. The political myths of the Green Revolution encapsulate many different stories, having to do with issues of power, of science and of course, of food. One important element of the political mythology of the Green Revolution, and the focus of our analysis, is reflected in an oft-told story of averted famine: in the 1950s and 1960s scientists identified a looming catastrophe due to runaway population growth that would soon outstrip food supply. But then, based on this foreknowledge, the world took action to avert disaster – resulting in the Green Revolution -- and then obviously succeeded, as the predicted global famine did not happen. The Green Revolution thus provides a readily comprehensible narrative for the role of science-based technological innovation to avert crisis. That narrative -- focusing on a predicted
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apocalypse, that require intense technological innovation to be averted -- places scientists at the center of policy making as agents of warning, discovery and implementation.
As we will see, this story is not well supported by historical evidence. Instead, evidence suggests that although malnutrition was a serious global challenge (and which remains a challenge today), the world was not facing unprecedented global famine in the 1960s. The Green Revolution was less of an intervention to prevent famine, and more the inexorable consequence of accelerated incremental (and ultimately highly significant) gains in agricultural productivity based on processes of continuous innovation, that continued for decades after the 1960s. The Green Revolution was a decades-long acceleration of the pace of agricultural productivity after the 1950s and 1960s that reshaped global agriculture, economies and, in some cases, entire societies. Scientists (in particular) helped to advance a political myth of the Green Revolution that emphasized rapidly averted famine that was not only self-serving, but also has developed into a narrative of the role of technology in society that continues to shape broader thinking about innovation.
Our exploration of this particular political mythology of the Green Revolution is grounded in almost a century of research on the role of symbols in politics (cf., Pielke 2012). Lasswell and Kaplan (1950) posited that political myth can be usefully characterized into three parts:
• doctrine (comprised of core beliefs) • formula (representing preferred actions)
• miranda (the symbols that manifest core beliefs and preferred actions)
Using this language, our focus is on the miranda of political myth in the case of the Green Revolution. In plain English, we are focused on stories that have come to be told that simplify the highly complex set of experiences that have come to be known simply as the “Green Revolution,” and set the stage for beliefs and actions in contemporary technology policies in agriculture and beyond.
Narratives are the stories we tell to make sense of our experience (Harré et al 1999). The distillation of experience into simplified narratives is made possible by political symbols. Discourse contains myriad political symbols. Cobb and Elder (1983) define a symbol as: “any object used by human
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beings to index meanings that are not inherent in, nor discernible from, the object itself. Literally anything can be a symbol: a word or a phrase, a gesture or an event, a person, a place, or a thing. An object becomes a symbol when people endow it with meaning value or significance.” Consequently, political symbols play an important role in politics – bargaining, negotiation and compromise in pursuit of shared interests, and in policy – the securing of a shared commitment to a course of action (Pielke, 2007). Social science has a long tradition of research into the structure and function of narratives in shaping the social and political context of collective action. Gunnell (1968) argued that one purpose of such research is “illuminating the symbolic context that gives meaning to social action.” Geertz (1993) pointed at the dual function of symbols as models both for and of reality. Symbols, narratives and political myth reflect how we make sense of the world, but also produce our understanding of phenomena and relationships.
Sapir (1934) highlights the importance of symbols in human interactions: “society is peculiarly subject to the influence of symbols in such emotionally charged fields as religion and politics.” Following Sapir, Lasswell et al. (1952) define “key political symbols” as those which occur “in the flow of political statements.” They further distinguish three types of symbols:
• identification (referring to people and groups); • demand (referring to preferences and volitions); and • expectation (referring to assumptions of fact).
Symbols play an important role in politics, because they are used as instruments of power and influence but also explicitly and implicitly to expand and contract the scope of options that are considered for collective action (see, e.g., Brunner 1987; Burnier 1994). How the Green Revolution typically is characterized reflects a shared, simplified understanding of what it was, but also those causal factors linking action to desirable outcome. To the extent that the Green Revolution narrative is used as a blueprint (or narrative structure) for understanding other innovation challenges it has the potential to shape effective action, or alternative, if not well-grounded in actual cause-effect relationships, to mislead.
The concepts and dynamics of political myth can thus serve as useful heuristics for understanding belief and action, and relationships between them. Bottici and Challand (2006) explain, “[P]olitical
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myths are mapping devices through which we look at the world, feel about it and therefore also act within it as a social group.” They continue:
[P]olitical myths cannot be falsified because they are not scientific hypotheses as to the constitution of the world or astrological almanacs that foretell its future: they are determinations to act that can always reinforce themselves. This practical dimension of a political myth cannot, however, be separated from what we can call its cognitive and its aesthetic dimension. Political myths provide fundamental cognitive schemata for the mapping of the social world: by reducing the complexity of experience, they enable us to come to terms with the multifaceted character of the world we live in.”
They argue that “symbolic power, defined as the power to construct a successful version of reality, permeates all the dimensions of power.” Such power is an instrument of politics, where “politics seems to be increasingly about a struggle for people’s imagination.” What we think shapes how we act, and myths are central to understanding what we think. We posit that one important function of technology assessment is to construct and critique such political myths. Technology assessment results in the simplified stories we tell about innovation in society.
In what follows we critique the “Green Revolution” as a narrative of averted famine as political myth, that is, as a mapping device through which we look at, interpret and shape how we act in the world as related both to agricultural innovation and science-based technological innovation more generally. We argue that this dominant political mythology of the Green Revolution may obscure fundamental lessons of the past half-century in agricultural innovation, with broader relevance for science and innovation policies. Political myths are what we make them. It may be time to remake the political mythology of the Green Revolution to be grounded in a version of history that comports more directly with evidence related to cause and effect in policy. Political myth need not always be evidence-based, but the lessons that we take from them for future decision making will likely be more effective if they reliably reflect the relationships of intentional action and the achievement of desired outcomes.
