Thursday, March 04, 2004

The Green Revolution fights back

Conventional wisdom is that the Green Revolution has been a bad thing. And once again CW is wrong.

"The presumed costs of the Green Revolution are that the HYV (high yielding varieties) of seeds 'require' more fertilizer, water and pesticides (when in fact they outperform the traditional varieties at nearly any level of inputs) and that they have given rise to a dangerous monoculture leading also to a decline in non-grain products with a resulting worsening of the nutrition of poor people. Part of the anti-globalization mythology is that the Green Revolution gave rise to greater inequality of income and possibly even left the poor worse off. The data on the Green Revolution and the growth in global food production generally has accumulated and been frequently analyzed and it is clear that each of these beliefs is egregiously wrong."

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