green revolution
Case 20
The Green Revolution
Rockefeller Foundation, 1943
Scott Kohler
Background.
For the last five years, we’ve had more people starving and hungry. But something has happened.
Pakistan is self-sufficient in wheat and rice, and India is moving towards it. It wasn’t a red, bloody revolution as predicted. It was a green revolution.
Norman Borlaug recalls William Gaud speaking these words at a small meeting in 1968. Gaud, who, at the time, administered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), was describing an almost unbelievable surge in food output then being achieved by a number of Asian nations that had seemed, until very recently, to be on the brink of disaster. The two nations cited by
Gaud were especially worrisome. Neither Pakistan, a country of 115 million people, nor India, whose population already exceeded half a billion, had been producing enough food to meet the growing need of its rapidly expanding population. Famine, and its attendant turmoil, seemed inevitable. But
Gaud was right. Something had happened. Within a few years, food production in India, Pakistan, and many of their neighbors, would outstrip population growth. The threat of mass starvation would loom less ominously over the land, and Borlaug, an agronomist working for the Rockefeller
Foundation, would be a Nobel laureate credited with saving more lives than any person in human history. Despite all appearances, this “green revolution” did not occur overnight. Its roots go back several decades earlier. In 1940, the Vice President-elect, Henry Wallace, traveled to Mexico. He was
“appalled” by the conditions there. Masses of people were eking out an existence on meager quantities of food. At the time, Mexico was forced to import over half its wheat, and a significant portion of its maize. Wallace met with an official of the Rockefeller Foundation, and, soon after, with the Foundation’s president, Raymond Fosdick. He described the plight of the Mexican poor,
emphasizing
The Green Revolution
Rockefeller Foundation, 1943
Scott Kohler
Background.
For the last five years, we’ve had more people starving and hungry. But something has happened.
Pakistan is self-sufficient in wheat and rice, and India is moving towards it. It wasn’t a red, bloody revolution as predicted. It was a green revolution.
Norman Borlaug recalls William Gaud speaking these words at a small meeting in 1968. Gaud, who, at the time, administered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), was describing an almost unbelievable surge in food output then being achieved by a number of Asian nations that had seemed, until very recently, to be on the brink of disaster. The two nations cited by
Gaud were especially worrisome. Neither Pakistan, a country of 115 million people, nor India, whose population already exceeded half a billion, had been producing enough food to meet the growing need of its rapidly expanding population. Famine, and its attendant turmoil, seemed inevitable. But
Gaud was right. Something had happened. Within a few years, food production in India, Pakistan, and many of their neighbors, would outstrip population growth. The threat of mass starvation would loom less ominously over the land, and Borlaug, an agronomist working for the Rockefeller
Foundation, would be a Nobel laureate credited with saving more lives than any person in human history. Despite all appearances, this “green revolution” did not occur overnight. Its roots go back several decades earlier. In 1940, the Vice President-elect, Henry Wallace, traveled to Mexico. He was
“appalled” by the conditions there. Masses of people were eking out an existence on meager quantities of food. At the time, Mexico was forced to import over half its wheat, and a significant portion of its maize. Wallace met with an official of the Rockefeller Foundation, and, soon after, with the Foundation’s president, Raymond Fosdick. He described the plight of the Mexican poor,
emphasizing