Harry M. Cleaver Jr., “Contradictions of the Green Revolution,” The American Economic Review 62, no. 1/2 (Mar. 1972), 177-186.

Notes

• 180-181 – “By breeding new grain varieties that give maximum results only on carefully irrigated land, the Rockefeller scientists insured that only limited areas of Third World agriculture would benefit. This was partly due to their concentrating on the best potential lands.”
• 181 – “In all of these countries the Green REvolution is benefiting those regions which are already the most developed and neglecting the poorest and least developed areas.”
• 181-2 – “For those wealthier farmers who can adopt the new grains and afford all the complementary inputs, the change can be a very profitable one. A study by AID shows impressive differentials in average cash profits between traditional and new methods. Viewed together with the higher adoption rate for the entire package by large farmers, the implied greater profit differential suggests that the Green Revolution is resulting in a serious increase in income inequality between different classes of farmers in those areas where it is being adopted.”
• 184 – “the most difficult to foresee but the most potentially devastating of all the contradictions of the Green Revolution are those involving the ecosystem.”
• “Pesticides, which are widely required in heavy doses for the new varieties, are primarily developed in the laboratories of private business. Their efforts to minimize research costs and to reach as wide a market as possible are dictated by capitalist competition. The resultant products are both undertested and designed to kill a broad spectrum of pests. The lack of kill specificity is bad enough in the United States. When transferred to the much more complex tropics, the results can be catastrophic.”
• “The rapid distribution of a few varieties of plant varieties has created the danger of oversimplified ecosystems. The recent southern corn leaf blight in the United States is an example of what may be in store for Green Revolution areas. There were over 50 percent losses in many areas of the Gulf states and a one billion dollar loss to the country as a whole. The vulnerability of the crop was apparently due to the efforts of commercial hybrid breeders to reduce labor costs involved in detasseling corn plants. They used a particular kind of sterility gene which eliminated detasseling, but also conferred susceptibility to the leaf blight.”
• 186 – “For radicals in the developed countries there is at least one lesson. The Green Revolution provides a striking illustration of how imperialist intervention, no matter how well-intentioned, can have far-reaching negative effects on the Third World. The problem of hunger in the capitalist world has rarely been one of absolute food deficits, particularly when the productive capacity of the developed countries is taken into account. It is one of uneven distribution caused by a system that feeds those with money and, unless forced to do otherwise, lets the rest fend for themselves.”