The Green Revolution

The Green Revolution was a wave of agricultural change from the 1940s through the 1970s that sharply raised crop yields in many developing countries. It began in Mexico, where the plant scientist Norman Borlaug bred high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat, and spread in the 1960s to South Asia, where new wheat and rice varieties, such as the IR8 rice released in the Philippines in 1966, helped India and Pakistan greatly increase their harvests. The package combined high-yielding seeds with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and machinery. It is credited with averting famine for hundreds of millions of people, and Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. It also had costs: its benefits went mostly to farmers who could afford seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation; it drew down groundwater and damaged soils in some areas; chemical runoff polluted water; planting fewer crop varieties reduced genetic diversity; and it had much less success in sub-Saharan Africa, where conditions and crops differed.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report