TIME was when food experts round the world regularly issued gloomy forecasts of impending famine and starvation for the earth's exploding population. That rarely happens these days, thanks largely to the Green Revolution brought about by new, high-yield strains of wheat and rice. Thus, when 1,200 authorities wound up the second meeting of the World Food Congress in The Hague last week, the emphasis was less on the problems of paucity than on those of plenty.
Unless the Green Revolution is carefully managed, said The Netherlands' Addeke H. Boerma, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the result may be "a conflagration of violence that would sweep through millions of lives."
A Hurricane Camille. The idea that abundance can pose vast problems may be jarring. Yet the FAO, which for years led the way in warning that populations were growing faster than food production, now maintains that the world's agricultural potential is great enough to feed 157 billion people (v. the world's present population of 3.5 billion). Plainly, the Green Revolution has shown that the battle of food production can indeed be won. But not without its own kind of chaotic upheavals.
Because these new miracle grains require relatively costly investments in seeds, irrigation, fertilizers and insecticides, large landholders may force increasing numbers of small farmers and peasants off the land and into the already overcrowded cities. The prospect, says British Economist Barbara Ward, is of "a tidal wave, a Hurricane Camille of country people that threatens to overwhelm the already crowded, bursting cities." Agrees India's Home Minister Y.B. Chavan: "Unless we do something about the Green Revolution, it will become the red revolution."
Production Explosion. The Green Revolution dawned in 1944, when four young men funded by the Rockefeller Foundation gathered in the hills outside Mexico City and began experimenting with what eventually became a strain of unusually hardy, plump-grained wheat. Buoyed by their success, the Rockefeller Foundation joined with the Ford Foundation in 1962 and began work at Los Banos in the Philippines on an equally miraculous rice strain. The result was IR5 and IR8, experimentally introduced in 1964. Their arrival touched off a production explosion in the grain bowls of the world.
Five years ago, the Philippines imported 1,000,000 tons of rice annually. Today the country is not only self-sufficient but will soon begin exporting rice. Since the introduction of high-yield grains in West Pakistan, that country has increased wheat production by 171% and rice production by 162%. Just in the last two years, India's wheat production rose 50%, and Ceylon's rice crop increased 34%. In Mexico, wheat yields have grown from 500 lbs. per acre in 1950 to 2,300 Ibs. Japan, long an importer of rice, now has such a huge surplus that one company has taken to spraying rice grains out of pressurized nozzles in order to clean the blades of air-cooling fans. Other countries feeling the impact of the Green Revolution are Turkey, Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, South Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Brazil and Paraguay.