In the nineteen sixties, dwarf and semi-dwarf varieties of wheat and rice with long panicles and responding favourably to exogenous inputs of inorganic chemical fertilizers registered dramatic increases in productivity (kg/ha.). While based on the yield consideration for the immediate present, it could be regarded as a Green Revolution, it was really an unsustainable exploitative agriculture over long periods of cultivation.
The Green Revolution/exploitative agriculture, as expected, started showing signs of yield fatigue since 1990s owing to depletion of biodiversity and freshwater, and degradation of soil health. Further, the Green Revolution which substantially built the food security at the national level did not provide food security at the individual household levels to hundreds of millions of rural women and men. This was because it did not reduce the famine of rural livelihoods and increase the access (i.e. purchasing power) to food. For these reasons, a ‘systems approach’ – based ‘evergreen revolution’ was developed. Its design provides for various forms of ecoagriculture to produce food for ‘availability’ and for harnessing ecotechnologies for sustainable management of resources and creation of market-driven on-farm and non-farm ecoenterprises to enhance ‘access’ to food at the individual household level of hundreds of millions of rural women and men.
The evergreen revolution in the resource-poor small and marginal farms integrates diverse agri-horticultural crops, fodder, farm animals and also capture and culture fisheries in the coastal villages. Further, such small and marginal farms could cultivate biofortified crops as to provide agri-horticultural remedies to nutritional maladies, and use dung to generate methane for cooking purposes. Consequently, no methane is emitted into the atmosphere, and when that is used as cooking gas in the rural households, it saves the women from the drudgery of cutting and collecting fuel wood on one hand, and the trees which sequester carbon on the other. All these aspects are discussed briefly in the paper.