How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 11

what it represents, the value of meaningful landscapes of agriculture (McKibben 2008).
Deep disputes exist as well over implications for the most vulnerable rural people
engaged in agriculture: how do technologies affect income distribution and security?
The so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s generated fault lines across technologies
that reverberate with the politics of the Gene Revolution decades later. Plant breeding
for nitrogen response—widely called the Green Revolution by critics and supporters
alike—required complementary inputs and made great demands on fresh water; it was
variously constructed as necessary to feed the world or as an assault on the world's peas-
ant r y.22 The answer for “ what is to be produced ” was predominately and urgently “more”;
the mechanism was plant breeding for improved yields. International science and finan-
cial flows followed the path of plant breeding for increased global production, largely in
international public-sector institutions. The political imperative for governments was
clear: Regimes that cannot guarantee food supplies have historically proved ephemeral.
One reading of new technologies for agriculture held that the Green Revolution would
aggravate rural inequality; the fear that “the Green Revolution would turn red” was
expressed by politicians and academics alike. The Green Revolution built on the best-
endowed areas and first appealed to the best-endowed farmers. Moreover, environmen-
tal externalities from synthetic-chemical intensive agriculture were potentially harmful
to the rural poor—eutrophication of village ponds meant unsafe drinking water and
fewer fish to eat, for example. More fundamentally, critics charged that the new technol-
ogy packages presaged the demise of peasant society, its cultural moorings and egali-
tarian ethos. These ideas, whether or not true, figured prominently in the building of
political coalitions critical of new agricultural technology at local, national, and global
sites. Alternatives varied in characterization, but largely they focused on agroecological
approaches.23
In a fascinating replay of history, the Gene Revolution reproduces the cleavages and
dynamics of the Green Revolution. Gordon Conway as president of the Rockefeller
Foundation advocated a “doubly-green revolution” to avoid the environmental external-
ities of the Green Revolution while confronting new and urgent production imperatives
(Conway 1998). This revolution would utilize biotechnology alongside improved agro-
ecological knowledge and green practices. Africa became the reference point; bypassed
by the Green Revolution, widespread poverty and poor agricultural performance in
the continent seemed locked in a self-reinforcing spiral of low production leading to
low investment leading to low production. Conway's vision suggested walking on two
legs—agroecological practices and improvement of plant genetics. Opposition to bio-
technology on a global scale—most effective in Africa—posed these two options not as
complementary but as oppositional: One had to choose the agroecological path or the
transgenic.24 Transnational advocacy networks formed around a perception that “tech-
nological fixes” will not work; they will enrich only multinational firms and interna-
tional consultants, with significant risks to the environment and the poor. In response, a
“biotechnology for the poor” literature and policy stance emerged, with a sense of crisis
and urgency similar to that of advocates of the Green Revolution. Although this posi-
tion gained considerable acceptance in international organizations dealing with food,