The story I have always accepted about the green revolution is that the world avoided famine by learning to manufacture and dump enormous quantities of fossil fuel-derived synthetic nitrogen fertilizer on crops. This came at an enormous environmental price, but saved literally billions of people. To the extent I have ever questioned this, I have wondered if there are any good alternatives to this system going forward, given the world’s enormous human population, and whether the system is sustainable (in the dictionary sense of can we continue to feed the world’s population this way even accepting the high environmental price) for the long term.

This article questions the mainstream story of the green revolution. The tag line of this website/blog is “ecosocialism or barbarism”, so I am not saying it is 100% credible, I am just saying I found it thought-provoking and the ideas/claims are worth digging into.

Meanwhile, the government urged Indian farmers to grow nonfood export crops to earn foreign currency. They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.

Borlaug’s miracle seeds were not inherently more productive than many Indian wheat varieties. Rather, they just responded more effectively to high doses of chemical fertilizer. But while India had abundant manure from its cows, it produced almost no chemical fertilizer. It had to start spending heavily to import and subsidize fertilizer.

India did see a wheat boom after 1967, but there is evidence that this expensive new input-intensive approach was not the main cause. Rather, the Indian government established a new policy of paying higher prices for wheat. Unsurprisingly, Indian farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/10/11/how-not-to-feed-a-hungry-planet/

So even if we continue with the current system, will the planet’s biophysical limits push back at some point? Synthetic fertilizer contributes to global warming emissions both through the industrial process required to fix nitrogen gas from the air and from releases from farms (nitrogen dioxide, tractors, cows, livestock, etc. All other things being equal, heat drives down grain yields. And all other things are not equal, because drought, flooding, and salinization are in the mix. Then we have nutrient-laden runoff poisoning the oceans.

On the plus side, we hear there is a demographic transition that could at least reduce the growth rate in the number of new mouths to feed. This is partly due to improving living standards particularly for women and children, but improving living standards also mean people want to eat more meat and processed food and not just bowls of grain. Meat substitutes are coming along (Chicky Nobs anyone?), so there is a lot going on.

Food is where the climate change sh**, er, rubber meets the road.