In a report released only a few weeks ago, the UN FAO said that the trend towards uniformity in crops and the loss of biodiversity pose a major threat to the world's ability to feed its soaring population (anonymous 1996). Rather surprisingly, considering its support of the Green Revolution over the past 30 years, the report went on to denounce the massive loss of phytogenetic resources as a result of modern farming methods. The report illustrated the biodiversity loss with some examples: for instance, in the US, over 7,000 varieties of apples were grown at the turn of the century; 80% have disappeared altogether.
Blaming the loss of biodiversity on the expansion of modern commercial farming methods which priviledge the most profitable varieties, the report notes what alternative farmers have been saying for decades - the result of this uniformity is crops which are less resistant to disease and climatic condition, and can be wiped out by a single cause. However - before further discussing monocrops in today's agricultural world, let us take a brief look at how the present situation evolved.
During the 1950s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank, the United States government, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations of the US, and several other international organizations told the international community that the world was facing an impending food shortage and that an ambitious program must be immediately undertaken to attempt to increase the global food supply. The various initiatives begun during these years and implemented in the 1960s and following years came to be known under the collective title of the Green Revolution.
The first step of this program was to establish or enlist the aid of already established agricultural research centres, such as the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. These research centres formed an international consortium in 1971 known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), with headquarters in New York and under the auspices of the World Bank, UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and the FAO (Feder 1983).
The central idea that resulted from these research centres was that crop yields could be increased by the use of High Yield Variety (HYV) seeds; through years of research, these seeds would be genetically manipulated to provide higher yields. An important feature of these seeds was that they required high inputs of fertilizers and water to provide their maximum potential, and to further increase efficiency they would be grown on large monoculture plantations using modern farm machinery. It soon became apparent that these large monocultures were perfect hosts for large infestations of pests, so large inputs of chemical pesticides were also required.
To implement all of these measures on the large international scale the proponents of the Green Revolution deemed necessary, the assistance of many international aid agencies was enlisted, to provide money and consultative help to the developing countries of the so-called third world, which still relied largely on peasant small-holding farming systems and traditional methods of farming to provide food for local communities.
All of these factors were considered acceptable and even beneficial in various ways by the proponents of the Green Revolution - i.e. the large water requirements of the new seeds provided an opportunity for international aid and development with the building of large dams, which could further be used for hydro-power and to provided employment in the host countries; likewise the increased use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides provided opportunity for huge growth in these industries; and the increased farm output would provide new products for international markets and export income for the producing countries. And, of course, the huge increases in crop production would feed the world's hungry.
Such was the rationale of the proponents of the Green Revolution.
After over 30 years, however, it is becoming widely recognized that the Green Revolution has failed miserably to live up to its glowing promises and has instead left a legacy of environmental degradation, social disruption, homeless farmers, impoverished farmland, and contributed greatly to international debt burdens from which is is impossible for these countries to escape.
Let us examine some of these factors a little more closely.
The international centres for agricultural research were founded to attempt to find ways to increase the yield of the worlds crops by searching for and finding seeds that would yield higher crop amounts on the same amount of land. This was perhaps a laudable goal, but it failed to account for some vary basic principles - for instance:
As with other aspects of the Green Revolution scenario, the implementors seemingly failed to recognize that small irrigation systems have been used for centuries, with minimal damage to the local environment, and it would have been a great deal more useful to first study these systems and attempt to expand them, with full consideration of sustainable usage, rather than to simply forge ahead with huge dam megaprojects and their equally huge environmental impacts.
Again, in retrospect, the motives of those originally supporting such schemes must be raised and seriously examined, for such megaprojects proved a boon to international construction companies and advisors, while causing great environmental damage and leaving literally hundreds of thousands of people homeless around the world. (For a thorough discussion of the effects of large dams, see Goldsmith and Hildyard, 1985-1989)
Today the legacy of decades of virtually uncontrolled pesticide use is a litany of severe contamination of soils and river systems, widespread human health problems including cancer and birth defects, and a new generation of chemical-resistant insects whose natural predators have been decimated by the very pesticides meant to control the pests. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in 1989 that, globally, there are at least three million cases of acute pesticide poisoning and 20,000 deaths each year from agricultural pesticide use - primarily, of course, in the developing countries (WHO 1989).
