The Green Revolution

This summer, I attended two programs at Columbia University. Because there was so much to talk about these courses, this is only the first of 3 or 4 posts.

In particular, this post will be about a movie I watched during the first program. The movie’s name was “The Man who Tried to Feed the world”. It follows the life of Norman Borlaug and his vital role in the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was an agricultural movement that saw the efficiency at which crops were grown increase drastically. Rather than expand the amount of farmland used, he developed unique strains of crops that grew a greater yield in the same amount of space. His efforts, especially those in South Asia, have been said to have saved over a BILLION lives. Despite this absolutely incredible statistic, he still remains a largely unrecognized figure when compared to other Nobel Prize winners.

Moving away from his accomplishments, I found the character of Borlaug itself to be very interesting. His youth shaped his personality in many ways. Specifically, his unwillingness to compromise has been attributed to his early days wrestling, which he believed taught him to stand his ground. Additionally, unlike other scientists or activists of his time, he did his work in the field, travelling the world in the process. This meant that he witnessed firsthand the struggles of people all over the world over the basic necessity that is food.

With all of this in mind, there is a reason that people still go hungry in today’s world. If you look at a map of the percentage of people hungry in each country, you can see that most of the extreme cases are in countries in Southeast Asia (such as India) or in Africa (the most extreme case being Chad). It is important to understand that global hunger is not just about providing food to those who need it but providing nutrients as well. Food may be available but if it isn’t healthy or it doesn’t provide the entire set of elements, vitamins, and other nutrients that a human needs to survive, it is not adequate. Another statistic of note is that the majority of those who suffer from food insecurity are women, which implies that there may be social barriers to overcome in addition to logistical ones. While people may think that we can just generate more food, agriculture is not magic. When higher-yield crops became more prominent in places such as India, the amount of nutrients used also increases, which opens a window to other problems. For example, agricultural production may pollute the water, the air, and the earth while greenhouse gas emission from cattle-farming may worsen the already critical conditions of climate change. This means that those who seek to solve the overall issue of global hunger in the world must first consider every possible impact of their solutions.

The purpose of this article isn’t to say that tackling global hunger is impossible, but rather to shed some light on some of the other often overlooked factors at play that people may not think about when they hear about global starvation on the news.