Dwarf wheat and hybrid rice rewrote the twentieth-century harvest
The Green Revolution—or Third Agricultural Revolution—was a wave of technology transfer that sharply raised crop yields, starting in rich countries early in the twentieth century and spreading worldwide into the late nineteen eighties. Farmers adopted high-yielding dwarf wheat and rice plus packages of fertilizer, irrigation, and machines.
New cultivation methods often arrived as conditional loan packages that pushed developing nations to privatize fertilizer manufacture and distribution. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations seeded early work in Mexico; Norman Borlaug, dubbed Father of the Green Revolution and Nobel Peace Prize winner in nineteen seventy, is said to have kept more than a billion humans from starving. Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice is credited with saving at least as many lives again.
Studies link the Revolution to broad poverty reduction, averted hunger, higher incomes, lower greenhouse emissions than alternative land clearing, less farmland expansion, and falling infant mortality. USAID administrator William S. Gaud coined “Green Revolution” on eight March nineteen sixty-eight, contrasting it with a violent “Red” Soviet revolution and Iran’s “White Revolution.”
The bet was that seeds, chemicals, and machines could outrun Malthusian scarcity—an agricultural politics as much as a botanical one. Critics still debate equity and ecology, yet the documented yield surge remains one of the century’s clearest cases of science altering the human food supply at planetary scale.
Mexico was the proving ground. Visiting in 1940, U.S. Vice President-elect Henry Wallace was dismayed to learn that a farmer there might need 500 hours to grow one bushel of corn, roughly fifty times an Iowa grower's effort. Within eight years the country no longer needed food imports for the first time since 1910, and it went from buying half its wheat abroad in 1943 to self-sufficiency by 1956. Asia followed through the International Rice Research Institute, founded in the Philippines in 1960, whose IR8 variety of 1966 could yield about five tonnes per hectare unfertilised and nearly ten in ideal conditions, earning the nickname Miracle Rice. The costs were real too: the full kit of seed, fertiliser, pesticide and water was often beyond smallholders, and spraying contaminated waterways and endangered workers' health.
Source: Green Revolution
