green revolution

Period of food crop productivity growth that started in the 1960s due to a combination of high rates of investment in crop research, infrastructure, and market development and appropriate policy support, and whose environmental impacts have been mixed: on one side saving land conversion to agriculture, on the other side promoting an overuse of inputs and cultivation on areas otherwise improper to high levels of intensification, such as slopes.

A set of research and the development of technology transfer initiatives occurring between the 1930s and the late 1960s (with prequels in the work of the agrarian geneticist Nazareno Strampelli in the 1920s and 1930s), that increased agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s. The initiatives resulted in the adoption of new technologies, including: new, high- yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereals, especially dwarf wheats and rices, in association with chemical fertilizers and agro-chemicals, and with controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and new methods of cultivation, including mechanization. All of these together were seen as a package of practices to supersede traditional technology and to be adopted as a whole.

Period of food crop productivity growth that started in the 1960s due to a combination of high rates of investment in crop research, infrastructure, and market development and appropriate policy support, and whose environmental impacts have been mixed: on.