By: Alanna Shaikh

In the past couple of years we’ve faced major reconsideration of two of international development’s biggest miracles: micro-credit and the Green Revolution.[i] They have gone from being seen as world-changing silver bullets to just one more tool in a kind of effective arsenal.

Micro-credit – the extension of small loans to poor people – it seems, doesn’t lift most people out of poverty. Instead, what it does is help poor people to smooth their consumption – spread the cost of major expenditures over time. A loan that pays for a wedding, a home, or medical expenses allows a family to pay in installments slowly, as opposed to being suddenly drained of all their resources. It acts, in fact, in much the same way as micro-savings. Or a credit card, for that matter, and how many people have been lifted out of poverty by a Discover card? It’s a useful tool for money management, and a valuable tool for people who previously had no access to this kind of credit, but it’s not a game-changer. (For more information on micro-finance, I recommend reading anything David Roodman has written in particular this paper and his excellent blog.)

The Green Revolution has faced a similar rethinking. For those of you not familiar with the term, the Green Revolution was “a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1970s, that increased agriculture production around the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s…The initiatives involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.”

The impact of the Green Revolution was felt primarily in South Asia, with Africa as a lesser beneficiary of the new technology. It has long been seen as one of international development aid’s greatest successes. We broke South Asia’s famine cycle. How do you not count that as a win?

Well…in several ways, it turns out. The Green Revolution shifted South Asian agriculture from being based on a range of crops that required minimal amounts of water and agricultural inputs to a monoculture based on one or two crops of cereal grains that required irrigation, fertilizer, and plenty of pesticides. This favors large farms over small, and has a substantial negative environmental impact.

The new high-yield crops also seem to have a lower nutritional value. While fewer people actually starve from sheer lack of calories, malnutrition rates have gone up, especially among children. Malnutrition is a massive contributor to child death – it makes every illness and injury a child faces far more dangerous, and it also leads to cognitive losses.

So there is, for sure, more food grown in South Asia now, but it’s lower quality food that it takes a lot more money and environmental damage to grow, and it basically destroyed traditional agricultural systems. Still a win, yes, but a much smaller one.

What does this have to do with neglected tropical diseases, you ask?

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[i] Both of these link to Bangladesh. Why does so much interesting development innovation come out of Bangladesh?

Alanna Shaikh is an expert in health consulting, writing about global health for UN Dispatch and about international relief and development at Blood & Milk. She also serves as a frequently contributing blogger to ‘End the Neglect.’ The views and opinions expressed by guest bloggers are not necessarily the views and opinions of the Global Network. All opinions expressed here are Alanna’s own and not those of any employer or the US government.