Development Assistance to Reduce Hunger

In the early and mid-1960s, many experts were predicting that millions of people around the world would die of starvation.

At the end of the 1950s, the future looked particularly grim for India and China, both of which had experienced horrific famines in earlier decades. The two countries were mired in poverty, overall economic growth was barely keeping pace with population growth, and agricultural production was stagnant. But beginning in the 1960s, and continuing through the 1970s, new technologies developed by international agricultural research centers in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other donors, were introduced in Asia and Latin America. These technologies basically involved using improved varieties of wheat, rice, and hybrid maize in combination with irrigation and chemical fertilizers. While arguments persist over the long-term environmental and social costs of the technologies used in the Green Revolution, it is hard to dispute that the impact on food security was astounding, especially in Asia. Since the start of the Green Revolution, neither India nor China has experienced a famine.

The “greenness” of this revolution refers to a dramatic growth in agricultural productivity. At the beginning of the Green Revolution, experts were skeptical that the countries involved would ever emerge from chronic food insecurity. The focus on improving crop yields turned things around. Today, India is a net rice exporter and the wheat it imports is an insignificant share of the country’s food consumption. And despite what were seen as nearly insurmountable obstacles, India has been able to reduce poverty from 55 percent of the population in 1970 to 35 percent in 2000, largely because of policies complementary to the Green Revolution that supported growth in agriculture and the rural economy.

In China, “astounding” may be too mild a description of the changes that have occurred. China has experienced the most rapid reduction in poverty in modern history. In little more than two decades, the country’s poverty rate fell more than six-fold: from 66 percent of the population in 1981 to 10 percent by 2004. To put this in terms of people: during this period, 500 million Chinese people were lifted out of extreme poverty.¹ Economists often point to China as a textbook case of export-led growth in the manufacturing sector. In reality, it was rural economic growth, and agricultural growth in particular, that had far more to do with China’s dramatic reduction in poverty between 1981 and 2004.²

India and China together make up nearly one-third of the world’s population. It is impossible to know what the world would be like if these two economies were as weak today as they were before the Green Revolution—but it’s an unsettling thought. We cannot exaggerate the role of the Green Revolution by saying that it had everything to do with the progress these countries have made—yet we shouldn’t underestimate it either. And well-focused, effective development assistance played a vital role in making the Green Revolution happen.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ Martin Ravallion (2008), Lessons for Africa, World Bank Development Research Group.

² Ibid.