Agro-technological Revolutions in Latin America        

Courtesy of Pablo Lapegna and Johana Kunin. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/the-impact-of-soybeans-in-argentina-and-beyond-a-double-edged-sword/

When we speak about a revolution in agriculture in Latin American history, most scholars rightly think of peasant revolts, land tenure struggles or commodification of crops, to name a few of the most salient themes. While these are indeed core historical (and current) issues that allow us to understand Latin America’s past and its present, there are other —lesser discussed yet —equally important revolutions in the countryside.

I am thinking here specifically of advances in agrotechnology that altered not just the molecular structure of crops by using designer seeds but also the push to normalize the current (excessive) use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. These agro-scientific advances did not favor small-plot, subsistence scale farmers, which describes the majority of the world’s farmers, but rather commercial agriculture that used vast tracts of land. Thus, the embrace of so-called modern or “science-driven” agriculture—which since the last century has defined farming in Latin America from the Mexican border to the Argentinian pampas —helped to directly transform land-tenure systems across Latin America.

This preference for technology-driven, highly mechanized farms shifted subsidies and agrarian reform legislation away from small-plot farmers and their style of farming. By the 1940s, the type of farming that was typical in, say, most of Mexico —diversified crops on small plots, subsidized by the government, mostly subsistence with any excess going to the market—was redefined as “backward” and “inefficient.” At the core was the mistaken belief that more yields meant better farming. So, how to increase these yields? Through scientific agriculture and an embrace of technology.

This mid-20th-century quest to increase crop yields, most often for export, by forsaking traditional farming methods is directly linked to worsened soil conditions and water-shortages today—as well as the rupture of the countryside’s social fabric. Despite this, we seldom think of scientific advances in crop science as the root of many of the problems with Latin American agriculture today. More compellingly, the current crop production model that emerged in the 1960s in Latin America was later exported to the rest of the world. Put differently, current farming techniques introduced to Latin America as “development aid,” were perfected in the region and then exported to the rest of the world.

Yet this style of farming, though reminiscent of earlier eras, is not 19th-century monocropping. How did crops designed for optimum growth under artificially controlled conditions of massive monocropping (think, for example, of the current sea of soybean fields that have overtaken fields in Brazil and Argentina) come to define Latin American agriculture in the 21st century? To answer this, we need to turn to two twin concerns of the mid-20th century: overpopulation and hunger.

The mid-20th century marked the height of both the Cold War and the era of development projects destined to “modernize” Latin America with external formulas for progress. In this context, agriculture became a singular concern of funding agencies. For many global institutions the world’s population was at a tipping point. As evidence of this problem, many agencies zeroed in on the apparent increase in famines crisscrossing various continents. As organizations such as the World Bank argued, hunger would destabilize an already ideologically divided world. The concern with hunger was tied to a Malthusian fear that the world was already overpopulated and incapable of feeding itself. Thus, philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation shifted their focus away from earlier mandates to instead invest in researching agriculture. The clear goal was to apply science to the fields with the aim of producing more food to avoid the specter of hunger.

It was with this clear directive that the Rockefeller Foundation entered into a 1943 agreement with the Mexican government. In exchange for providing experimental land, the foundation would bring funds to redesign the countryside through the use of hybrid seeds designed to withstand common diseases while also producing larger “miraculous” yields.  To achieve storied yields that often doubled and tripled traditional crop outputs, chemical fertilizer was strongly recommended. As was irrigation. Seeds designed in the mid-20th century responded wonderfully to both fertilizer and capital-intensive irrigation —not rain-fed conditions as had long been the practice for the majority of farmers. At that point in time, agriculture was redefined as another branch of labor that could be, if not fully mechanized, then mechanized enough to make it feel like another industry. To fully industrialize agriculture uniformity was vital. So seeds were designed to ensure that, for example, wheat, traditionally a tall and slender crop, would instead be stout and closer to the ground and crucially the same height across the field, giving machines the ability to quickly harvest it.

So it was a revolution—but not a peasant revolution—that transformed farming. What came to be known as the Green Revolution —fertilizer, insecticide, hybrid seeds and irrigation—was a new way of thinking about land, water resources and crops. It was a revolution in the sense that it was about industrializing the countryside to a degree that had not been done before.

The promise was that science would be able to transform society in a way that social movements and calls for social change had been incapable of doing. “Development” (or progress) came to mean an embrace of science-driven commercial (as opposed to traditional ejidos, or small-plot communal) farming.  This embrace translated to decreasing subsidies to ejidos while increasing subsidies to commercial farmers and their products meant for international markets.

In a 1940s technified world, progress was no longer defined as land redistribution and communal landholding which in Mexico had, mere decades earlier in the 1910s, fought for in a bloody revolution. So to speak about agriculture in Latin America we must speak about how technology changed farming practices which in turn altered the type of crops and the type of farmer who could afford to farm them.

Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. She is finishing a book on the impact of the Green Revolution in Mexico and India. 

gsotolaveaga@fas.harvard.edu