IN 1970, Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ‘a new world situation with regard to nutrition . . .’. According to the Nobel Prize Committee, ‘the kinds of grain which are the result of Dr Borlaug’s work speed economic growth in general in the developing countries.’1 The ‘miracle seeds’ that Borlaug had created were seen as a source of new bundance and peace. Science was awarded for having a magical ability to solve problems of material scarcity and violence.
‘Green Revolution’ is the name given to this science-based transformation of Third World agriculture, and the Indian Punjab was its most celebrated success. Paradoxically, after two decades of the Green Revolution, Punjab is neither a land of prosperity, nor peace. It is a region riddled with discontent and violence. Instead of abundance, Punjab has been left with diseased soils, pest-infested crops, waterlogged deserts and indebted and discontented farmers. Instead of peace, Punjab has inherited conflict and violence. At least 15,000 people have lost their lives in the last six years. 598 people were killed in violent conflict in Punjab during 1986. In 1987 the number was 1544. In 1988, it had escalated to 3,000. And 1989 shows no sign of peace in Punjab.
The tragedy of Punjab – of the thousands of innocent victims of violence over the past five years – has commonly been presented as an outcome of ethnic and communal conflict between two religious groups. This study presents a different aspect and interpretation of the Punjab tragedy. It introduces dimensions that have been neglected or gone unnoticed in understanding the emergent conflicts. It traces aspects of the conflicts and violence in contemporary Punjab to the ecological and political demands of the Green Revolution as a scientific experiment in development and agricultural transformation. The Green Revolution has been heralded as a political and technological achievement, unprecedented in human history. It was designed as a strategy for peace, through the creation of abundance by breaking out of nature’s limits and variabilities. In its very genesis, the science of the Green Revolution was put forward as a political project for creating a social order based on peace and stability. However, when violence was the outcome of social engineering, the domain of science was artificially insulated from the domain of politics and social processes. The science of the Green Revolution was offered as a ‘miracle’ recipe for prosperity. But when discontent and new scarcities emerged, science was delinked from economic processes.
On the one hand, contemporary society perceives itself as a sciencebased civilisation, with science providing both the logic as well as propulsion for social transformation. In this aspect science is selfconsciously embedded in society.
On the other hand, unlike all other forms of social organisation and social production, science is placed aboe society. It cannot be judged, it cannot be questioned, it cannot be evaluated in the public domain.
As Harding has observed,
‘Neither God nor tradition is privileged with the same credibility as scientific rationality in modern cultures . . . The project that science’s sacredness makes taboo is the examination of science in just the ways any other institution or set of social practices can be examined.’2
While science itself is a product of social forces, and has a social agenda determined by those who can mobilise scientific production, in contemporary times scientific activity has been assigned a privileged epistemological position of being socially and politically neutral. Thus science takes on a dual character. It offers technological fixes for social and political problems, but delinks itself from the new social and political problems it creates. Reflecting the priorities and perceptions of particular class, gender, or cultural interests, scientific thought organizes and transforms the natural and social order. However, since both nature and society have their own organisation, the superimposition of a new order does not necessarily take place perfectly and smoothly. There is often resistance from people and nature, a resistance which is externalised as ‘unanticipated side effects’. Science stays immune from social assessment, and insulated from its own impacts. Through this split identity is created the ‘sacredness’ of science.
Within the structure of modern science itself are characteristics which prevent the perception of linkages. Fragmented into narrow disciplines and reductionist categories, scientific knowledge has a blind spot with respect to relational properties and relational impacts. It tends to decontextualise its own context. Through the process of decontextualisation, the negative and destructive impacts of science on nature and society are externalised and rendered invisible. Being separated from their material and political roots in the science system, new forms of scarcity and social conflict are then linked to other social systems e.g. religion.
The conventional model of science, technology and society locates sources of violence in politics and ethics, in the application of science and technology, not in scientific knowledge itself.3 The assumed dichotomy between values and facts underlying this model implies a dichotomy between the world of values and the world of facts. In this view, sources of violence are located in the world of values while scientific knowledge inhabits the world of facts.
The fact-value dichotomy is a creation of modern reductionist science which, while being an epistemic response to a particular set of values, posits itself as independent of values. By splitting the world into fact vs values, it conceals the real difference between two kinds of value-laden facts. Modern reductionist science is characterised in the received view as the discovery of the properties and laws of nature in accordance with a ‘scientific’ method which generates claims of being ‘objective’, ‘neutral’ and ‘universal’. This view of reductionist science as being a description of reality as it is, unprejudiced by value, is being rejected increasingly on historical and philosophical grounds. It has been historically established that all knowledge, including modern scientific knowledge, is built on the use of a plurality of methodologies, and reductionism itself is only one of the scientific options available.
The knowledge and power nexus is inherent to the reductionist system because the mechanistic order, as a conceptual framework, was associated with a set of values based on power which were compatible with the needs of commercial capitalism. It generates inequalities and domination by the way knowledge is generated and structured, the way it is legitimized, and by the way in which such knowledge transforms nature and society. The experience of the Green Revolution in Punjab is an illustration of how contemporary scientific enterprise is politically and socially created, how it builds its immunity and blocks its social evaluation. It is an example of how science takes credit for successes and absolves itself from all responsibility for failures. The tragic story of Punjab is a tale of the exaggerated sense of modern science’s power to control nature and society, and the total absence of a sense of responsibility for creating natural and social situations which are totally out of control. The externalization of the consequences of the Green Revolution from the scientific and technological package of the Green Revolution has been, in our view, a significant reason for the communalization of the Punjab crises.
