"The Green Revolution is an ongoing continuum.  Millions of people are currently undernourished in the world.  The world population for 2025, at a medium fertility rate, is projected to be about 8.3 billion people.  I calculate that we will need an additional one billion tons of grain by then.  We have to increase yields to feed these people -- more bushels per acre, more tons per hectare.  Higher yields are especially important now due to spreading urbanization, which takes away agricultural land.  We will need to use both conventional breeding and biotechnology methods to meet the challenges of this century.”

-Dr. Norman Borlaug
American Institute of Biological Sciences Interview, 2002

The Green Revolution in agriculture helped food production keep pace with population growth.  It is credited with saving almost a billion human lives.  Despite these gains, major problems remain with food insecurity, malnutrition, and unsustainable use of natural resources.  These problems are particularly severe in the poorest countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

With business as usual, more than 500 million people could be food insecure by 2020, more than 130 million preschool children could be malnourished, and natural resource degradation could worsen.  With accelerated action and appropriate changes in policies and institutions, major progress can be made towards sustainable food and nutrition security for all.

The Green Revolution began in 1945 when the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government established the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program to improve the agricultural output of the country's farms.  Norman Borlaug was instrumental in the success of this program.  This produced astounding results, so that Mexico went from having to import half its wheat to self-sufficiency by 1956 and, by 1964, to exporting half a million tons of wheat.  This program was continued in India and Pakistan where it is credited with saving millions of people from starvation.

The Green Revolution applied two major technologies.  The first is the breeding of higher yielding varieties of a crop by crossbreeding a broad range of strains of the crop to produce the desired combination of yield characteristics in a single variety.  The second is the development of new agricultural techniques for use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, irrigation, and farm machinery with these varieties.

A new phase of the Green Revolution began in the mid-1980s in response to the continuing population explosion, discrimination against women, environmental degradation, the loss of crop plant genetic diversity, and global warming.  The international response has been that vigorous pursuit of sustainable development through locally appropriate solutions is the best answer to these problems.  Interest in sustainable agriculture and food systems that are more energy efficient and less socially and environmentally destructive has grown rapidly in all countries.  The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, is promoting proposals, made by Sir Gordon Conway in his work The Doubly Green Revolution, which seeks rural development of the world's poorest regions though sustainable farming systems developed with full farmer participation, including women subsistence farmers.
                                                                                    Reference IFPRI’s 2020 Vision

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