The Green Revolution as a Story of Averted Catastrophe
The phrase “Green Revolution” was coined in 1968 to describe the recent and anticipated rapid increase in agricultural productivity through the adoption of new technologies, such as new hybrid
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crop varieties that thrived with a surging use of fertilizers, irrigation and pesticides. The phrase was also used to ground such technological innovation into the context of the Cold War. The Green Revolution is used to refer to both an event and a process.
As an event, the Green Revolution is primarily associated with rapid increases in Indian wheat production in the late 1960s. As a process, the Green Revolution is commonly attributed to the period 1940 to 1970, starting with the planting of modern crop varieties in Mexico under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, led by Norman Borlaug. The Indian story is far more well-known in public discourse than is the Mexican experience. A Google search for “Green Revolution in India” gave 160,000 hits, five times as more common as “Green Revolution in Mexico”, which shows up 33,500 times. The same search terms for other countries give even fewer hits.7 We do not attempt to characterize the voluminous academic literature focused on the Green Revolution.8 A significant part of this varied literature is focused on exploring the causes and consequences of the Green Revolution. Our focus is far more narrow: on the narrative of averted famine that has emerged as a leading political myth.
The so-called developing world saw food production more than double between 1960 and 1985 (Conway 1997). By the 1990s, almost three-quarters of Asia’s rice production and half of the wheat in Asia, Latin America and Africa was produced through new, higher-yielding plant varieties (Rosset et al. 2000). While Asia’s net cropped area only increased 4% in 25 years, the food supply was doubled. In four decades after 1950, global cereal production had increased by 174% while the global population increased by 110% (Otero and Pechlaner 2008). The enormous increase in food production was the consequence of innovation in agricultural productivity with deep historical roots (Patel 2013). To understand how and why the surge in productivity was conceptualized as a revolution, we need to look at the development of not only of agriculture in the early post-World War II years, but also on the connection between the global population debate, natural resources management, geo-politics and the emergence of a powerful scientific elite.
7 www.google.com, search terms ”Green Revolution in Mexico” and ”Green Revolution in India”, 2016.08.29. 8 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=%22green+revolution%22&btnG=
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As political myth (and specifically the “miranda” representing symbols of core beliefs and actions), the “Green Revolution” has come to represent a story of salvation from starvation. In May, 2014 The Economist repeated this oft-told salvation story:
The first Green Revolution helped save the developing world from disaster. Two plant breeders, Norman Borlaug with wheat and M.S. Swaminathan with rice, persuaded governments in Asia and elsewhere to encourage the planting of higher-yielding varieties, especially of rice; 3.5 billion people, half of mankind, get a fifth of their calories or more from the stuff. When the men started work in the early 1960s, China was suffering the famine of the Great Leap Forward. And India was widely thought to be on the brink of starvation.9
As with most political myths, there are elements of fact and fiction at work together. Agricultural innovation undoubtedly contributed decisively to increasing crop yields in India and elsewhere. But, as we will see, the notion that India (or the world) was on the brink of famine in the 1960s was an explicit political creation, motivated by the confluence of US Cold War politics (both domestic and international), the rise of neo-Malthusians and a growing scientific community that had long sought greater political influence.
Agriculture and Cold War Politics
When the Food and Agricultural Organizations of United Nations published the World Food Survey in 1946 covering about 90 percent of world population, it concluded that that at least half of the world’s population did not receive adequate nourishment (FAO 1946).10 In its Second World Food Survey six years later it raised the figures two thirds. Malnutrition was a significant global issue of the era.
Correspondingly, US President Harry S Truman saw the issues of food and natural resources as vitally important to his national security policy, as was perceived to threaten not only health, but social stability in many countries. This view was perhaps expressed most clearly in the aid program
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http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21601815-another-green-revolution-stirring-worlds-paddy-fields-bigger-rice-bowl
10 For comparison, FAO estimated that about 10% of the world’s population was malnourished in 2017:
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– Point Four – that he presented in his inauguration speech in January 1949. The address was dominated by foreign policy and the program was named after its fourth article: aid to the “underdeveloped areas.” American science and technological development, the president argued, should be made accessible to these less successful countries. The American dream was to be exported and would be made possible even for the poor of this world: “Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors but also against their ancient enemies – hunger, misery and despair.” (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1964: 114-116). The growing concern of communist agitation taking advantage of unstable conditions, believed to be caused by overpopulation and subsequent resource shortages, strengthened the idea to use agricultural science as an important means to create stable political conditions as a bulwark against the spread of communism.
The US global food endeavor built on the experiences of the Mexican agricultural expansion which had started a decade earlier. The Mexican Agricultural Program was a joint venture between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government which established research stations around Mexico focused not only on the traditional stable crops of corn and beans, but most prominently wheat, as well as sorghum, barely, potatoes, feed grains and even livestock. Norman Borlaug, who later became the figurehead of the Green Revolution, and his team at the Rockefeller Foundation primarily focused on newly developed wheat seeds, often called “modern varieties” (Cullather 2010).
Borlaug started at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico in 1944, which became most well-known for the Mexican Wheat Improvement Program. This program led the development of "dwarf varieties" which had shorter stems that were able to stand two or three times more artificial fertilizer than the long-bladed varieties and thus could eventually almost double yield to up to 800 kilos per acre. In addition, the varieties could be planted in different parts of the world, as they were not affected by varying lengths of daylight. They were also resistant to rust fungus, a disease that often hampered wheat production.
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By 1963, 95% of Mexico’s wheat fields were growing the new seeds. The 1964 harvest was six times larger than two decades before.11 That year Mexico could export half a million ton of wheat compared to being self-supporting by 1956 and importing half of its consumption at the onset of the Mexican Agricultural Program. From 1966-67 to 1972-73 the area planted with the high yield varieties increased from a little over 500,000 hectares to over ten million hectares (Perkins 1997). Overall production (tonnes) increased by 90%. Almost all of this increase was due to increasing yield, rather than an expansion of the area planted. The ability to produce more crops from the same, or even less, land area was the realized promise of the Green Revolution.
