ABSTRACT
One might trace the roots of the Green Revolution to 1941, when the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation established the Centro International de Agriculture Tropical (CIAT) in Columbia and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria, and in 1971 the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). As early as 1954, Rockefeller Foundation scientists and policymakers had envisioned what would become CGIAR. This is the moment when scientists R. E. Evenson and D. Gotlin imagine the origins of the Green Revolution. In the early 1940s, despite the ravages of World War II, these organizations had the lofty goal of ending hunger and poverty in the developing world. In 1968, William S. Gaud, an administrator in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), coined the phrase Green Revolution. This language was carefully chosen. The revolution was green in order to highlight the role of plants and to contrast with red, the color of Soviet communism. In fact, the Green Revolution was born in a geopolitical context.1 As early as 1949, the then U.S. President Harry Truman stated the foreign policy goal of wooing unaligned nations to the United States by helping them produce more food through the application of science to farming. As early as 1969, the U.S. House of Representatives acknowledged that the success of the American-led Green Revolution would head off a Malthusian crisis in the developing world that, if allowed to happen, would destabilize nations and perhaps bring them into the orbit of Soviet or Chinese communism. By helping the developing world feed itself, the United States might win converts and allies among the nonaligned nations of the developing world, strengthening America and potentially weakening communism. These hopes for developments were important at a time when the United States was ghting a war in Vietnam to prevent Southeast Asia from following China into communism. In this context, Ford Foundation policymaker Wolf Ladejinsky, in 1969, dismissed the notion that science could be socially, economically, and politically neutral.2
