Page 53 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

872 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

matched India’s success or the number of jobs in auxil- in water supplies, animal and human tissues, and soil with
iary facilities such as chemical factories and hydroelectric often unforeseen consequences. Along the Costa Rican
power stations. coast 90 percent of the coral reefs are dead due to pesti-
Proponents such as Martina McGloughlin point out cide run off from plantations that monocrop bananas for
that GR technologies create more food for sale, increase export and that have ruined 80,000 hectares of former
foreign exchange and national income, and generate a banana plantation land with copper residues from pesti-
steady income source for successful growers as well as cides so that the land can no longer be used to grow food
new nonagricultural jobs. Proponents do not believe that for either domestic consumption or export. Costa Rica
the adoption of biotechnology crops is creating genetic now imports basic staple grains: beans, corn, and rice.
uniformity or inducing vulnerability to new strains of The irrigation required by the Green Revolution has
pathogens. They assert that GR technologies are size led to massive dam-building projects in China, India,
neutral and can promote sustainable agriculture centered Mexico and elsewhere, displaced tens of thousands of
on small farmers in developing countries. Despite such indigenous peoples, and submerged their farmland.The
claims, the Green Revolution has promoted monoculture frequent result of massive irrigation has been the creation
worldwide because each hybrid seed crop has specific fer- of soil with a high salt content that even large does of fer-
tilizer and pesticide requirements for maximum growth: tilizer cannot repair. Critics have documented the reduc-
Farmers save money by buying seed, fertilizer, and pes- tion in species diversity that followed the Green Revolu-
ticide in bulk and by planting and tending the same crop tion. Rice, wheat, and maize have come to dominate
uniformly on their land. global agriculture: They supply 66 percent of the world’s
entire seed crop. They have edged out leafy vegetables
Negative Outcomes and other food crops that do not respond to nitrogen-
The picture is not all rosy, however. Despite claims by and water-rich farming regimes. Critics note that human
proponents, monoculture did make crops more suscep- beings cultivated more than three thousand plant species
tible to infestations and damage by a single pest. When as food sources before the Green Revolution, whereas
farmers turned to heavier doses of petroleum-based pes- today fifteen species (among them rice, corn, wheat, po-
ticides, the more-resistant pests survived, and their off- tato, cassava, the common bean, soybean, peanut, coco-
spring returned the next year to cause even greater losses. nut, and banana) provide more than 85 percent of all
Famous cases of such resistance are the southern corn human nutrition.
leaf blight in 1970–1971 in the United States; the brown The energy requirements for this agriculture are high:
planthopper, which attacked the various strains of “mir- In what Southern Illinois University professor of anthro-
acle rice” during the 1970s and 1980s in the Philippines, pology Ernest Schusky has dubbed the“neo-caloric revo-
Sri Lanka, Solomon Islands,Thailand, India, Indonesia, lution” GR agriculture is one-half as energy efficient as
and Malaysia and inThailand,Malaysia, and Bangladesh ox-and-plow agriculture and one-quarter as energy effi-
again in 1990; and the recent potato blight in the Andes. cient as hoe agriculture. The model of GR agriculture,
Millions of people, mostly agricultural workers, suffer U.S. grain farming, is remarkably energy inefficient: It
from acute pesticide poisoning, and tens of thousands consumes eight calories of energy for every one calorie it
die every year from it. The horrific explosion at Union produces. For critics thirty years of the Green Revolution
Carbide’s Bhopal, India, plant on 2 December 1984 have left a legacy of environmental degradation, unsus-
killed an estimated 3,000 people and injured 200,000 tainable agricultural practices, social disruption, home-
more. The chemical Sevin manufactured at Bhopal was less farmers, ruined farmland, crushing international
essential for India’s Green Revolution. In addition, ever- debt burdens for developing countries, and the export of
rising doses of pesticides have meant that they ended up needed food to meet loan payments.