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The world has so far avoided dismal predictions by Malthus and Ricardo on the inexorable consequences of population growth with the application of science to the development of technology geared towards maximizing the intensity of land use for agricultural production. The mechanism by which this 'science-based agriculture' has been transferred from developed to developing economies and how this process can further be strengthened are investigated.

Given political stability and the existence of a pro-poor political coalition, what actions have achieved a sustained fall in poverty? This chapter focuses on fiscal policies, which have the political merit of being targetable on particular interest groups. One pro-poor pathway (represented by Uganda and Indonesia within the study’s sample) orientates expenditure policies towards low-incomerural producers and thus towards green revolution-type policies. A second (represented by Ghana, Argentina, Russia and, after 2006, Bolivia) orientates expenditure policies towards low-income consumers in the urban labour force, motivating a shift of expenditure towards social protection and housing expenditures. Taxation can also be reoriented for political motives towards the poor, as in Uganda, Ghana, Bolivia, and Argentina. However, taxation imposes a political dilemma because it is politically unpopular and the temptation in a weak state is to use aid rather than tax to finance expenditure, which over the long term weakens the state further. The chapter illustrates various ways out of this dilemma, including closing of tax loopholes, user charges, depoliticisation by establishment of an independent revenue authority, and politically imaginative sequencing.

On famines, Amartya Sen has produced two seminal insights: why democracies do not have famines; and why entitlement failures, not food availability decline, cause famines. The two arguments have very different methodological moorings. Exploring variation in outcome — famine in China but no famine in India — established the role of democracy, but a similarity in outcome — four famines in Asia and Africa — was the basis for the claim about entitlements. This chapter extends outcome variation as a methodological principle to Sen's theory of entitlements. The argument that emerges supports Sen's claim about entitlements, but a new famine-preventing factor can also be identified: technological dynamism in agriculture.

This chapter discusses approaches that have worked in the past in improving cooperation within species. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, with evolutionary biology at the center, it argues that we need to pay particular attention to tradeoffs. The chapter first considers the Green Revolution, which it claims was based on reversing past natural selection, before looking at past evolutionary arms races and how they have resulted in plants, and even chickens, that compete vigorously with their neighbors for resources, even when that competition reduces their collective productivity. The chapter examines the ideas of Colin Donald and the case of the Australian wheat variety called Drysdale, and solar tracking by leaves. It also explores the tradeoff between the yield potential of a crop genotype and its ability to suppress weeds based on cooperation, group selection as a strategy for crop genetic improvement, and the role of biotechnology in understanding how plants detect crowding.

This chapter confronts two serious objections. According to the first, the perfect storm metaphor relies too heavily on game theoretic analysis, and so is committed to flawed, egoistic assumptions which make it both unrealistic and unsuitable as a basis for talking about the ethics of climate change. According to the second, the metaphor fails to appreciate the extent to which considerations of self‐interest can drive a solution by prompting both a green energy revolution and a drive towards less consumption‐oriented lifestyles that (it is claimed) will actually make people happier. The chapter argues that the perfect storm analysis can (and in the case of climate change largely does) rely on weaker assumptions than the objections suggest, and so is able to accommodate many of the criticisms. However, it also claims that taking such criticisms seriously reveals ways in which the perfect storm may be morally worse than initially apparent.

Discusses the state of the Philippine environment by studying the trends of available data on environmental quality and natural resource degradation, and comparing them with those of other Asian countries. It then presents a brief review of theoretical links among environment quality, resource depletion, and development strategies and outcomes, considering Philippine data in light of this theory. Recent economic trends and policy initiatives affecting the environment and development are discussed, and simulation results indicating likely trends in economic and environmental variables under alternative policy regimes are presented. The chapter concludes with what past experience and current trends might indicate for the future of the Philippine environment.

The world has so far avoided dismal predictions by Malthus and Ricardo on the inexorable consequences of population growth with the application of science to the development of technology geared towards maximizing the intensity of land use for agricultural production. The mechanism by which this ‘science‐based agriculture’ has been transferred from developed to developing economies and how this process can further be strengthened are investigated.

The Introduction begins by contrasting the technocratic vision for the green revolution as it was conceived in the U.S. with the radical perspective on science and politics that informed the Mao-era “scientific experiment movement.” It then lays out the patchwork of traditional and modern technologies that constituted “scientific farming” in socialist China. A section on source interpretation explains the challenges and opportunities afforded by the diverse array of published, archival, and interview sources for the study of the Mao era. Finally, the Introduction suggests that the political fluctuations of Mao-era China cannot be characterized as struggles between pro-science and anti-science factions. Technocrats and radicals had different perspectives on how science should work, but both groups embraced science as a core value. By the same token, excessive faith in the possibilities of science and modernization presented very similar dangers in the hands of radicals and technocrats. The radicals' insistence on putting "politics in command" of science and technology did not result in the kind of critique of green revolution technologies that was needed from the standpoint of environmental health, and it fell short also in the realm of labor and social justice.