The Sevin manufactured in Union Carbide's Bhopal plant was an essential component of Green Revolution technology; in a statement of amazing cynicism, Norman Borlaug, one of the original proponents of the Green Revolution, said that there was no need to make a terrible fuss about pesticide poisoning deaths since more people died in automobile accidents than in farming (Alvares 1986).
Again, as with other central aspects of Green Revolution technology, the motives of those originally propounding it must be questioned, for although the detrimental effects on both people and environment have been severe, the agri-chemical business has gathered fortunes over the decades of the Green Revolution. (see, for instance, Van Der Bosch 1980).
Furthermore, indiscriminate use of pesticides kills not only pests but their natural enemies as well, enabling the next generation of pests to multiply unchecked, in many cases with growing resistance to the pesticides. Coupled with large areas of genetically identical crops - thus identically susceptible to a pest which exploits a particular weakness - this effect can have disastrous results, such as the outbreak of Brown Planthopper in the 1970s and 1980s in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Solomon Islands, Thailand, India, Indonesia and Malaysia; and then again in 1990 in Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh (Easton no date).
In Bangladesh recently, a group of farmers talked about modern, high-yield agriculture: "It is like a fever on the land," they agreed, "...It is higher yield for a short time only, and of one crop. And to do that they are killing our fishes, our birds, our useful insects and our livestock. Do you see pigeons and birds in the fields anymore? No insects remain for their food. ... They are gone because our water is poisoned with pesticides. Our cattle are getting sick eating HYV straw sprayed with pesticide. So what 'high yield' are you talking about? Agriculture does not mean the production of a single variety of rice - it means the production of paddy, birds, livestock and our families at the same time and in the same act. Governments and fertilizer and pesticide are actually destroying our land, our water, our air, our whole environment - and this is what you call modern agriculture?" (quoted in Francis, Julian no date).
With the increased use of fertilizers, modern agricultural machinery and irrigation it became possible to farm much land on a year-round basis. However, this practice quickly depletes the natural fertility of the soil, at which point it becomes uneconomical to farm and turns to desert. In a recent UN report, it noted that from 5 to 7 million hectares of arable land are lost each year to some form of soil degradation (Anonymous 1989a), and the Worldwatch Institute described the deleterious effects of intensive farming practices on marginal soil (Brown & Wolf 1984); "...the main cause of soil erosion in the US is intensive monoculture..."
It may seem obvious today, but thirty years ago, 'environmental accounting' was an unheard of concept, and there was no recognition that increases in food supply on the 'credit' side of the balance sheet should be counterbalanced as required by entries for increased fertilizer use and the resultant soil degradation and eutrophication of rivers on a 'debit' side. Today, after 30 years of intensive fertilizer use, the resulting soil degradation is now recognized as a serious threat to future food supplies.
Increased use of marginal lands has led to the cutting of large tracts of forest - directly and indirectly, as peasant farmers forced from their land must live where they can and farm what land they can find - and this poor soil can only be farmed for a brief period of time before losing its little fertility and becoming eroded away, while the destruction of the water regulating capacity of the forest further reduces water supplies.
As one writer observed, "Farmers can overplough and overpump with impressive results in the short run, but the short run is drawing to a close. As marginal lands brought under the plough during the boom years of the 1970s become exhausted and irrigated areas shrink because of falling water tables in key food-producing areas, the growth in world food production is slowing down." (Reijntjes et al. 1992; pg. 5).
After 20 years of Green Revolution policies in Chad and Mali in the Sahel region of Africa, for instance, cotton exports had grown by 100-200% - and yet even World Bank estimates suggested that the people in these countries were eating as much as 20% less food than prior to 'development' (Madeley, 1985).
Although the area received over US$7 billion in agriculture aid during that time, less than a fifth of the money went for research on rain-fed crops - which provided almost all of the region's cereal production. As Lappe and Collins (1977) note, "Hungry people cannot eat that which is exported, nor are they likely to eat from export earnings or benefit from the so-called development achieved through these export earnings. People will escape hunger only when policies are pursued that allow them to grow food and to eat the food they grow."
Asia and Latin America have fared the same - as one author reports, "After over a decade of enormous foreign and national, public and private investment in Asia's Third World economies and agricultures, and the admittedly great efforts to raise staple food production, the status of the urban and rural working masses did not improve but instead deteriorated. Even the establishment agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank had to admit that poverty and all the phenomena related to it either persisted or worsened....." (Feder 1983).
