Common criticisms against the Green Revolution programs in Mexico include:
- it was initially designed to be successful for farmers with irrigation or who could afford to implement irrigation infrastructure (excluding rain-fed farms, correlates to socioeconomic class)
- it is only successful for farmers who can get access to credit (correlates to socioeconomic class)
- it is only successful for farmers who afford the whole package of inputs, which must be replaced every year (seed, fertilizer, pesticide)
- it is only successful for farmers who are in a position to take on risk (i.e. not subsistence farmers)
- despite the near-infinite divisibility of seed, fertilizer, and pesticides, because of ancillary properties of the technological package, the Green Revolution inordinately advantages economies of scale (accentuates inequality)
these criticisms, when questioning the efficacy of the technoscientific endeavor, constitute a claim to the soft social constructivism of the Green Revolution programs, meaning they don’t detract from the epistemic quality of the HYV’s developed for the Mexican case, or the synthetic input regimes prescribed, they only establish the socially-influenced aspects of the implementation of the program
