In the early 1940s, Mexico was a fraught region for U.S. geopolitical
strategists. Not so long before—1939—a revolutionary government had
nationalized the Mexican oil supply, dealing a sharp blow to U.S. oil
interests, especially the Rockefeller family’s dominant Standard Oil.
Meanwhile, as war raged in Europe, there was doubt about which side the
Mexican government would take—the Allies or the Axis. What if Mexico
chose to supply the Germans with oil?
Into that tense milieu, the Rockefeller family’s foundation dispatched
a team of agricultural scientists into the Mexican countryside on a
mission of goodwill: to bring Mexican farmers the seed varieties,
knowledge, and inputs necessary to “modernize” crop production.
As the University of Texas economist Harry Cleaver put it in a 1972
paper in
American Economic Review, “The friendly
gesture of a development project would not only help soften rising
nationalism but might also help hang onto wartime friends.”
One of the junior scientists on that mission would become the best
known, eventually netting a Nobel Peace Prize for his work: Norman
Borlaug, who died Sunday at the age of 95.
Borlaug is widely hailed as the father of the Green Revolution—the
grand effort, which started in Mexican wheat and corn fields in the
1940s, to bring industrial agriculture to the global South.
There’s no evidence that Borlaug thought much about geopolitics during
his career as a plant pathologist and evangelist for industrial
agriculture. In their book
Enough—largely a Borlaug hagiography—the
Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman portray him
as a man almost innocent of politics: He started out with a narrow
scientific interest in wheat rust and a desire to “secure a steady job
where he could work outdoors”; by the ‘60s and for the rest of his long
life, he wanted merely to “do what was best for the hungry,” the
authors write.
Thoughts on the Legacy of Norman Borlaug
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By Tom Philpott
Grist Magazine, Sept 14, 2009
Straight to the Source
