A Global Green Revolution: Semidwarf Genes from Asia, Agrónomos, and the Environmental Laboratory of Mexico, 1953-1970

Abstract

In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and Mexican government collaborated in the creation of the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) to boost the production of hybrid corn and wheat in Mexico. The MAP utilized a top down strategy in which it sought to provide largescale, affluent farmers with new seed technology to boost staple crop production intended for urban consumers that underpinned industrialization, principally in the middle- and upper-classes. The MAP’s wheat program served as the model for the Green Revolution in the Global South beginning in the 1960s, and policymakers and philanthropists continue to evoke it today as a successful effort to combat rural poverty despite mixed results. During the Green Revolution, farmers produced millions more tons of food using semidwarf wheat seed technology which possessed short, stiff straw that allowed farmers to transcend the biological constraints of conventional wheat. In particular, this wheat prevented a problem called lodging which meant farmers could now apply massive amounts of inorganic fertilizers, the byproduct of natural gas and oil production, to wheat fields. While the historiography of the Green Revolution credits the U.S. and RF with this innovation, the semidwarf characteristic derived from a Korean wheat seed technology that underwent protracted testing in Japan in the early twentieth century. Moreover, agrónomos, Mexican agricultural scientists, also played a prominent role in the MAP’s wheat breeding program which gave rise to the Green Revolution. In particular, the treatment of Mexico as an environmental laboratory gave rise to an innovative practice called shuttle breeding which revealed unique characteristics in wheat and allowed MAP scientists to produce universal wheat. Mexico’s environmental diversity meant a wheat that could grow widely in Mexico was easily adaptable around the world, especially the Global South.