How Green is the Green Revolution

Between 1950 and 1984, world grain production increased by 250% (Pfeifer, 2004). This is a huge achievement in the fight against world hunger. This video paints a very positive picture of the green revolution, allowing only a few seconds to consider the environmental impacts of the practices and giving no consideration to its long-term sustainability.

         The Green Revolution was made possible by the use of fossil fuels, to run mechanized equipment, for production of fertilizers and pesticides and to run irrigation pumps etc. This led to increased energy consumption by agriculture of 100 fold or more (Pfeifer, 2004). Previous food production was reliant on solar energy; this renewable resource has a limited rate of flow into the planet and therefore kept population growth within environmental constraints. The shift to fossil fuels enabled rapid population growth. Paddock (1970) believes the Green Revolution undermined the efforts to limit the world’s population growth. He states that the increase in food, enabling more people to survive, could be detrimental in countries where no effective population control is in place. He highlights that populations will expand until they reach a carrying capacity, when starvation limits growth. If technology increases the carrying capacity, the population will grow until it reaches the new carrying capacity and starvation will occur again, thus the Green Revolution provides no solution. What Paddock (1970) predicts here, is exactly what we see today.

         This newly enabled population growth increased our reliance on non-renewable, finite, fossil fuels. The Green Revolution allowed for population growth but cannot sustain it. The environmentally degrading nature of this intensive practice is leading to even higher energy input requirements with no increase in output. Between 1945 and 1994 energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold (Pfeifer, 2004). Modern agriculture must continue to increase energy input just to maintain current yields. Paddock (1970) states that ‘the Green Revolution would die tomorrow without one of its three legs: subsidies, irrigation and fertilizer’ which are reliant on fossil fuels and each come with their own environmental impacts.

         Paddock (1970) sees the Green Revolution as merely a way of ‘postponing the day of reckoning’ when the growth of food production will be slowed by rational means or by an indescribable catastrophe. Calculations on fossil fuel reserves indicate that the agricultural crisis will only begin to impact upon us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050 (Pfeifer, 2004). However, the current peaking of global oil production and the peak of North American natural gas production may cause this crisis to begin much sooner.

‘To many, the Green Revolution is a turning point in man’s long war against the biological limitations of the earth’ (Paddock, 1970).

But the earth is fighting back!