Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
they were at greater financial risk than larger farmers when crops failed.
Many farmers left agriculture and more continue to leave.
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, environmentalists, activists, farmers,
and researchers started drawing atention to these and other shortcom-
ings of the Green Revolution. Environmental activist Vandana Shiva, for
example, has writen proliically on this topic. She has also noted that the
new agricultural methods worsened the status of women by diminish-
ing their autonomy and control over food systems and their households.
Government programs often targeted men, urging them to convert their
land to cash crop agriculture and monocrops. As a result, the agricultural
priorities of families changed, and the burden of engaging in subsistence
agriculture and finding daily food for their households fell to women.32
The “success” of the Green Revolution has thus been extensively ques-
tioned. As Perkins states: “If success means an increase in the aggregate
supply of grain, the green revolution was a success. If success means an
end to hunger, then the green revolution was a failure. People without ac-
cess to adequate land or income, regardless of their country of residence,
remain ill fed.”33 Over two hundred million people in India are under-
nourished today, in spite of the production gains of the Green Revolu-
tion.34 At the same time, similar to the British colonial regime, the Gov-
ernment of India exports millions of tons of wheat and rice, suggesting
that production-oriented agriculture alone does not solve the problem of
hunger in the food system.35
In the southwestern state of Kerala, the first Green Revolution
technologies and experiments centered on rice, through the government-
funded Intensive Agricultural District Programme (IADP) in 1961. This
program introduced HYV rice to Kerala, and promoted the use of chemi-
cal inputs. W hile some farmers in Kerala were already aware of and using
synthetic chemicals and HYV rice before the IADP, it was only after the
advent of this program that most farmers abandoned traditional varieties
of rice and adopted and used chemical fertilizers and pesticides in agri-
culture more widely.36
Since the 1960s, Kerala's policy makers have actively promoted market-
oriented and chemical-based agriculture for a variety of other crops as