The Mexican program has been criticized for not targeting small farms and favoring large scale, affluent, farms, which could afford the investments of new seeds, fertilizers, machinery, and irrigation investments (e.g., Shiva 2016). The Rockefeller Foundation’s initial crop breeding program in Mexico was in several ways not designed to suit the needs of resource-poor small farms, where purchasing new seed annually was not an option (Fitzgerald 1986). At least rhetorically, the program was not only focused on improving yields in general, but ultimately rural standards of living by enhancing productivity of smaller peasant farms. The early phase of the program was accordingly not merely targeting new varieties and technology innovations, but mechanisms of economic development.
The program was also initially set on developing extension services, which would assist in transferring knowledge on cultivation practices, erosion and soil depletion. Harwood (2009) argues that improving seed varieties was the next most important priority in the early phase of the Mexican program. As the demands grew to demonstrate quick and profound production increases, focus shifted from extension services to develop and introduce a few new hybrid varieties, in particular wheat, suitable for larger farms that could afford investments in fertilizers, irrigation, equipment as well as the annually purchasing new hybrid seeds.
The crop production success in the Mexican program by the Rockefeller Foundation set the stage for the global expansion of the new technologies of agricultural productivity. Borlaug, in his 1970 Nobel Prize speech, explained:
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“The green revolution in India and Pakistan, which is still largely the result of a breakthrough in wheat production, is neither a stroke of luck nor an accident of nature. Its success is based on sound research, the importance of which is not self-evident at first glance. For, behind the scenes, halfway around the world in Mexico, were two decades of aggressive research on wheat that not only enabled Mexico to become self-sufficient with respect to wheat production but also paved the way to rapid increase in its production in other countries.”12
The Mexico experience was certainly not unknown, but as we shall see, it never had the reach or role in the political myth of averted famine that was played by the Indian experience. The focus on India, in particular, owed far more to Cold War politics and vocal scientists in the US than it did to improved technologies of food production in poor countries developed over decades. Science and Politics Advance the Story of Averted Famine
In the United States in the first half of the 20th century, policy makers had long grappled with a “paradox of plenty” in which increasing agricultural productivity had consistently led to the overproduction of food and depressed market prices for farmers, addressed in part through subsidized price floors (Levenstein 2003). An international resource crisis would provide a new opportunity to address this paradox. If poor countries needed food, then the United States farmer could help via exports and in the process reduce domestic supply and the downward price pressure on agricultural commodities resulting for production gains. Lower food prices benefited consumers, but they also hurt farmers who at the time (due to their numbers) were a more significant political force than they are today. Thus, in 1954 the US created the “Food for Peace” program to share US crops around the world. President Eisenhower recognized that the program would also be useful in delivering US support to south Asia, India in particular, as part of its Cold War chess match with the Soviet Union. Such food aid support would circumvent Congressional concerns about providing direct economic aid (Ahlberg 2008).
By the early 1960s, the Food for Peace program had begun to receive critical evaluations, yet President Lyndon Johnson continued to see it as a mechanism to support India’s industrial development, by helping to free up Indian economic resources otherwise devoted to agriculture.
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In the face of Congressional opposition, to help sustain political support for the program “through the fall of 1965 [Johnson] developed the theme of a world food crisis brought on by runaway population growth” (Cullather 2010, 218, cf. Ahlberg 2008). The notion of a world food crisis served to displace attention away from any Cold War motivations behind Johnson’s desire to offer agricultural support to India. That year’s failure of the Indian monsoon provided a propitious opportunity for the Johnson Administration to advance the argument that a looming famine in India required humanitarian assistance from the West.
As Cullather (2010) explains, at first the Indian government did not cooperate with the Johnson Administration, and stated publicly that “there was no famine.” In March, 1966 US and Indian leaders met in Washington to get their different stories straight, with the US explaining that what emerged from their private discussions had to meet conflicting criteria -- “it shouldn't be such as to frighten people in India, but on the other hand the need must be seen to be real in the United States.”13 The Indian delegation noted that, “The situation in the United States is that to get a response, the need must be somewhat overplayed” and “the case should be presented as this being the year in which famine was averted.”14 Fate played its part – 1965 saw the nation’s lowest summer rainfall total since 1918. A second failed monsoon season in 1966 – the first such 2-year failure since 1904-1905 – formed the backdrop for a narrative of looming famine that continued to gain momentum (Parthasarathy et al. 1988).
Neo-Malthusians in the scientific community had finally seen their day come, and readily reinforced the story spun by the Johnson Administration in collaboration with the Indian government. In March 1966, The New York Times reported on the fears of (mostly) atmospheric scientists who pointed to India as an example that we were “losing the race” to feed the world, and raised the specter of population control (Sullivan 1966). The next month the National Academy of Sciences held a symposium on the “Prospects of the World Food Supply” during which Roger Revelle, the director of Harvard University’s Center for Population Studies, warned that if food supply was not addressed, “the fate of all men will be the fate of India” (Sullivan 1966). Here we see political myth-making in action with scientists readily supporting Johnson’s politically
13 http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v25/d308 14 http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v25/d308
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expedient story of unprecedented India famine. India, certainly a very poor country with many destitute substance farmers, was not however experiencing an unprecedented famine (discussed below, see also Maharatna 1992).
The relationship of science and politics during this period was exceedingly complex. The neo-Malthusian perspective in the scientific community had pre-dated the 1960s. For decades, a focus on improving crop productivity had been the subject of work by scientists and supported by politicians. Neo-Malthusians more generally had also been around for many decades (Linnér 2003). Yet many scientists first discovered their interest in promoting the need to avert a looming famine only after the issue was elevated to prominence in Johnson’s clever approach to Cold War politics focused on creating perceptions of a crisis necessitating the response he wanted. The interests of scientists and political commitments of politicians aligned.
