I agree with Chris Newman about our not needing a new Green Revolution. The world grows plenty of food. And I’m sure his food is fabulous, and I wouldn’t mind eating it. I disagree with a lot of the rest because basically he is so certain that modern agriculture is bad for us, but that doesn’t fit the evidence.
Newman begins his post with a photo of a lovely farm, with a caption indicating that today’s agriculture leads to chemically-induced cancer. The link takes you to a US News article on fears of increasing cancers among the rural poor in India. It doesn’t provide numbers, but it’s true that known cancer rates have climbed in India, though it has very low cancer rates by Western standards — the reasons given in the published data for increased largely being aging, and more Western diets and lifestyles. [1] Some pesticides can cause cancers in large enough doses or long-enough exposures, but there is not much risk even among agricultural workers in the U.S. at least (I couldn’t find Indian figures). [2]
But I want to look at India more closely. How bad has the green revolution been for the population? I’ll take the three best markers of how well or poorly off a population is — (a) amount of malnutrition (I’ll use “stunted growth”) among children under 5, (b) infant mortality rates (deaths for every 1,000 live births in the first year of life), (c) life expectancy.
Malnutrition (stunting):
UNICEF figures show that in 1988–90 62.7% of Indian children showed stunted growth. By 2015–16 that had dropped to 38.4%. that’s a 39% relative reduction, despite a growing population.[3]
Infant mortality
In 1960, the infant mortality rate was 165 deaths per 1,000 live births! By 2015 it was down to 38. That’s a relative decrease of almost 77%. [4]
Life expectancy
In 1960, life expectancy in India was only 41.2 years. By 2015 it was up to 68.4 years, over a 27 year increase, or a 66% relative increase.[5] And this wasn’t just because of the drop of infant deaths. It was among all age groups. It also wasn’t something that happened early and then leveled off. In fact life expectancy increased by five years just in the decade between 2001–05 and 2011–15. [6]
What we have is nothing short of a set of demographic miracles. Indians are ever better off. Things aren’t “bad” for them, at least not when compared to before they started to benefit from late-2oth century agriculture.
At it isn’t just India. It is almost the entire world except where warfare intercedes. We’re better fed. We’re healthier. We live longer. The green revolution’s increase in food production plays a major role here.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
[1] https://www.scgcorp.com/pdf/scg_written_11.pdf
[2]http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.25.101802.123020
[3] https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/malnutrition/
[4] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN