ABSTRACT
The inception of India’s “new agricultural strategy” from 1961 followed the visit of a team of experts from the Ford Foundation, whose report on “India’s Food Crisis” evidently greatly influenced government policies. This chapter examines some of the negative consequences of the Green Revolution in India, one of the countries where the high external input model is widely believed to have been successful. The first phase of the Green Revolution from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s was primarily concentrated on wheat and was associated with a substantial rise in both yield per unit area and total output, especially in north India. During the second phase of the Green Revolution, from about 1975 to the present, despite the advocates of the new strategy anticipating that the new techniques would be generalized wholesale to rice-producing areas, this has not happened.
