Borlaug Wheat and the Green Revolution

Author: Nicholas Stubblefield Edited by: Nora Lewis

Suggested Citation:

Stubblefield, N., Lewis, N. (2026). Borlaug wheat and the Green Revolution. Technology Assessment Project Case Study Library, University of Michigan. https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/tap-case-study-library/borlaug-wheat-…

Borlaug Wheat and the Green Revolution

Key Takeaways

  • States without robust domestic research institutions were less likely to invest in HYVs.
  • States require government support and ready infrastructure (physical, scientific, institutional) to effectively integrate imported technologies.
  • Forceful adoption of HYVs displaced most of India's indigenous rice and wheat varieties, which severely reduced crop diversity and made crops more vulnerable to pests and disease.
  • Imported technologies are often implemented in ways that erase local knowledge and expertise.
  • Adoption of HYVs induced the need to deploy other high-cost, low-sustainability technologies.
  • Supposedly benevolent technology transfers are leveraged as geopolitical weapons.

Borlaug Wheat and the Green Revolution

The Green Revolution was a period from the 1950s to 1980s that saw an increase in global food production through the distribution of agricultural technology, most notably genetically altered crops designed to produce higher yields. Among these technologies was "dwarf wheat," high-yielding varieties (HYV) of wheat developed by American scientist Norman Borlaug. Shortly after WWII, a joint venture between the Mexican government and the private Rockefeller Foundation called MAP (Mexican Agricultural Program) recruited Borlaug to help boost wheat production and increase food security in Mexico. Specifically, the partnership was forged in hopes that Borlaug could counter the virulent effects of rust disease, a fungal plant pathogen that was eradicating Mexico's wheat crops. Borlaug crossbred different strains of wheat to produce varieties that not only proved resilient against rust, but were also compatible across different environments and produced higher yields. This robust dwarf wheat focused on grain production rather than on stalk height (hence the name), and its greater yields allowed Mexico to become self-sufficient in wheat production by 1956.

Borlaug and his funders hoped to take these dwarf wheat strains worldwide and stave off a global, population-incited food shortage many feared as inevitable. While Mexico founded MAP as a wholly domestic-focused research institution, it formed the foundation of international high-yield crop initiatives. Beginning in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation and Mexico began reorganizing MAP's resources and personnel into international agricultural research programs such as the International Corn and Wheat Research Institute and, eventually, the enduring International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT).

Borlaug and his scientists concentrated their attention on India, which since its independence from Britain in 1947 had relied on emergency food exports from the United States. India seemed to embody the Malthusian fears of overpopulation and resource exhaustion. In 1961 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization predicted the country's population would outstrip its food production within five years. Then, in 1965, India experienced a severe drought which threatened food supplies further. The United States, anticipating a need for increased food exports, argued India was experiencing a famine, a narrative India's agriculture minister called "scaremongering." But when the drought extended another year, Borlaug saw an opportunity for his dwarf seeds to make a public impact. In 1966, India imported 18,000 tons of dwarf wheat seeds from Mexico, which Borlaug and his Indian collaborators set to work multiplying in northern India. They seemed to work. Indian wheat yields increased on average 2.6% annually from 1968 to 1985. By the 1970s, for the first time since its independence, India became a food exporter. As the success of Borlaug's wheat seeds became evident to the rest of the world, other countries adopted the seeds, and the Green Revolution began to take form. Between 1950 and 1990, as the global population increased by 110%, global production of cereals increased 174%. The great terror of overpopulation had been averted, and in 1970 Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize.

Though Borlaug hoped to see his contributions make a fully global impact, countries which lacked substantial domestic research capabilities struggled to develop and integrate HYVs at home. States with robust agricultural research programs were more likely to invest and participate in these HYV exchanges, and even develop their own varieties to fit domestic climate and agricultural conditions. HYV technology relied on both government support and ready, competent infrastructure; without either, countries could not translate HYV growth potential into sustained crop production. For example, the Punjab Agricultural University already had experience adapting wheat varieties to local conditions, providing the institutional and technological know-how to implement Borlaug's strains, and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute successfully pushed the Indian government to import HYVs in the 1960s. However, in countries like Bangladesh, which lacked this same research foundation as India, the first HYV uptake occurred almost a decade later. Global disparities in food security arose with this delayed (or for some countries, non-existent) uptake, and agricultural technology transfers proved largely dependent on domestic research capabilities and international information sharing.

