ABSTRACT
Green, yes; revolution, no. The term ‘green revolution’, now much maligned as a journalistic exaggeration, did echo a real perception of scientists in the late 1960s: that, without political upheavals, MVs could produce ‘revolutionary’ improvements in the wellbeing of many of the world’s poor. However, in most MV regions, the greening has not been revolutionary in this sense, either. Perhaps 40 per cent of rural populations in the developing world now cultivate mainly MVs. Yet, except in East Asia (including China), the poor in these ‘MV regions’ are neither much rarer nor much stronger, absolutely or relatively to the groups that held power before the MVs arrived.1 In the 1960s, most socially aware tropicalplant scientists would have seen their main role as ‘keeping food output growing faster than population’. In the 1980s, even where this has been achieved-and even though most of the extra food comprises cheap cereal MVs, grown by smallholders and/or worked by farm labourers-the achievement has not sufficed to improve poor people’s food intakes much.
