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IB DP ESS — Topic 5: Land | SL & HL | Paper 1 & Paper 2
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define subsistence agriculture, intensive agriculture, extensive agriculture, and monoculture using IB-aligned ESS terminology.
- Describe the key features of the Green Revolution and the technologies it introduced into global food production systems.
- Explain how the Green Revolution altered nutrient cycles, water systems, and biodiversity at local and regional scales.
- Compare and contrast the environmental and social impacts of intensive and extensive agricultural systems.
- Analyse the trade-offs involved in industrial agriculture using ESS analysis parameters: scale, sustainability, perspectives, and uncertainty.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the Green Revolution in addressing global food security, considering both its achievements and its environmental costs.
- Discuss contrasting worldviews — ecocentric, technocentric, and anthropocentric — in relation to agricultural intensification and food system design.
Real-World Context & Relevance
In 1970, Norman Borlaug accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yielding wheat varieties that, combined with synthetic fertilisers and irrigation, had helped avert famine across South Asia and Latin America. India's wheat production had more than doubled in a decade — from roughly 11 million tonnes in 1960 to over 23 million tonnes by 1970 — feeding hundreds of millions of people who might otherwise have starved (Evenson and Gollin, "Assessing the Impact of the Green Revolution, 1960 to 2000," Science , 2003). This transformation, known as the Green Revolution, is one of the most consequential interventions in the history of human land use.
Yet by the early 2000s, the same Punjab region of India that had been celebrated as a Green Revolution success story was reporting alarming declines in groundwater tables, widespread soil salinisation, and a collapse in crop genetic diversity as thousands of traditional wheat and rice varieties were replaced by a handful of high-yielding strains. Farmers who had become dependent on expensive inputs — seeds, fertilisers, pesticides — found themselves trapped in debt cycles. The story of the Green Revolution is therefore not simply one of triumph over hunger; it is a systems story, in which solving one problem generated a cascade of new environmental and social pressures. Understanding this story is central to understanding how human agricultural systems interact with, and alter, the Earth's land systems.
🌍 Why This Matters Agriculture currently occupies approximately 50% of the Earth's habitable land surface and accounts for around 70% of global freshwater withdrawals (FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2020 ). How we grow food — the systems we choose, the technologies we deploy, and the trade-offs we accept — determines the fate of biodiversity, soil health, water systems, and climate stability at a planetary scale. No topic in ESS connects more directly to the real-world challenge of feeding 8 billion people without destroying the ecological systems that make food production possible.
Core Concepts & Definitions
To understand the Green Revolution, we first need to understand the range of agricultural systems that exist and how they differ in their relationship with natural systems. Not all farming is the same: the inputs used, the scale of operation, the degree of ecological integration, and the social structures involved vary enormously across the globe. These differences have profound consequences for environmental systems.
Agricultural Systems: A Spectrum of Approaches
At one end of the spectrum, subsistence agriculture involves farming primarily to meet the immediate food needs of a household or small community, with little or no surplus for sale. Subsistence systems are typically low-input — they rely on human and animal labour, organic matter, and natural rainfall rather than synthetic chemicals or mechanisation. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and