The inherent social inequalities in Asian rural societies demarcated the gains of productivity. Poor farmers cannot afford to buy fertilizers and other inputs in volume. Inequitable terms in local trading often dictated that poor farmers are shortchanged and exploited by traders. Water is a requirement of the HYV, and rent for irrigation was often out of the reach of the poor.

Hence, the GR package became a tool to further disenfranchise the poorer farmers, remove them farther away from control of and access to production. In South Asia, there was “nine percent more food per person by 1990, but there were also nine percent more hungry people … What made possible greater hunger was the failure to address unequal access to food and food-producing resources” (Rosset at al. 2000).

Narrowly focusing on increasing production as the GR cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter the tightly concentrated distribution of economic power, especially access to land and purchasing power. Even the WB concluded in a major 1986 study of world hunger that a rapid increase in food production does not necessarily result in food security (Rosset at al. 2000).

Perennial indebtedness to rural bankers, traders and merchant-usurers is a situation introduced by GR in Asian rural areas. Making fertilizer and pesticide purchases mandatory, as in the Philippines, was a means for these entities to profit from the sweat of farmers. This deepened the problem of usury as an instrument of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation in the countryside, and led to the loss of land and resources by farmers.

Hence, increases in productivity (claimed by IRRI as the only indicator of farming success), came at a price to poorer farmers especially over the longer term. The intensive requirement of inputs to create productivity also increased over time. In India, adoption of the new seeds had been accompanied by a six-fold rise in fertilizer use per acre. Yet the quantity of agricultural production per ton of fertilizer used dropped by 2/3 during the GR years. In fact, over the past 30 years, the annual growth of fertilizer use on Asian rice has been from three to 40 times faster than the growth of rice yields. In West Java, Indonesia, 23 percent yield increase was virtually cancelled by 65 to 69 percent increase in fertilizer and pesticides respectively (Rosset, 2000).

In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yield increased to 13 percent during the 1980s but came at the cost of a 21-percent increase in fertilizer use. Along these lines, fertilizer became a critical input into rice production, and of the total area planted for rice in 1988, about 68 percent was applied with fertilizer. And in 1997, the ratio increased to 86 percent, translating to an average use of 4.4 bags of 50 kilogram of fertilizer per hectare where the intensity of fertilizer use in irrigated rice farms is higher than in non-irrigated ones. Studies by the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Soils and Water Management (BSWM) revealed that the increased use of nitrogenous fertilizers has led to soil problems (imbalanced plant nutrition causing increased deficiencies in major plant food nutrients, including a number of micro-nutrients such as zinc and boron). The single use of urea likewise resulted in sulfur deficiency in major-rice producing provinces located on light soils.

The claim of GR is that it is scale neutral because it delivers increased annual harvests, higher yields and more work for laborers leading to higher wages. This was not the case in many rural farms, such as in Uttar Pradesh in India which reported decrease in real farm wages by 18 percent because of influx of machinery and migrants to compete with the local labor and the landless farmers.

According to the FAO, “despite its successes at increasing aggregate food supply, the GR as a development approach has not necessarily translated into benefits for the lower strata of the rural poor in terms of greater food security or greater economic opportunity and well-being. Under-nutrition and poverty are still prevalent and the distribution of food remains skewed with families in landless, small-scale farming households and general laborers as high-risk groups. Studies of impact have shown that the better-off strata of rural society have gained access to better incomes generated by the introduction of technology whereas the poorest strata have tended to lose access to income that was available before its introduction. The rapid modernization of agriculture and the introduction of new technologies such as those characterized by GR have had a differential impact on rural population by both class and gender. Two general trends are apparent: the wealthy have benefited more from technological change in agriculture than the less well-off and men have benefited more than women. Studies on the impact of GR have shown that technological change can generate major social benefits but at the same time generate significant costs for particular categories” (FAO Focus).

IRRI’s high-yield creation is not sustainable

While the various international agencies had praised the successes of GR in terms of yield (measured in increase per capita food supply from 1961 to 1998 (Pinstrup – Anderson et al., 1999), subsequent reports account for the slowing down of growth rates of production and yields of cereals and pulses (Kaosa and etal, 1999). The growth rate of productivity of the major cereals – rice, wheat and maize – declined in Asian countries from 3.35 percent in 1977-86 to 1.5 percent in 1987-97 for rice; from 6.21 percent to 2.96 percent for wheat and from 4.04 percent to 3.34 percent for maize. Cereal yields are stagnating or falling in many areas, mainly due to micronutrient exhaustion, low pest build-up and falling water tables (Impact on Poverty and Rural livelihoods). In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yields grew steadily in the late 1970s, peaked in the early 1980s, and have been dropping gradually ever since. Long-term experiments conducted by IRRI in both Central Luzon and Laguna province confirm these results.

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