In the same report, Feder quotes from a United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA): "...the general concentration of income in the larger countries of the region has not diminished and has clearly increased in some areas..." (pg. 275)
Clearly, indeed, decades of massive foreign 'aid' and investment have done little to help feed the world's hungry people - however, during the same period of time, the large multinational corporations which provide seed, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and offer 'expert advice', and the huge bureaucracies which disseminate international aid moneys, have prospered greatly - and are now seeking to increase their wealth and influence even further through plant patents on the genetic resources once freely available to and used by the indigenous peoples of the world.
Again, it is a situation that requires a serious questioning and examination of the motives of those who forced the Green Revolution on the peoples of the world.
As Bandyopadhyay & Shiva note (1987), the commercialization of forests is the primary cause of most large scale and rapid deforestation, and the changing of the character of the forests so they serve commercial interests rather than as the long-standing home of indigenous peoples. In Central India, for instance, the tribal sustenance base in cane and bamboo for basket weaving, mangoes, tamarind, jackfruit, mahua and edible berries are all destroyed when natural forests are replaced by monoculture plantations of eucalyptus or tropical pine.
The replacement of natural forests by monoculture plantations also, as the very name suggests, leads to great loss of biodiversity in the forests, which has several undesirable consequences.
First, the loss of biodiversity reduces the overall strength of the local system and thus of the planet as a whole - it is a basic and true biological maxim that strength lies in diversity.
Secondly, the destruction of huge swaths of tropical forest may lead to irreversible climate change on the planet - the forests absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, rainfall and sunshine, and play a leading role in regulating water flow and preserving the integrity of the ecosystem; monoculture plantations can only fill these functions in a very reduced capacity, if at all - for instance, studies conducted in the aftermath of the terrible flooding and destruction resulting from flooding and landslides in southern Thailand in November of 1988 isolated rubber as a key cause of the devastation, pointing out that the young monoculture plantations were unsuited to withstand heavy rains, which were likely to recur in the future (NESDB 1989, quoted in Usher 1992).
Also, aside from purely pragmatic grounds, it is questionable in the extreme as to whether mankind has the right to wantonly destroy thousands or tens of thousands of other species on the planet, and possibly lead to the destruction of the planet itself.
The words of Aunderlal Bahuguna, the leader of the Chipka movement in India, are a good summary of the current situation: "A natural forest provides soil, water and pure air - the very source of life; a plantation provides but timber, resin and foreign exchange." (quoted in Goldsmith, 1985)
In more recent times, rubber plantations began in the mid 19th century in the Amazon jungle of South America; since then, the cutting of the world's largest jungle has accelerated, with mining, dam-building, and beef farming among the chief causes; the burning of forest to provide land for cattle raising is particularly serious. In the temperate forests of South America, the largest single crop for which the forest is now cleared is soybeans - i.e. almost 10% of the world supply comes from the upper Paraguay Basin, where over 3.5 million hectares are planted in soybean (Anonymous 1989a). Soybeans are intensive users of soil nutrients, and in only 3 or 4 years begin to require such expensive additions of fertilizers that it is more economical to abandon the land to cattle and clear new tracts of forest.
Current estimates of South American deforestation are in the area of 20,000 sq. km. per year - over 500,000 sq. km. have been destroyed in the last century. Modern monoculture farming is responsible for at least 50% of this deforestation. Since 1960, over 25% of the rainforest in Central America has been cleared to provide land for cattle ranching (RGE p7).
In Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras and Guatemala, the US fruit companies are expanding their banana plantations - Ecuador and Costa Rica are the world's leading banana exporters. Plantations in Costa Rica have expanded to over 45,000 hectares, and forest clearing for such plantations has become the leading cause of deforestation in that country. The banana industry imports 25-30% of all pesticides used in the country, and over 250 cases of serious pesticide poisoning are reported yearly.
Along the Costa Rican coast the coral reefs are 90% dead, killed by pesticide runoff, and local fisheries have also declined for the same reason. The intensive use of pesticides also poisons the land for future use - over 80,000 hectares of former banana plantations have been abandoned, the land too poisoned with copper residue from pesticides for further use. With the high percentage of land devoted to plantations, every country in Central America must now import basic grains - beans, rice and corn. (Lewis, 1992).
