Feb 10, 2017
The world’s most recent agricultural revolution? Oil crops.
By Derek Byerlee, editor-in-chief of Global Food Security journal; Walter P. Falcon, senior fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University
It’s not often that agricultural revolutions sharply accelerate the growth of global food production and transform agricultural systems. During our professional lives, we have witnessed, participated actively in, and studied the Green Revolution that emerged during the 1960s and transformed rice and wheat farming in the developing world. Unparalleled in its breadth and depth of change, especially in Asia, the Green Revolution generated a spate of research, publishing and debate that continues today. Less conspicuously but no less controversially, another agricultural revolution has unfolded during the past two decades. From 1990 to 2010, world production of soybean grew by 220% and production of palm oil* by 300%. This is more than the increase seen in wheat production during the Green Revolution — and much faster than the increase in rice production at the time.
Like the Green Revolution for cereal crops, this more recent revolution largely involves two crops — oil palm and soybeans — that expanded their shares in their respective crop subsector dramatically (in this case, oil crops). Another trait shared by the two revolutions is that they have played out mostly in the developing world, although not in Africa.
Despite their similarities, in crucial ways the revolution in oil crops stands in direct contrast to the Green Revolution, which embraced tens of millions of producers across many countries, especially where irrigation was available. The oil crop revolution has been highly concentrated in a few countries (two for each crop, in fact) and almost entirely in rain-fed areas. Unlike the Green Revolution, which was spurred on by rapid gains in yield, the force behind the oil crop revolution was expansion of crop area. This key difference originates with the market-driven nature of the revolution in oil crops compared with the technology-driven nature of the green revolution.
The Green Revolution was led by small-scale farmers, whereas the oil crop revolution has been led by large-scale farmers and private agribusiness, including huge vertically integrated companies that are the world’s largest farmers. Although the products of the Green Revolution served domestic food markets, the products of oil crops have been exported largely to global markets for multiple uses for food, feed, and biofuels.
Although the number of producers touched by the oil crop revolution may be small on a global scale, the products of oil crops reach a high share of the world’s consumers in some way.
Like the Green Revolution before it, the revolution in tropical oil crops provokes controversy. Nearly all the big debates on agricultural and food systems surround tropical oil crops, including debates over the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), production of food versus biofuels, small-scale farming versus agribusiness, the risks of foreign “land grabs,” monocropping versus diversified cropping systems, the role of agriculture in promoting healthy diets, and globalization and its environmental footprint. By far the loudest debate concerns the accusation that tropical forests in South America and Southeast Asia are destroyed to make way for oil crops.
Many specific dimensions of the oil crop revolution have been studied, but no one has developed a holistic synthesis of its origins and outcomes. Much of the literature emphasizes the negative consequences of the oil crop revolution, especially the environmental costs of the massive changes in land use that accompanied the spread of oil palm and soybeans in the tropics. Along with these aspects of the oil crop revolution, it’s important to look at the incomes and jobs the sector provides for millions (which have lifted many out of poverty), and the critical role of vegetable oils in world food security.
Given that Africa is poised to join the oil crop revolution in production and consumption, an especially pertinent question is whether lessons from the recent experience with oil crops in Asia and Latin America can be applied in Africa to promote more favorable development outcomes there.
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Adapted and reprinted with permission from The Tropical Oil Crop Revolution: Food, Feed, Fuel, and Forests by Derek Byerlee, Walter P. Falcon, and Rosamond L. Naylor published by Oxford University Press, Inc. © 2017 Oxford University Press.
* The terms oil, vegetable oil and edible oil are used interchangeably.
