Shiva, Vandana, “Science and Politics in the Green Revolution,” in The Vandana Shiva Reader (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015), 15-39.

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Notes

• 16 – “In its very genesis, the science of the Green Revolution was put forward as a political project for creating a social order based on peace and stability. However, when violence was the outcome of social engineering, the domain of science was artificially insulated from the domain of politics and social processes. The science of the Green Revolution was offered as a ‘miracle’ recipe for prosperity. But when discontent and new scarcities emerged, science was delinked from economic processes.”

 

• “On the one hand, contemporary society perceives itself as a science-based civilization, with science providing both the logic and the propulsion for social transformation. In this aspect science is self-consciously embedded in society. On the other hand, unlike all other forms of social organization and social production, science is placed above society. It cannot be judged, it cannot be questioned, it cannot be evaluated in the public domain.”

 

• “As Harding has observed, ‘Neither God nor tradition is privileged with the same credibility as scientific rationality in modern cultures. . . . The project that science’s sacredness makes taboo is the examination of science in just the ways any other institution or set of social practices can be examined.’”

 

• “While science itself is a product of social forces and has a social agenda determined by those who can mobilize scientific production, in contemporary times scientific activity has been assigned a privileged epistemological position of being sociall and politically neutral. Thus science takes on a dual character. It offers technological fixes for social and political problems it creates.”

 

• 17 – “Within the structure of modern science itself are characteristics that prevent the perception of linkages. Fragmented into narrow disciplines and reductionist categories, scientific knowledge has a blind spot with respect to relational properties and relational impacts. It tends to decontextualize its own context. Through the process of decontextualization, the negative and destructive impacts of science on nature and society are externalized and rendered invisible.”
• “The conventional model of science, technology, and society locates sources of violence in politics and ethics, in the application of science and technology, not in scientific knowledge itself. The assumed dichotomy between values and facts underlying this model implies a dichotomy between the world of values and the world of facts. In this view, sources of violence are located in the world of values, while scientific knowledge inhabits the world of facts.// The fact-value dichotomy is a creation of modern reductionist science which, while being an epistemic response to a particular set of values, posits itself as independent of values. By splitting the world into fact versus values, it conceals the real difference between two kinds of value-laden facts. Modern reductionist science is characterized in the received view as the discovery of the properties and laws of nature in accordance with a ‘scientific’ method that claims to be ‘objective,’ neutral,’ and ‘universal.’ This view of reductionist science as being a description of reality as it is, unprejudiced by value, is being rejected increasingly on historical and philosophical grounds. It has been historically established that all knowledge, including modern scientific knowledge, is built on the use of a plurality of methodologies, and reductionism itself is only one of the scientific options available.”

 

• “The knowledge and power nexus is inherent to the reductionist system because the mechanistic order, as a conceptual framework, was associated with a set of values based on power that was compatible with the needs of commercial capitalism. It generates inequalities and domination by the way knowledge is generated and structured, the way it is legitimized, and by the way in which such knowledge transforms nature and society.”

 

• 19 – “The Green Revolution was based on the assumption that technology is a superior substitute for nature, and hence a means of producing limitless growth, unconstrained by nature’s limits. However, the assumption of nature as a source of scarcity, and technology as a source of abundance, leads to the creation of technologies that produce new scarcities in nature through ecological destruction.”
• 22 – “The need to plan from the bottom, to consider every individual village and sometimes every individual field, was considered essential for the program, called ‘land transformation.’ At this seminar, K. M. Munshi told the state directors of agricultural extension: ‘Study the Life’s Cycle in the village under your charge in both its aspects — hydrological and nutritional. Find out where the cycle has been disturbed and estimate the steps necessary for restoring it. Work out the village in four of its aspects, (1) existing conditions, (2) steps necessary for completing the hydrological cycle, (3) steps necessary to complete the nutritional cycle, and a complete picture of the village when the cycle is restored, and (4) have faith in yourself and the programme. Nothing is too mean and nothing too difficult for the man who believes that the restoration of the life’s cycle is not only essential for freedom and happiness of India but is essential for her very existence.”

 

• “Repairing nature’s cycles and working in partnership with nature’s processes were viewed as central to the indigenous agricultural policy.”

 

• 25 – “Edmundo Taboada, who was the head of the Mexican office of Experiment Stations, maintained, like K. M. Munshi in India, that ecologically and socially appropriate research strategies could evolve only with the active participation of the peasantry. ‘Scientific Research must take into account the men that will apply its results. . . . Perhaps a discovery may be made in the laboratory, a greenhouse or an experimental station, but useful science, a science that can be applied and handled must emerge from the local laboratories of . . . small farmers, ejidatorios and local communities.’”

 

• “Together, peasants and scientists searched for ways to improve the quality of criollo seeds (open-pollinated indigenous varieties) that could be reproduced in peasant fields. However, by 1945, the Special Studies Bureau in the Mexican Agriculture Ministry, funded and administered by the Rockefeller Foundation, had eclipsed the indigenous research strategy and started to export to Mexico the American agricultural revolution. In 1961, the Rockefeller-financed center took the name of CIMMYT (Centro international de mejoramiento de maiz y trigo, or the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center). The American strategy, reivented in Mexico, then came to the entire third world as the ‘Green Revolution.’”

