Jonathan Harwood
The Green Revolution (GR) is sometimes portrayed as a set of
humanitarian programmes, organised by philanthropic foundations, which
applied northern expertise to the problem of hunger and poverty in the
global South. Several historians of the GR have qualified this view,
noting that although the GR’s consequences may have been
humanitarian – in that it succeeded in boosting food production and
reducing the need for grain imports – the actual motivation
behind the programmes, as John Perkins demonstrated, was a geopolitical
one. Namely, during the 1950s and ‘60s hungry Asian peasants were
thought to be susceptible to the charms of communism. In this piece,
however, I will argue that this geopolitical interpretation does not go
far enough in challenging the view that the reduction of hunger –
whatever the motive – was a central concern of the GR’s planners and
funders. Recent work on the GR in India by Corinna R. Unger and by Kapil
Subramanian suggests that historians (including me) have not paid
enough attention to the fact that GR programmes were not even designed to maximise food production.
As various development historians have shown, in the 1950s it was
common among modernisation theorists to regard peasant agriculture as
‘static’ and’traditional’, thus resistant to economic change.
Development programmes, therefore, needed to do more than merely
introduce new technology and institutions; they would have to bring
about a shift in mentality. To that end, as Nick Cullather has shown,
development experts were particularly keen on innovations which would
not just improve agricultural production but would yield spectacular
results quickly. The resulting shock – among farmers and government
officials alike – was thought necessary to undermine longstanding values
and assumptions. And the point of triggering this psychological
‘reawakening’ was to induce among peasants the desire to do more than
just feed their families better but to gain cash-income through
increasing efficiency and producing primarily for the market. Unger
reports one Rockefeller Foundation official enthusing in 1969 that
India’s peasants were ‘breaking out of centuries-old patterns of
subsistence agriculture and entering the new world of commercial food
production….’. Given this aim, the targetting strategy of the GR’s
planners made sense. They set up programmes to distribute improved seed,
fertiliser and pesticide only in ‘promising’ regions where water was
plentiful, growing conditions were good, and farmers were keen on new
technology. This, they reckoned, would maximise the likelihood of
producing the most dramatic yield-gains.
A major drawback of this strategy, however, was that while it boosted
production in the selected areas, it did not maximise overall
food-production (and was accordingly controversial among Indian
experts). For example, as Subramanian shows, the Indian irrigation
bureaucracy’s longstanding strategy was to maximise the area served by
public systems since this was thought to be not only socially equitable
but would also maximise production. But in the 1960s David Hopper, the
Ford Foundation’s agricultural economist in New Delhi, while conceding
that the bureaucracy’s strategy was indeed the optimum way to maximise production, instead advocated concentrating irrigation on ‘progressive’ areas because this would maximise profit for the favoured few.
The situation with fertiliser was similar. Indian agricultural
economists had calculated that the overall effect upon production would
be greater if fertiliser were distributed widely in small amounts
(because Indian tall wheat varieties were more responsive to low doses
of fertiliser than were the high-yielding dwarf varieties promoted by
the GR). The GR’s proponents, however, insisted that available supplies
of fertiliser should be concentrated on the favoured areas so that very
high doses of fertiliser could be used there, and yields would be
maximised. Finally, we need to ask why GR breeding-programmes focused on
some crops rather than others. Although rice (along with white millet)
was much more widely grown (and consumed, especially in rural areas)
than wheat in 1960s India and had been accordingly favoured by
agricultural policy there during the 1950s, from the mid-1960s GR
programmes devoted more resources to wheat- than to rice-improvement. (A
comparable crop-bias had earlier characterised the Rockefeller
Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program.) Boosting aggregate food
production was evidently less important to the GR’s champions – despite
the existence of widespread rural hunger – than producing spectacular
yield-increases on a relatively small number of farms.
Many years ago Gavin Williams made a similar case for the World
Bank’s development aid to small farmers during the 1970s; its main aim
was not to enable them to grow more food but to encourage production for
the market. Moreover the tension between these two aims is much older.
As Harro Maat and other historians of colonial agriculture have shown in
recent years, although colonial authorities usually promoted the
growing of cash crops for the international market, peasant farmers
often resisted, growing subsistence food crops for themselves and
sometimes for sale on local markets. Have things changed since then?
According to Rajeev Patel, the team carrying out a Gates
Foundation-funded project for the African Enterprise Challenge Fund
reported that a central problem they faced was that most farmers there
‘viewed agriculture as a way of life and not a business’. For the
foundations, it appears, the profitability of small farms remains more
important than the amount of food they produce.
Jonathan Harwood is emeritus professor at the University of
Manchester and visiting professor in the Centre for History of Science,
Technology & Medicine at Kings College London. His most recent book
is Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since (Routledge 2012) and his current work focuses upon the role of expertise in twentieth century agricultural revolutions.
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