Green Omelets and Broken Eggs
(posted by Jim Henley)
I got a lot out of the comment thread to Alex Tabarrok’s post about Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution from earlier this month. It seems pretty inarguable to me that Borlaug’s work saved many lives in its day. It seems debatable whether what the present moment calls for now is more of the same. During the era of cheap oil, there was real economic - if not ecological - sense in pumping plants up with massive inputs of fossil fuel. Now? I’m honestly unsure what a post-hydrocarbon agriculture that can feed billions of people will (can) look like.
June 30th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I think there are serious questions as to whether Borlaug’s Green Revolution really did save lives. The issue involves “the path not taken.” Green Revolution varieties are adapted to thrive mainly on giant monoculture plantations on land that assorted feudal oligarchs stole from the peasantry, using heavily subsidized irrigation water and other inputs. The alternative is small-scale, soil-intensive agriculture using locally-adapted varieties that are drought-hardy and optimized for the stress of the local environment. I believe the latter alternative would be more productive per acre than large-scale monoculture using Borlaug’s seeds. The Green Revolution was a case of giving the Third World crutches after breaking its legs. And Borlaug’s crutches are being sold by the same cluster of interests that, by reenacting the Enclosures on a modern stage, broke the legs in the first place.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I don’t remember the specifics, but economist Elinor Ostrom has discussed the way the introduction of GR planting methods disrupted, for the worse, the methods that had been used in southeast Asia for decades, if not centuries.
As for enclosures, there’s been interesting news out West Bengal in recent months, as the Communist Party in control in that region has attempted to boot people off their land to make way for a prominent Indian auto manufacturer, among others.
I read about this over at Dissent, where I’ve learned, sadly, that Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen - the latter a supposedly a modern-liberal-friendly-classical liberal - are not opposed to this, only the excessively authoritarian way it’s been implemented. You see, they are “realistic” and “reasonable” enough to distance themselves from the radical primitive leftists that want to stop progress in its tracks, and who’ve been defending these folks from the corporate/commie land grab.
Nussbaum’s Dissent piece here: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1157
July 1st, 2008 at 12:39 pm
[...] Dain: I don’t remember the specifics, but economist Elinor Ostrom has discussed the way the introduction of GR planting methods disrupted, for the worse, th… [...]