The Green Revolution, Plant Breeding, and Wide Adaptation: Marci Baranski's <i>The Globalization of Wheat</i>

The Green Revolution is at the center of the histories of twentieth-century technology, agriculture, and economic development in the Third World. Given the lack of a similarly evocative phrase in the historiography of agricultural change in the rich world, the Green Revolution is central to our picture of twentieth-century agricultural technology more generally. In its simplest form, the story goes that many poor countries faced a Malthusian disaster in the late twentieth century—a disaster that was mitigated by a spectacular growth in foodgrain yields caused by the adoption of new seeds developed by plant breeders of the Rockefeller Foundation.As Nick Cullather commented in The Hungry World (2010), social scientists have produced enough analyses of the Green Revolution to fill a medium-sized public library, but as I've previously noted, historical treatments are still scant.1 In the Indian case, which usually serves as the exemplar, works have sought to situate the Green Revolution in the politics of US technical aid during the Cold War: hungry stomachs made for communist insurrection. Thus, both biologist-historian John Perkin's pioneering Geopolitics and the Green Revolution (1997) and Nick Cullather's Hungry World have the phrase “Cold War” in their subtitles.Challenges to the standard narrative of the Green Revolution have argued that higher production has not resulted in reduced malnutrition,2 emphasized the environmental consequences of intensive agriculture,3 and highlighted the inequality engendered by agricultural modernization.4 The Cold War context and the mid-1960s as a technological inflection point have also been deemphasized.5But it is less well recognized that the Green Revolution was a failure even when measured by the terms set for it by its proponents: that is, higher foodgrain production. While Vandana Shiva's much-referenced work The Violence of the Green Revolution (1991) made the same observation three decades ago, such is the hold of the standard popular narrative that this point must still be forcefully made and is only now becoming widely accepted and analyzed in detail.6 Essentially, any production boom was confined to wheat, which contributed a mere 14 percent of India's foodgrain production in 1964–65 (ranking third in importance after rice and jowar), but wheat is too often taken to stand for Third World agriculture as a whole. The standard narrative ascribes this boom to high-yielding varieties of seeds (the so-called miracle seeds) on which the historiography maintains a near-exclusive focus. My own recent work has decentered plant breeding and argued instead that irrigation from groundwater pumps was the key wellspring of productivity. Thus, the most central element of standard accounts of the Green Revolution—which also serves as the key triumphalist success story of plant breeding—stands discredited, prompting a rethink of both celebratory and condemnatory accounts of the Green Revolution.7Marci Baranski's The Globalization of Wheat generously acknowledges these challenges even as she produces a novel history of plant breeding. She centers her iconoclasm on Norman Borlaug, who, as she writes in the opening paragraphs, she (like many others) once idolized. Baranski specifically centers the book on the concept of wide adaptation, which she argues was key to Borlaug's work. Wide adaptation is the idea that new varieties developed under one set of conditions can thrive under a wide range of environmental and input conditions. In Baranski's telling, until the 1960s, conventional wisdom held that crop selection should be conducted in the target environment to create varieties specifically adapted to local conditions. From 1959 onward, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the FAO, Borlaug sent seeds for testing to hundreds of locations. The results seemingly implied that he could directly transfer seeds rather than just knowledge of breeding, and in 1965 Borlaug made a case for the moral imperative of wide adaptation, given its potential for rapid results in regions where the food problem was one of particular urgency. His efforts to center wide adaptation were aided by Rockefeller Foundation cereal breeder Charles Krull and Australian wheat breeder Keith Finlay. Through a process that Baranski likens to Thomas Hughes's “technological momentum,” wide adaptation became central to wheat breeding at the Rockefeller Foundation, within the Indian agricultural research system, and at international institutions such as CIMMYT, to the detriment of resource-poor farmers.This book will prove to be an eye-opener to the community of international agricultural development professionals to which it is directed, and historians will find much food for thought in this close critical study of plant breeding as well. The key message, while at least as old as James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998), bears repetition: development models created in one region (flawed even for that region to begin with) cannot in toto be applied elsewhere, and “one size fits all” (encapsulated in the very concept of wide adaptation) is a terrible approach to agricultural development. However, while opening the “black box” of wide adaptation, as Baranski seeks to do, she fails to center certain key questions. To what extent did scientists and others actually lay store by wide adaptation? What “nonscientific” ends could the concept be employed toward? And what was the precise nature of its impact on agricultural modernization?In Baranski's own telling, Borlaug himself consistently emphasized that his seeds only be tested in irrigated and high-fertility conditions. In Krull's words, “While there is interest in many countries in producing varieties that do not require fertilizer or water, there is no such group of varieties” (41). In India the introduction of new seed varieties was debated not just by politicians and economists but also by scientists, led by the recognition that the high-yielding varieties could only perform in a high-input environment. Even the Indian agriculture minister, C. Subramaniam, had to admit that without irrigation, one could not “just throw the seeds and fertilizer and ask the farmer to produce.”8Thus the argument