An alarming prospect for many of the Andean people in South America is the present reappearance of the dreaded potato blight, cause of the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s. Its most recent form is much deadlier and more resistant to attempts to control it - in the US, flame throwers are commonly used to burn it off. It poses such a grave threat because potatoes are now grown in many parts of the world as a staple food, in large monocultural areas using genetically uniform or similar seed, and potato blight can rapidly devastate large areas.
Eastern Europe and large areas in Africa and North America stand to be devastated by the blight, but it is in South America where the genetic resource is the greatest, and should the blight reach this area it could mean devastation for one of the world's most important food stocks (Mooney et al. 1995).
As Nicholas Hildyard repor (Hildyard 1991), the FAO has addressed many of the concerns of critics of the Green Revolution in its recent Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) strategy - but has not really made any fundamental changes to its policies. As Hildyard dissects the SARD document, he reveals that FAO still sees a future with large monoculture plantations monopolizing the best land to grow cash crops for export, using irrigation and chemicals and HYV seeds, and forcing indigenous peoples to 'transmigrate' to areas of marginal lands. "In that respect," Hildyard concludes, "SARD should be recognized for what it is. A cunning attempt to co-opt the language of sustainability to promote the same worn-out policies. It is simply old wine in a new bottle."
Less than ten years ago there was a great drought in the Sahel where over 100,000 people died. A primary cause of this drought was the disruption of the traditional method of cropping and sustainable land use, as the French colonial policies forced the indigenous people to abandon their traditional methods and turn all of the land, including that once left fallow for several years, into mass monocultures of peanuts. (Return to the Good Earth (RGE) p6).
In a similar fashion, although without the drastic loss of life, Northern Ghana was forced to turn its plentiful food production system, famous for yams and other foods, into monocultures of cocoa; and the growing of food for local consumption was virtually abandoned in Dahomey and Nigeria to plant oil palm - for export, of course. The starvation in Ethiopia has been a world concern for over two decades - yet almost all of the arable land in the country is still being used to grow coffee for export.
Facing similar hardships with their food supply, Chad and Mali nonetheless managed to increase their cotton exports by over 150% (RGE 41). Although drought was widely accepted as the cause for these food shortages, as one author points out, the food shortages faced by African countries during these years were not likely caused by a shortage of rain, since such shortages were common - it was rather the policy, implemented by foreign-funded aid projects, which turned land that once produced food for the people into large-scale monoculture plantations producing for the world market (Madeley 1985).
In her book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, she describes in detail the impact the various policies - HYV seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation - have had in the Punjab, formerly one of India's foremost suppliers of food. In a detailed and damning expose, she describes the failure of the Green Revolution with its huge monoculture plantations of hybrid seeds as having led to reduced genetic diversity, increased vulnerability to pests, soil erosion, water shortages, reduced soil fertility, micronutrient deficiencies, soil contamination, reduced availability of nutritious foods for the local population, the displacement of vast numbers of small farmers from their land, rural impoverishment and increased tensions and conflicts in the communities.
The beneficiaries have been the agrochemical industry, banks, large petrochemical companies, manufacturers of agricultural machinery, dam builders and large landowners. It is, in essence, an ideal case study of the factors we described at the beginning of this paper - an answer to the questions that were posed concerning the real beneficiaries of the Green Revolution.
In spite of promises of higher wages and improvement in living conditions, the plight of the poor in India was also dealt a considerable setback by the Green Revolution, as peasants who formerly laboured on the land were displaced from their jobs by modern machinery and migrant workers, and also evicted from their marginal lands by landowners who used the machinery to farm it themselves (Dogra no date).
The cultivation of large-scale monoculture has also had a serious impact on the health of many Indian children who relied on traditional plants such as brathua to provide essential nutrients such as vitamin A - brathua grows as an associate of wheat in traditional farming methods, but in Green Revolution monocultures it is regarded as simply a pest and is destroyed with herbicides. Over 40,000 children go blind every year for lack of vitamin A, and destroying brathua contributes to this problem. Herbicides also destroy reeds and grasses, thus removing the livelihood of many Indian women who rely on basket and mat making for income. (Shiva 1993b).
Women, who traditionally practiced indigenous, environmentally sound methods, planting and nurturing through the use of natural fertilizers and pesticides, were quickly alienated from farming; also, impoverished peasant families now had to allocate a substantial part of their income to pay for high-cost chemicals. And the chemicals proved a two-edged sword - women on banana and pineapple plantations began to experience spontaneous abortions and stillbirths, and other serious health effects were widespread.
