Nearly 50 years since its apex, the Green Revolution (GR) – a chapter in history associated with rapid expansion in agricultural production and yields driven by science and technology – retains the power to inspire. Notwithstanding criticism emphasising its harmful social and environmental legacy, there are talks about unleashing a greener GR and many African countries aspire to a GR that turns their agricultural sectors into the engine of growth and prosperity.
This research looks at the GRs of three agricultural giants of the global South: Brazil, China and India. It analyses and contrasts these countries’ agricultural science and technology history over the last 50-60 years and interrogates how their GRs are framed (and contested) today, both domestically and in these countries’ cooperation and business relations abroad. The project therefore explores the interaction between past, present and future in the three countries’ agricultural trajectories. The notion of ‘epic narrative’ is used to refer to the narration of the past in ways that invoke heroic achievements at times of pressing social and political concerns – being that of ending famines and safeguarding food security or that of strengthening national sovereignty and expanding the state’s control over the territory. Variants of the epic permeate the three countries’ agricultural history and have been deployed in their relations with other countries in the global South, in Africa particularly. So what role do these epic narratives play?
When have these past experiences become crystallised as epic transformations and why? How do they, as invocations of the past, incorporate change in agricultural science and technology, and the context more generally, that have taken place over the years?
The research will offer a new perspective on the history of the GR that puts the focus on the domestic techno-politics of the three countries and how these play out abroad. Besides its contribution to the scholarly debate on the topic, it also engages with policy debates on South-South cooperation and on alternative agricultural development pathways, including the types of technology (and ways of generating it) that can help deliver sustainable development.
Project journal articles
Listen to Lidia Cabral’s keynote presentation on Green Revolutions at the IX conference of the Brazilian Rede de Estudos Rurais (in Portuguese – minute 41 onwards)
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