The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1996 by Rachna Sachasinh Boone

In this collection of essays activist Vandana Shiva addresses the impact of Green Revolution policies on ecology, agriculture, politics, and social relations in the Third World, particularly the indian state of Punjab. Within this broad critique, Dr. Shiva categorizes the rising political and religious tensions and domestic violence in the Punjab as direct consequences of Green Revolution policies.

Shiva elucidates the multinationol companies' attempts to lure farmers away from growing traditional food crops to supplying exotics for the palates of the international elite. She also charts the country's development of immense dam projects designed to serve the mighty thirst of Bourlag's miracle seeds. India's wholehearted adaption of the Green Revolution's twin offspring, monoculture and multicropping, demanded intensive irrigation systems that eventually replaced natural drainage patterns, triggered disastrous waterlogging, and exacerbated interstate water conflicts.

Shiva argues that the Green Revolution and burgeoning trends in biotechnology are steps toward the recolonization of the Third World.

The Green Revolution was necessarily paradoxical. On the one hand it offered technology as a substitute to both nature and politics, in the creation of abundance and peace. On the other hand, the technology itself demanded more intensive natural resource use along with intensive external inputs and involved a restructuring of the way power was distributed in society. While treating nature and politics as dispensable elements in agricultural transformation, the Green Revolution created major changes in natural ecosystems and agrarian structures. New relationships between science and agriculture defined new links between the state and cultivators, between international interests and local communities, and within the agrarian society.

Punjab is the most advanced example of the disruption of links between the soil and society. The Green Revolution strategy integrated Third World farmers into the global markets of fertilizers, pesticides and seeds, and disintegrated their organic links with their soils and communities. The progressive farmer of Punjab became the farmer who could most rapidly forget the ways of the soil and learn the ways of the market. One outcome of this was violence to the soil resulting in water logged or salinated deserts, diseased soils and pest-infested monocultures. Another outcome was violence in the community, especially to women and children. Commercialization linked with cultural disintegration created new forms of addictions and new forms of abuse and aggression.