What are the positive and the negative impacts of green revolution?

Answer 1

Following are the positive and negative impacts of green revolution:-

Positive Impacts

The Green Revolution led to sizable increases in returns to

land, and hence raised farmers' incomes. Moreover, with

greater income to spend, new needs for farm inputs, and milling

and marketing services, farm families led a general increase in

demand for goods and services.This stimulated the rural

nonfarm economy, which in turn grew and generated significant

new income and employment of its own. Real per capita

incomes almost doubled in Asia between 1970 and 1995, and

poverty declined from nearly three out of every five Asians in

1975 to less than one in three by 1995.The absolute number

of poor people fell from 1.15 billion in 1975 to 825 million in

1995 despite a 60 percent increase in population. In India, the

percentage of the rural population living below the poverty line

fluctuated between 50 and 65 percent before the mid-1960s

but then declined steadily to about one-third of the rural

population by 1993. Research studies show that much of this

steady decline in poverty is attributable to agricultural growth

and associated declines in food prices.

The Green Revolution also contributed to better nutrition by

raising incomes and reducing prices, which permitted people to

consume more calories and a more diversified diet. Big

increases occurred in per capita consumption of vegetable oils,

fruits, vegetables, and livestock products in Asia.

Negative Impacts

A revolution of this magnitude was bound to create some

problems of its own. Critics charged that the Green

Revolution resulted in environmental degradation and

increased income inequality, inequitable asset distribution, and

worsened absolute poverty. Some of these criticisms are valid

and have been or still need to be addressed. But there is a

tendency today to overstate the problems and to ignore the

appropriate counterfactual situation: what would have been the

magnitude of hunger and poverty without the yield increases of

the Green Revolution and with the same population growth?

The Green Revolution in Asia stimulated a large body of empirical

literature on how agricultural technological change affects poor

farmers. Critics of the Green Revolution argued that owners of

large farms were the main adopters of the new technologies

because of their better access to irrigation water, fertilizers, seeds,

and credit. Small farmers were either unaffected or harmed

because the Green Revolution resulted in lower product

prices, higher input prices, and efforts by landlords to increase

rents or force tenants off the land. Critics also argued that the

Green Revolution encouraged unnecessary mechanization,

thereby pushing down rural wages and employment.Although a

number of village and household studies conducted soon after

the release of Green Revolution technologies lent some

support to early critics, more recent evidence shows mixed

outcomes. Small farmers did lag behind large farmers in

adopting Green Revolution technologies, yet many of them

eventually did so. Many of these small-farm adopters benefited

from increased production, greater employment opportunities,

and higher wages in the agricultural and nonfarm sectors.

Moreover, most smallholders were able to keep their land and

experienced significant increases in total production. In some

cases, small farmers and landless laborers actually ended up

gaining proportionally more income than larger farmers, resulting

in a net improvement in the distribution of village income.

Development practitioners now have a better understanding of

the conditions under which the Green Revolution and similar

yield-enhancing technologies are likely to have equitable

benefits among farmers.These conditions include: (1) a scaleneutral

technology package that can be profitably adopted on

farms of all sizes; (2) an equitable distribution of land with

secure ownership or tenancy rights; (3) efficient input, credit,

and product markets so that farms of all sizes have access to

modern farm inputs and information and are able to receive

similar prices for their products; and (4) policies that do not

discriminate against small farms and landless laborers (for

instance, no subsidies on mechanization and no scale biases in

agricultural research and extension).These conditions are not

easy to meet.Typically, governments must make a concerted

effort to ensure that small farmers have fair access to land,

knowledge, and modern inputs.