Creating Food (In)Security and Nutritional Crisis: Re-Evaluating the Legacy of the Green Revolution in India

Abstract

The Green Revolution (GR) has been lauded for providing high-yielding variety seeds of cereals like rice and wheat to countries like India, thus, preventing famine and bringing self-sufficiency and food security in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this conventional claim has been challenged by recent revisionist research which shows that instead of bringing food security, the GR led to the overproduction of cereals and sugar, and the decline of nutritious foods like millets, pulses, and oilseeds in India by the end of the 20th century. It also led to the creation of industrialized food processing that diminished the nutritive value of cereals and promoted ultraprocessed food. This played a role in shaping the nutrition crisis of obesity, under-nutrition and micronutrient deficiencies that we see in the 21st century.

Not only did the GR compromise dietary diversity, it also did not end import dependence. While it freed India from the humiliating clutches of PL480 wheat, it made the country dependent on imports of oilseeds, pulses, fertilizers, and petroleum. Thus, the country could never claim to have become self-sufficient in food. It had drastic negative impacts on the agricultural resource base (soils, water, biodiversity) and on human health—all of this to produce more rice, wheat, and sugarcane that was many more times the requirement. Whether using the narrow metrics of economics (overall production) and science (aggregate yields) or the broader metrics of livelihoods (farmer indebtedness), ecology, and human health, the Green Revolution did not provide meaningful food security or nutrition security to India.

The green revolution was projected as an apolitical technological and institutional intervention but it was deeply political. It arose from a colonial mindset that dismissed agricultures of the global south as unproductive; it was justified using racial logics of demography and population growth that have since been challenged; and it has entrenched a set of beliefs and cultures of knowledge privileging narrow economic and scientific interests in agriculture at the expense of farmer livelihoods, resilient and healthy food cultures, and the natural resource base needed to farm. Recognizing this politics of power is critical to broadening the lenses with which we view agriculture and its relationship to nature, to food, and to our own bodies, which is an urgent need in this time of planetary crisis.