The Green Revolution In The Global South

A synthesis of the agricultural history of the Green Revolution The Green Revolution was devised to increase agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Agriculturalists employed anhydrous ammonia and other fertilizing agents, mechanical tilling, hybridized seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and a multitude of other techniques to increase yields and feed a mushrooming human population that would otherwise suffer starvation as the world’s food supply dwindled. In The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, R. Douglas Hurt demonstrates that the Green Revolution did not turn out as neatly as scientists predicted. When its methods and products were imported to places like Indonesia and Nigeria, or even replicated indigenously, the result was a tumultuous impact on a society’s functioning. A range of factors—including cultural practices, ethnic and religious barriers, cost and availability of new technologies, climate, rainfall and aridity, soil quality, the scale of landholdings, political policies and opportunism, the rise of industrial farms, civil unrest, indigenous diseases, and corruption—entered into the Green Revolution calculus, producing a series of unintended consequences that varied from place to place. As the Green Revolution played out over time, these consequences rippled throughout societies, affecting environments, economies, political structures, and countless human lives. Analyzing change over time, almost decade by decade, Hurt shows that the Green Revolution was driven by the state as well as science. Rather than acknowledge the vast problems with the Green Revolution or explore other models, Hurt argues, scientists and political leaders doubled down and repeated the same missteps in the name of humanity and food security. In tracing the permutations of modern science’s impact on international agricultural systems, Hurt documents how, beyond increasing yields, the Green Revolution affected social orders, politics, and lifestyles in every place its methods were applied—usually far more than once.

Rising concerns about agricultural productivity and food security in rapidly changing economic and environmental contexts have led to renewed interest in agricultural development. But the extent to which new policies and programs will enable socially just and environmentally sustainable futures for rural communities remains a matter of intense debate. This book contributes to such debates by critically examining the intersection of agricultural histories, heterogeneous social contexts and new technological developments in rural communities across the Global South. It shows how experiences of the previous Green Revolution can inform new agricultural programs and enable equitable and participatory development in rural places. Through close engagement with rural communities, this book ensures that rural voices become part of the debate on agricultural development and suggests pathways for building on the gains of the Green Revolution without necessarily repeating its problematic social, technological and environmental aspects. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability.

The idea and practice of the ‘green economy’ is gaining momentum, coinciding with financial instability and continued economic woe in the Global North, but generally more positive economic circumstances in the Global South. ‘Green economic initiatives’ in the Global South are multiplying, and include carbon payments, ecotourism, community-based wildlife management, sustainability certification initiatives, and offsets by mining companies exploiting new resources. These initiatives are reallocating resources, redefining inequalities and redistributing the fortune and misfortune of participants of the green economy and those excluded from it. They have also led to resistance – locally, nationally, and transnationally – and to demands for alternatives to market-driven instruments and solutions, which are generally gaining strength and coherence. The articles included in this volume bring together a multi-disciplinary team of scholars from North and South to provide nuanced analyses of green economy experiences in the Global South – analysing the opportunities they provide, but also the redistributions they entail and the kinds of resistances they face. The ultimate aim of the collection is to provide a critical, but balanced, overview of the emerging green economy in the Global South and point the way to possible adjustments, alternatives or radical resistance, depending on different situations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

This volume examines the dominant neoliberal agenda for agricultural development and hunger alleviation in Africa. The text reviews the history of African agricultural and food security policy in the post-colonial period, across a range of geographical contexts, in order to contextualise the productionist approach embedded in the much heralded New Green Revolution for Africa. This strategy, supported by a range of international agencies, promotes the use of hybrid seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides to boost crop production. This approach is underpinned by a new and unprecedented level of public–private partnerships as donors actively work to promote the private sector and build links between African farmers, input suppliers, agro-dealers, agro-processors, and retailers. On the consumer end, increased supermarket penetration into poorer neighbourhoods is proffered as a solution to urban food insecurity. The chapters in this volume complicate understandings of this new approach and raise serious questions about its effectiveness as a strategy for increasing food production and alleviating poverty across the continent. This book is based on a special issue of African Geographical Review.

This book, which is the result of an intellectual odyssey, began as an attempt to explore and map the environmental and cross-cultural dimensions of the continuing spread of the green revolution-that package of high-yielding varieties of grain, fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides that constitutes the core of modern industrial agriculture. In the process of traversing the terrain of several intellectual traditions and cutting through various disciplinary forests and thickets, a number of striking observations were made-all leading to two sober ing conclusions. First, most intellectual maps dealing with agriculture fail to recognize it as the basic interface between human societies and their environment. Because of this, they are little better than the "flat earth" maps of earlier centuries in helping to understand global realities. Second, when agriculture is analyzed from a global perspec tive that takes evolution seriously, one sees that the ecological risks as well as the energy and social costs of modern industrial agriculture make it largely inappropriate for developing countries. Beyond that, one can see a great need within industrialized countries to develop less costly, less risky, and more sustainable agricultural alternatives. Early in the journey it became clear that conventional disciplinary approaches were inadequate to comprehend the scope and diversity of global agriculture and that a new multilevel approach was needed. It also became clear that any new approach would have to try to correct certain Western biases and blind spots.

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past--and future--of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.

This collection critically engages the resource use nexus. Clearly, a nexus-approach to resource policy, planning and practice is essential if sustainable development goals are to be met. In particular, in an era of climate change, an integrated approach to water, energy and agriculture is imperative. Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water withdrawals, food production accounts for 30% of global energy use and a rising global population requires more of everything. As shown in this collection, scholars of resource development, governance and management are ‘nexus sensitive’, utilizing a sort of ‘nexus sensibility’ in their work as it focuses on the needs of people particularly, but not only, in the global South. Importantly, a nexus-approach presents academics and practitioners with a discursive space in which to shape policy through research, to deepen and improve understandings of the interconnections and impacts of particular types of resource use, and to critically reflect on actions taken in the name of the ‘nexus’.

1. The argument in outline