Elizabeth Kolbert
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/creating-a-better-leaf

Like most revolutions, the green one had unintended consequences. The new, high-yield varieties were needy; to realize their full potential, they required plenty of fertilizer, pesticides, and water. These “inputs,” in turn, required money. The bulk of the benefits thus accrued to those with resources. Farms became bigger and more mechanized, developments that often cost the very poorest agricultural workers their livelihoods. Research suggests that the new varieties, combined with the agricultural practices they promoted, exacerbated inequality.

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The ecological costs, too, were high, and by many accounts these are still growing. Fertilizer runoff has filled rivers and lakes with nutrients, producing algae blooms and aquatic “dead zones.” Increased pesticide use has had the perverse effect of doing in many of the beneficial insects that once kept pests in check. The demands of irrigation have emptied aquifers. In the northern Indian state of Punjab, an early center of the Green Revolution, groundwater is being pumped out so much faster than it can be replenished that the water table is falling by about three feet a year.

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the target of the farmers’ ire is a set of laws pushed through Parliament by Modi’s party; these, they fear, could lead to an end to government price supports. In a deeper sense, though, the tensions go back to the Green Revolution. To encourage farmers to plant the higher-yielding, thirstier varieties of rice and wheat, the Indian government introduced the price-support system, in the nineteen-sixties. Now the subsidies have produced gluts of these commodities, even as growing them is depleting the country’s aquifers, and the government wants to prod farmers to move away from the crops it once prodded them to plant. To the country’s millions of farmers, most of whom own fewer than five acres, changes in the status quo seem likely to lead only to more misery.