It is, however, misleading to reduce the roots of the Punjab crisis to religion, as most scholars and commentators have done, since the conflicts are also rooted in the ecological, economic and political impacts of the Green Revolution. They are not merely conflicts between two religious communities, but reflect tensions between a disillusioned and discontented farming community and a centralising state, which controls agricultural policy, finance, credit, inputs and prices of agricultural commodities. At the heart of these conflicts and disillusionments lies the Green Revolution.
The present essay presents the other side of the Green Revolution story – its social and ecological costs hidden and hitherto unnoticed. In so doing, it also offers a different perspective on the multiple roots of ethnic and political violence. It illustrates that ecological and ethnic fragmentation and breakdown are intimately connected and are an intrinsic part of a policy of planned destruction of diversity in nature and culture to create the uniformity demanded by centralised management systems. The ecological and ethnic crises in Punjab can be viewed as arising from a basic and unresolved conflict between the demands of diversity, decentralisation and emocracy on the one hand, and the demands of uniformity, centralisation, and militarisation on the other. Control over nature and control over people were essential elements of the centralised and centralising strategy of the Green Revolution. Ecological breakdown in nature and the political breakdown of society were consequences of a policy based on tearing apart both nature and society.
The Green Revolution was based on the assumption that technology is a superior substitute for nature, and hence a means of producing limitless growth, unconstrained by nature’s limits. However the assumption of nature as a source of scarcity, and technology as a source of abundance, leads to the creation of technologies which create new scarcities in nature through ecological destruction. The reduction in availability of fertile land and genetic diversity of crops as a result of the Green Revolution practices indicates that at the ecological level, the Green Revolution produced scarcity, not abundance.
It was not just ecological insecurity but also social and political insecurity was generated by the Green Revolution. Instead of stabilising and pacifying the countryside, it fueled a new pattern of conflict and violence. The communalisation of the Punjab conflicts which originally arose from the processes of political transformation associated with the Green Revolution, was based, in part, in externalising the political impacts of technological change from the domain of science and technology. A similar pattern of externalisation seems to be at play in the introduction of the ‘biotechnology revolution’, exemplified in Punjab by the Pepsi project. The social and political planning that went into the Green Revolution aimed at engineering not just seeds but social relations as well. Punjab is an exemplar of how this engineering went out of control both at the material as well as the political level.
Half a century ago, Sir Alfred Howard, the father of modern sustainable farming wrote in his classic, An Agricultural Testament, that,
‘In the agriculture of Asia we find ourselves confronted with a system of peasant farming which, in essentials, soon became stabilized. What is happening today in the small fields of India and China took place many centuries ago. The agricultural practices of the orient have passed the supreme test, they are almost as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie, or of the ocean.’4
In 1889, Dr John Augustus Voelcker was deputed by the Secretary of State to India to advice the imperial government on the application of agricultural chemistry to Indian agriculture. In his report to the Royal Agricultural Society of England on the improvement of Indian Agriculture, Voelcker stated:
‘I explain that I do not share the opinions which have been expressed as to Indian Agriculture being, as a whole, primitive and backward, but I believe that in many parts there is little or nothing that can be improved. Whilst where agriculture is manifestly inferior, it is more generally the result of the absence of facilities which exist in the better districts than from inherent bad systems of cultivation. . . . I may be bold to say that it is a much easier task to propose improvements in English agriculture than to make really valuable suggestions for that of India. To take the ordinary acts of husbandry, no where would one find better instances of keeping land scrupulously clean from weeds, of ingenuity in device of water raising appliances, of knowledge of soils and their capabilities as well as of the exact time to sow and to reap as one would in Indian agriculture, and this not at its best only but at its ordinary level. It is wonderful, too, how much is known of rotation, the system of mixed crops and of fallowing. Certain it is that I, at least, have never seen a more perfect picture of careful cultivation combined with hard labour, perseverance and fertility of resource.’5
When the best of western scientists were earlier sent to ‘improve’ Indian agriculture, they found nothing that could be improved in the principles of farming, which were based on preserving and building on nature’s process and nature’s patterns. Where Indian agriculture was less productive, it was not due to primitive principles or inferior practices, but due to interruptions in the flow of resources that made productivity possible. Land alienation, the reservation of forests and the expansion of cash crop cultivation were among the many factors, introduced during colonialism, that created a scarcity of local inputs of water and manure to maintain agricultural productivity.
In the second quarter of the century, from World War I to independence, Indian agriculture suffered a set-back as a consequence of complex factors including reduced exports due to worldwide recession, depression, and the near complete paralysis of shipping during World War II. The chaos of partition added to its decline, and the expansion of commercial crops like sugarcane and groundnuts, pushed food grains on to poorer lands where yields per acre were lower. The upheavals during this period left India faced with a severe food crisis.
