Technology and Culture

The so-called Green Revolution (GR) was an agricultural intensification approach based on the development of high-yield varieties of wheat, rice, and maize, and on the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and large-scale irrigation. It made its way from Mexico to India and from the Philippines to sub-Saharan Africa between the 1940s and the 1970s, driven by concerns about the connections between lack [End Page 1237] of food resources, population growth, and political stability, and by the trust in the power of technology to solve social, economic, and political problems. Historical research on the GR has been scarce for a long time, and only in recent years have historians paid more systematic attention to it. Existing histories of the GR have focused on the agronomic and technical knowledge involved; on the connection with U.S. foreign policy in the context of the Cold War; on the role of private enterprise, national governments, and international organizations in promoting the approach; and the ways in which it played out in different countries. What has been missing is a study that offers a synthesis of the GR in its many locations and over the course of time.

This is what this book by R. Douglas Hurt, an American historian of agriculture, does. The Green Revolution in the Global South "analyzes the effects of science, technology, and politics on agricultural improvement and reform" in Latin America, South Asia, East and Southeast Asia, China, and sub-Saharan Africa and evaluates "the different theories between agricultural scientists and social scientists of the benefits of the Green Revolution" (p. 3). Based on primary and secondary English-language literature, the author presents an overview of the key actors and institutions involved, the types of agricultural technologies tried out, and the economic and social effects of the GR in different settings. In that sense, the book can be described as a socioeconomic history of the GR in the so-called Global South. Yet it goes beyond this level by discussing the different interpretations of a range of contemporary scholars on the GR, which gives the book the character of a political history of science and technology.

The dual approach is mirrored in the author's careful weighing of positions and findings. For example, Hurt writes that Indian social scientists in the 1970s sharply criticized the GR as a process that increased existing inequalities among rich farmers and poor peasants and that led to social unrest and violence in India's rural regions. Yet, he contends, by the 1980s it was difficult to question the fact that the approach had increased yields and lowered food prices, and that the socioeconomic effects were less grave than originally assumed. "Landowners had benefited more than agricultural workers, but the latter would have suffered greater economic problems, if not destitution, without the Green Revolution because it provided more labor and income" (p. 59). Hurt suggests that the critique of the GR in India was so strong because the approach had been presented as a universal solution to India's problems: it was supposed to end chronic food shortages, free up rural labor, create employment, respond to population growth, and make India independent from food aid. In other words, the expectations toward a "technological fix" were outsized and necessarily had to be disappointed.

Hurt presents similar findings for the other regions he analyzes. Yields did increase as a result of the GR, yet, as he claims, "Hungry people need more than increased food production. They need access or entitlement to it, and this depends on government pricing, distribution, and labor policies, [End Page 1238] among other factors" (p. 190). Statements like these provide a valuable counterpoint to the often-heard argument that a new GR is needed for the African continent, and that the new technological possibilities that have been developed since need to be applied there. The so-called Gene Revolution, in which the...