The Green Revolution of the 1960s brought about a marked improvement in the yield of agricultural crops such as rice and wheat. It was based on the use of newly developed high-yielding crop varieties in conjunction with the intense use of irrigation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. India saw a three-fold increase in rice yield per hectare.
Now, fifty years later, some negative effects of this intense methodology are becoming apparent — nitrogen fertilizers and agrochemicals pose environmental hazards; water is often in short supply; and agricultural soil is increasingly fatigued.
To obtain more food for the world’s growing population, forests and grasslands would have to be converted to farms in order to produce food. This, in turn, would enormously strain our ecosystems.