Ultimately, the narrative of a looming famine in India, averted because of the Green Revolution, became a dominant narrative. When Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, the New York Times summarized this narrative as follows (Shenker 1970):
Until recently the world’s food experts were wondering how to drive off the specter of hunger and frustrate the predictions of Malthus, who warned in 1798 that population was outrunning food supply. Today many experts are concerned about the specter of feast rather than famine and a single phrase – “the Green Revolution” – signals the new attitude and growing vogue.
This particular political mythology of the Green Revolution in terms of averted famine represented a sharp turnabout from how the phrase was originally presented. In March, 1968 William Gaud, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development coined the phrase “Green Revolution” to describe the intensification of agriculture in developing nations: “These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violet 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” (Gaud 1968).
The use of the term “revolution” and Gaud’s allusion to other contemporary political revolutions placed his version of the “Green Revolution” into the explicit political context of the Cold War
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and the battle to prevent developing nations, especially in Asia, from slipping into communist rule. Gaud was quite clear that the revolution that he described was much more than scientific or technological: “New inputs and infrastructure, new attitudes, adequate farm credit, and sound policies - these are the active ingredients of the Green Revolution” (Gaud 1968). In India, revolution was alluded to also in the slogan "The Indian Wheat Revolution 1968”, which was proclaimed in a postage stamp that same year.15
In earlier decades, the phrase “Green Revolution” had been used before in very different contexts, such as to describe agrarian revolt in Eastern Europe following the First World War and to describe the defection of Republican voters in the US Midwest to Truman.16 But unlike earlier uses, Gaud’s formulation stuck, but not as he had intended. Borlaug died nearly 40 years after receiving the Nobel Prize and his obituaries repeated the political myth of famine averted: “His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history.”17 Borlaug’s Nobel Peace Prize was arguably, and at least in part, a consequence of the political salience of the non-existent Indian famine, a mythology that Borlaug sought to clarify, in his Nobel Speech and after, unsuccessfully.18 The dynamics of political myth are more powerful than those who may be a part of its narrative.
The Rockefeller Foundation had been nominated to the Peace Prize by a group of Swedish Parliamentarians as early as 1962 for its successful agricultural programs that introduced dwarf wheat in Mexico with large impacts on crop yields. The Swedes argued that potential future food shortages were a threat to world peace and stability and the Foundation’s efforts to rapidly increase food access were a vital contribution worthy of the Nobel Prize. But the Nobel Committee did not see the Mexico programs worthy of the award at that time. It was only when the US president used the Indian experience to establish a new political mythology of a Green Revolution that the Nobel committee was ready to award agricultural research and development with the Peace Prize. It is impossible to conclusively prove the association, but based on the timing, arguably the political myth of averted famine helped to elevate Borlaug’s work to Nobel status, rather than the
15 www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1970/press.html 16 See Google Ngrams: https://books.google.com/ngrams
17 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html 18 www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1970/press.html
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underlying scientific and technological contributions to innovation, as they had already occurred in Mexico in years before. Myth matters.
A Critique of the Political Myth of Averted Famine
For his part, particularly in his later years Borlaug did not appear to fully believe the mythology of the Green Revolution, often calling it the “so-called Green Revolution.” But he contributed to the creation of the myth in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech when he said:
During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago. Most of the increase in production has resulted from increased yields of grain per hectare, a particularly important development because there is little possibility of expanding the cultivated area in the densely populated areas of Asia.
The term "The Green Revolution" has been used by the popular press to describe the spectacular increase in cereal-grain production during the past three years . . .
Indian wheat production has risen from the 1964-1965 pre-Green Revolution record crop of 12.3 million tons to 16.5, 18.7, and 20.0 million tons during 1968, 1969, and 1970 harvests, respectively.19
In the absence of broader context, Borlaug’s statement could easily be taken to imply that increasing yields from the introduction of modern varieties of wheat in India, as they were in Mexico, were the most important factor in wheat crops increasing from 12.3 to 20.0 million tons, an increase of about 63%.
Math and history tell a somewhat more nuanced story.20 Crop production is a function of the area planted times the crop yield per unit area. From 1965 to 1970 (the period mentioned by Borlaug) the area planted in India for wheat increased by 24% and the yield increased by 32%. Several studies have looked at the relationship of weather (especially rainfall as related to ENSO, the El
19 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-lecture.html 20 This analysis was inspired by Falcon 1970, footnote 9.
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Niño-Southern Oscillation) and determined that the detrended variability in wheat production from 1965 to 1970 accounts for 20-30% of the increase in yield (Parthasarathy et al. 1988, Krishna Kumar et al. 2004). By 1970 modern varieties of wheat made up about 30% of the total crop (Gollin 2006).
Figures 1a and b show for wheat, trends in area planted, yield and production for India for 1965 to 1970 and for Mexico 1961 to 1970, the year in which Borlaug received his Nobel Prize. The data show that in India during this 5-year period, the increased yield was only slightly more important than increased area planted for the greater production. This stands in sharp contrast to Mexico over the longer period 1961 to 1970, in which area planted increased by only a few percent, with production gains largely the result of increasing yields. If the Green Revolution was about technological innovation in agricultural productivity, then the Mexico experience is a far better representation than was India, in the period leading to Borlaug’s Nobel Prize.
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Figure 1a and b. Breakdown of wheat production 1965 to 1970 in India vs. 1961 to 1970 in
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India did not experience widespread famine in 1966 and 1967 following fail monsoons associated with the atmospheric ENSO phenomenon, unlike what it had experienced in the 1940s and early 1900s. One region, South Bihar, did experience severe food shortages which were effectively addressed by more effective national response as well as the fortuitous shipments of US wheat (Maharatna 1992), which had begun when there was no such regional crisis. According to Dreze and Sen (1989) less than 2,500 people died in the region during this famine, far less than the more than 2 million people who died in the Bengal drought of the early 1940s (Hasell and Roser 2017). Thakur (2005) suggests that the 1967 regional drought was a motivation for Indian to commit more attention to the technologies of the Green Revolution. The historical record suggests that Eisenhower invented the specter of an Indian famine (Cullather 2010), and to the extent that there was a food crisis in subsequent years, the emerging Green Revolution played little role in addressing it.
