The Green Revolution and Its Legacy

The Green Revolution refers to the package of high-yielding, semi-dwarf cereal varieties, synthetic fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticide that transformed cereal agriculture across much of the developing world beginning in the 1960s. Its central figure, the American agronomist Norman Borlaug, worked from 1944 at a research station in Mexico that became the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT, where he bred short-stemmed, disease-resistant wheat varieties incorporating dwarfing genes from the Japanese Norin 10 wheat cultivar, which had been brought to the United States by the agronomist Cecil Salmon after the Second World War. Because these dwarf varieties devoted less energy to stem growth, they could support much heavier grain heads without collapsing (a failure called lodging) and responded far more productively to heavy nitrogen fertilizer application than traditional tall varieties. Borlaug's Mexican wheat lines were adopted at large scale in Pakistan and India starting in the mid-1960s, an introduction championed within India by the agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan, and Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of the resulting gains against famine.