Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ecologically [the Green Revolution] combined with mechanization to promote
monoculture. Since farmers now had to purchase seed rather than use their own,
and because they needed fertilizers and pesticides specific to a single crop, they
saved money on inputs by buying in bulk for one crop. Monocultures, . . . ,
invites pest problems. Often even the initially pest-resistant crops eventually
proved vulnerable to one or another infestation. Hence farmers turned to heavier
and heavier doses of pesticides.
(McNeill, 2000: 223-4)
Many of these pesticides had little or no effect but did end up in water supplies and
the human body. The World Health Organization estimated that in 1990 about
20,000 people died of pesticide poisoning and in 1985 about one million people
had experienced acute but non-fatal poisoning. As Indian environmental activist and
founder of the Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology,
Vandana Shiva (1991) wrote, the so-called green revolution in India involved the
growth of high-yield cash crops, the creation of monocultures and an increased use
of pesticides which destroyed a considerable amount of biodiversity. Industrial-scale
agricultural production was also a cause of rural impoverishment, local conflict,
ecological vulnerability and severe water shortages. The Punjab, for example, was
not transformed from being a begging bowl to a bread basket but the agrochemical
industries, large petrochemical companies, manufacturers of agricultural plant and
equipment, dam builders and large landowners did gain significant financial dividends.
She writes:
The central paradox posed by the Green Revolution and biotechnology
development is that modern plant improvement has been based on the destruc-
tion of the biodiversity which it uses as raw material. The irony of plant
and animal breeding is that it destroys the very building blocks on which the
technology depends. When agricultural modernization schemes introduce new
and uniform crops into the farmers' fields, they push into extinction the diversity
of local varieties.
(1991: 251)
In
Stolen Harvest
, Vandana Shiva (2000) further explores the impact of genetic
engineering and the corporate patenting of life on local people and ecosystems
powerfully advocating organic and small-scale community-based agriculture, which
she believes will produce sufficient food and a decent quality of life for all rural
dwellers. She believes organic farming, agroforestry and forest regeneration not only
creates a major carbon sink, and thereby addresses climate change issues to a degree,
but they also address issues of poverty, hunger and nutrition. Industrialized chemical-
based agriculture does not. She writes:
Industrial chemical agriculture also causes hunger and malnutrition by robbing
crops of nutrients. Industrially produced food is nutritionally empty but loaded
with chemicals and toxins. Nutrition in food comes from the nutrients in the
soil. Industrial agriculture, based on the NPK mentality of synthetic nitrogen,
phosphorous and potassium-based fertilizers, leads to depletion of vital micro-
nutrients and trace elements such as magnesium, zinc, calcium, iron.
