by Noel Kingsbury
Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago Press
Published by The University of Chicago Press

From Chapter 12

GREEN REVOLUTION – can plant breeding feed the world?

Just as the world of politics has reformists and revolutionaries, so does the world of agricultural development – there are those involved in the business who believe that problems can be solved through the constant self-correcting mechanism of science and the market, and those who reject the entire system.

Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins, of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, an NGO based in California have been at the forefront of a radical critique of food and development policy since the 1970s. Lappé wrote Diet for a small planet in 1971 – it was very influential at the time, introducing a radical critique of global food issues, as well introducing many readers to the idea of a vegetarian or reduced-meat diet in order to make the world’s limited supply of agricultural land go further. It also included some very good recipes – the author still makes their poppyseed cake regularly, some thirty years later. In 1977, with Joseph Collins, he produced another very influential book, Food first: beyond the myth of scarcity.

The Green Revolution, they say, “was a choice not to start developing seeds better able to stand drought or pests. not to concentrate first on improving traditional methods of increasing yields, such as mixed cropping…not to concentrate on reinforcing the balanced, traditional diets of grain plus legumes”. There is a reluctance to believe that the Green Revolution actually fed more people, and predictions of famine in the future as disease sweeps genetically uniform crops or some other disaster strikes. No one since the 1970s can deny that the Green Revolution has produced more food, but radical critics argue that simply relying on producing more food will not solve world hunger. This will only happen when unjust social, economic and political structures are changed. Food they say, is “plentiful”, as do many others in the global justice movement, indeed “there is enough food in the world” has become something of a mantra; the problem they believe lies in unjust social systems that stop it being equitably distributed. HYVs tend to be referred to sarcastically as “miracle seeds” (with the inverted commas), and the role of plant breeding is implicitly denied. There is no denying that social justice would indeed help to feed more people, but what is distinctive about the arguments advanced here is that there seems to be an unnecessary ‘either/or’ inserted into the analysis, as if social justice on its own would make scientific advance unnecessary, and that scientific plant breeding is not needed. Many would go further and argue that scientific plant breeding is part of a plot for world domination by US capitalism.

Indian activist Vandana Shiva belongs to this camp. The Green Revolution, she argues is part of a sociopolitical strategy aimed at “pacifying” the poor “not through redistributive justice but through economic growth”, and at ensuring dependency on the west and on multinational corporations. Despite having started her career in science (nuclear physics), Shiva is now very anti-science, speaking of “the exaggerated sense of modern science’s power to control nature and society”. Asian agricultural systems had nothing to learn from outside, she argues, quoting Sir Alfred Howard (1873-1947), “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”. Any vegetation ecologist will of course now tell you that there is nothing primeval or unchanging about any of these environments.

Who was Sir Alfred Howard? He was an Imperial British agriculture expert who worked in India from 1905 to 1924, who became a convert to traditional farming technology, believing that it could not be improved upon; he went home to become an early campaigner for organic agriculture. What was he doing in India? He, and his first wife Gabrielle were breeding new wheat varieties. Unlike most of the wives of British imperial civil servants whose work was almost entirely taken up with organizing large teams of servants, Gabrielle Howard spent a great deal of time doing the intricate work of cross-breeding wheats, working under a parasol “to the astonishment of the ladies of the Station, who prophesied either a complete breakdown in household arrangements or at least sunstroke from so many hours spent in the field”. The Howards had taken the decision to use native Indian wheats as much as possible; they sifted through landraces to isolate pure lines and cross-bred to improve yields and rust resistance, coming up with some fifty varieties, all including ‘Pusa’ in the name. The new wheats made a huge impact on Indian agriculture and were widely used for breeding elsewhere. The message for today is that a belief in the worth of traditional agricultural systems can go hand in hand with scientific plant breeding. Sadly this message seems to have been lost on Vandana Shiva and almost the entire alternative agriculture movement.

In her 1991 book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, Shiva maintains that the Green Revolution set off a spiral of social conflict. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of landholdings in Punjab state fell by around 25%, as a result of poorer farmers leaving the land, often, according to Shiva, because they were unable to afford the higher costs of inputs needed by the new crops. She goes on to claim that increasing indebtedness in Punjab during the early 1980s led to agitation by farmers over the costs of agricultural inputs, which contributed to the destabilization of the state by Sikh separatists, culminating in the attack by the Indian army on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984, and the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. She tries to blame the Green Revolution for more or less everything that went wrong in Punjab during this time: alcoholism, smoking, drug-addiction, pornography, violence against women. In particular she sees the Green Revolution as a “cultural strategy” replacing “traditional peasant values of co-operation with competition, of prudent living with conspicuous consumption, of soil and crop husbandry with the calculus of subsidies, profits and remunerative prices”.

Shiva’s critique of the Green Revolution centers on two main issues: what she argues is the replacement of diversity of crops with uniformity, and on the substitution of the internal resources of the farm with inputs which have to be bought in: fertilizers, pesticides, seeds etc. In the case of the latter, she is putting forward an argument which has been a constant in the alternative agriculture movement, that of self-sufficiency. Her argument is very much that traditional societies managed very well through their self-sufficiency and recycling of nutrients, and that entry into the market place inevitably brings with it social and ecological disintegration. The seed in particular becomes the focus of her discourse, and that of many others in the this movement, as the repository of deep symbolism; indeed it becomes a quasi-spiritual entity. In particular it becomes a block to the introduction of market economics to the world of the farm, for the seed (at least in the case of grains and pulses) is not just the end-result of one’s labors – an item of food, but also the means to start the next year’s crop; it is both present sustenance and future crop.

The fact that traditional farmers can save their seed and start again next season presents a clear block to the interests of commercial seed suppliers. ‘The seed” explains Shiva, “has therefore to be transformed materially if a market for seed has to be created… modern plant breeding is primarily an attempt to remove this biological obstacle to the market in seed”. The marketing of F1 hybrid seed which has to be sown every year clearly gives private sector seed producers an open door, yet Shiva appears to object to any ‘corporate seed’ which puts control over seed and breeding beyond the control of farmers themselves, even if it is open-pollinated.

By effectively forcing farmers to become part of the marketplace: by buying seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, even water, from outside the village, the Green Revolution, so its radical critics allege, breaks open the tight and self-contained world of the traditional village and integrates its inhabitants into a global world where everything is a commodity. The implication of the critics is that this is by its very nature, a bad thing. Those who argue for science-led development are entitled to ask, how is agriculture meant to progress, in order to feed millions more hungry mouths, in particular those increasing millions who are moving to the cities? Radical critics of the Green Revolution such as Shiva tend to ignore the fact that many, indeed most, traditional societies were far more integrated into extensive market-based systems than is often supposed, and that many traditional societies were extremely rigid, offering a life of poverty and ceaseless hard work for the vast majority; it is for this reason that many of those millions are leaving the country for the city – they want the possibility of freedom from centuries of class- and ethnically-based repression, the chance to be part of a labor market which offers minimal options rather than none at all, and the opportunity to better themselves and their families through education and entrepreneurial activity. Interestingly, critics such as Shiva rarely discuss the deeply oppressive nature of many traditional societies - instead the traditional village becomes an idealized golden age. Any mention of India’s own ‘peculiar institution’ - caste, is strangely absent from Shiva’s discourse.