It is often said that we need to move from financing industrial agriculture to financing agroecology and thus promote food sovereignty. While it is true that we need resources and strengthen agroecology, the idea that it is enough to move money, or guide institutions in another direction, is not as simple as it seems. We learned this several decades ago and the hard way.
“We cannot depend on those who created our unequal food system to improve it”
Corinna Hawkes and others, the lancetjuly 2022
the first battles
Since its consolidation in the 1960s and 1970s in different parts of the world, the Green Revolution has encountered strong resistance from peasants, local communities and civil society in general.
For those who don’t know, the “Green Revolution” was an initiative of the American foundations Ford and Rockefeller, which decided to allocate the wealth of both families, accumulated in the automobile industry (Ford) and oil (Standard Oil), to increase agricultural productivity in what is now known as the global South. At that time, the intention was to “fill hungry stomachs” to prevent the spread of communism, mainly in Asia and Latin America. Hence the name green revolution as opposed to the red revolution.
The “adventure”, as its founders called it, began in the Philippines with the creation of the International Rice Research Institute and continued in Mexico with the International Maize and Wheat Research Institute.
In 1971, the foundations transferred responsibility to the World Bank, which agreed to host an international secretariat for what had become a network of 16 international agricultural research centers, each closely connected with their counterparts at the national level, in order to reach maximum range.
In essence, these centers were plant breeding laboratories, and as they began to function, they replaced the incredible biodiversity and cultural wealth and knowledge that gave rise to wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes, with extremely standardized crops called high-yield.
To grow well, the new seeds, as farmers would learn over time, required a package of chemical fertilizers, irrigation and pesticides. They were promoted through government grants and conditional credit mechanisms (no loans unless you use the right seeds), and for the rising international seed corporations they marked the beginning of their new role as seed sellers – hybrids. first, GM later. this new captive clientele.
In the 2000s, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, fell in love with this initiative and went on to directly fund several international research centers, as well as similar projects, for example, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
In some places, this strategy increased grain production, but at the cost of enormous damage. It has wiped out biodiversity and people’s knowledge of it, destroyed soils, poisoned water sources, brought health problems to many communities due to agrochemicals and monoculture diets, and indebted farmers.
Despite this, 70 years later, factory farming is still being promoted as the answer to feeding the world. It is not surprising, then, that there is a strong counter-movement, coming both from the grassroots and from allies in the NGO community. Today, this counter-movement has unified itself around the promotion of “agroecology” as an antidote to the “industrial food system”. The words and the context have changed, but it’s still the same battle as when we fought the original Green Revolution.
a troubling dilemma
What worries us today is the tendency, on the part of these movements and their allies, to want to take advantage of the same money and those responsible for creating the problem, as a platform for the search for a solution. We often hear these people claim that the task is not just to stop funding industrial agriculture (the current equivalent of the Green Revolution), but to put these funds “instead” at the service of agroecology or smallholder farmers.
The same is happening in the climate debate, where many campaigns call for mobilizing funds (through debt cancellation, carbon emission taxes, reparations or as an obligation under the Paris Agreement) and earmarking them for renewable energy “instead of de” to fossil fuels.
While it is true that funding is needed to get many initiatives off the ground, this form of binary thinking (as if simply pushing a button) can end up depoliticizing the issue and thus turning it into a trap. Money, like technology, is not neutral. Neither do the actors who own it, promote it, or simply deliver it. In particular, institutions are anything but neutral.
If you look at the World Bank, Goldman Sachs or BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller or IFAD, the French, Japanese or British government, the money they move responds to a certain objective, that is, it is fundamentally political. You can’t just tweak a program, move money in a different direction, and believe that things are “okay” now. It is not how it works.
We learned this a long time ago, fighting alongside our allies against the “original” research institutes of the Green Revolution and their sponsors. To destroy biodiversity through the massive propagation of uniform seeds, these research centers built seed banks. However, these banks brought huge problems. They were centralized; they tried to freeze live seeds and put them out of reach of farmers, as they were created primarily to serve scientists.
Banks were seen as a slap in the face to communities where the seeds were taken (without their consent or knowledge). We argue that the only way to truly conserve diversity, in a scientifically sound and politically just way, is with people in their farming communities, on their land, and under their own control. After many years of struggle, the Green Revolution institutes seemed to agree on this.
However, “farm conservation”, as they called it, allowed them to raise funds, set up a few programs (which they didn’t know a bit about) and then claim that they were fulfilling the “conservation” objective. It was never more than a drop of water in the sea. But it gave them more money, more power and a new legitimacy, because they now accepted criticism and lived up to social demands.
Many similarities that we see in this story compared to other scenarios and other actors. The result? In our experience, it was just a waste of time. So we learned that you can’t take a bad actor, steer him in a new direction, or give him a new goal and expect him to get it right. Although institutions and people change, they are also deeply rooted in their origins, their roots and their history, and these things do not go away.
The danger of depoliticization
The logic of changing goals is also potentially dangerous, as it can divert attention from the real source of the problem: capitalism and the inequality it generates. Instead of confronting power and really changing its origins and workings, we just move some money in a different direction, almost as if money is the solution itself.
Many argue that we cannot simply “go against” the forces that drive industrial agriculture (from pension funds to patent laws). They say we also have to promote a proactive program, whether it’s agroecological research or farmers’ rights. We agree with the latter, but we believe we should do both. We will never be able to promote the right agenda unless we address the source of the problem.
It could be argued that large foundations like Rockefeller or Gates, agribusiness giants like Nestlé, Syngenta or Cargill and development banks like FMO in the Netherlands or Proparco in France should not exist. The great concentration of power and wealth that all this represents, because of capitalism, colonialism and racial injustice, is exactly what we need to get rid of. This means not adding an agroecological agenda to their large operations, or putting some of their funds into the smallholder circuit.
When challenging the industrial food system, as we do with climate change, we need to make sure we get to the source of the problem, not work around it, or worse, with it.