The Green Revolution was the mid-twentieth-century transformation of global agriculture through high-yield crop varieties, synthetic fertilizers, irrigation expansion, and mechanization. Led by Norman Borlaug's wheat research in Mexico and the International Rice Research Institute's work in the Philippines, it produced extraordinary increases in global food production, credited with averting famines that would have killed millions across India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other developing regions during the 1960s and 1970s. It is frequently invoked as evidence that technology transfer can produce humanitarian transformation at scale.
Myrdal discussed the Green Revolution extensively in his later work, particularly The Challenge of World Poverty (1970), and his analysis identified it as the paradigmatic case of the distributional pattern that the AI transition now replicates. The technology was genuinely transferable: the high-yield seeds were available, the fertilizers were available, the techniques were documented. The institutional conditions that determined whether farmers could translate technology access into sustained productivity gains were not transferable. Farmers with access to credit for inputs, secure