 

• 26 – “The American strategy of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations differed from the indigenous strategies primarily in the lack of respect for nature’s processes andp eople’s knowledge. In mistakenly identifying the sustainable and lasting as backward and primitive, and in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable agricultural practices worldwide.”
• 28 – “The combination of science and politics in creating the Green Revolution goes back to the period in the 1940s when Daniels, the U.S. ambassador to the government of Mexico, and Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States, set up a scientific mission to assist in the development of agricultural technology in Mexico. The Office of Special Studies was set up in Mexico in 1943 within the Agricultural Ministry as a cooperative venture between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government. In 1944, Dr. J. George Harrar, head of the new Mexican research program, and Dr. Frank Hanson, an official of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, invited Norman Borlaug to shift from his classified wartime laboratory job in Dupont to the plant-breeding program in Mexico. By 1954, Borlaug’s ‘miracle seeds’ of dwarf varieties of wheat had been bred. In 1970, Borlaug had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his ‘great contribution towards creating a new world situation with regard to nutrition. . . . The kinds of grain which are the result of Dr. Borlaug’s work speed and economic growth in general in the developing countries.’ This assumed link between the new seeds and abundance, and between abundance and peace, was sought with the goal of replicating it rapidly in other regions of the world, especially Asia.”
• 29 – “In 1971, at the initiative of Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was formed to finance the network of these international agricultural centers (IARC). Later, nine more IARCs were added to the CGIAR system.”
• “The growth of the international institutes was based on the erosion of the decentralized knowledge systems of third world peasants and third world research institutes. The centralized control of knowledge and genetic resources was, as mentioned, not achieved without resistance. In Mexico, peasant unions protested against it. Students and professors at Mexico’s National Agricultural College in Chapingo went on strike to demand a program different from the one that emerged from the American strategy and was more suitable to the small-scale poor farmers and to the diversity of Mexican agriculture.”
• 30 – “In the Philippines, IRRI seeds were called ‘Seeds of Imperialism.’ Burton Onate, president of the Philippines Agricultural Economics and Development Association, observed the IRRI practices had created debt and a new depndence on agrochemical and seeds. ‘This is the Green Revolution connection,’ he remarked. ‘New seeds from the CGIAR global crop/seed systems which will depend on the fertilizers, agrichemicals and machineries produced by conglomerates of transnational corporations.’”
• “Uniformity and vulnerability were built into international research centers run by American and American-trained experts breeding a small set of new varieties that would displace the thousands of locally cultivated plants in the agricultural systems, built up over generations on the basis on knowledge generated over centuries.”
• 31 – “The strategy of the Green Revolution was aimed at transcending scarcity and creating abundance. Yet it put new demands on scarce renewable resources and generated new demands for nonrenewable resources. The Green Revolution technology required heavy investments in fertilizers, pesticides, seed, water, and energy. Intensive agriculture generated severe ecological destruction, created new kinds of scarcity and vulnerability, and resulted in new levels of inefficiency in resource use. Instead of transcending the limits imposed by natural endowments of land and water, the Green Revolution introduced new constraints on agriculture by wasting and destroying land, water resources, and crop diversity. The Green Revolution had been offered as a miracle, yet, as Angus Wright has observed: ‘One way in which agricultural research went wrong was precisely in saying and allowing it to be said that some miracle was being produced. . . .Historically, science and technology made their first advances by rejecting the idea of miracles in the natural world. Perhaps it would be best to return to that position.’”
• 31-2 – “The Green Revolution was necessarily paradoxical. On the one hand, it offered technology as a substitute for both nature and politics in the creation of abundance and peace. On the other hand, the technology itself demanded more intensive natural resource use along with intensive external inputs and involved a restructuring of the way power was distributed in society. While treating nature and politics as dispensable elements in agricultural transformation, the Green Revolution created major changes in natural ecosystems and agrarian structures. New relationships between science and agriculture defined new links between the state and cultivators, between international interests and local communities, and within the agrarian society.”
• 33 – “In Mexico, the Spanish instituted the system of hacienda (large estate) owners. After two centuries of colonization, haciendas dominated the countryside. They covered 70 million hectares of the land, leaving only 18 million hectares under the control of indigenous communities. According to Esteva, by 1910, around 8,000 haciendas were in the hands of a small number of owners, occupying 113 million hectares, with 4,500 managers, 300,000 tenants and 3 million indentured peons and sharecroppers. An estimated 150,000 ‘Indian’ communal landholders occupied 6 million hectares. Less than 1 percent of the population owned over 90 percent of the land, and over 90 percent of the rural population lacked any access to it.”
• 34 – “When Cardenas was succeeded by Avila Camacho, a fundamental shift was induced in Mexico’s agricultural policy. It was now to be guided by American control over research and resources for agricultural through the Green Revolution strategy. Peasant movements had tried to restructure agrarian relationships through the recovery of land rights. The Green Revolution tried to restructure social relationships by separating issues of agricultural production from issues of justice. Green Revolution politics was primarily a politics of depoliticization.”
• 34-5 – “As Anderson and Morrison have observed: ‘Running through all these measures, whether major or minor in their effect, was the concern to stabilize the countryside politically. It was recognised internationally that the peasantry were incipient revolutionaries and if squeezed too hard could be rallied against the new bourgeois-dominated governments in Asia. This recognition led many of the new Asian governments to join the British-American-sponsored Colombo Plan in 1952 which explicitly set out to improve conditions in rural Asia as a means of defusing the Communist appeal. Rural development assisted by foreign capital was prescribed as a means of stabilizing the countryside.’”
• “In Cleaver’s view: ‘Food was clearly recognised as a political weapon in the efforts to thwart peasant revolution in many places in Asia . . . from its beginning the development of the Green Revolution grains constituted mobilizing science and technology in the service of counter-revolution.’”

 

• [By exclusively drawing from the opinions and dictates of governmental and NGO executives, often of the West, isn’t Vandana Shiva reinscribing their importance in the story of agricultural development programs? Most of her evidentiary claims are predicated on the assumption that the word of any one of these executives is a sufficient explicator of their entire office, institution, or program, and by implication, is a sufficient narrator of the story of Cold War agricultural development programs.]