There were two responses to the food crisis created through the war years and during partition. The first was indigenous, the second was exogenous. The indigenous response was rooted in the independence movement. It aimed at strengthening the ecological base of agriculture, and the self-reliance of the peasants of the country. The Harijan, a newspaper published by Mahatma Gandhi, which had been banned from 1942 to 1946, was full of articles written by Gandhi during 1946-1947 on how to deal with food scarcity politically, and by Mira Behn, Kumarappa and Pyarelal on how to grow more food using internal resources. On 10 June 1947, referring to the food problem at a prayer meeting Gandhi said:
‘The first lesson we must learn is of self-help and self-reliance. If we assimilate this lesson, we shall at once free ourselves from disastrous dependence upon foreign countries and ultimate bankruptcy. This is not said in arrogance but as a matter of fact. We are not a small place, dependent for this food supply upon outside help. We are a sub-continent, a nation of nearly 400 millions. We are a country of mighty rivers and a rich variety of agricultural land, with inexhaustible cattle-wealth. That our cattle give much less milk than we need, is entirely our own fault. Our cattle-wealth is any day capable of giving us all the milk we need. Our country, if it had not been neglected during the past few centuries, should not today only be providing herself with sufficient food, but also be playing a useful role in supplying the outside world with much-needed foodstuffs of which the late war has unfortunately left practically the whole world in want. This does not exclude India.’6
Recognising that the crisis in agriculture was related to a breakdown of nature’s processes, India’s first agriculture minister, K M Munshi, had worked out a detailed strategy on rebuilding and regenerating the ecological base of productivity in agriculture based on a bottom-up decentralised and participatory methodology.
In a seminar on 27 September 1951, organised by the Agriculture Ministry, a program of regeneration of Indian Agriculture was worked out, with the recognition that the diversity of India’s soils, crops and climates, had to be taken into account. The need to plan from the bottom, to consider every individual village and sometimes every individual field was considered essential for the programme called ‘land transformation’. At this seminar, K M Munshi told the State Directors of Agricultural extension:
‘Study the Life’s Cycle in the village under your charge in both its aspects – hydrological and nutritional. Find out where the cycle has been disturbed and estimate the steps necessary for restoring it. Work out the village in four of its aspects, (1) existing conditions, (2) steps necessary for completing the hydrological cycle, (3) steps necessary to complete the nutritional cycle, and a complete picture of the village when the cycle is restored, and (4) have faith in yourself and the programme. Nothing is too mean and nothing too difficult for the man who believes that the restoration of the life’s cycle is not only essential for freedom and happiness of India but is essential for her very existence.’7
Repairing nature’s cycles and working in partnership with nature’s processes was viewed as central to the indigenous agricultural policy. However, while Indian scientists and policy-makers were working out self-reliant and ecological alternatives for the regeneration of agriculture in India, another vision of agricultural development was taking shape in American foundations and aid agencies. This vision was based not on cooperation with nature, but on its conquest. It was based not on the intensification of nature’s processes, but on the intensification of credit and purchased inputs like chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It was based not on self-reliance, but dependence. It was based not on diversity but uniformity. Advisors and experts came from America to shift India’s agricultural research and agricultural policy from an indigenous and ecological model to an exogenous, and high input one, finding, of course, partners in sections of the elite, because the new model suited their political priorities and interests.
There were three groups of international agencies involved in transferring the American model of agriculture to India – the private American Foundations, the American Government and the World Bank. The Ford Foundation had been involved in training and agricultural extension since 1952. The Rockefeller Foundation had been involved in remodelling the agricultural research system in India since 1953. In 1958, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute which had been set up in 1905 was reorganised, and Ralph Cummings, the field director of the Rockefeller Foundation, became its first dean. In 1960, he was succeeded by A B Joshi, and in 1965 by M S Swaminathan. Besides reorganising Indian research institutes on American lines, the Rockefeller Foundation also financed the trips of Indians to American institutions. Between 1956 and 1970, 90 shortterm travel grants were awarded to Indian leaders to see the American agricultural institutes and experimental stations. One hundred and fifteen trainees finished studies under the Foundation. Another 2,000 Indians were financed by USAID to visit the US for agricultural education during the period.
The work of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations was facilitated by agencies like the World Bank which provided the credit to introduce a capital intensive agricultural model in a poor country. In the mid-1960s India was forced to devalue its currency to the extent of 37.5%. The World Bank and USAID also exerted pressure for favourable conditions for foreign investment in India’s fertilizer industry, import liberalisation, and elimination of domestic controls. The World Bank provided credit for the foreign exchange needed to implement these policies. The foreign exchange component of the Green Revolution strategy, over the five year plan period (1966-71) was projected to be Rs1,114 crores, which converted to about $2.8 billion at the then official rate. This was a little over six times the total amount allocated to agriculture during the preceding third plan (Rs 191 crores). Most of the foreign exchange was needed for the import of fertilizers, seeds and pesticides, the new inputs in a chemically intensive strategy. The World Bank and USAID stepped in to provide the financial input for a technology package that the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations had evolved and transferred.
Within India, the main supporter of the Green Revolution strategy was C Subramaniam, who became agriculture minister in 1964, and M S Swaminathan, who became the Director of IARI in 1965, and had been trained by Norman Borlaug, who worked for Rockefeller’s agricultural programme in Mexico. After a trip to India in 1963, he despatched 400kg of semidwarf varieties to be tested in India. In 1964, rice seeds were brought in from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines (which had recently been set up with Ford and Rockefeller funds). In the same year Ralph Cummings felt that sufficient testing had been done to release the varieties on a large scale. He approached C Subramaniam to see if the new agriculture minister would be willing to throw his support to accelerating the process of introducing the green revolution seeds.
Subramaniam acknowledges that he decided to follow Cumming’s advice quickly, and began to formulate a strategy for using the new varieties.8 Others in India were not as willing to adopt the American agricultural strategy. The Planning Commission was concerned about the foreign exchange costs of importing the fertilizer needed for application to the HYV’s in a period of a severe balance-of-payments crisis. Leading economists B S Minhas and T S Srinivas questioned the strategy on economic grounds. State governments worried that adoption of the new seeds would reduce their autonomy in agricultural research. Agricultural scientist objected to the new varieties for risks to disease and displacement of small peasants. The only group supporting Subramaniam were the younger agricultural scientists trained over the past decade in the American paradigm of agriculture.
