Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 287

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 33 of the 33 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Green Revolution research saved an estimated 18 to 27 million hectares from being brought into agricultural production

Open access
Stevenson, James R., Villoria, Nelson, Byerlee, Derek, Kelley, Timothy, Maredia, Mywish·2013·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI 10.1073/pnas.1208065110
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

New estimates of the impacts of germplasm improvement in the major staple crops between 1965 and 2004 on global land-cover change are presented, based on simulations carried out using a global economic model (Global Trade Analysis Project Agro-Ecological Zone), a multicommodity, multiregional computable general equilibrium model linked to a global spatially explicit database on land use. We estimate the impact of removing the gains in cereal productivity attributed to the widespread adoption of improved varieties in developing countries. Here, several different effects—higher yields, lower prices, higher land rents, and trade effects—have been incorporated in a single model of the impact of Green Revolution research (and subsequent advances in yields from crop germplasm improvement) on land-cover change. Our results generally support the Borlaug hypothesis that increases in cereal yields as a result of widespread adoption of improved crop germplasm have saved natural ecosystems from being converted to agriculture. However, this relationship is complex, and the net effect is of a much smaller magnitude than Borlaug proposed. We estimate that the total crop area in 2004 would have been between 17.9 and 26.7 million hectares larger in a world that had not benefited from crop germplasm improvement since 1965. Of these hectares, 12.0–17.7 million would have been in developing countries, displacing pastures and resulting in an estimated 2 million hectares of additional deforestation. However, the negative impacts of higher food prices on poverty and hunger under this scenario would likely have dwarfed the welfare effects of agricultural expansion.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1073/pnas.1208065110

Cites

33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 33 references

Research works printed but not linked: 10

  1. M Renkow Assessing the Environmental Impacts of the CGIAR Research: Toward an Analytical Framework. Working Paper for the CGIAR Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (CGIAR Independent Science and Partnership Council Secretariat, Rome, 2011).
  2. RE Evenson, M Rosegrant Crop Variety Improvement and its Effect on Productivity, eds RE Evenson, D Gollin (CABI, Wallingford, UK), pp. 473–497 (2003). · doi:10.1079/9780851995496.0473
  3. SK Rose, HL Lee Economic Analysis of Land Use in Global Climate Change Policy, eds TW Hertel, S Rose, R Tol (Routledge, Abingdon, UK), pp. 89–121 (2009). · doi:10.4337/9781035305674.00014
  4. PG Pardey, JM Alston, JE Christian, S Fan Hidden Harvest: U.S Benefits from International Research Aid (International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, 1996).
  5. A Kuhn From World Market to Trade Flow Modelling—The Re-designed WATSIM Model (Institute of Agricultural Policy, Market Research and Economic Sociology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany, 2003).
  6. ; US Environmental Protection Agency Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Potential in US Forestry and Agriculture. Report No. EPA-R-05-006. (US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2005).
  7. J Assunção, CC Gandour, R Rocha Deforestation Slowdown in the Legal Amazon: Prices or Policies? Working Paper (Climate Policy Initiative, Rio de Janeiro, 2012).
  8. , ed TW Hertel (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK Global Trade Analysis: Models and Applications, 1997).
  9. C Monfreda, N Ramankutty, T Hertel Economic Analysis of Land-use in Global Climate Change Policy, eds TW Hertel, S Rose, R Tol (Routledge, Abingdon, UK), pp. 33–49 (2009).
  10. B Sohngen, C Tennity, M Hnytka, K Meeusen Economic Analysis of Land-use in Global Climate Change Policy, eds TW Hertel, S Rose, R Tol (Routledge, Abingdon, UK), pp. 49–72 (2009).

Cited by

See all 287

Metadata

Authors
Stevenson, J. R., Villoria, N., Byerlee, D., Kelley, T., & Maredia, M.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2013-05-13
Volume
110
Issue
21
Pages
8363-8368
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1208065110
OpenAlex
W2109912963
Cited by
287
References
33
FWCI
13.85
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Green Revolution research saved an estimated 18 to 27 million hectares from being brought into agricultural production. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1208065110
The paper
Stevenson, J. R., Villoria, N., Byerlee, D., Kelley, T., & Maredia, M. (2013). Green Revolution research saved an estimated 18 to 27 million hectares from being brought into agricultural production. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1208065110

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.