Vandana Shiva stated: “Alarmed by growing peasant unrest in the newly independent countries of Asia, agencies like the World Bank, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the U.S. Agency for International Development and others looked towards the intensification of agriculture as a means of “stabilizing” the countryside – and in particular of defusing the call for a wider redistribution of land and other resources. Above all, the U.S. wished to avoid other Asian countries’ following in the revolutionary footsteps of China. In 1961, the Ford Foundation thus launched its Intensive Agricultural Development Programme in India, intended to “release” Indian agriculture from “the shackles of the past” through the introduction of modern intensive chemical farming.”

Finally, in 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation together with Ford Foundation forged an agreement with the Philippine government for the establishment of IRRI in Los Baños, Laguna. During that same period, the IMF and the World Bank started to play their role in restructuring the Philippine economy. The debt of the Philippines to these institutions, and consequently their influence in domestic economic policy, would eventually increase.

The World Bank continues to fund and influence policies favorable for IRRI. The entry of IRRI into Philippine territory was not without breaching the civil rights of Filipino farmers and local landowners. This was done through Presidential Decrees (PD) 457 and 1046-A issued by Marcos in 1974 which gave IRRI the legal authority to occupy the farmlands where it built its research and operations structure. The said land was forcibly taken from the farmers who were forced to sell for less than their lands’ worth.

Impact of Green Revolution on Asian Agriculture

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reported that since GR, the Asia-Pacific region has been on the forefront of generation and transfer of modern agricultural technologies, recording the highest agricultural production growth rate (about 4 percent) from the 1970s to the 1990s. The GR is said to have ushered in thorough development and adoption of HYVs of rice and wheat, and more than doubled the productivity of these crops (FAO, 1994).

Indeed, by 1970 about 20 percent of the wheat area and 30 percent of the rice area in the Asian region were devoted to HYVs. By the 1990s, the share increased to 70 percent for both crops, i.e., the changes were more than doubled in cereal production in Asia between 1970 and 1995. In recalling an overall impact through statistics, a paper published by IFPRI states the sizable increase in incomes, stimulation of overall rural non-farm economy, and decline in overall poverty between 1970 to 1995 to less than one third, where absolute numbers fell from 1.15 billion to 825 billion (Peter B.R Hazell, 2003). Statistics also drew a picture of hungry people in 1970 vs. 1990. They indicated that the total food available per person in the world rose by 11 percent over the two decades, and the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, or 16 percent drop (Rosset, 2000).

These figures, however, were contradicted by an assessment of worldwide poverty, which says that despite three decades of expanding global food supplies (through GR) there were still an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world in the 1990s. It is in Asia where GR seeds have contributed to reported greatest production success, but where roughly two-thirds of the world’s undernourished in the entire world are found even up to the present. In India, one-third of India’s 900 million people are still poverty-stricken. On closer look, if China figures are eliminated from the analysis, the number of hungry people rose by more than 11 percent, from 536 to 597 million (Paul & Steinbrecher, 2003).

The rosy picture painted by statistics on productivity and yield need to mention that production increases during the decades under GR had been achieved at considerable cost to the resource base and largely by means of heavy external input use; irrigation, seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, animal breed and feed (FAO, 1994). “The new technology was capital intensive. It commits the nation to large investments from predominantly foreign corporations. In nitrogenous fertilizer alone the indigenous capacity had to be increased from 0.37mT of nutrients in 1967-68 to 2.23mT in 1979-80 (worth 6,000 cores in 1980 prices). Furthermore, production capacity had to be generated for tractors, diesel-sets, etc., and every farmer adopting this new technology had to invest his own capital to acquire these machines, which often came from public financing agencies” (Organic Farming Source Book).

The full impact of GR can be measured along several variables: increased poverty, indebtedness, harm to human health, loss of biodiversity, and destruction of the environment.

Poverty, indebtedness and structural inequality exacerbated in the era of GR

The GR has resulted in greater poverty, hunger and illnesses of rural populations across Asia. (The First Asian Peoples’ Tribunal against IRRI, April, 2006).

Landlessness or inadequate land to till remained the yoke of peasants in feudal and semi-feudal economic circumstances in poor Asian countries. GR favored the rich because of their ability to access the package of input requirements of production. Big growers could afford and could even get discounts for large purchases, and pay for irrigation fees. Government-subsidized credit overwhelmingly benefited the big farmers and landlords. Hence, the gains of GR filled the coffers of the landlord class and the big traders of fertilizers and pesticides.

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