3rd World Congress of Environmental History

The Green Revolution’s Cradle: Mexican Agricultural Program, 1942-1988

• In Event: Agriculture and Science: Histories of the 20th Century

Abstract

The term “Green Revolution” refers to the large-scale, mechanized, mono-cropping, irrigated, and chemical pesticide heavily dependent agricultural methods that spread worldwide in the 1960s. These agricultural innovations are widely recognized by their success to feed millions of people in Asian and African countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The International Rice Research Institute founded in the Philippines in 1960, devoted to the advancement of more effective new agricultural technologies to accelerate the production of stronger rice yields in the same land extension, stands to this day as one of the world’s most important nodes of knowledge in yields’ breeding. The extraordinary labor of its experts, saved numerous poor families in Asia from famine in the late 1960s, making the Institute one of the most remarkable successes of the Green Revolution.
Despite its strong connection with Asia, and later Africa, the Green Revolution was not born there. It may have had its major impacts in Asian and African countries, but Mexico is its cradle. The first agricultural program and techniques were designed in and for Mexico. Before the IRRI, there was the Mexican Agricultural Program, which led to the foundation in Mexico City of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in 1966, and before Norman E. Borlaug, known as the “Father of the Green Revolution”, went to Asia to increase and improve wheat production, he developed and applied those techniques in Mexico since the 1940s.
This paper argues that the Cold War tension that led international organizations and scientists into a race to fight human starvation as a strategy to contend the advancement of communism, did not give enough time to test the Green Revolution’s impacts in Mexico’s fields in the long run, and the exact same Mexican agricultural packages were carried out worldwide regardless their negative outcomes.

Author

• Viridiana Hernandez Fernandez, University of California, Davis