ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at three case studies in quite different contexts: Mexico, the home of the Green Revolution, and India and China two emerging powers which were keen to make a mark on the world stage to challenge what they saw as Western hegemony. In the case of India, the Green Revolution was a policy response to what was widely seen as an existential crisis in the mid-1960s, when agricultural output was unable to meet the demand of a growing population, and the capacity to import food on the scale required was stretched. These three case studies highlight the tension between ‘betting on the strong’ at the expense of the small-scale peasant farmers. In the case of India and Mexico it was the larger peasant farms which had access to irrigation, and the focus was mainly on wheat initially, and only later other crops were included that were grown by poorer farmers.
