As Larry Lessig puts forth in ‘CODE’, the
policy makers use four means to influence allocation of resources. Green
Revolution represented the architecture or the product being changed to
influence the increase in food supply in the country. It was in 1967-1978 that
India began the transformation from endemic famine hit nation to one of the
pioneers in agricultural production. In
the 1970’s while the per capita food production was around 180 kgs, it
increased to more than 200 kg by the early 1990s inspite of doubling the
population. It was a far cry from the days of the disastrous famine in Bengal
in 1943 (caused by state indifference than by shortage of food), which wiped
out nearly 4 million people and 1964-65
when PM Lal Bahadur Shastri appealed to people to fast one day per week to
ensure availability of food to all.
Borlaug revolution of hybrid seeds sowed the
roots for wheat and paddy production in India. The rise in prosperity among
farmers in Punjab, Haryana and Western UP can be substantially owed to the fact
of Green Revolution. Green Revolution included use of modern technologies,
fertilizers and high yielding seeds to increase the production of crops. A
large amount of land was also released under agricultural category to satiate
the hunger of growing population of our nation. All these formed determinants
for increasing the supply of food grains.
In simple economic terms, the introduction of
technology shifted the supply curve to the right and increased the amount of
food available to the society. In the initial phases, even a small change in
the architecture of the seed and other inputs resulted in more than
proportional change in the output produced thus causing what economists call as
increasing returns to scale. The presence of increasing returns enabled the
food supply to go up at lower increments of inputs while prices too started to
show a downward decline. But increasing returns are only upto a point. Smaller
land holdings, over use of chemical fertilizers, over use of ground water, soil
fertility all begin to show diminishing returns after a certain time. Current
trends suggest a fall in per capital cereals production by around 15 kgs in the
last decade. The industrialization of agriculture suited the large scale
production of grains consume a large amount of energy. This energy is absorbed
from the soil and water thus causing the condition for decreasing returns to
emerge. The water consumption leads to salinity and negative impact on ground
water reserves. Further the use of fertilizers can result in the generation of
byproducts that damage the soil and also the overuse can create the drug
resistant pests in the fields. These byproducts, what economists call as
externalities would impose social costs thus decreasing the benefits of the
green revolution in the long run. This
is now manifested in lower groundwater reserves and depleting soil fertility in
Punjab and Haryana etc. the incidence of certain diseases in these areas is
also being attributed the over use of fertilizers.
Now a time for architectural change to bring
back the increasing returns in the form of permaculture and integrating
traditional systems with modern science like keyline ploughing and swale
building. Further linkages to cities and food production sites have to be
revisited. The benefits of the low hanging fruit of green revolution have been
exhausted. The supply curve has been
shifting and shifting leftwards. The production possibility curve is shifting
inwards. The gap between demand and supply would be an equivalent of another
India or China in the next fifty years.
Food reserves have halved. Profitability of alternative products like
corn and cotton result in farmers adopting these crops in the Western world at
the altar of food production. Moreover, the food prices being relatively
inelastic do not generate benefits to Western farmers on accounts of bumper
forecasts. We await a disruptive sustainable innovation. Is organic farming the
answer?
Source: Based on the writings of noted critics like
Vandana Shiva, Adam Fenderson, Gwynne Dyer and reports issued by Food and
Agricultural Organization.
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