SUBSISTENCE × TECHNOLOGY

The Green Revolution

~1965 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In the mid-1960s, as famine forecasts for Asia hardened into triage arithmetic, semi-dwarf wheats and rices bred by international research centres began reaching farmers. The new varieties converted fertilizer 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, feeding incomes and cutting food prices for consumers.

Why it matters

The famines predicted for the late twentieth century largely did not happen, and this is a principal reason: plant breeding, deliberately organized as international public science, moved the Malthusian ceiling within a generation. The gains were real and uneven, favouring irrigated lands and staple grains over rainfed fields and pulses, and their ecological costs are part of today's ledger. It remains the strongest evidence that organized 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. The counterfactuals are computed: high-yielding varieties raised developing-world yields some 44 percent between 1965 and 2010, and a modelled ten-year delay would have cost 17 percent of GDP per capita and added 223 million people to the developing world 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