WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 82

duction costs. To realize the promise of Green Revolution technology, farmers didn't just have to pur-
chase new seeds; they also needed to install modern irrigation equipment, apply heavy doses of synthet-
ic fertilizers, and control pests with chemicals.
Paying these costs required continual access to credit. And in the Mexican countryside, that meant
only larger farmers with disposable wealth and close ties to private banks or government bureaucrats
could grow Green Revolution wheat over the long haul. Smaller farmers without access to subsidized
credit could try, but this meant turning to rapacious moneylenders. So, as much as it increased productiv-
ity, the Green Revolution also reinforced rural inequality, creating a new class of wealthy U.S-style
industrial farmers, coddled with subsidies, and masses of peasants who couldn't compete in the debt-
driven race. Worse still, the new mechanized and chemically dependent commercial farms required less
labor—meaning fewer jobs and lower wages for rural workers, and these changes impacted women dis-
proportionately. The few jobs created by the spread of Green Revolution technologies—driving tractors
or working with irrigation equipment—tended to be seen as “men's work,” while traditional hand labor
that women counted on for income shrank. As was the case in many countries adopting the new agri-
cultural model, declines in women's incomes had devastating consequences for family nutrition, health,
and opportunities. 59 Taken as a whole, Mexico's efforts to facilitate industrialization and urbanization
with Green Revolution seeds and U.S.-style farms resulted in what Harvard-trained biologist turned so-
cial scientist John H. Perkins called a “tragic irony”: increased hunger in the presence of rapidly growing
agricultural productivity. 60
During the 1950s and 1960s, peasants and landless workers, displaced from the countryside by these
forces, streamed into the cities faster than even the country's record economic expansion could create
new urban jobs. Mexican industrial policies bear some of the blame for this—they tended to favor more
glamorous heavy industries over labor-intensive production, even though the former generated fewer
jobs—but the U.S.-style approach to agricultural development exacerbated the problem. The glut of rur-
al refugees—a classic army of surplus labor—kept wages low in cities, despite record increases in in-
dustrial productivity. This stymied the creation of a large, self-sustaining society of middle-class con-
sumers. 61
Recognizing the tragic bias of its past efforts, the MAP initiated a new project in 1970—the Plan
Puebla—targeting small-scale peasant corn producers. 62 It had some success, but by that point the as-
sociation between large-scale industrial agriculture, progress, and national security was too deeply en-
grained to turn back.
THE PROBLEM WITH MORE FOOD
In India, where the Mexican Green Revolution model was exported first, the results were even more am-
biguous. Indeed, the Punjab region—considered a “success story” of South Asian agricultural develop-
ment—has emerged as the ultimate case study in the failings of a productivity-focused approach to rural
poverty. There, Green Revolution wheat programs helped food supplies increase at double the rate of
population growth. Yet, as even one pro-Green Revolution scholar acknowledged soberly, “There may
have been no improvement at all in human nutrition, in the proportion of poor people, or in the average
severity of their poverty.” Ardent Green Revolution critic Vandana Shiva put it more bluntly: the intro-
duction of new agricultural technologies in Punjab, she argued, displaced farmers, created intractable
rural unemployment, increased the proportion of people living in poverty, and sparked violent conflicts
over resources. 63
By the 1970s, knowledge of the Green Revolution's negative effect on rural equality and its failure to
alleviate poverty had become widespread, thanks in large part to work done around the world by the Un-