Yves here. This short but very important post by Jomo explains how the Green Revolution wound up weakening food security even as it increased output.
A key reason is that this effort was initially government-led. It then over time came to be operated by international Big Ag, which pushed Green Revolution techniques beyond the point of maximum advantage to participating nations (this will include the US but with presumed less dire consequences than for poor nations).
Keep in mind that neoliberalism prizes efficiency over everything else. Safety is not efficient. It requires setting up reserves as well as other break points that impede shocks from propagating quickly through what would otherwise be over-optimized system. The world is about to get a disastrous lesson of the cost of blind fetishization of eliminating pro-survival protections that inherently also create friction and costs.
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and Kuhaneetha Bai Kalaicelvan, and Nurina Malek, an economics graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is currently working on policy research at the Khazanah Research Institute, and Professor Felice Noelle Rodriguez, Director of the Centre for Local History and Culture, Universidad de Zamboanga, Philippines. Originally published at Jomo’s website
Transnational agribusinesses increasingly shape food policies worldwide. Claiming to best address recent food security concerns, they seek to profit more from innovations in food production, processing, and distribution.
Post-War Food Security
Food policies in the Global South have evolved significantly since World War Two (WWII), especially after nations in Asia and Africa gained independence, often after experiencing wartime food deprivations.
The early post-WWII and post-colonial eras saw new emphases on food security, especially following severe food shortages before, during, and after the war.
Many starved as millions experienced acute malnutrition. The wartime Bengal faminein India claimed over three million lives as Churchill prioritised British imperial interests and military priorities.
After WWII, colonial powers weaponised food supplies for counterinsurgency and population control purposes, especially to overcome popular anti-imperialist resistance.
Many who died were not military casualties but victims of deliberate counter-insurgency food deprivation. Unsurprisingly, food security efforts became a popular policy priority after WWII.
Western-controlled research organisations, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), became highly influential, shaping and even developing post-colonial food security policies.
Green Revolution
Public research institutions were established in developing countries, many of which are affiliated with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The Green Revolution initially focused on increasing yields of wheat, maize, and rice. These efforts increased cereal production unevenly during the 1960s and 1970s.
Malthusian logic held that rising life expectancies meant population growth outstripped the increase in food supply, constrained by limited agricultural land.
As government funding from wealthy nations declined, powerful corporate interests and philanthropies became even more influential. They often promoted their own interests at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was established in the 1970s, channelling a small share of windfall petroleum incomes into food and agricultural development.
Soon after, the US transformed its Public Law (PL) 480 program into the World Food Programme (WFP). Thus, some FAO functions were ceded to donor-controlled UN funds and programmes also set up in Rome.
Embarrassingly, an FAO report found WFP food supplies were withheld from Somalia to avoid being taken by the ‘Islamist’ As-Shabaab militia. Chatham House also estimated two to three hundred thousand deaths as a consequence.
Neoliberalism
The counter-revolution against national development efforts in the 1980s undermined government fiscal capacities, import-substituting industrialisation, and food security efforts.
Neoliberal structural adjustment policies involving economic liberalisation were imposed on heavily indebted developing countries, mainly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Global North promoted trade liberalisation, undermining earlier protection of and support for food and industrial production.
Powerful food conglomerates sponsored and promoted import-friendly food security indicators, undermining FAO and other civil society research and advocacy efforts.
Countries hardly producing any food were highly ranked, as civil society organisations tried to counter with their own indicators, mainly focused on food sovereignty.
Trump 2.0
A new phase has begun with Donald Trump’s re-election as US president.
Trump 2.0’s weaponisation of economic policies and agreements, including food supplies, has ominous implications for countries trying to assert some independence.
Economic and military threats have been used for diverse ends, including economic, political, and other ‘strategic’ goals. Tariffs and sanctions are now part of a diverse arsenal of such weapons deployed for various purposes.
Governments have even been threatened with tariffs and sanctions for personal reasons. Trump has demanded Brazilian ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s freedom following his failed coup after losing the last presidential election.
Deploying such economic weapons has worsened the deepening worldwide economic stagflation, as various Trump economic and military policy threats exacerbate contractionary and inflationary pressures.
The US-controlled WFP was long used to provide food aid selectively. But there is little sympathy left in Washington for other nations’ food security concerns.
