by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The so-called “green revolution” and its effect on farmers and people
Now, however, it turns out that it has caused and is causing malnutrition because one of the staples of the diet no longer is present, actually an edible weed, namely goosefoot (plants in the Chenopodium genus), and the leaves are used as a kind of spinach in the diet of that area.
The shorter wheat varieties that have come about after the so-called “green revolution” are being outperformed in growth by the goosefoot and farmers are forces, literally, to employ weedkiller against the weed that once formed a staple of the local diet, leading to the loss of said nutritious weed and to malnutrition.
In fact it was the “green revolution” that led to the use and excessive use of weedkillers such as glyphosate whether in the form of Roundup or others and often the use of certain seeds employed in this “green revolution” goes hand-in-hand with the use of such herbicides, now all grouped under the name of “pesticides”.
Well, for some those weeds were anything else by pests. They were necessary foods and the fact is that some of those weeds have a far higher nutritional content than there cultivated cousins.
We have become so obsessed with weeds and their eradication, especially when it comes those much shorter crop varieties today in comparison to some 80 to 100 years ago where, in the end, the crop outperformed the weeds and, to some extent, smothered them. But not before the people were able to make use of much of them.
In addition to the shorter stemmed varieties of wheat and other corn (I am not using the word corn here in the American sense where it equates maize) and weeds outperforming the crop (in the early stages) the use or more and more sophisticated machines for harvesting also made weeds in the field something that needed eradicating. And we are surprised why our soil, water and air is poisoned and even our very foods, with the residues of those toxic substances.
Our modern farming practices and those of the “green revolution” are not conducive to health of the Planet and neither to human health, and that especially not in what used to be called third-world countries and while, say, India, is quite industrialized in some way in other ways and aspects it is still a third-world country and, personally, I see nothing wrong with countries developing slower than we have developed in Britain, the US and elsewhere. That rapid development, be it in farming or otherwise, may not be and have been the best thing ever anyway.
The obsession with so-called weeds and their eradication by farmers has led to serious problems in the ecosystems and that, alas, mostly because we (all) seem to misunderstand what many weeds actually are, namely the ancestors of many of our cultivated crops.
As I have said above there are many so-called weeds that are, nutritionally, much better than the crops that have been cultivated from them and this does not just go for goosefoot (although there does not really seem to be a cultivar of that genus, as far as I can see). Dandelion, though that being a different subject, is one of those weeds that everyone obsesses with as regards to eradication of “weeds”. It is, however, a plant that is extremely beneficial and good to eat and in some countries, France being one of them, it is often deliberately grown in kitchen gardens.
In summing up one could say that the co-called “green revolution” was not very green, as in environmentally beneficial, at all and also in many cases does not really have benefited people either.
© 2021
