The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences by R. Douglas Hurt

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences by R. Douglas Hurt Jonathan E. Robins The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences. By r. douglas hurt. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020. 280 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2051-5. $49.95 (hardcover). R. Douglas Hurt's The Green Revolution in the Global South is an ambitious attempt to evaluate long-running controversies over the planning, deployment, and impacts of Green Revolution technologies in the second half of the twentieth century. Arranged geographically, with chapters on Latin America (mostly Mexico), South Asia (mostly India), East and Southeast Asia, China, and sub-Saharan Africa, the book follows the Green Revolution from the 1950s into the 2000s. A final chapter on the "gene revolution" rounds out the study. Hurt describes the book as "a highly selective effort to synthesize the literature and trace the acceptance or rejection of the Green Revolution over time" (p. 4). Each chapter pits agricultural scientists, who delivered high-yielding varieties and related technical inputs to food-deficit states, against their critics. The latter are described as no more than that, occasionally with adjectives like "social scientist" or "Marxian" attached. The book defines success in terms set by agricultural scientists: did total food production increase or not? Readers will find a complicated, and at times confusing, picture. The Green Revolution was a success in Mexico, but by the mid-1970s it was a failure (p. 27). In China, famine was "no longer a possibility" after Green Revolution technologies were implemented, yet "food security . . . had not been achieved" (pp. 111–112). Critics of Green Revolution policies in South Asia allegedly "did not understand the difference between biotechnology, which is scale neutral . . . and the economy of scale associated with mechanization," (p. 65) yet only a few pages earlier we read that biotechnologies were too costly for most farmers (p. 52). This back-and-forth is, in part, an artifact of the linear chronology and attempt at comprehensive coverage found in each chapter. Hurt disavows modernization theory in the introduction, but the analysis that follows reproduces its key claims: that farmers in fooddeficit countries were tradition-bound and backward; that rural markets were underdeveloped or nonexistent; and, particular to the Green Revolution, that technology was scale-neutral, available to anyone willing to learn and work. The book frames social dislocation as an "unexpected outcome" of the Green Revolution, but it was exactly what modernization theorists predicted. High-producing commercial [End Page 725] farms would displace peasants, pushing "unproductive" labor to other sectors. Hurt contends that agricultural scientists "never believed that they had responsibility for creating a more equitable world," as if agriculture existed in a social vacuum (p. 183). In India, for example, Hurt argues that "most critics failed to realize that class and gender historically determined the social and economic problems of the subcontinent and not Green Revolution science" (pp. 51–52). Yet, Green Revolution technologies worked within historic class, caste, and gender contexts, and technologies often intensified inequitable outcomes, including hunger. This was exactly what the critics were writing about. Hurt resorts to "ideology" to explain much of their analysis, even while pointing to the importance of land reform in Green Revolution success stories, and in documenting the negative social and environmental impacts of Green Revolution policies. Each chapter surveys contemporary agricultural and social science publications, and relies heavily on a few recent books. These include excellent titles like Sigrid Schmalzer's Red Revolution, Green Revolution (2016), but also nonspecialist books like Martin Meredith's Fate of Africa (2005). There are fewer references to the growing body of recent articles and dissertations on the Green Revolution and its antecedents. These studies demonstrate that "traditional" agriculture was not timeless, but responded to market pressures, colonialism, and other forces. Focused solely on cereal crops, the book has no room to address cash crops like cotton, which were vitally important in peasant decisions about food crops. And as recent studies—and Hurt—show, peasants often rejected Green Revolution crops for sensible reasons: they were too thirsty for rainfed regions, produced poorly without costly fertilizers, had unacceptable flavors, or were outproduced in...