You might have heard of the Green Revolution – presented as the pure and disinterested application of plant-breeding science – in the context of it helping countries to dodge catastrophic hunger in the 1960s and 1970s. But the reality is rather different: it was a US imperial strategy that was counter-revolutionary and ecologically disastrous.
The term was first coined in 1968 in a speech by William Gaud, the head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). ‘Developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution,’ he said. ‘It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.’
This was always a capitalist political project at heart. It opposed the land reforms that communists in the Global South had advocated. Instead, the Green Revolution spoke to the fevered Malthusian nightmares that troubled Western policy elites. They believed that populations would inevitably swell and outstrip their food supply. In the 1960s, the foreign policy establishment projected the moment when populations would expand beyond the food supply, and then spiral into starvation and social collapse would arrive in 1985. This biological fear was coupled with a political one: after a fecund proletarian population in the Global South exhausted their food supply, the poor would riot, take to the streets in the capital city and become communist. The Green Revolution – whose supporters included the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations – was a mix of government policy, subsidy, fertilizers, pesticides, hybrid seeds, birth control and philanthropy to ensure that more cheap food would postpone the inevitable communist dawn.