Plant breeding and poverty: Can transgenic seeds replicate the ‘Green Revolution’ as a source of gains for the poor?1

Abstract

Improved farm technology helps all main groups of the poor – small farmers, farmworkers, other low-wage labour – when it raises labour value-productivity, but raises land and/or water value-productivity faster; and cuts staples prices, but raises smallholders' total factor productivity faster. From 1965 the Green Revolution walked these two tightropes largely by luck. Though targeting bigger piles of rice and wheat, it cut poverty through consumption; nutrition; smallholder income; employment; risk reduction; and ecological sustainability. Yet large areas were left out, and from 1985 progress slowed. In the new environment for research and agriculture, how can transgenics revive and spread poverty reduction? What has been the evidence so far? What determines whether new varieties have traits conducive to poverty reduction: who owns the research, or what crop science is?