Food production and productivity did advance significantly due to the technologies of the Green Revolution. Influences other than the introduction of modern varieties were realized by Borlaug and others at the time (cf. Falcon 1970). Borlaug cautioned unsuccessfully in his Nobel acceptance speech against the “Green Revolution” characterization:
Perhaps the term "Green Revolution", as commonly used, is premature, too optimistic, or too broad in scope. Too often it seems to convey the impression of a general revolution in yields per hectare and in total production of all crops throughout vast areas comprising many countries. Sometimes it also implies that all farmers are uniformly benefited by the breakthrough in production. These implications both oversimplify and distort the facts. William Gaud, in his 1968 speech in which he coined the phrase “Green Revolution,” also acknowledged the other factors, including the weather:
This new revolution can be as significant and as beneficial to mankind as the industrial revolution of a century and a half ago. To accelerate it, to spread it, and to make it permanent, we need to understand how it started and what forces are driving it forward. Good luck - good monsoons - helped bring in the recent record harvests. But hard work, good management, and sound agricultural policies in the developing countries and foreign aid were also very much involved.
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The impact of the new crop varieties was frequently confused with the impacts of institutional arrangements, agricultural policies and labor-saving mechanization was frequently confused with the plant breeding achievements of Borlaug and his colleagues and its required input of water, fertilizers and pesticides (Pinstrup-Andersen 1985). Famine averted by the intervention of scientific genius is a much more straightforward narrative than a famine-free story of incremental, accumulating, multi-factor progress in local agricultural production due to a complex tapestry of societal and political actors. Such nuance however was quickly lost in popular discussions of the Green Revolution as events became distilled into a simplified narrative, and ultimately political myth.
Mechanisms of Political Myth Making
To understand how the Green Revolution became mythologized as famine averted it helps to look at the backdrop of the neo-Malthusian construction of population-resources crises in early postwar decades. In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his famous essay on the possible catastrophic consequences of unchecked population growth. But it was not until the twentieth century that the Malthusian specter of a population crisis occupied the attention of the scientific community and eventually became adapted to Cold War policy led by the United States (Linnér 2003).
The new prominence of neo-Malthusians in post-War policy was coincident with the greater authority of scientists in general. In 1949 the United Nations held a scientific conference on the “conservation and utilization of natural resources” which marked the emergence of resource concerns at the highest level of international politics. The relationship of science and politics during this period was rapidly evolving, with scientists looking for greater influence and funding, and the U.S. government warily supportive, based on the contributions of science to helping win World War II (Pascal 1997). Politicians saw in resource concerns an opportunity for political expediency in the looming Cold War, while scientists were looking an opportunity for greater influence.
The early efforts of agricultural technology improvements funded by the Rockefeller Foundation were not initially primarily motivated by concerns about population growth. But in the late 1940s, directly motivated by neo-Malthusian arguments, the Foundation’s agricultural programs were
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more closely linked to the concern of diminishing food resources in an overpopulated world and the perceived danger of political instability in areas where the population reached the limits of food subsistence (Perkins 1997).
The world experienced unprecedented population growth after World War II. Death rates were rapidly declining as health measures were becoming more accessible in poorer countries, sanitation was enhanced and large parts of the world improved their diets. Yet, birth rates associated with growing affluence had not yet begun to fall (Connolley 2008). The crude death rate fell markedly all over the world in the early 1950s, in particularly in the least developed countries and less developed regions. The birth rate started to drop in the 1950s, but much slower. This temporal divergence between rates of change in death and birth rates is important for understanding the widespread Malthusian concern of the era.
Several developments, in particular, raised the global food production in the early postwar years: Technological changes had modernized agriculture, new seed varieties and vast areas of new land had been opened up for tillage and grazing outside Europe. The neo-Malthusians pointed at the marginalized land being rapidly exploited. The rapid increase in population, rising affluence and expansion of globalized trade heightened agricultural production. New lands were cleared. Highland regions were ploughed, rainforests were cut down, and dry land was to be made fruitful. The demand in the richer markets for coffee, citrus fruits, bananas and beef cattle required more fertile tropical lowlands. The subsistence food production had to move onto more fragile marginal land prone to soil erosion. An increased capacity for ploughing resulted from the rapid spreading of tractors and new heavy machinery after the Second World War. Although crucial for the agricultural productivity gain, heavy machinery also compacted soils. New irrigation practices brought on new problems of soil salinity. Urbanization and roads took their share of fertile land. Land at the equivalent of the United Kingdom was paved over between 1945 and 1975 (McNeill 2000).
Rapidly rising population and the increased exploitation of marginal lands stirred images of an overpopulated planet plagued by a desperate exploitation depleted diminishing resources. The growing concern in the early postwar years was captured in concepts such as “the fifth plate,”
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referring to the 20 per cent increase in population that was expected to take its place at the world’s dinner table by 1960 (Linnér, 2003). Into the 1970s, warnings echoed of an impending danger that world famine would spread also to prosperous nations. Newspaper headlines spelled out anxiety about famines spreading across the world, even to the prosperous nations in Europe and North America. The concern expressed was that when the world’s hungry would demand their fair slice of the global pie, the rich industrialized countries would no longer be able to import from poorer, increasingly populous countries either basic food supplies, fodder, indispensable fertilizers or other goods produced from resources in those countries (Linnér 2003).
