What happened
In 1943 the Rockefeller Foundation began a farm research program with Mexico’s government. Mexico supplied the research station, and the foundation paid the scientists. One of them, the plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, bred dwarf wheat suited to Mexican conditions, and by 1956 Mexico was self-sufficient in wheat. In the mid-1960s he brought dwarf wheat to India and Pakistan, where production rose sharply. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations also built the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which opened in 1960 and bred the high-yield rice IR-8. A 1968 speech called the movement a “Green Revolution,” and in 1970 Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The scale of the result is hard to overstate. In a 2012 review, Prabhu Pingali of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reports that cereal production in the developing world tripled over about 50 years, while the population more than doubled and farmland grew by only about 30 percent. The review cites estimates that without the new crop varieties, food production in developing countries would have been almost 20 percent lower and world food and feed prices 35 to 65 percent higher. In Asia, each 1 percent rise in crop productivity has been estimated to cut the number of poor people by 0.48 percent.
Where it sits in the system
On the depth scale this is structure (level 3). The work changed the institutions that produce food. The early research centers in Mexico and the Philippines grew into a permanent international network for crop research.
It is mixed because the ledger has more than one column, and Pingali’s own review documents the other columns. The gains were concentrated in irrigated, high-rainfall areas. Poorer rain-fed regions and women farmers gained less. By 1998 modern varieties covered 82 percent of the planted area in Asia but only 27 percent in Africa. Diets gained calories but often lost variety. Overuse of fertilizer, pesticides and water degraded soils and polluted water, harms Pingali attributes mostly to subsidies and price policies rather than to the seeds themselves. In northern India, a satellite study found groundwater falling fast between 2002 and 2008, mainly because of pumping for irrigation.
Seen through one lens, yield, this is among the great successes in history. Seen through others, such as the environment, future generations or fairness, the picture is more complicated. That gap is the Single Lens. The costs that came due decades later are the Short Horizon.
What carries over
Paying for public research, and for the institutions that keep it going, can change a whole system. The same reach means the side effects are system-sized too. Count every column of the ledger before calling the result, and keep counting after the headlines move on. How much harms to future people should weigh against gains today is Open Problem 13, Discounting the Future.
Lessons for the system
- Research that every farmer can use is a public good. Funding the institutions that keep producing it can change a whole food system, not one farm at a time.
- Measuring success in one unit, tons of grain, hid costs that were counted in other units, such as water, soil, diets and who was left out.
- Many of the harms grew from the rules around the technology, such as subsidies that encouraged overuse of inputs. The same tool does more or less damage depending on the policies it arrives with.
- Costs that arrive decades later are easy to leave out of a success story. Long-horizon work needs long-horizon accounting.