Post #4309978

update on WIP industrial ag mega-zine: i'm so deep in the weeds on the green revolution that i'm reading about the agrarian development model of C. Subramaniam, India's Food and Ag Minister from 1964-66: "Subramaniam's agrarian model can be divided up in three components: the economic, the technological and the organizational. The economic component consisted in the view that price incentives would motivate farmers to produce more since it would be profitable to do so. Technology was required since acreage expansion had reached its limits, making production increases dependent on yields per acre. And organizational effort was needed because in order for the first two components to work, institutions had to be created for determining what the level of prices should be and how to implement them. Also necessary was a research and administrative structure that would generate or adapt appropriate, yield-increasing technologies and transmit them to farmers." this is from a paper called "Ideas, Interest and Institutions in Policy Change: Transformation of India's Agricultural Strategy in the Mid-1960s" by Ashutosh Varshney, published in 1989. this paper argues that it wasn't the technology of the green revolution per se that led to increased agricultural yields in india starting in the late 60s, but the state's reorientation of its agricultural policy to the goal of improving yields via technology and to the use of price policies to shape agriculture (over previous strategies which were more oriented around redistribution of land and creation of farmer co-ops). i gotta say, as someone who gets interested in the complexities of how societies change, the green revolution is a fascinating (if exhausting) subject to research. the scholarship is bottomless, and i'm still only focused on india. the green revolution was different in every country that experienced it. anyway, people say one is "in the weeds" as if one is lost, but most weeds i know need one to get down on the ground and pull them up by their roots if one wants to really get at the problem. so that's what i'm doing: really trying to understand. while i'm researching, i'm thinking about what information i'll present in the zine and how it will be organized. currently, i'm thinking it might be interesting to have a spread that contrasts elements of the "standard story of the green revolution" with the actual complexities of each of those elements. examples of the elements of the standard story are claims like "there was famine in india before the green revolution", "india's agriculture before the green revolution was backward", "the green revolution increased agricultural yields", "the green revolution solved hunger in india", and "the US developed the improved wheat and rice varieties that were central to the green revolution in order to address global hunger." each one of those is an extremely complicated question with loads of scholarship that continues to this day. instead of trying to "prove/disprove" each claim, i think that instead i'll try to point to information that complicates the story to the point where the reader understands that the simplistic story is simply inadequate. we'll see. (addendum: further elements of the "standard" green revolution story include less-obvious assumptions like "the government of india was bumbling and just sitting on its hands while its agriculture stayed stagnant" (extremely untrue - members of the government were extremely sophisticated actors who took their country's agricultural situation extremely seriously, and who had in fact already increased yields significantly since partition), and "america foisted the agricultural revolution on india" (also somewhat untrue - although the government *was* influenced by the west, it was very interested in the western agricultural program. it's possible to say that the system was foisted on india's farmers, but not on the government). other elements of the "standard" story: "indian agriculture was unchanged for centuries", and "indian peasants didn't know how to farm." anyway, i really want to challenge the major theme of the standard story, which is that "the poor, backwards indians were saved by the generous and technologically-advanced west.") #research #GreenRevolution #agriculture #history #wip