SUBSISTENCE × TECHNOLOGY

The Green Revolution

~1965 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In the mid-1960s, as famine forecasts for Asia hardened into arithmetic about who could be saved, semi-dwarf wheats and rices bred by international research centres and their national partners began reaching farmers. The new varieties turned fertiliser and irrigation into grain far more efficiently; by the 1990s they covered three quarters of Asia's rice land, and analysis credits them with raising developing-world yields by some 44 percent between 1965 and 2010. Consumers generally gained from falling food prices; farmers gained only where their costs fell faster than the prices they received.

Why it matters

The famines predicted for the late twentieth century largely did not happen, and this is a principal reason: plant breeding, deliberately organised as international public science, moved the Malthusian ceiling within a generation. The gains were real and uneven, going to irrigated land and staple grains more than to rainfed fields and pulses, and their ecological costs are still being counted. It remains the strongest evidence that organised research can outrun a catastrophe.

Dating & uncertainty

Modern crop varieties spread from the mid-1960s, unevenly across crops and regions; the anchor marks the first mass adoptions in Asia. Their scale comes from modelling rather than from counting: high-yielding varieties raised developing-world yields by some 44 percent between 1965 and 2010, and a ten-year delay in their arrival would have left GDP per capita 17 percent lower and the developing world 223 million people larger by 2010.

Sources

1. Evenson & Gollin (2003), Science · Assessing the impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000doi:10.1126/science.1078710
2. Gollin, Hansen & Wingender (2021), Journal of Political Economy · Two blades of grass: the impact of the Green Revolutiondoi:10.1086/714444
3. Blackie (2019), Food Security · International trade and food security: pulses for nutrition in India (review)doi:10.1007/s12571-019-00896-0

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:4316.7 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day