ABSTRACT
The history of economic development, the Green Revolution is as real as the Marshall Plan, as famous, as praised, and as vilified. In 1968, the Philippines declared self-sufficiency in rice, and India, Indonesia, South Vietnam, Pakistan, and Malaysia each predicted that the era of food scarcity was at an end. Forrest F. Hill, the agronomist and Ford Foundation grant slinger who created the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines that bred the dwarf rice IR-8, believed the story owed much to luck and television. India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and other new nations shifted production away from colonial export crops toward domestically consumed foods, supporting the transition with investments in agricultural research, irrigation, and fertilizer production. The geopolitical interpretation of the causes of war, emphasized competition for scarce resources, and Hiroshima-induced misgivings about the inevitability of progress laid the groundwork for the first postwar Malthusian panic in 1948.
