The Third World: Seeds of Revolution

TIME was when food experts round the world regularly issued gloomy forecasts of impending famine and starvation for the earth's exploding population. That rarely happens these days, thanks largely to the Green Revolution brought about by new, high-yield strains of wheat and rice. Thus, when 1,200 authorities wound up the second meeting of the World Food Congress in The Hague last week, the emphasis was less on the problems of paucity than on those of plenty.

Unless the Green Revolution is carefully managed, said The Netherlands' Addeke H. Boerma, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the result may be "a conflagration of violence that would sweep through millions of lives."

A Hurricane Camille. The idea that abundance can pose vast problems may be jarring. Yet the FAO, which for years led the way in warning that populations were growing faster than food production, now maintains that the world's agricultural potential is great enough to feed 157 billion people (v. the world's present population of 3.5 billion). Plainly, the Green Revolution has shown that the battle of food production can indeed be won. But not without its own kind of chaotic upheavals.

Because these new miracle grains require relatively costly investments in seeds, irrigation, fertilizers and insecticides, large landholders may force increasing numbers of small farmers and peasants off the land and into the already overcrowded cities. The prospect, says British Economist Barbara Ward, is of "a tidal wave, a Hurricane Camille of country people that threatens to overwhelm the already crowded, bursting cities." Agrees India's Home Minister Y.B. Chavan: "Unless we do something about the Green Revolution, it will become the red revolution."

Production Explosion. The Green Revolution dawned in 1944, when four young men funded by the Rockefeller Foundation gathered in the hills outside Mexico City and began experimenting with what eventually became a strain of unusually hardy, plump-grained wheat. Buoyed by their success, the Rockefeller Foundation joined with the Ford Foundation in 1962 and began work at Los Banos in the Philippines on an equally miraculous rice strain. The result was IR5 and IR8, experimentally introduced in 1964. Their arrival touched off a production explosion in the grain bowls of the world.

Five years ago, the Philippines imported 1,000,000 tons of rice annually. Today the country is not only self-sufficient but will soon begin exporting rice. Since the introduction of high-yield grains in West Pakistan, that country has increased wheat production by 171% and rice production by 162%. Just in the last two years, India's wheat production rose 50%, and Ceylon's rice crop increased 34%. In Mexico, wheat yields have grown from 500 lbs. per acre in 1950 to 2,300 Ibs. Japan, long an importer of rice, now has such a huge surplus that one company has taken to spraying rice grains out of pressurized nozzles in order to clean the blades of air-cooling fans. Other countries feeling the impact of the Green Revolution are Turkey, Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, South Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Brazil and Paraguay.

Taste Test. Many of the countries, however, are incapable of handling the huge crops that they have begun harvesting. In West Pakistan, there is not a single elevator for storing the mountainous grain crop. As much as 20% of that crop is being lost to rodents, bugs, at-home pilferers and foreign smugglers. For two months in 1968, scores of village schools in northern India were closed because the buildings had been commandeered to store surplus wheat. Even so, untold numbers of Indians starved because the country--like most that are harvesting huge crops for the first time--lacked adequate distribution and marketing networks.

Another serious problem is consumer resistance. Many of the peasants of South and Southeast Asia, who eat rice with their fingers, find that the miracle rice is too gluey and sticks to their fingers. In Turkey, imported Mexican wheat sells for 10% less than local wheats; it fails the taste test. The new rice sells for 30% less in the Philippines and is often sold at a discount for use as cattle fodder. Moreover, production spurted so quickly that in many cases prices have tumbled.

In many areas, one effect of the Green Revolution has been to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Explains Barbara Ward: "Large holdings can be mechanized and smaller farms consolidated, thus increasing the gains of the fortunate and ruining the little man." Without government credits, agrees FAO Director Boerma, "it is indeed only the richer farmer who can afford the investment to develop the Green Revolution." In one clash in Tanjore, one of India's model agricultural development districts, between two groups of landless laborers, 42 people were burned to death.

Displaced Peasants. Despite--and to some extent because of--the bright and glittering promises of greater production, agriculture cannot possibly provide employment for those additional millions who will be populating the earth by 1985 (another one billion in the underdeveloped countries alone). Says a recent FAO report: "Nearly 70% of the people living in the Third World depend upon agriculture for their livelihood." By 1985, their number is expected to increase nearly 50%--even though, the report adds, "there are far more people on farms now than are needed."

As British officials see it, the displaced peasant will be the Third World's biggest problem for the next 20 years. Says Lester Brown, senior fellow of Washington's Overseas Development Corporation: "The food problems of the '60s could well become the employment problems of the '70s. Large numbers of people neither culturally nor vocationally ready for urban life are being driven into the cities."

Pandora's Box. The growing realization that the Green Revolution is creating as many problems as it is solving has spurred a search for solutions. Diversification into crops other than grains is one possibility. Agrarian reform is another, but not if it results in the creation of tiny, uneconomic parcels of land. Boerma suggests agricultural cooperatives in which small farmers would band together to farm a large spread that would lend itself to mechanization. Governments would have to help with credits and the construction of irrigation systems. Barbara Ward recommends creating rural agricultural centers that would provide the "agro-industries" necessary to employ the peasants left jobless by the Green Revolution--warehouses, fertilizer plants, facilities to manufacture silos and other storage units, work forces for loading and shipping. Taiwan already has a collective program under way, and so far some 7,000 acres in eight different locations have been consolidated into large production units. In Thailand, 167 collectives are farming a total of 29,000 acres.

The Green Revolution is also compelling countries that have long produced grain surpluses--including the U.S.--to re-examine their own agricultural policies. As rice-rich Thailand has already discovered, the markets for rice are rapidly disappearing, while many wheat-importing countries may soon be producing surpluses of their own. The fact that Washington may eventually have to readjust acreage allotments and agricultural subsidies as a result of the

Green Revolution is especially ironic inasmuch as American funds and technology started it all.

Of course, the U.S. is by no means the only country that has been surprised by the Green Revolution. As Overseas Development Corporation Vice President Dr. Clifton Wharton noted in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, it "has burst with such suddenness that it has caught many unawares." Long-range planning, he wrote, is urgently needed. "Perhaps in this way we can ensure that what we are providing becomes a cornucopia, not a Pandora's box." That is a challenge--and a promise--that the world can ill afford to ignore.

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