So, what even is the “Green Revolution”?
It may sound boring, but this movement has fueled the rise of cancer cases and has taken away the jobs of small farmers. The Green Revolution has introduced pesticides into farming and allowed a higher crop yield. Hence, more people have been fed at a quicker rate.
The Green Revolution was primarily led by Norman Borlaug, an agricultural scientist. He aimed to lessen famine and help farmers produce crops to satisfy our growing population. This revolution was funded by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, and many scientists helped to create synthetic fertilizers and hybridized seeds for farmers to use for their crops.
Although this movement has helped lessen famine, it hasn’t lessened health-related deaths, and as a matter of fact, it has increased them. This is because the fertilizers and pesticides that are helping to grow more crops contain lots of inorganic chemicals. These chemicals have been combined with the soil and have been washed down to water sources where people drink them, causing people to drink these cancer-causing chemicals. It has also caused the soil in the sprayed areas to lose its nutrients and not be able to provide nutrients for the next generations of crops that are planted.
The Green Revolution has also caused indigenous crops like millet and lentils to go nearly extinct, since farmers have replaced them with high-yielding crops like soybeans and wheat. This has provided a less nutrient-dense, but higher-calorie food, which has helped to increase obesity rates and nutrient deficiencies.
The pesticides themselves disrupt human endocrine, nervous, and reproductive function. If too many pesticides are consumed, they stay in your body and become toxic, causing certain forms of cancer to occur.
Now, this hasn’t been the only negative effect of the Green Revolution. This revolution has greatly affected small farmers and caused them to go into debt. The organic farmers are barely able to get their crops into grocery stores, due to the takeover of commercial farms that use pesticides.
This still hasn’t changed now, since organic farmers are also bought out by the same companies as non-organic farms, and the companies find a way around classifying their crops as organic but not really being fully organic. Thus, grocers are selling these “organic” crops for more money, even though they are practically the same as the non-organic ones we see in stores today.
The Green Revolution has also paved the way for GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, to come into play. GMOs help to grow crops in seasons in which they don’t grow naturally, and they even help to make some fruits larger, redder, or sweeter, making them more desirable to buyers.
Since farmers know that people are more likely to buy their better-looking crops, they have begun to rely on these GMO seeds. This has made farmers heavily dependent on these big corporations that make these seeds, and without them, they have struggled to grow desirable crops.
Therefore, although the Green Revolution has helped reduce famine in many regions of the world, it hasn’t helped us to be healthier and has been overall harmful to smaller farmers. These negative aspects are hard to ignore, since it causes us to lack some nutrients and develop cancer.
This Revolution has got to go.
