Green Revolution - India's un-sustainable agriculture growth

A recent Public Policy lecture at The Takshashila Institution made me think of my Economics classes from back in college in 2004, where while doing marathon reading sessions of Uma Kapila's book on the Indian economy, we students had once asked each other in a debate, "What if I tell you that the Green Revolution that started in the 1960’s, is directly responsible for India’s agriculture crisis of today?"

With almost two decades more of insight, hindsight and I-told-you-so moments, let us dive a bit into this question.

Back in the 1960's; frequent famines and low crop productivity with a potent mix of geo-political factors gave us the Green Revolution in India, as we know it today. At its core, the Agriculture Green Revolution of the past 55 years, from 1968 to 2023, has brought us to a state of flux today, where we are having to ask ourselves the same questions that we had asked back in the 1960s.

If we take a systems-thinking approach to evaluate this predicament, here is how the time travel on the same would look like.

1. In the 1960’s, low crop yield and overall crop availability, leads India to desperately buying the PL480 wheat variety from USA.
2. India becomes one of the first country to adopt the High Yielding Variety (HYV) of wheat seeds of the Green Revolution, the seeds for which had been first sown in Mexico, by Norman Borlaug. India’s drive is led by M.S.Swaminathan.
3. These seed varieties have their own requirement of high input materials application, including stronger versions of pesticides and fertilizers.
4. The success and subsequent profitability of the newly launched seed varieties, leads to a system of mono-culture in parts of North India – where vast swathes of land now grow only a single crop.
5. The combination of Minimum Support Price (MSP) and assured buyback on certain critical crops, further entrenches the wholesale shift towards crops that are assured to be bought back by the government.
6. Paddy also gets introduced in Punjab, to reduce our dependence on imported seeds of wheat. Western UP takes the route of sugarcane farming subsequently.
7. The culture of mono-culture of water and chemical-guzzling crops continues unabated. It continues to be a profitable venture for the farmers.
8. Just in a few years from the 1960s to 1970s, Punjab has shifted from growing 200+ crops to 3 crops (wheat, rice and cotton).
9. The increased use of chemical inputs, over a few generations affected not just the soil health, but also human health. Remember, that for long, the fertilizer have also been heavily subsidized by the government.
10. An assessment in late 1990’s and early 2000’s shows that same states which fed the country for thirty years, are now suffering due to the same mono-culture having destroyed its soil nutrients (not like Borlaug or Swaminathan didn't warn us about this).
11. From the 1990's; even more of flood irrigation, pesticides and fertilizer application per hectare is needed to keep alive the same the level of productivity.
12. The input cost of crops has gone up exponentially over time, while the productivity (yield) which went up by more than 10% y-o-y in the first two decades of the Green Revolution, was only growing by a meagre 1%-2% from the 1990s
13. A Swaminathan Commission from 2004, devises a formula for MSP for keeping farming profitable and not a loss-making venture. This formula is yet to be implemented even in 2023.
14. Parallel to this, our Food Corporation India (FCI) storage warehouses fail to keep up with the pace of crop output, and their edifice begins to crumble.
15. Village Level Aggregators (VLA/VLC’s) and the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) gain more power; to make up for the lack of storage spaces as well as financing opportunities for the farmers.
16. The soil today, in 2023, is now devoid of basic Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potassium (NPK) and other micro-nutrients.
17. To recover from this nutrient-loss, the farmers are being suggested inter-cropping and multi-cropping techniques, which they anyway used to do pre-Green Revolution. A few have also started exploring more natural methods of farming.
18. The water table has gone down to abysmal levels, wells are now being made functional at 500 or even 1000 feet (remember, paddy, the water-guzzler?)
19. The Bhatinda-Bikaner “Cancer Trains” gains folklore prominence, as the state government launches its Mukhya Mantri Punjab Cancer Raahat Kosh Scheme (MMPCRKS). Fertilizer used had gone up by 8 times, between 1970 to 2006
20. This in then topped up with sugarcane starting to take the same route in a few states of North and West India through the past two decades.

I will stop here. Any points beyond this, would require me to just make a Systems Diagram to show the inter-connectedness of this mess we are in today (let's keep that for a later visual write-up).

Essentially, what we have today is a redux of the core agriculture problems of 1960s and newly created ones which are borne out of the decisions taken in the 1960s. Our problems of yesterday led to our progress of today, which has created the new problems for our tomorrow (this write-up doesn't even cover the problem of stubble burning, the controversy around the three farm laws and micro-finance and crop insurance as few other pain areas of our ongoing challenges). It is an almost infinite loop of ‘development’, that we are currently immersed in.

So, will we be able break this chain? Will our agriculture solutions of today, not be the albatross around the neck of those living a further fifty five years down the line, in 2078?

Norman Borlaug had said that it is not enough to increase food production, and that we have to increase the purchasing power of the “vast underprivileged masses” to improve their access to the new agriculture bounty. Dr.Swaminathan himself had detailed plans on an "evergreen revolution", which was to be "productivity with perpetuity".

This has given me the confidence, that it is indeed possible to break away from this chain. Hence, moving forward in this newsletter series, I will be sharing more policy solutions for sustainable agriculture growth.