The occurrence of drought in 1966 caused a severe drop in food production in India, and an unprecedented increase in food grain supply from the US. Food dependency was used to set new policy conditions on India. The US President, Lyndon Johnson, put wheat supplies on a short tether. He refused to commit food aid beyond one month in advance until an agreement to adopt the Green Revolution package was signed between the Indian agriculture minister, C S Subramaniam and the US Secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman.9
Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Indian Prime Minister in 1965 had raised caution against the rushing into a new agriculture based on new varieties. With his sudden death in 1966 the new strategy was more easy to introduce. The Planning Commission, which approves all large investment in India, was also bypassed since it was viewed as a bottleneck.
Rockefeller agricultural scientists saw Third World farmers and scientists as not having the ability to improve their own agriculture. They believed that the answer to greater productivity lay in the American-styled agricultural system. However the imposition of the American model of agriculture did not go unchallenged in the Third World or in America. Edmundo Taboada, who was head of the Mexican office of Experiment Stations, maintained, like K M Munshi in India, that ecologically and socially appropriate research strategies could only evolve with the active participation of the peasantry.
‘Scientific Research must take into account the men that will apply its results . . . Perhaps a discovery may be made in the laboratory, a greenhouse or an experimental station, but useful science, a science that can be applied and handled must emerge from the local laboratories of . . . . . small farmers, ejidatorios and local communities.’10
Together peasants and scientists searched for ways to improve the quality of ‘criollo’ seeds (open pollinated indigenous varieties) which could be reproduced in peasant fields. However, by 1945, the Special Studies Bureau in the Mexican Agriculture Ministry, funded and administered by the Rockefeller Foundation, had eclipsed the indigenous research strategy and started to export to Mexico the American agricultural revolution. In 1961, the Rockefeller-financed center took the name of CIMMYT (Centro International de Mejoramiento de Maiz Y Trigo or the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre). The American strategy, reinvented in Mexico, then came to the entire Third World as the ‘Green Revolution’.
The American model of agriculture had not done too well in America, though its nonsustainability and high ecological costs went ignored. The intensive use of artificial fertilizers, extensive practice of monocultures, and intensive and extensive mechanisation had turned fertile tracts of the American prairies into a desert in less than thirty years.
The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s was in large measure a creation of the American agricultural revolution. Hyman reports,
‘When, between 1889 and 1900, thousands of farmers were settling in Oklahoma, it must have seemed to them that they were founding a new agricultural civilization which might endure as long as Egypt. The grandsons, and even the sons of these settlers who so swiftly became a disease of their soil, trekked from their ruined farmsteads, their buried or uprooted crops, their dead soil, with the dust of their own making in their eyes and hair, the barren sand of a once fertile plain gritting between their teeth. . The pitiful procession passed westward, an object of disgust – the God-dam’d Okies. But these God-dam’d okies were the scapegoats of a generation, and the God who had damned them was perhaps after all a Goddess, her name Ceres, Demeter, Maia, or something older and more terrible. And what she damned them for was their corruption, their fundamental ignorance of the nature of her world, their defiance of the laws of co-operation and return which are the basis of life on this planet’.11
When an attempt was made to spread this ecologically devastating vision of agriculture to other parts of the world through Rockefeller Foundation programmes, notes of caution were sounded. The American strategy of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations differed from the indigenous strategies primarily in the lack of respect for nature’s processes and people’s knowledge. In mistakenly identifying the sustainable and lasting as backward and primitive, and in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable agricultural practices worldwide. The Ford Foundation had been involved in agricultural development in India since 1951. In 1952, 15 community development projects, each covering about 100 villages, were started, with Ford Foundation financial assistance.
This programme was however shed in 1959 when a Ford Foundation mission of thirteen North American agronomists to India argued that it was impossible to make simultaneous headway in all of India’s 550,000 villages. Their recommendations for a selective and intensive approach among farmers and among districts led to the winding down of the community development programme and the launching of the Intensive Agricultural Development Programme (IADP) in 1960-61.
The IADP totally replaced an indigenous, bottom up, organic-based strategy for regenerating Indian agriculture, with an exogenous, top down chemically intensive one. Industrial inputs like chemical fertilizers and pesticides were seen as breaking Indian agriculture out of the ‘shackles of the past’, as an article on ‘Ford Foundations Involvement in Intensive Agricultural Development in India’ stated:
‘India is richly endowed with sunshine, vast land areas (much of it with soils responsive to modernizing farming), a long growing season (365 days a year in most areas). Yet the solar energy, soil resources, crop growing days and water for irrigation are seriously underused or misused. India’s soils and climate are among the most underused in the world. Can multiple cropping help Indian farmers utilize these vast resources more effectively – the answer must be yes.’
‘New opportunities for intensifying agricultural programs through multiple cropping are presenting themselves; led by the plant breeder there are new short season, fertilizer responsive, non-photo sensitive crops and varieties that under skillful farming practices have high yield potential; chemical fertilizer supplies are increasing rapidly – this frees the Indian cultivator from the shackles of the past permitting only very modest improvement of soil fertility through green manure and compost and the slow, natural recharge of soil nutrients. Also, up until recently varieties were bred for these conditions, plant protection was applied after the damage was done, and so on – a status quo agriculture. This has changed. Indian farmers are prepared to innovate and change; Indian leaders in agricultural development, extension, research and administration are beginning to understand the new potentials; intensive agriculture, first identified under IADP, is now India’s food production strategy.’12
Under the Ford Foundation programme, agriculture was transformed from one that is based on internal inputs that are easily available at no costs, to one that is dependent on external inputs for which credits became necessary. Instead of promoting the importance of agriculture in all regions, the IADP showed favouritism to specially selected areas for agricultural development, to which material and financial resources of the entire country were diverted. The latter however was a failed strategy where native varieties of food crops were concerned. The native crops tend to ‘lodge’ or fall under the intensive application of chemical fertilizers, thus putting a limit to fertilize use.
