The Green Revolution is one of development's most celebrated success stories. Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug's high-yielding wheat varieties, combined with irrigation and fertilizers, are credited with saving a billion lives from famine. The numbers are staggering—India went from importing millions of tons of grain to becoming self-sufficient within a decade.

But development history is rarely so simple. Behind the aggregate production statistics lies a more complicated picture of winners and losers, short-term gains and long-term costs, problems solved and problems created.

The evidence suggests we should neither dismiss the Green Revolution as a failure nor celebrate it uncritically. Understanding what it actually achieved—and at what cost—offers crucial lessons for agricultural development today, as we face the challenge of feeding ten billion people without destroying the planet.

The yield increases were genuinely unprecedented. Between 1960 and 2000, wheat yields in developing countries tripled. Rice yields doubled. India's grain production grew from 50 million tons in 1950 to over 250 million tons by 2000. These aren't marginal improvements—they represent a fundamental transformation of agricultural productivity.

Crucially, this happened while population was exploding. Without the Green Revolution, the math simply didn't work. Economists estimate that food prices would have been 35-65% higher without these yield gains, with devastating consequences for the urban and rural poor who spend the largest share of income on food.

The caloric impact shows up clearly in the data. Average calorie availability in South Asia increased from about 2,000 per capita in 1960 to nearly 2,500 by 2000. Famine—once a recurring feature of life in the Indian subcontinent—essentially disappeared. The 1943 Bengal famine killed millions; nothing comparable has occurred since the new varieties spread.

Critics sometimes argue these gains could have been achieved through other means. Perhaps. But no alternative technology delivered comparable results at comparable speed. When you're facing mass starvation, theoretical possibilities matter less than what actually works. The Green Revolution bought time—and time, in development, is not nothing.

Takeaway

When evaluating development interventions, distinguish between 'this wasn't perfect' and 'the alternative would have been better.' The counterfactual matters enormously.

Here's where the triumphant narrative starts to crack. The Green Revolution technologies weren't scale-neutral. They required irrigation, purchased inputs, and access to credit. Farmers with land, water, and capital could adopt them. Those without could not.

The regional disparities are stark. Punjab and Haryana prospered; eastern India lagged. Irrigated areas transformed; rainfed regions were largely bypassed. In Mexico, where the Revolution began, large commercial farms captured most benefits while smallholders in the south saw little change. The technology worked—but only where conditions allowed.

Evidence on poverty impacts is genuinely mixed. Some studies find that higher yields and lower food prices benefited poor consumers substantially. Others document widening inequality within rural communities as adopting farmers pulled ahead. Landless laborers sometimes benefited from increased demand for agricultural work; sometimes they were displaced by mechanization that accompanied intensification.

The honest assessment is that the Green Revolution was not designed with distributional equity as a primary goal. It was designed to increase production, and it succeeded at that. Whether the gains reached the poorest depended on pre-existing land distribution, policy choices about credit and inputs, and local labor market conditions. The technology amplified whatever institutional structures existed.

Takeaway

Technologies are never neutral—they interact with existing power structures and resource distributions. An intervention's impact depends as much on who has access as on whether it works technically.

The Green Revolution was built on intensification: more water, more fertilizer, more pesticides, fewer crop varieties, year after year on the same land. For decades, the yields kept climbing. Now, in many regions, they've plateaued—and the costs are becoming impossible to ignore.

Punjab's water table is dropping by nearly a meter per year. Farmers now pump from depths that were unimaginable a generation ago. Soil degradation from continuous rice-wheat rotation has reduced organic matter to dangerously low levels. Pesticide resistance has emerged in major pest species. These aren't hypothetical future risks—they're current realities affecting millions of hectares.

The loss of crop diversity is particularly troubling. Before the Green Revolution, Indian farmers grew thousands of rice varieties adapted to local conditions. Today, a handful of high-yielding varieties dominate. This genetic narrowing increases vulnerability to disease outbreaks and climate shocks—exactly the kinds of risks that climate change is amplifying.

None of this means the Green Revolution was a mistake. But it does mean that we borrowed from the future to solve a present crisis. That can be the right choice when the alternative is mass starvation. The problem is that we've continued the borrowing long after the emergency passed, and the interest is compounding.

Takeaway

Successful interventions can create new problems that only become visible over longer time horizons. Evaluating development impact requires asking not just 'did it work?' but 'is it sustainable?'

The Green Revolution saved lives. It also concentrated benefits among those already better positioned and created environmental debts we're now struggling to repay. Both things are true.

The lesson isn't that agricultural intensification was wrong—it's that any intervention this powerful will have consequences we can't fully anticipate. Development that ignores distributional effects isn't just unfair; it's incomplete analysis. Development that ignores sustainability isn't really development at all.

As we face the challenge of climate-resilient agriculture, the Green Revolution offers both a model and a warning. We can transform food systems. We should be more careful about how we do it.