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Do We Need Another Green Revolution?

As the global population grows, we’ll have to find ways of feeding the planet without accelerating climate change.

The new varieties of wheat he had bred, along with new strains of rice and corn which had subsequently been developed, represented, he said, only a “temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation.” The world’s population, he predicted, would continue to grow, and eventually the demand for food would again outstrip the supply. Humanity, he says, is facing “some terrible math.” On one side of the equation is the growing need for food; Grunwald estimates that, to keep pace with demand, agricultural production will have to increase by fifty per cent over the next twenty-five years. Even if the Green Revolution reduced the price of a commodity like rice by sixty per cent, Raj Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has written that this would have been “little consolation” to those farmers who “lost 100% of their income.”

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