The toxic legacy left by the Green Revolution
There are more than 390,000 identified plant species in the world, but just three -- rice, maize, and wheat -- account for roughly 60% of the plant-based calories in our diets. The dominance of these three grains is largely the result of major technological breakthroughs, particularly the development of high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice and wheat during the Green Revolution of the 1960s.