As a spokesman of the Ford Foundation put it, ‘The programme revealed the urgent need for improved crop varieties as it was found that the native varieties (the only ones available during these early years) responded very poorly to improved practices and produced low yields even when subjected to other modern recommended practices.’
It was not that native crop varieties were low yielding inherently. The problem with indigenous seeds was that they could not be used to consume high doses of chemicals. The Green Revolution seeds were designed to overcome the limits placed on chemically intensive agriculture by the indigenous seeds. The new seeds thus became central to breaking out of nature’s limits and cycles. The ‘miracle’ seeds were therefore at the heart of the science of the ‘Green Revolution’.
The combination of science and politics in creating the Green Revolution goes back to the period in the 1940s when Daniels, the US Ambassador to the Government of Mexico, and Henry Wallace, Vice- President of the United States set up a scientific mission to assist in the development of agricultural technology in Mexico. The office of Special Studies was set-up in Mexico in 1943 within the agricultural ministry as a co-operation venture between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Government. In 1944, Dr J George Harrar, head of the new Mexican research programme and Dr Frank Hanson, an official of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York invited Norman Borlaug to shift from his classified wartime laboratory job in Dupont to the plant breeding programme in Mexico. By 1954, Borlaug’s ‘miracle seeds’ of dwarf varieties of wheat had been bred. In 1970, Borlaug had been awarded the ‘Nobel Peace Prize’ for his ‘great contribution towards creating a new world situation with regard to nutrition . . . The kinds of grain which are the result of Dr Borlaug’s work speed economic growth in general in the developing countries.’13
This assumed link between the new seeds and abundance, and between abundance and peace was sought to be replicated rapidly in other regions of the world, especially Asia.
Impressed with the successful diffusion of ‘miracles’ seeds of wheat from CIMMYT (International Maize & Wheat Improvement Centre) which had been set-up in 1956 on the basis of the Rockefeller Foundation and Mexican Government programme, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in 1960 established IRRI, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which by 1966 was producing ‘miracle’ rice, to join the ‘miracle’ wheats from CIMMYT.
CIMMYT and IRRI were the international agricultural research centres which grew out of the Rockefeller Foundation country programme to launch the new seeds and the new agriculture across Latin America and Asia. By 1969, the Rockefeller Foundation in co-operation with the Ford Foundation had established the Centro International de Agriculture Tropical (CIAT) in Columbia and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria.
In 1971, at the initiative of Robert McNamara, the President of the World Bank, a Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was formed to finance the network of these international agricultural centres (IARC). Since 1971, nine more IARC’s were added to the CGIAR system. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) was started in Hyderabad in India in 1971.
The International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases (ICRAD) and the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA) were approved in 1973. The Consultative Group had 16 donors, who contributed $20.06 million in 1972. By 1981, the budget had shot up to $157.945 million provided by 40 donors.
The growth of the international institutes was based on the erosion of the decentralised knowledge systems of Third World peasants and Third World research institutes. The centralised control of knowledge and genetic resources was, as mentioned, not achieved without resistance. In Mexico, peasant unions protested against it. Students and professors at Mexico’s National Agricultural College in Chapingo went on strike to demand a programme different from the one that emerged from the American strategy and was more suitable to the small-scale poor farmers and to the diversity of Mexican agriculture.
The International Rice Research Institute was set up in 1960 by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, nine years after the establishment of a premier Indian Institute, the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Cuttack. The Cuttack institute was working on rice research based on indigenous knowledge and genetic resources, a strategy clearly in conflict with the American- controlled strategy of the International Rice Research Institute. Under international pressure, the director of CRRI was removed when he resisted handing over his collection of rice germplasm to IRRI, and when he asked for restraint in the hurried introduction of the HYV (High Yield Varieties) from IRRI.
The Madhya Pradesh government gave a small stipend to the exdirector of CRRI so that he could continue his work at the Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute (MPRRI) at Raipur. On this shoestring budget, he conserved 20,000 indigenous rice varieties in situ in India’s rice bowl in Chattisgarh. Later the MPRRI, which was doing pioneering work in developing a high yielding strategy based on the indigenous knowledge of the Chattisgarh tribals, was also closed down due to pressure from the World Bank (which was linked to IRRI through CGIAR) because MPRRI had reservations about sending its collection of germplasm to IRRI.14
In the Philippines, IRRI seeds were called ‘Seeds of Imperialism’. Robert Onate, president of the Philippines Agricultural Economics and Development Association observed that IRRI practices had created debt and a new dependence on agrichemicals and seeds. ‘This is the Green Revolution connection’, he remarked. ‘New seeds from the CGIAR global crop/seed systems which will depend on the fertilizers, agrichemicals and machineries produced by conglomerates of transnational corporations.’15
Centralism of knowledge was built into the chain of CGIAR‘s from which technology was transferred to second-order national research centres. The diverse knowledge of local cultivators and plant breeders was displaced. Uniformity and vulnerability were built into international research centres run by American and American-trained experts breeding a small set of new varieties that would displace the thousands of locally cultivated plants in the agricultural systems, built up over generations on the basis on knowledge generated over centuries.
