The Green Revolution is one of the most
important events of the 20th century
and it has led to many 
millions of people being fed
when they otherwise would 
have starved or gone hungry.
A green revolution refers 
most generally to
an increase in 
the productivity of agriculture.
But our green revolution 
starts with Norman Borlaug,
an American who eventually 
won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Borlaug was an American scientist 
and in the mid 1940s
he found himself working in central Mexico
as part of a Rockefeller Foundation 
program to improve crop yields.
He came up with some major breakthroughs,
including rust-resistant wheat crops,
shuttle breeding programs 
to accelerate crop engineering
and stronger and 
higher yielding wheat plants.
Rather than just keeping
this knowledge to himself,
Borlaug tried to spread it to 
his many Mexican farmers as possible.
And among the Mexican farmers, 
he was known for his willingness
to get his hands dirty
and just go over there out
in the fields and work with them.
Basically, these ideas worked.
Borlaug is best thought of as a kind of
genius offshoot innovator from 
a more general increase of
agricultural productivity in the United States.
For instance, between 1880 and 1940,
agricultural productivity 
in the United States
was going up by about 1 percent a year.
That's OK, but after World War II,
the trend rate of growth went up
to about 2.8 percent a year.
So this was a time when American
agriculture itself was flourishing.
This was due to more and better fertilizer,
greater and better use of
mechanized vehicles,
better crops and hybrids, larger farms,
and in general the application of 
large-scale business
and business management to growing food.
Borlaug took some of these ideas, 
improved them
and adapted them for use 
to developing countries.
In the early 1960s, the green revolution
started to spread to South Asia,
most notably India and Pakistan.
And this was due in large part to 
the personal efforts of Norman Borlaug.
During 1969 to 1970,
55% of the wheat hectares sown
in Pakistan used Mexican
or Mexican derived varieties of wheat.
In India it was 35% of wheat hectares sown.
Domestic farmers in India and Pakistan were
big advocates of this green revolution
and they did the rest of the work
and their political leaders allowed 
this change to happen.
By 1970, the countries with significant
increases in cereal production
due to the green revolution were
Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon,
Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, Morocco,
Malaysia, Thailand, Tunisia and Turkey.
Later in the 1970s, 
Borlaug encouraged the Chinese
to move to a more productive 
variety of hybrid rice.
Before the green revolution, 
it was a common prediction
that the developing world was 
facing a future of mass starvation.
In large part this green revolution 
was not foreseen by commentators.
Now, it's the case that the world is 
feeding many more people than ever before.
Yield rates on various crops 
rose dramatically.
They rose for grains, they rose 
for cereals, they rose for a rice
and they rose most of all for wheat
by nearly a factor of fourfold.
That's a comparison 1950 to 1998
for India kilograms per hectare.
The green revolution has 
been extremely impressive
and of course much of the developing world
picked up where Norman Borlaug left off.
To read more on the green revolution, 
google just "green revolution",
"Norman Borlaug",
"green revolution India",
"green revolution Pakistan"
and see also my book 
"An Economist gets Lunch".
