The Green Revolution that transformed agriculture in the last century was an American invention. It began in 1944 with a project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico. Dr. Norman Borlaug, a plant geneticist from Minnesota, was sponsored by the Foundation to assist in breeding new plant hybrids that would boost yields of basic food grains. The project was enormously successful: Mexico was transformed from an importer of wheat to an exporter within a couple of decades.
In the 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation helped bring the Green Revolution to India which was faced with such severe food shortages that there was a fear of major famine. The hybrid seeds developed in Mexico were planted in Punjab, where yields soared. Dr. M.S. Swaminathan went on to shepherd India’s own Green Revolution, developing local hybrids and spreading miracle yields throughout South and Southeast Asia. India went from a net grain importer to producing a bumper crop of 131 million tons of grain in 1978, establishing India as one of the world’s biggest grain producers.
In addition to new hybrid seeds, the Green Revolution made heavy use of new pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers and irrigation techniques. Synthetic fertilizers, based on nitrogen made from natural gas, put the plants on the equivalent of steroids, further boosting production. Rapidly, however, it became clear that organochlorine pesticides were harming more than agricultural pests. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring drew attention to the dangers of DDT, and helped launch the environmental movement.
The cost of synthetic fertilizers has risen in tandem with those of natural gas, increasing the cost of food production. Moreover, pollution from these fertilizers, in the form of nitrates, is a serious problem the world over. Without these fertilizers, the high yields of the post-Green Revolution era would not be possible, yet they pose serious risks and may permanently damage our environment, especially our water. Too much water, delivered via irrigation, can be environmentally harmful. Over-watering has negative impacts on soil composition, increasing, especially in conjunction with the use of nitrogen fertilizers, the salinity of the soil and reducing its productivity. Farmers are facing these problems in Punjab, where India’s Green Revolution took off.
Dramatically increasing the production of food did not end hunger in India. Though India claims food self-sufficiency, and in terms of sheer quantity of food grains produced the claim is just, more people in India go hungry than in any other single country. At least 232 million people in India do not receive sufficient food. According to UNICEF, 200 million children—one third of all the malnourished children in the world—live in India. Nearly half of India’s children, 47 percent, are severely underweight.
India cannot meet its needs in food grains. In 2006, the country imported 2.2 million tons of wheat, including orders from American giants Cargill, the world’s largest grain trading company, and Archer Daniels Midlands. India’s strides in increased wheat production—achieving about 70 million tons annually—cannot keep up with the steady growth in population and swelling consumption. The diversion of land by subsistence farmers from food crops to cash crops such as cotton contribute to the problem, as does the reduction of land put to cultivating traditional hardy and nutritious food grains such as jowar, sorghum, and bhajra, buckwheat. The shortfall in wheat production caused prices of wheat flour, the ingredient for India’s flatbread that is the stuff of life for hundreds of millions, to rise 30 percent in 2007. In 2011, in the wake of the collapse of Russian wheat production and a menace to Chinese wheat, the world is again facing a critical shortfall. The resulting inflation of food prices represents a major hardship for India’s poor and puts stress on lower middle-class households as well.
A key component of the closer India–U.S. relationship is a new agricultural development initiative hailed by George W. Bush during his 2006 speech in Delhi as “a second Green Revolution” and which the Obama administration has supported and expanded. The initiative is called the “U.S.-India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative.” Dr. Norman Borlaug, after winning a Nobel prize for his work on the first Green Revolution, participated in the new joint effort. The goals of the agricultural initiative are listed as follows: 1) raise agricultural productivity to promote food security; 2) increase technology transfer, including biotechnology; 3) build a sound policy and regulatory environment; 4) expand trade and investment and promote integration of India into the global economy; 5) ensure a key role for the U.S. and Indian private sectors; and, 6) reinvigorate U.S.-India university partnerships.