To cut federal government spending, Trump has ended official development and humanitarian assistance, including food aid, while the US remains the world’s leading food exporter.
Nevertheless, Trump may take unexpected new steps to boost farmers’ earnings to recover electoral support before the November mid-term election.
Weaponisation of food aid took an ominous turn during the Israeli siege of Gaza, by calibrating food access to enable selective ethnic cleansing.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation attracted hungry residents to its food centres, causing hungry families desperately seeking food to be shot while seeking food.
Poverty is primarily defined by inadequate access to food, while the FAO considers income the main determinant of food insecurity.
Although World Bank poverty measures have generally continued to decline, FAO indicators suggest a reversal of earlier progress in food security over the last decade.
These contradictory trends not only reflect problems in estimating and understanding poverty and food security but also suggest that resulting policies are poorly informed, if not worse.
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There is also Monsanto with its transgenic seeds where the sterile non replaceable seeds trap farmers in a cycle of dependence for seed. That’s one of the major reasons why India banned them.
Clarence Thomas was a Monsanto lawyer and never recused himself when he ruled in their favor at the Supreme Court.
Monsanto with its transgenic seeds where the sterile non replaceable seeds trap farmers in a cycle of dependence for seed.
That’s not even real.
While Monsanto developed terminator seeds (genetic use restriction technology) that produce sterile second-generation seeds to prevent replanting, the company pledged not to commercialize them since 1999, relying instead on legal patent enforcement for its primary transgenic products
“These contradictory trends not only reflect problems in estimating and understanding poverty and food security but also suggest that resulting policies are poorly informed, if not worse.”
Poorly informed AND worse.
Then from the opening:
“Keep in mind that neoliberalism prizes efficiency over everything else. Safety is not efficient. It requires setting up reserves as well as other break points that impede shocks from propagating quickly through what would otherwise be over-optimized system…”
And my mind wanders to another connection:
What else does neoliberalism love?
Selling insurance. And isn’t profit over payout the name of that game?
the answer, of course, is to decentralise ag(and energy production).
let a billion farmers bloom, and support them in doing pretty much what ive managed to do…but in my case, against all odds, and while confronting poverty, various and sundry existential crises, and a system that is set against me to such an extent that i am relegated to black market produce sales on the side of the highway.
enable a billion me’s, and we wont have these problems.
bury Big AG deep in a hole, somewhere, and spend all that welfare money on people like me, instead.
if Cuba could do it,lol…
the biggest obstacles to me finishing my Great Work are capital and labor.
and by capital, i aint talking millions…im talking maybe 20k, tops.
and by labor, i aint talking an hundred slaves, but a half dozen true believers who want to live like this.
this is not about markets or reality, this is about the ideology of control…hydraulic despotism.
control the food supply and production, concentrate it in as few hands as possible, and you control the population. usa, that beacon of freedom and light, has been doing exliactly that for 80 years, using commodity crops as a weapon. thats where big ag comes from
i mean, investigate where the shit you eat comes from…and who controls it. its a shitshow of conglomerates.
vertically and horizontally integrated.
the big boys have hoovered up everything, and they have no real competition, any mores.
monopoly and monopsony is the name of the game…and welfare checks, writ large, from fedgov.
Big Ag are the true “welfare Queens”, except that we aint allowed to talk about that.
a true greater depression, and a collapse of pretty much all of the various and sundry machinations that keep this whole thing going…is the only way that i can see that would amend this stupid and predictable situation.
and that seems to be where trump is leading us,lol.
so, a thin raft of hopium.
Norman Borlaug.
Back in the daze when I wuz groveling before philanthropies for world food system PBS series support (we only got development dough, then Cargill weighed in), his name was uttered in posh offices of NGO/foundation meeting rooms with reverence. FFS, he got a NOBEL.
And shoved Africa back a century or two in self sufficiency.
Poet, novelist and screenwriter Jim Harrison often quoted his late father, a humble Michigan State Ag Extension Agent: “….foundations are funded by stolen wages.”
Missing from this otherwise excellent expose is the role played by the US to block land reform in post colonial states “because communism” and to force those same countries to accept importation of subsidized US agricultural staples and promote production of non-staple crops for export to the developed West in order to pay for those imports — simultaneously creating food dependency in those states and profit opportunities for US capital on the import side. Michael Hudson is good on this topic in his The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60979483-the-destiny-of-civilization?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_20