Also, the soil fertility was adversely affected and the natural balance of nutrients destroyed.. Traditional and affordable foods such as snails, frogs and fish were exterminated - to be replaced by new pests which required even more pesticides. (Ayupan & Oliveros 1992)
An early warning of the destructive effects of monoculture, long before the Green Revolution, is the infamous 'dust bowl' of the 1930s in the United States, which was largely attributable to the advent of modern, heavy farm machinery coupled with vast tracts of monoculture crops depleting the soil year after year - , and when a few years of sub-average rainfall hit the soil, depleted of its natural health, simply blew away. As one writer put it: "When, between 1899 and 1900, thousands of farmers were settling in Oklahoma, it must have seemed to them like they were founding a new agricultural civilization which might endure as long as Egypt. The grandsons, and even the sons, of these settlers who so swiftly became a disease of their soil, trekked from their ruined farmsteads, their buried or uprooted crops, their dead soil, with the dust of their own making blowing in their eyes and hair, the barren sand of a once fertile plain gritting between their teeth ... damned for their fundamental ignorance of the nature of their world, their defiance of the cooperation and return which are the basis of life on this planet (Hyman 1952, quoted in Shiva 1993b).
Another example from America of the potential disaster involved with Green Revolution technologies was the attack of the Southern Corn Leaf Blight in 1970-71, which ravaged the corn belt of America, leaving a path of withered plants, broken stalks and malformed cobs. The widespread nature of the attack was the result of the uniformity of the hybrid corn seed, with its genetic susceptibility to such attacks. (Allaby 1973).
Although America has been a major food grower for many years, it has in effect been mining the earth rather than using it sustainably, and is beginning to experience major problems - for instance, the underground Ogallala aquifer in the southwest which has supplied irrigation water to tens of thousands of hectares of farmland is beginning to dry up (Anton 1995); also, much of the land has become unusable due to saltification of the soil - throughout the US, as much as 25% of the irrigated land suffers from saltification or waterlogging (Shiva 1993a; Clunies-Ross & Hildyard 1992).
The United Kingdom also has a history of experience with monoculture problems - the Irish potato famine of the 1840s caused the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants. Today, the growing awareness of consumers in the UK is leading to demands for chemical-free farm products, but farmers are finding this demand hard to meet because of the practice of widespread monoculture farming - such a system makes crops very vulnerable to pests, and farmers are beginning to realize that diversification rather than monocultures are a necessary step. The rest of Europe faces similar problems- in Germany, for instance, modern agriculture is recognized as contributing to species extinction, deforestation, contamination of ground and drinking water, and soil erosion (Weizsacker 1988).
This plan revolves around the use of biotechnology and genetic resources from developing countries to create what they call even 'better' varieties of miracle seeds than they were able to come up with during the Green Revolution.
This new scheme has come to be known as the Gene Revolution, and is a fairly blatant attempt by those who profited from the Green Revolution to continue making big profits while doing little to alleviate the problems caused by their modern farming methods. The Gene Revolution will turn control of seed production directly over to large MNCs who, if they get their way, will be allowed to patent the seeds which will be used world wide - seeds which are dependent upon high external inputs to continue the profits of the chemical companies.
Cynical as it may sound, there can be little doubt that this is the real reason behind the present international campaign to allow the patenting of life forms, a campaign fully supported by the original proponents of the Green Revolution (Shiva 1993b). It is not the point of this paper or conference to go into detail about the Gene Revolution at this time, but it is a trend that we in the alternative agriculture movement must ever be aware of as we continue our work.
In conclusion, concerning the world situation of monoculture farming and the Green Revolution, we can do little better than to quote Vandana Shiva, from her interesting and important work Monocultures of the Mind (Shiva 1993a):
"Monocultures first inhabit the mind and are then transferred to the ground ... they are impoverished systems, both qualitatively and quantitatively; they are also highly unstable and non-sustainable systems. The expansion of monocultures has more to do with politics and power than with enriching and enhancing systems of biological production ... It is a myth that monocultures are essential for solving problems of scarcity ... it is not true that without monoculture plantations there will be famines of fuel wood, and without monocultures in agriculture there will be famines of food. Monocultures are in fact a source of scarcity and poverty ..." (page 6-7)
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