Immigration and population control were also a concern. Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, two well-known neo-Malthusians expressed this concern in 1972 in terms of a clear metaphor:
“If a leaking ship were tied to a dock and the passengers were still swarming up the gangplank, a competent captain would keep any more from boarding while he manned the pumps and attempted to repair the leak.”
For neo-Malthusians the Green Revolution was only a temporary fix. In traditional Malthusian logic, new resources could never in the long-run keep pace with population growth. Neo-Malthusian concerns were voiced in the parliaments, government offices, the United Nations headquarters, and in boardrooms, radio shows, and lecture halls and on the front pages of newspapers and magazines. The message reverberated the population theory of Thomas Malthus that in the long-run population, if unchecked, inevitably grows faster than the supply of food. The postwar Neo-Malthusianism took several inter-related forms: Among them a popular focus on population control to counter the social miseries of people growing in numbers and poverty, and an environmental focus on the impact of high population densities on scarce resources (cf, Connolley 2008, Linnér 2003). We briefly discuss each and its role in helping to set the stage for the emergence of the political mythology of the Green Revolution focused on averted famine. Popular Neo-Malthusianism and Population Growth
In 1953, the Population Council was created and headed by John D. Rockefeller III to predict population growth and survey global resources. The New York Times applauded the creation of the
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organization as “economists, public health officials and governments” now reverberated the Malthusian “predictions of misery” (New York Times 1952).
In the last ten years we have witnessed a revival of the Malthusian doctrine that the world’s population is increasing more rapidly than its supply of food, minerals and other commodities considered necessary for the maintenance of a high standard of living.
The neo-Malthusian surge was also reflected in popular culture with an increase in popular characterizations of an ecological doomsday resulting from waste, pollution, or technology (Wagar 1982).
Several years earlier, the publisher of The Saturday Review of Literature captured the extinction angst in his 1948 article “What Shall We Do to Be Saved?,” writing:
Three years after the Second World War the course of political and economic events has persuaded vast numbers of people that the doom of mankind is sealed... To the warnings of the fatal result of an atomic and biological war there are added the death knells rung by prophets of man’s starvation, resulting from the increase in the population of the globe from man’s continuing destruction of nature’s resources (Smith 1948: 20).
A reporter from The New York Times described the atmosphere: “Scientists...envisioned a dark outlook for the human race in the next century. They linked this outlook to over-population and the dwindling of natural resources both of which are the direct consequences of progress in science and technology” (New York Times 1948).
At the beginning of the 1960s, ‘That Population Explosion’ was on the cover of Time magazine: “Long a hot topic among pundits … the startling 20th century surge in humanity’s rate of reproduction may be as fateful to history as the H-bomb and the Sputnik, but it gets less public attention.” The cover story gave numerous accounts from all over the world of an overcrowded planet, where people were living on an increasingly poorer diet, “their fury may well shake the earth.” The magazine pointed at the promise of technological and scientific innovations to remedy the problem. The 1960s also marked a turnaround in global food trading patterns. Up until World War II, many “Third World” regions were net exporters of food. By the 1960s, they had become
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net importers. By 1970, their imports of food had reached 20 million tons per year (Poleman 1975). The U.S. Department of Agriculture was pessimistic in its prognosis at the beginning of the 1960s. The World Food Budget, 1963 and 1966, published in 1961 added to the sense of a population– resource crisis getting out of hand. The report concluded that in the so-called developing countries 1.9 billion people were inadequately nourished: “In most of them, population is expanding rapidly, malnutrition is widespread and persistent, and there is no likelihood that the food problem soon will be solved” (USDA 1961).
The relative lack of public attention to issues of population growth was soon to change. A voluminous outpouring of literature appeared on the population–resource dilemma in the early 1960s. Vogt published People: Challenge to Survival (1961) Fertility and Survival (1961), Our Crowded Planet (1962). In Essays of a Humanist (1964), Julian Huxley gives an illustrative description of the population concern of his time:
The neo-Malthusians, supported by the progressive opinion in the Western World and by leading figures in most Asian countries, produce volumes of alarming statistics about the world population explosion and the urgent need for birth-control, while the anti-Malthusians, supported by the tow ideological blocs of Catholicism and Communism, produce equal volumes of hopeful statistics, or perhaps one should say of wishful estimates, purporting to show how the problem can be solved by science, by the exploitation of the Amazon or the Arctic, by better distribution, or even by shipping our surplus population to other planets (Huxley, 1964).
In a famous interview in Le Monde, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre declared after a world tour that the confrontation with famine had changed him profoundly. After having seen children die of hunger, he concluded that human alienation on Earth, exploitations of humans, and malnutrition had to put all metaphysical evil into the background: “Hunger is the only thing, period” (as quoted in Linnér 2003). The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an upsurge in food experts, demographers and environmentalists, predicting that the coming three decades would see massive starvation and famine in parts of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.
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Figure 2. Global Famine Deaths 1860-2016, ten-year average. Source: Hasell and Roser 2017,
figure used with permission.
Hasell and Roser (2017) have compiled available data on famines to 1860, shown in Figure 2.21 Notwithstanding that malnutrition was a severe problem around the developing world, these data do not support the notion that the 1960s were a period of particularly extreme famine impacts (with the notable exception of China during it’s “Great Leap Forward,” which further illustrates the role that politics has played in major famine), at least as compared to earlier decades (see graph above, Hasell and Roser 2017). Even so, the notion of global over-population had taken hold.
Environmental Neo-Malthusianism
Environmental Neo-Malthusianism held that the exponential growth in the number of people consuming and polluting already scarce resources would inevitably result in famine spreading
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around the world, ultimately even to a global ecological collapse or a third world war (Friedrichs 2014). Like Malthus, they predicted unplanned population checks. Environmental degradation caused by industrialization would also severely limit population growth. It was simply not possible for the Earth to support additional billions of people living at Western material standards, according to neo-Malthusians.
