From Sathyu’s Introduction to Bhopal for Young People
Cunning as they were, these corporations called this kind of agriculture using chemicals – the ‘Green Revolution’. They claimed that the Green Revolution would guarantee that there was enough food for everyone in the world and no one had to go hungry. Because the promise to abolish hunger was so attractive and more because these corporations were/ and are so powerful (some of them had more money than what several countries put together had) they could push governments to accept the Green Revolution as the national policy on agriculture.
Of course now, over 50 years later, we know that the Green Revolution did not provide food to the hungry. (The real reason people go hungry is not because there isn’t enough food but because they do not have enough money to buy food.) We also know that the Green Revolution actually caused massive damage to the land and water because of the use of poisonous chemicals, and uprooted millions of people because big dams had to be built to supply water to the farms that were part of the Green Revolution. The only people who benefitted from the Green Revolution were the big chemical and other corporations whose wealth grew tremendously as more and more farmers were conned (by their own government’s propaganda) into buying more and more chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