On first glance, it seems odd to name an agricultural deal a “knowledge initiative.” But a core goal of the agreement is to expand patentable intellectual property. According to the Ministry of Agriculture of the government of India’s Web site, the private-sector participants are Masani Farm and ITC on the Indian side and Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and Wal-Mart, on the American side. Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland have been deeply involved in Indian agriculture for some time. Wal-Mart has every intention of being so the moment the Indian government makes legal changes to allow multi-brand foreign retail stores to operate as such in India. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is setting up infrastructure, opening stores with its Indian partner Bharti Enterprises and sourcing an increasing number of agricultural products from India. The Hindu newspaper, reporting on the Knowledge Agreement, noted that “transgenic research,” meaning research on genetically modified organisms, “in crops, animals and fisheries would be a substantial part of the collaboration in biotechnology.” Reporting for Nature Biotechnology, K.S. Jayaraman asserted: “What critics resent most is the presence of Monsanto, the second largest GM seed producer in the world, and Wal-Mart, the word’s [sic] largest retailer, on the board of the new initiative.” The article goes on to quote Indian food-policy analyst Devinder Sharma on the role Indian universities are likely to play: “With them on the board, the US multinationals are all set to determine the Indian agricultural research agenda.”
The combination of India’s rich plant and animal genetic diversity, its potentially large market and its proven capacity as a research and development center are all powerful attractions for U.S. agribusiness concerns. They can look forward to dramatically expanding the scope of their intellectual property rights holdings, using Indian brain power to help unlock new applications in biotechnology and transgenic research, using Indian fields to test new transgenic products, and then selling these products to Indian consumers, whether to Indian farmers or to Indian retail customers.
I called up Suman Sarai of Genecamp in Delhi to ask her more about her take on the U.S.-India agricultural deal. Genecamp is an NGO focused on food and livelihood security of rural and tribal communities, technologies to genetically modify food, indigenous knowledge, sustainable use, genetic resources conservation and intellectual property rights. Sarai has been vocal in criticizing the deal, saying: “India will gain little and give away too much.” She told me: “Look, the agricultural deal is payoff for the nuclear deal. I see it very much that way. It’s easy to understand why Monsanto needs India. There is a huge amount of resistance to GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) in Europe, Africa and Japan. Who are they going to sell this stuff to? An agricultural giant like India is hugely important for them.”
In 2006, farmers in Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and California sued Bayer Crop Science after an unapproved genetically modified strain of rice it had developed entered the food chain and contaminated the U.S. rice crop. The modified rice contains a protein dubbed Liberty Link that allows it to resist herbicides used to kill weeds. After the contamination was discovered, Japan banned imports of U.S. rice and the EU instituted testing requirements to insure that all rice coming from the United States was not contaminated. This was a major blow to U.S. rice producers. No one knows the long-range potential effects of altered plant or animal genes entering the food chain. Yet the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before, has aggressively supported Monsanto’s rollout of new GMO crops in the United States, including genetically modified alfalfa and sugar beets, and has made Monsanto an official partner of USAID in spreading Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds to the developing world.
I asked Sarai why the Indian government would give so much genetic capital away to the United States? Sarai would not name names, but she told me that influential policy makers “have direct tie-ups to this.” American companies aren’t the only ones favored. Swiss biotech giant Syngenta, for example, is working with the Vasantdada Sugar Institute in Pune, Maharashtra, on genetically modified sugarcane. In general, Sarai told me, “there has been a huge buy-in at the top level of the Indian government on GMOs.
“This has been packaged very cleverly by linking it to the Green Revolution,” she continued. “For Indians, the Green Revolution gave us our sovereignty, it made us self-sufficient, so, to associate this deal with that by calling it “a second Green Revolution” is very shrewd. But this is nothing like the Green Revolution. All the knowledge generated by the Green Revolution was public knowledge. This will all be private knowledge. This is about intellectual property rights and monopoly corporations extending the reach of what they own.”
Mira Kamdar is a Paris-based senior fellow at World Policy Institute and the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World. This post was adapted from “Chapter Four: 600,000 Villages” of Planet India.