Politics was built into the Green Revolution because the technologies created were directed at capital intensive inputs for best endowed farmers in the best endowed areas, and directed away from resource prudent options of the small farmer in resource scarce regions. The science and technology of the Green Revolution excluded poor regions and poor people as well as sustainable options. American advisors gave the slogan of ‘building on the best’. The science of the Green Revolution was thus essentially a political choice.
As Lappe and Collins have stated:
‘Historically, the Green Revolution represented a choice to breed seed varieties that produce high yields under optimum conditions. It was a choice not to start by developing seeds better able to with stand drought or pests. It was a choice not to concentrate first on improving traditional methods of increasing yields, such as mixed cropping. It was a choice not to develop technology that was productive, labour-intensive, and independent of foreign input supply. It was a choice not to concentrate on reinforcing the balanced, traditional diets of grain plus legumes.’16
The crop and varietal diversity of indigenous agriculture was replaced by a narrow genetic base and monocultures. The focus was on internationally traded grains, and a strategy of eliminating mixed and rotational cropping, and diverse varieties by varietal simplicity. While the new varieties reduced diversity, they increased resource use of water, and of chemical inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers.
The strategy of the Green Revolution was aimed at transcending scarcity and creating abundance. Yet it put new demands on scarce renewable resources and generated new demands for non- renewable resources. The Green Revolution technology require heavy investments in fertilizers, pesticides, seed, water and energy. Intensive agriculture generated severe ecological destruction, and created new kinds of scarcity and vulnerability, and new levels of inefficiency in resource use. Instead of transcending the limits put by natural endowments of land and water, the Green Revolution introduced new constraints on agriculture by wasting and destroying land, water resources, and crop diversity. The Green Revolution had been offered as a miracle.
Yet, as Angus Wright has observed:
‘One way in which agricultural research went wrong was precisely in saying and allowing it to be said that some miracle was being produced. . . . Historically, science and technology made their first advances by rejecting the idea of miracles in the natural world. Perhaps it would be best to return to that position.’17
The Green Revolution was promoted as a strategy that would simultaneously create material abundance in agricultural societies and reduce agrarian conflict. The new seeds of the Green Revolution were to be seeds of plenty and were also to be the seeds of a new political economy in Asia.
The Green Revolution was necessarily paradoxical. On the one hand it offered technology as a substitute to both nature and politics, in the creation of abundance and peace. On the other hand, the technology itself demanded more intensive natural resource use along with intensive external inputs and involved a restructuring of the way power was distributed in society. While treating nature and politics as dispensable elements in agricultural transformation, the Green Revolution created major changes in natural ecosystems and agrarian structures. New relationships between science and agriculture defined new links between the state and cultivators, between international interests and local communities, and within the agrarian society.
The Green Revolution was not the only strategy available. There was another strategy for agrarian peace based on reestablishing justice through land reform and the removal of political polarisation which was at the base of political unrest in agrarian societies.
Colonialism had dispossessed peasants throughout the Third World of their entitlements to land and to a full participation in agricultural production. In India, the British introduced the system of ‘Zamindari’ or landlordship, to help divert land from growing food to growing opium and indigo, as well as to extract revenue from the cultivators.
R P Dutt records the sudden increase in agricultural revenues when the East India Company of British soldier-traders took over revenue rights of Bengal:
‘In the last year of administration of the last Indian ruler of Bengal, in 1764-65, the land revenue realized was £817,000. In the first year of the company’s administration, in 1765-66, the land revenue realized in Bengal was £1,470,000. By 1771-2, it was £2,348,000 and by 1775-6, it was £2,818,000. When Lord Cornwallis fixed the permanent settlement in 1793, he fixed £3,400,000.’18
The diversion of increasing amounts of agricultural produce as a source of colonial revenue took its toll in terms of deteriorating conditions of peasants and agricultural production.
According to Bajaj:
‘With more and more money flowing into the British hands the village and the producer were left with precious little to feed themselves and maintain the various village institutions that catered to their needs. According to Dharampal’s estimates, whereas around 1750, for every 1000 units of produce the producer paid 300 as revenue, only 50 of which went out to the central authority, the rest remaining within the village; by 1830, he had to give away 650 units as revenue, 590 of which went straight to the central authority. As a result of this level of revenue collection the cultivators and the villagers both were destroyed.’19
In Mexico, the Spanish instituted the ‘hacienda’ (large estate) owners. After two centuries of colonisation, haciendas dominated the countryside.
They covered 70 million hectares of the land, leaving only 18 million hectares under the control of indigenous communities. According to Esteva, by 1910, around 8,000 ‘haciendas’ were in the hands of a small number of owners, occupying 113 million hectares, with 4,500 managers, 300,000 tenants, and 3,000,000 indentured peons and sharecroppers. An estimated 150,000 ‘Indian’ communal land holders occupied 6 million hectares. Less than 1% of the population owned over 90% of the land and over 90% of the rural population lacked any access to it.20
Between 1910 and 1917, over one million peasants in Mexico had died fighting for land. Between 1934 and 1949, Lazaro Cardenas redistributed 78 million acres and benefited 42% of the entire agricultural population.
Under the new distribution small farmers owned 47% of the land.