that scientists and others took wide adaptation seriously is questionable, starting with the case of Borlaug himself. Why then did the concept assume such centrality in agricultural development? To the extent that it did, it may have done so by rhetorically muddying the waters and helping to soften opposition to the far-reaching changes that were being made to agricultural policy. As Baranski notes, the key object of the plant breeders was not so much to produce seeds widely adapted to a range of input conditions but to force a shift to high-input agriculture. As Krull put it, “The important thing in changing the production pattern in a country is to introduce varieties that will respond to good management and then change the management” (41).There is no doubt that during the 1960s and afterward, wheat breeding in India shifted to what may be called a Borlaugian mode. But the central feature of this strategy was an emphasis on catering to resource-rich farmers in regions favored by irrigation, rather than the belief in wide adaptation centered by Baranski. Indeed, the policy of confining efforts (and seeds) to resource-rich environments represented an implicit disbelief in the doctrine of wide adaptation. Opposition to the New Agricultural Strategy of the 1960s similarly rejected the doctrine of wide adaptation in being driven by the recognition that it made for a shift to an expensive high-input agriculture and to an agricultural policy that concentrated resources on a select few regions, thus abandoning both the Nehruvian industry-first development strategy and the ideal of equitable agricultural development. In debates about the strategy, while the halo of recent innovation over the new seeds played a very general role in providing the Subramaniam with a claim to having found a “scientific formula[,] a calculated plan for increased production,” no serious claim to wide adaptation was made.9 In any case, even by Baranski's account, in just a decade, by the late 1970s, Indian scientists had a large volume of published evidence putting paid to the concept of wide adaptation.Plant breeding in India may well have not served the interests of resource-poor farmers. But Baranski's stinging critique is let down by the centrality she accords to wheat, failing to recognize that most resource-poor farmers were simply not in the business of wheat production and that consequently, any development efforts disproportionately focused on wheat may in themselves be seen as a betrayal of poor farmers. Her study of post–Green Revolution programs, which attempted to serve a wider range of conditions, focuses on finding references to wheat therein, rather than recognizing that any success at serving the poor would necessitate a shift in focus away from wheat. In centralizing wheat, Baranski's account remains within the standard narrative of the Green Revolution even as she critiques it.In the case of wheat itself, given the disproportionate concentration of wheat production in resource-rich northwestern India, an initial focus there was, despite Baranski's critique, perhaps not entirely unwarranted if wheat were at all to be the focus. Other regions have seen gains in subsequent years; today it is Madhya Pradesh in central India that is the second-largest wheat-producing state, while in the largest producer, Uttar Pradesh, much of the production no longer comes from the western districts that were the heartland of the 1960s Green Revolution. Baranski's critique of Indian agricultural research and development is let down by her failure to fully acknowledge that agricultural modernization cannot be reduced to plant breeding alone or even to scientific research alone. Gains beyond (and indeed within) northwestern India have come not merely (or even largely) through plant breeding but through what US Agency for International Development administrator William Gaud—who coined the term “Green Revolution”—called the “complicated business of development,” which included irrigation infrastructure, extension infrastructure, and changes in agronomic practices.10An important insight in Baranski's book is the hint of discord between state (provincial) and national-level institutions. Given that most histories of the Green Revolution are written from a US perspective, sparsely enriched with national-level Indian sources, her conjecture could make for a beginning toward provincial histories of postwar agricultural change that can enable an understanding of local socioeconomic-political-environmental dynamics and shed new light on the workings of India's federal system. Agriculture is a provincial responsibility under the Indian constitution, after all.Gaud's phrase “Green Revolution” referred to a new development model rather than standing as a retrospective judgment. It has nevertheless been used by historians and others to refer to a production boom that never was, with an uncritical acceptance of boosters’ claims that this was due to recently developed seed varieties (“innovation”). The term's continuing immense purchase must not be underestimated. During the two-year-long protests over the new farm liberalization laws brought about by the Modi government in India, both proponents and opponents made arguments that centered the Green Revolution.11 The term has an even stronger grip on the international development community, with a Gates Foundation–backed Association for a Green Revolution in Africa, talk of a doubly Green Revolution, of an “evergreen” revolution as well as an official government program called Bringing the Green Revolution to Eastern India.12It is now crucial to see the term Green Revolution as an actor's category rather than as a historical event, and to study it as such. There was indeed a larger process of agricultural modernization including expanded irrigation and fertilizer use, a shift toward wheat and away from other foodgrains, and an emphasis on producing a marketable surplus through commercialization. Indeed, some argue that even the motive of policy change was not to increase production but to induce a commercialization of agriculture.13 While much beyond Baranski's excellent book remains to be written about plant breeding, any new seed-centric histories must recognize Cullather's point that technology was used as a way to avoid historical responsibility and democratic choice.14