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Pandora's Box. The growing realization that the Green Revolution is creating as many problems as it is solving has spurred a search for solutions. Diversification into crops other than grains is one possibility. Agrarian reform is another, but not if it results in the creation of tiny, uneconomic parcels of land. Boerma suggests agricultural cooperatives in which small farmers would band together to farm a large spread that would lend itself to mechanization. Governments would have to help with credits and the construction of irrigation systems. Barbara Ward recommends creating rural agricultural centers that would provide the "agro-industries" necessary to employ the peasants left jobless by the Green Revolution—warehouses, fertilizer plants, facilities to manufacture silos and other storage units, work forces for loading and shipping. Taiwan already has a collective program under way, and so far some 7,000 acres in eight different locations have been consolidated into large production units. In Thailand, 167 collectives are farming a total of 29,000 acres.
The Green Revolution is also compelling countries that have long produced grain surpluses—including the U.S.—to re-examine their own agricultural policies. As rice-rich Thailand has already discovered, the markets for rice are rapidly disappearing, while many wheat-importing countries may soon be producing surpluses of their own. The fact that Washington may eventually have to readjust acreage allotments and agricultural subsidies as a result of the
Green Revolution is especially ironic inasmuch as American funds and technology started it all.
Of course, the U.S. is by no means the only country that has been surprised by the Green Revolution. As Overseas Development Corporation Vice President Dr. Clifton Wharton noted in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, it "has burst with such suddenness that it has caught many unawares." Long-range planning, he wrote, is urgently needed. "Perhaps in this way we can ensure that what we are providing becomes a cornucopia, not a Pandora's box." That is a challenge—and a promise—that the world can ill afford to ignore.