The second half of the 1960s saw accelerated outpouring of Malthusian thought with titles such as The Hungry Planet (1965), The Silent Explosion (1965), Famine –1975 (1967), Born to Hunger (1968). Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, became one of the most widely read publications by an environmentalist. He argued that the economy expanded at a geometric ratio it would eventually run up against the limits of the earth: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.” Ehrlich explained that the “gunpowder of the population explosion” was the ominous fact that people under 15 years of age made up roughly 40 percent of the population in what Ehrlich called the “undeveloped” areas. Ehrlich argued that when they come into reproductive age we would see the greatest baby boom of all time (Ehrlich 1968).
Environmental Neo-Malthusianism came in several modes. Lifeboat ethics was launched by Garret Hardin as a triage concept. It was too late to save all humankind, he argued, so it was better to save a select few than let all perish. Others emphasized the need to overcome unequal ecological and economic exchange and called for nutritional redistribution as a key measure to counteract the perils of population growth and diminishing resources (Linnér 2003).
The same year Ehrlich rose to fame, Hardin argued in “Tragedy of the Commons” that it was too late to stop population growth on a voluntary basis. Zero growth of birth rate had to be accomplished through compulsory legislation (Hardin 1968). The Club of Rome’s 1972 report Limits to Growth warned that the physical limits of the planet would be reached within a hundred years because of environmental degradation and pollution caused by population growth, food production, and industrialization. John Holdren, who later became science advisor to President Barack Obama, testified before Congress in 1974 that society was “a house of cards about to
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collapse” and called for a “conscious accommodation to the perceived limits of growth via population limitation and redistribution of wealth” (Holdren 1974).
The political myth of the Green Revolution as an averted famine was supported by environmentalists who had already adopted a stance on resource shortages and population growth consistent with the narrative of a global food crisis. The interests of Neo-Malthusians thus converged with the interests of those politicians who had advanced the idea of a looming global famine, and scientists who focused on population control and desired a greater access to government decision making. One key difference between these groups is that many scientists and politicians saw the Green Revolution as a solution to the perceived crisis, whereas Neo-Malthusians saw it as exacerbating the problem of over-population which had created the crisis in the first place, in addition to creating new ecological and social problems, and thus only putting off Armageddon.
Perhaps somewhat ironically in political terms, the environmentalist focus on resource shortage overlapped with the interests of Cold Warriors looking to use resources as a weapon in their arsenal in the all-consuming battle against the spread of communism. Providing for a decent standard of living for the poor countries was regarded as one of the most effective means to hold communism at bay (Leffler, 1992, Woods and Jones, 1991, McCoullough, 1992). In 1951 the Rockefeller Foundation published a report, “The World Food Problem, Agriculture, and the Rockefeller Foundation,” which linked the concerns about overpopulation to geopolitics. Overpopulation and inadequate or unequally divided resources were the root cause of global political tensions. Agriculture thus had an important political role to play in the superpower struggle. In 1949, Mao Zedong’s communist forces had prevailed in the Chinese civil war. The second most populous nation, India, was seen by US policy makers as at risk of a communist takeover.
In short, politicians, scientists and environmentalists converged on the political myth of a global population explosion, looming resource shortages and, ultimately, a narrative of famine averted. Almost 50 years after Borlaug’s Nobel Prize, it may be impossible to reshape the political mythology of the Green Revolution as the world calls for its successor. The constant reappearance
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of the Malthusian population principle was described as follows in 1977 by economist Herman E. Daly: “Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garret Hardin remarked, anyone who has been buried so often cannot be entirely dead” (Daly 1991). Nonetheless, there are a few practical lessons that might be learned about political myth and how we thinking about innovation in agriculture and beyond.
Remaking Political Myth? Lessons and Broader Significance
We suggest three lessons from this exploration of the political myth of the Green Revolution as a story of averted famine. First, political myth and the symbols that comprise it are powerful forces in politics. Second, as a practical matter it may impossible to fundamentally change the political myth of the Green Revolution, but nevertheless, we suggest an alternative mythology that squares more fully with evidence. Third, and finally, we argue that political myth shapes innovation policies and recommend that scholars and political actors devote more attention to the role that such myth play in opening up or closing down policy options related to technological innovation. One important role for technology assessment may be to help construct political myths that preserve an evidence-grounded basis for connecting the cause and effect of policy action and practical outcomes.
The Power of Political Myth
Symbols play a significant role in policy and politics. When a part of political myth encapsulating a narrative expressing patterns of identification, expectation and demand political myth can play a powerful role shaping discourse, and discourse can shape which policy options are deemed acceptable and which are not. For instance, Pielke (2012) explores how the concept of “basic research” serves as a political symbol that shapes expectations of accountability over publicly-funded research as well as the basis for a causal policy relationship between putatively unfettered publicly-funded research and economic growth. As documented in the case of the “Green Revolution” the notion of “basic research” is based on an understanding of policy causality that does not necessarily comport with historical or policy evidence.
Similarly, Hulme (2009) argues that “climate change” serves as “environmental, cultural and political phenomenon that is reshaping the way we think about ourselves, about our societies and
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about humanity’s place on Earth.” It other words, in addition to being a scientific issue related to the human impact on the planet, “climate change” also serves as political myth when it forms a narrative basis for the cause and effect relationships of particular policy actions. Arguably, in order to make sense of the world we necessarily must condense highly complex social, political and scientific issues into apprehensible narratives in order to make sense of problems and possible options for action in response. As Brunner (1996) argues: “Faith in myths enables us to mobilize the emotional energies of the personality, to exploit our limited capacity for reason, and to coordinate collective action in a complex, changing world that no one can understand entirely.” How political myths are created, and whose interests they serve, is an important aspect of the political and policy processes.
Consequently, it matters whether the “Green Revolution” refers to a burst of disruptive technological innovations that averted a looming global famine versus whether it refers to long-term, incremental improvements in crop productivity that did not avert a looming crisis, but nonetheless reshaped the modern world. It matters beyond just history. It matters when we hear calls for a “Second Green Revolution.” What those calls refer to depend upon how we conceptualize the original Green Revolution as political myth.