The 1984-1985 Ethiopian famine raised troubling questions about the effectiveness of foreign aid and helped to spark two decades of new international aid policies. Despite new policies and a devastating AIDS epidemic, the number of people living in poverty in Africa continued to increase. The world’s wealthiest countries began the twenty-first century promising to end poverty through more and better aid, but a growing number of voices argued that aid was the problem, not the solution. Academics, politicians, and even rock stars are now engaged in a heated battle over aid’s future. Ethiopia’s troubled history supports claims that bilateral aid often hinders more than it helps. It would be better for the world’s leading donor countries to alter their trade policies and practices, but that kind of change is difficult. It is easier to send money than to convince domestic constituencies to think differently about trade. Until that change happens, however, it seems likely that Ethiopia and its neighbours will continue to be plagued by poverty and hunger—the very things that Truman promised to cure back in 1949.

The transition from foraging to agriculture—the Neolithic revolution—began about twelve thousand years ago. It changed three basic human relationships—with other species, the environment, and other humans. Through crop domestication, humans controlled the evolution of other species. Domestication makes plants dependent on humans, necessitating the second change—increased management of ecosystems for crop plants. The third change was in society and culture to support agriculture, leading eventually to cities, occupational specialization, and greater material wealth and social inequity. Subsequent revolutions advanced basic Neolithic changes, including the global spread of agriculture; the increase in fossil energy, manufactured fertilizers, and machinery with the industrial and scientific revolutions; the Green Revolution, which spread industrial agriculture to the Third World; and the biotechnology revolution.

Indonesia and Malaysia both represent examples of the ‘new tiger’ economies of South-east Asia which, from the 1960s onward, achieved high rates of GDP growth through policies of labour-intensity, export orientation, heavy investment in human capital and, especially in Indonesia, strong state support for a smallholder-powered green revolution. These policies delivered not only rapid growth but some of the most dramatic falls in poverty ever experienced (from 60% to 15% in the twenty-five years after 1965, in the case of Indonesia). The political motivation underlying these policies is important in both countries, which in the 1960s were menaced by fears about food insecurity and by threats of communist takeover. Both governments, in the 1960s, established semi-authoritarian governmental structures which they looked to high rates of economic growth to legitimate. These structures privileged the rights of indigenous Malay and Indonesian, in relation in particular to Chinese and Indian ethnic groups. During the ‘East Asian’ crisis, the two countries adopted contrasted strategies, which were more successful in more protectionist Malaysia, which imposed controls on outflows of speculative capital, than, in more free-market Indonesia. After the deposition of President Suharto in 1999, there has been a democratic transition, and something of a slowing of the momentum of poverty reduction, in Indonesia.

This chapter discusses resurgence of religious fundamentalism, which brought about the renaissance of Hinduism. The Sikhs exodus in the partition had made them more vulnerable and thus ground was prepared for sowing the seeds of separatism and revival of orthodoxy. Sikh religious revival coincided with Green Revolution. Green Revolution, aided by new varieties of seed and modern farming methods led to prosperity. The Green Revolution began in Ludhiana, the most fertile region in the Indo-Gangetic plain. The Intensive Agricultural Areas Programme (IAAP) was also first conducted in Ludhiana. The discussion then shifts to Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. An outline of his start as a preacher to a pawn in party politics is provided. It shows that his early messages spoke of returning to the traditions of Khalsa Panth and renouncing the evils brought by modernism. As his popularity grew, he began to espouse the cult of violence and promote hatred towards Hindus as a means for preserving Sikh identity. The chapter concludes with Bhindranwale’s ‘hit list’, attempts to fortify Akal Takht, and beginning of Indira Gandhi’s involvement.

This chapter examines the economic growth in India for the period 1950–64. What is distinctive about this period is that while the policy regime had remained more or less unchanged, the rate of growth of the economy accelerated. Economic growth is explained in terms of the wider impact of the Green Revolution. Initiated with renewed vigour in the mid-1960s, this intervention not only increased the rate of growth of agriculture, notably food production, but energized the rest of the economy via forward and backward linkages. This account was validated in an econometric investigation of inter-sectoral growth relations prior to and inclusive of the transition date.

The contradictions between the cities and the countryside, between mental and manual labor, and between intellectuals and rural people with which the Mao-era state wrestled have by no means disappeared. Moreover, current state policies and efforts by various social actors to transform Chinese rural society and agriculture yet again suggest strong continuities with Mao-era agricultural extension and the scientific experiment movement—though translated into the new context of global capitalism. The Epilogue first presents a sketch of the so-called sannong ("three-rural") problems that Chinese peasants, rural society, and agriculture face today. It then discusses some of the efforts now under way to address these problems, in particular the New Rural Reconstruction movement, the state campaign to "Build a New Socialist Countryside," the Participatory Plant Breeding project, and the Food Sovereignty Movement. In the process, it demonstrates the lasting significance of the Mao-era’s red and green revolutions, and their meanings for various social actors, in the current Chinese agricultural landscape.

The third chapter begins by revisiting the story of the green revolution and placing the yellow revolution within this historical context. Recent research has shown that claims of the green revolution saving India from the brink of famine and destitution are nothing more than well-crafted myths. Questioning doomsday theories about food and population growth, this chapter draws upon an array of scholarship that suggests access to food is a function of social relationships and entitlements of people, rather than quantitative availability. The yellow revolution is different from the green revolution because soyabean is not grown for human consumption, and it is a rainfed crop, not requiring irrigation. But it is similar in that its revolutionary narrative draws upon repudiating a similarly tragic past. The idea of revolution is a problematic frame into which agrarian change is force-fitted and its recurrent use are based on persistent myths, which this research questions.