As Lappe and Collins report:
‘Social and economic process was being achieved not through dependence on foreign expertise or costly imported agricultural inputs but rather with the abundant, underutilized resources of local peasants. While production increases were seen as important, the goal was to achieve them through helping every peasant to be productive, for only then would the rural majority benefit from the production increases. Freed from the fear of landlords, bosses, and money-lenders, peasants were motivated to produce, knowing that at last they would benefit from their own labor. Power was perceptibly shifting to agrarian reform organizations controlled by those who worked the fields.’21
The result of this gain in political and economic power of the peasants was the erosion of power of the powerful hacienda owners, and the US corporate sector whose investment dropped by about 40% between the mid thirties and early 1940s.
When Cardenas was succeeded by Avila Camacho, a fundamental shift was induced in Mexico’s agricultural policy. It was now to be guided by American control over research and resources for agriculture through the Green Revolution Strategy.
Peasant movements had tried to restructure agrarian relationships through the recovery of land rights. The Green Revolution tried to restructure social relationships by separating issues of agricultural production from issues of justice. Green Revolution politics was primarily a politics of depoliticisation.
According to Anderson and Morrison:
‘The founding of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos in 1960 was the institutional embodiment of the conviction that high quality agricultural research and its technological extensions would increase rice production, ease the food supply situation, spread commercial prosperity in the rural areas, and defuse agrarian radicalism.’22
In the 1950s, the newly independent countries of Asia were faced with rising peasant unrest. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power it had encouraged local peasants’ associations to seize land, cancel debts and redistribute wealth. Peasant movements, inspired by the Chinese experience, flared up in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and India. The new political authorities in these Asian countries had to find a means to control agrarian unrest and stabilize the political situation. This ‘would include defusing the most explosive grievances of the more important elements in the countryside.’23
In India land reforms had been viewed as a political necessity at the time of independence. Most states had initiated land reforms by 1950 in the form of abolition of Zamindari (landlordism), security of tenure for tenant cultivators and fixation of reasonable rents. Ceilings on land holdings were also introduced. In spite of weaknesses in the application of land-reform strategies, they provided relief to the cultivators through the 1950s and 1960s. Aggregate crop output kept increasing during the 1950s in response to the restoration of some just order in land-relations.
A second strategy for agricultural production and agrarian peace was however being worked out internationally, driven by concern at the ‘loss of China’. American agencies like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, US Aid, the World Bank etc. mobilised themselves for a new era of political intervention.
As Anderson and Morrison have observed:
‘Running through all these measures, whether major or minor in their effect, was the concern to stabilize the countryside politically. It was recognised internationally that the peasantry were incipient revolutionaries and if squeezed too hard could be rallied against the new bourgeois-dominated governments in Asia. This recognition led many of the new Asian governments to join the British-Americansponsored Colombo Plan in 1952 which explicitly set out to improve conditions in rural Asia as a means of defusing the Communist appeal. Rural development assisted by foreign capital was prescribed as a means of stabilizing the countryside.’24
In Cleaver’s view:
‘Food was clearly recognised as a political weapon in the efforts to thwart peasant revolution in many places in Asia . . . from its beginning the development of the Green Revolution grains constituted mobilizing science and technology in the service of counter-revolution.’25
Science and politics were thus wedded together in the very inception of the Green Revolution as a strategy for increasing material prosperity and hence defusing agrarian unrest. For the social planners in national governments and international aid agencies, the Science and Technology of the Green Revolution were an integral part of sociopolitical strategy aimed at pacifying the rural areas of developing nations in Asia, not through redistributive justice but through economic growth. And agriculture was to be the source of this new growth. While the Green Revolution was clearly political in reorganising agricultural systems, the concern for political issues such as participation and equity, was consciously by-passed and was replaced by the political concern for stability. Goals of growth had to be separated from goals of political participation.
As David Hopper, then with Rockefeller Foundation wrote in his ‘Strategy for the Conquest of Hunger’:
‘Let me begin my examination of the essentials for payoff by focussing on public policy for agricultural growth. The confusion of goals that has characterized purposive activity for agricultural development in the past cannot persist if hunger is to be overcome. National governments must clearly separate the goal of growth from the goals of social development and political participation. . . . These goals are not necessarily incompatible, but their joint pursuit in unitary action programs is incompatible with development of an effective strategy for abundance. To conquer hunger is a large task. To ensure social equity and opportunity is another large task. Each aim must be held separately and pursued by separate action. Where there are complementarities they should be exploited. But conflict in programme content must be solved quickly at the political level with a full recognition that if the pursuit of production is made subordinate to these aims, the dismal record of the past will not be altered.’26
The record of the achievements of increased production through distributive justice is available in the experience of both Mexico and India in the years prior to the Green Revolution.
Gustava Esteva reports how as a result of the land reforms of the 1930s, the ‘ejidos’ or lands returned to peasant communities accounted for more than half of the total arable land of the country, and by 1940, for 51% of the total agricultural production. The production of the period continuously expanded at an annual rate of 5.2% from 1935 to 1942.
Similarly, Jatindar Bajaj in his study of pre-and post Green Revolution performance shows that the rate of growth of aggregate crop production was higher in the years before the Green Revolution than after it. 1967-68 is the year the Green Revolution was officially launched in India. (Table 1.4) The record of agricultural production before the Green Revolution was clearly not ‘dismal’. Nor has the record of production been miraculous after the introduction of the ‘miracle’ seeds. The usual image that is created to support the image of the ‘miracle’ is that India was transformed from ‘the begging bowl to a bread basket’27 by the Green Revolution and food surpluses put an end to India’s living in a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence. This common belief is based on the impression that foodgrain imports after the Green Revolution substantially declined. In fact, however, food imports have continued to be significant even after the Green Revolution as illustrated in Table 1.5.
