WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 81

of a small village outside Mexico City, noted that less than a third of townspeople ate bread in 1940. By
1950, according to Lewis, that had changed completely: almost everyone ate bread regularly. 56
THE MEXICAN MIRACLE?
As pan Bimbo spread throughout Mexico and the country's first (and only) wheat-export freighters set
sail for distant lands in the early 1960s, so too did the Rockefeller-Mexico model. Heralding it as the
template for successful agricultural development, U.S. government agencies, foreign governments, the
United Nations, and nonprofit organizations such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations worked to
replicate Mexico's plant research program from India to Algeria. Following similar lines of government-
private sector collaboration, researchers also turned their sights on other staples: rice in Asia, potatoes
in the Andes, millet in Africa.
Thanks to improved seeds and modern input packages, world per capita food supplies climbed stead-
ily in the postwar decades. In the United States, fears that the world was about to run out of food still
enjoyed considerable popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, appearing everywhere from apocalyptic
Hollywood movies to best-selling nonfiction, but these Malthusian nightmares never came true. Recog-
nizing the scale of this achievement, in 1970, the Nobel committee awarded Norman Borlaug its Peace
Prize. “More than any other single person of this age,” the prize's citation read, Norman Borlaug “has
helped to provide bread for a hungry world.” 57
Humanitarian causes aside, policy makers in the United States credited the Green Revolution with
staving off Red Revolution around the world, and Mexican officials saw it as a stepping-stone to even
grander things. For them, rural-development programs held the key to dreams of rapid industrializa-
tion. 58 Regardless of its effects on the countryside, Green Revolution wheat would ensure steady flows
of cheap food into the country's cities. Since Mexico's growing urban industrial workforce still spent
the majority of its wages on food, these flows would, in effect, subsidize factory owners, keeping labor
costs low without provoking political unrest. Not having to import wheat would also free up currency
that could be channeled to pay for even more direct industry subsidies.
In many ways the Mexican government's gambit worked. Orthodox economists today ridicule Mex-
ican policies of that era, reveling in their inefficiencies and heavy-handed state interventions, but Mex-
ican officials had grasped something important that mainstream U.S. economists often forget: no coun-
try in history had ever industrialized through laissez-faire and free trade. Active state intervention was
necessary to achieve the promises of modernization. And despite their inefficiencies and limits, the gov-
ernment's cheap food policies, promotion of basic education, investment in infrastructure, and extensive
trade protections did, in fact, usher in Mexico's most explosive period of economic growth. Automo-
bile, steel, and electronics factories rose up in what had been a largely rural country. Modern highways,
electrical grids, and ports connected its far-flung corners, and Mexicans could, increasingly, buy their
own appliances instead of importing them. But the Mexican Miracle had an Achilles' heel: the peasant
countryside.
Every member of the U.S. MAP team had been formed in American land grant universities and spent
time in the USDA, bastions of industrial agriculture. The scientists brought with them a strong cultur-
al bias toward large-scale projects, and they also faced stiff pressure from the Mexican government to
produce dramatic results quickly. As a result, the MAP, and its descendants, often ignored the mandate
to improve the lives of peasant corn farmers, focusing attention on the country's few large commercial
wheat farms. Rather than design technologies accessible to poor farmers, they pushed packages of ex-
pensive inputs. And they got exactly the results you would expect: a water-, machinery-, and chemical-
intensive Green Revolution package capable of out-of-this-world yields—with out-of-this-world pro-