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Could the adverse consequences of the green revolution have been foreseen? How experts responded to unwelcome evidence

J. Harwood

Published 2019 in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT By the late 1960s, it was becoming clear that the Green Revolution (GR) had succeeded only in part. Although crop yields, total production and food-per-capita were substantially higher, GR programmes were also increasing social inequality and damaging the environment, both of which began to attract attention in professional journals and the popular press. In this paper I examine the ways in which the GR’s advocates responded to criticism during the 1970s. Of particular interest is their defense that they were unprepared for the adverse effects of the new technology because these effects could not have been anticipated. I argue, however, that this claim is untenable because the negative effects of the technology had been pointed out from an early stage but were largely ignored. That experts reacted in this way derived in part from the narrow scope of their training and experience but also from a professional tendency to oversimplify the nature of development problems.

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