

Dry soil in India

In the 1970s India had not solved the problem of providing enough food for its vastly growing population. The Green Revolution promised to change this. Supported by American foundations the Indian government started a program to modernize the Indian agriculture. Replacing old traditions with new (imported) seeds, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. They achieved to dramatically increase the food production and gained independence from imported food.

But as with every revolution it was hard to oversee the consequences: The new methods increased the amount of energy used per produced crop. Important knowledge got lost and was replaced by chemical products. Which leads to the biggest problem: The farmers did not know how to handle the chemicals. A recent study shows:

The report includes details of a survey suggesting that nearly one-third of Punjabi farmers were unaware that pesticides come with instructions for use. Half of the farmers ignored these instructions. Three-quarters put empty pesticide containers to domestic uses.

As a result the Green Revolution turned into the Cancer Revolution. The rate of cancer in Punjabi the region most affected by the Green Revolution is dramatically high. Even young children are developing uncommon forms of cancer.

The use of agro-chemicals also destroyed the ecosystem. While a lot of local insects where killed by pesticides multi resistant insects could proliferate. Due to the high use of fertilizers the quality of Punjabi’s soil is getting poorer and soil erosion is becoming a wide spread problem.

India’s population has more than doubled since the 70s. But the Green Revolution is at its limit. Providing enough food for its population will again be a big issue for India.

The Indian government tries to fight these problems with banning some chemicals and ironically propagating farming techniques which were declared obsolete during the Green Revolution.

As an interesting side note: The Green Revolution was a strategy to fight support of communism in rural areas.

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This entry was posted on September 26, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under environment. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: food, health, india, revolution

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