The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 140

Green Revolution inputs such as fertilizer were restricted to a privileged rural elite, so
the gains of the new technology were not equitably shared. Agricultural land was made
more valuable by the new seeds, but this backfired on the poor who had previously been
allowed to subsist on land they did not own. They were now pushed off this land by the
landlords to make way for expanded commercial production. Some of the evicted peas-
ants gained limited compensation in the form of seasonal employment as hired cotton
pickers, but otherwise they were forced to move their farming efforts onto lands with
irregular terrain, no access to irrigation, and less fertile soil, or become slum dwellers on
the fringes of the urban economy (Williams 1986). This experience engendered a lasting
hostility toward the Green Revolution among groups on the Left (including Food First)
who saw the world primarily through a Latin American lens.
Asia had a much better experience with the new seeds because access to good land
was less narrowly held (in this regard, Africa is more like Asia than Latin America),
yet Green Revolution critics have even tried to depict Asia's experience with the new
seeds as a social calamity. In 1992, despite growing evidence to the contrary, the celebrity
activist Vandana Shiva published a polemic titled The Violence of the Green Revolution ,
which erroneously depicted the new seeds as a plot by multinational corporations (the
seeds had actually been introduced by philanthropic foundations and governments) to
lure farmers away from growing traditional crops, destroying their culture, and making
them poor and dependent (Shiva 1992). In fact, the new seeds finally ended India's strug-
gle with famine and helped cut rural poverty rates down from 60 percent in the 1960s to
39 percent by 1988 and an estimated 27 percent by 2000 (Deaton and Drèze 2002).
The alternatives to a Green Revolution for Africa offered by the political Left have
both a technical side and an institutional side. Technically, the preference is for agro-
ecology, a farming approach that favors traditional seeds over scientifically developed
seeds, polycultures over monocultures, biological controls for pests rather than chemi-
cal controls, and crop rotations plus manuring rather than using synthetic nitrogen fer-
tilizers. Many also favor organic farming, which eliminates synthetic chemicals entirely.
On the institutional side, the political Left is mistrustful of private companies and pri-
vate markets, so the preference is for something called “food sovereignty,” where small
peasant farmers avoid any dependence on inputs purchased from agribusiness firms
or on the sale of their product into unreliable export markets. The call for food sover-
eignty is not so much a formal school of thinking as it is a social movement, launched in
Belgium in 1992 by organization named La Vía Campesina, now nominally headquar-
tered in Honduras (Tandon 2008).
Widely cited support for this alternative to the Green Revolution can be found in the
2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology
for Development (IAASTD), completed under the auspices of the World Bank and the
United Nations. This assessment, authored by an international assembly of advocates
that included representatives of national governments and NGOs as well as scientists,
concluded that the Green Revolution had brought too many “unintended social and
environmental consequences.” The assessment calls for a greater emphasis on agroeco-
logical approaches and the incorporation of “traditional and local knowledge” (IAASTD