Scholars, advocates, and the lived experiences of Indian farmers have contested the legacy of Borlaug's wheat in India. When India began adopting HYVs of both wheat and rice (the latter imported from the Rockefeller Foundation's International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines), it did so at the expense of its indigenous crops. HYV developers and distributors IRRI and CIMMYT urged India to rely on their genetically altered seeds, which the Indian government in turn heavily promoted. As a result, HYVs displaced and extinguished indigenous varieties of wheat and rice. Prior to the Green Revolution, scientists recorded around 110,000 varieties of rice; a 2006 survey revealed that 90% of them had gone extinct. Ironically, while HYVs were designed to increase food production, their implementation induced a trend toward monocropping, which made crops more vulnerable to pests and disease. Insects became a significant problem, and farmers had to employ expensive pesticides to keep their crops alive.

Further, these HYVs only outperformed other crops when given substantial fertilizer and water at amounts indigenous varieties could not withstand. India, which traditionally relied on methods of organic husbandry and crop rotation to maintain soil nutrition rather than chemical fertilizer, had to heavily invest in importing fertilizers. Yet introducing these resource-intensive agricultural practices has devastated crop ecology. The overuse of chemical fertilizers and water degrades soil and lowers the water table, and pesticide use has led to heightened health disorders.

The dissonance between the stated goals of these technology transfers and the actual experiences of Indian farmers turns scrutiny toward the true motivations of these programs. In fact, the U.S. government aimed to wield these agricultural research institutions and their technology as proxy warriors for U.S. geopolitical ambitions. Even in the program's early days, the United States recognized the potential of this research to serve U.S. interests abroad. Prior to the founding of MAP, U.S. Vice President-elect Henry Wallace pushed the Rockefeller Foundation to work with Mexico because he saw the Mexican government's goals as beneficial to his country's economic and military objectives. In the following decades, U.S. politicians and philanthropists feared that nations experiencing hunger crises would follow the same path as China, where hunger had contributed to political unrest and a communist revolution. This fear was particularly potent with India, and the United States hoped HYV technology transfers would preclude famine-induced revolutions. HYVs, however, focused on rapidly increasing food production, and their technical limitations ignored the greater issue of food and resource access in India. The demanding water and expensive fertilizer requirements to optimally sustain HYV growth were both unfamiliar and unattainable for the majority of India's farmers, so scientists targeted the country's wealthy, landowning farmers to develop their genetically "enhanced" crops. And while wealthier farmers propagated HYVs and boosted food production, poor farmers still had to reckon with the technology's ecological consequences. By shaping its transfer of agricultural technology around geopolitical aims, the U.S. failed to distribute technological benefits across Indian society, benefiting the country's elites while harming local communities.

Relevance to Advanced Nuclear Energy

Borlaug wheat was developed in response to the perceived crisis of global hunger, just as advanced nuclear reactor development has been driven by the climate crisis. We wanted to examine how this crisis framing might produce technology with unintended consequences, where institutional knowledge clashes with local knowledge and ways of life, causing local harms. In the case of advanced nuclear energy technology, local conditions such as conceptions of risk, history of environmental harm, and economic and employment conditions will need to shape how the technology is deployed, and looking to the Borlaug wheat case shows the negative outcomes that arise when local systems of knowledge are ignored. The case explores how expertise is weighed between communities and technical "experts," and how high-income nations with strong technological and scientific institutions shape technological development and deployment in low- and middle-income nations.

Key References

Kumar, P., Lorek, T., Olsson, T. C., Sackley, N., Schmalzer, S. & Laveaga, G. S. (2017). Roundtable: New narratives of the Green Revolution. Agricultural History, 91(3), 397–422.

Pray, C. E. (1981). The Green Revolution as a case study in transfer of technology. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 458, 68–80.

Perkins, J. H. (1998). Wheat breeding and the exercise of American power, 1940–1970. In J. H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution. Oxford University Press.

Eliazer Nelson, A. R. L., Ravichandran, K. & Antony, U. (2019). The impact of the Green Revolution on indigenous crops of India. Journal of Ethnic Foods, 6(1), 8.

Stone, G. D. (2019). Commentary: New histories of the Indian Green Revolution. The Geographical Journal, 185(2), 243–250.

Deb, D. (2019, October 1). The struggle to save heirloom rice in India. Scientific American.

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