Elder and Cobb (1983) argue that a consensus on a political symbol depends on “common affective sentiments toward it” rather than “agreement about its substantive meaning.” In other words, symbols tend to reflect values as much as or more than facts. They continue, “A symbolic consensus is viable and can sustain the political community only as long as the content attributed to politically significant symbols is not brought into question. People may be talking past one another when these symbols are used, but this is of little consequence as long as their referent is, for most, remote, abstract, ambiguously defined, or poorly understood.” One role of those of us who think of our work as technology assessment is thus to work not at the level of the remote, abstract, ambiguously defined or poorly understood, but at the level of the concrete, the empirical and where proposed action meets up with observable outcomes. Technology assessment matters because it involves the creation and critique of political myths that shape how we view technological innovation in society.
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Re-Mythologizing of the Green Revolution
How might we rethink the political myth of the Green Revolution if the goal were to be to create a narrative that aligns more directly with how innovation actually happened during the 20th century in agricultural productivity? We recommend that the Green Revolution might be better characterized as the Green Evolution.22 Improvements in crop productivity predated the India experience of the 1960s and have continued since. The notion of evolutionary improvement in technology, rather than revolutionary, may provide better guidance for those grappling with the challenges of climate change, global energy access, agricultural productivity among others. Examining the policies that were in effect when small holder production of food crop increased rapidly, Dorward et al (2004) point at a number of policies that need to be in place: “appropriate and high-yielding agricultural technologies; local markets offering stable output prices that provide reasonable returns to investment in ‘improved’ technologies; seasonal finance for the purchase of inputs; reasonably secure and equitable access to land, with attractive returns for operators (whether tenants or owners); and infrastructure to support input, output and financial markets.” These conditions are influenced by geopolitics, market development, local social, economic and environmental conditions, but also national government investments in research and development, infrastructure and extension services as well as government support, such as price support, guaranteed produce procurement and credit subsidies.
In 2003, Evenson and Rosegrant asked a counterfactual question: “How would food prices, food production, food consumption and international food trade have differed in the year 2000 if the developing countries of the world were constrained to have had no [crop genetic improvement - CGI] after 1965, while developed countries realized the CGI that they historically achieved?” In other words: what would have happened if there were no “Green Revolution”?
Their answer was not that there would have been global famine, unchecked anarchy and the Malthusian nightmare realized – the standard counterfactual response. Instead, food would have
22 We are far from the first to recommend this characterization. Falcon 1970, the earliest reference that we have found, attributes the notion of “green evolution” to Morton Grossman. That symbolization did not catch on, but we nevertheless recommend it here.
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cost more and the patterns of global agriculture would have looked different: “world grain prices would have risen instead of falling by 35% or more. This probably would not be considered a ‘World Food Crisis’. However, a more careful examination of the calculations would show that much of the shortfall in production in developing countries would be made up by increases in production in developed countries.” This counterfactual suggests that the world would look different than it does today, but in the absence of the Green Revolution, there would not have been a global famine. If taken to be a more accurate counterfactual than the Malthusian version – which to our knowledge lacks any such systematic exploration -- then the fact that a global famine did not occur in the 1970s or since was not because of an accurate prediction leading to an effective intervention, but because the original prediction of looming catastrophe was flawed in the first place.23
Figure 3. The contribution of high yield food crops to yield growth measured (left) absolutely and
(right) proportionately between 1961-1980 (black) and 1981-2000 (red). Data from Evenson and Gollin (2003).
Another perspective is offered by Evenson and Gollin (2003) who examined the long-term impact of the introduction of high yielding food crops. Figure 3, from data in their study shows that
23 Again, severe and wide spread malnutrition in many areas of the world in the 1960s (and before and since) is well substantiated. But evidence points to multiple sources of food insecurity, such as inadequate transport and storage, conflicts, and lack of purchasing power (Drèze and Sen 1990, FAO and WFP 2018).
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agricultural productivity increased more and at a faster rate from 1981 to 2000 than from 1961 to 1980, They choose to use the terminology “early Green Revolution” and “late Green Revolution” to acknowledge that “Overall, the productivity data suggest that the Green Revolution is best understood not as a one-time jump in production, occurring in the late 1960s, but rather as a long-term increase in the trend growth rate of productivity.” We suggest that this long-long-term evolution is better characterized as the Green Evolution, a process which continues into the 21st century. If one function of policy is to create causality between intentional action and desired outcomes, then to the extent that the political myth of the Green Revolution supports policy actions that are grounded in a political myth of averted famine detached from actual mechanisms of policy causality, then the narrative may hinder effective action related to continued gains in global agricultural productivity. It may also serve to distort thinking and action related to innovation policies more generally, if scientists and policy makers attempt to “recreate” the supposed dynamics underpinning the first Green Revolution.
In short, the postwar agricultural production surge, was to a lesser extent due to perceived quick fix of new varieties, but also to ongoing policy innovations in incentives, finance, infrastructure, support, training and more – broad-based innovation. We are far from the first to make this observation (which dates to Borlaug himself). When we look back at the long history of agricultural development leading up to the major surge in production in the postwar era, we can see that the support in form of extension services and government infrastructure is essential for the new seed varieties to benefit small-scale farmers. The world did not experience a “Green Revolution” but rather has seen a longer-term process of “Green Evolution.” Yet, the political myth of a Green Revolution as an event that prevented a global famine lives on in calls for a second such event.
Political Myth and Technology Assessment
What are we doing when we do technology assessment? One answer to this question is that we are engaging in the construction of political myth. For instance, Stilgoe (2017) explains that the emerging conception of “self-driving cars” is really a misnomer, they are not “self-driving” but rather: “Self-driving cars are driven by social processes of goal-selection, machine-making,