A second reason for the Green Revolution being seen as a miracle lies in an ahistorical view of grain trade. The flow of grain from North to South is of recent origin, (Figure 1) before which, grain travelled from the South to the North. India was a major supplier of wheat to Europe until the war years. As Dan Morgan reports,
‘In 1873, with the opening of the Suez Canal, the first wheat arrived from India, after a push by British entrepreneurs to obtain a cheap, secure source of wheat under British control. The British envisaged India as a potentially secure source of wheat for the Empire. Industrial tycoons pushed rail roads and canals into the Indus and Ganges river basins, where farmers had been growing wheat for centuries.’28
According to George Blyn, in the quarter century before World War I, rising per capital output and consumption pervaded all major regions.
‘Most foodgrain crops also expanded at substantial rates, and though much rice and wheat were exported, domestic availability grew at about the same rate as output . . . This early period gives evidence that per capita consumption of agricultural commodities increased over a substantial period of years.’29
In times of crisis and scarcity, the colonial government of course put its revenue needs above those of the survival of the people. On 3 November 1772, a year after the great famine in Bengal that killed about 10 million people, Warren Hastings wrote to the Court of Directors of the East India Company:
‘Notwithstanding the loss of at least one third of the inhabitants of the province, and the consequent decrease of the cultivation the net collection of the year 1771 exceeded even those of 1768 . . . It was naturally to be expected that the diminution of the revenue should have kept an equal pace with the other consequences of so great a calamity. That it did not was owing to its being violently kept up to its former standard.’30
Injustice has been at the root of the worst forms of scarcity throughout human history and injustice and inequality has also been at the root of societal violence. By separating issues of agricultural production from issues of justice, the Green Revolution strategy attempted to diffuse political turmoil. But by-passing the goals of equality and sustainability led to the creation of new inequalities and new scarcities. The Green Revolution strategy for peace had boomeranged. In creating new polarisation, it created new potential for conflict.
As Binswager and Futten noted:
‘It does seem clear, however, that the contribution of the new seed fertilizer technology to food grain production has weakened the potential for revolutionary change in political and economic institutions in rural areas in many countries in Asia and in other parts of the developing world. In spite of widening income differentials, the gains in productivity growth, in those areas where the new seed-fertilizer technology has been effective, have been sufficiently diffused to preserve the vested interests of most classes in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary pattern of rural development.
‘By the mid-1970s, however, the productivity gains that had been achieved during the previous decade were coming more slowly and with greater difficulty in many areas. Perhaps revolutionary changes in rural institutions that the radical critics of the Green Revolution for the past ten years have been predicting will occur as a result of increasing immiserization in the rural areas of many developing countries during the coming decade.’31
Vandana Shiva, 2016 The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics, “Science and Politics in Green Revolution”, University Press of Ketucky
Reference
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2. S Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p30.
3. Vandana Shiva, ‘Reductionist Science as Epistemic Violence’, in A Nandy (ed), Science, Hegemony and Violence, United Nations University, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.
4. Alfred Howard, The Agricultural Testament, London: Oxford University Press, 1940.
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6. M K Gandhi, Food Shortage and Agriculture, Ahmedabad: Najivan Publishing House, 1949, p47.
7. K M Munshi, Towards Land Transformation, Ministry of Food and Agriculture, undated, p145. 8. C Subramaniam, The New Strategy in Agriculture, New Delhi: Vikas, 1979.
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10. E Taboada, quoted by Gustavo Esteva in ‘Beyond the Knowledge/Power Syndrome: The Case of the Green Revolution’, paper presented at UNU/WIDER Seminar, Karachi, January 1989, p19.
11. E Hyam, Soil and Civilisation, London: Thames and Hudson, 1952.
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13. Jack Doyle, op cit, p256.
14. Claude Alvares, ‘The Great Gene Robbery’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 23 March, 1986.
15. B Onate, ‘Why the Green Revolution has failed the small farmers’, paper presented at CAP seminar on Problems and Prospects of Rural Malaysia’, Penang, November 1985.
16. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First, London: Abacus, 1982, p114.
17. Augus Wright, ‘Innocents Abroad: American Agricultual Research in Mexico’, in Wes Jackson, et al (ed), Meeting the Expectations of the Land, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.
18. R P Dutt, quoted in J Bajaj, ‘Green Revolution: A Historical Perspective’, paper presented at CAP/TWN Seminar on ‘The Crisis in Modern Science’, Penang, November 1986, p4.
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20. G Esteva, op cit, p19.
21. Lappe and Collins, op cit, p114.
22. Robert Anderson and Baker Morrison, Science, Politics and the Agricultural Revolution in Asia, Boulder: Westview Press, 1982, p7.
23. Anderson and Morrison, op cit, p5
24. Anderson and Morrison, op cit, p3.
25. Harry Cleaver, ‘Technology as Political Weaponry’, in Anderson, et al, Science, Politics and the Agricultural Revolution in Asia, Boulder: Westview Press, 1982, p269.
26. David Hopper, quoted in Andrew Pearse, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p79.
27. M S Swaminathan, Science and the Conquest of Hunger, Delhi: Concept, 1983, p409.
28. Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain, New York: Viking, 1979, p36.
29. George Blyn, ‘India’s Crop output Trends; Past and Present’, C M Shah, (ed), Agricultural Development of India, Policy and Problems, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1979, p583.
30. Quoted in J Bajaj, op cit, p5.
31. Quoted in Edmund Oasa, ‘The political economy of international agricultural research: a review of the CGIAR’s response to criticisms of the Green Revolution’, in B Gleaser, (ed), The Green Revolution Revisited, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1956, p25.
