…a food praxis intelligence pamphlet
Published January 2007, for Insurgent American
By Stan Goff
This 44-page pamphlet is available to anyone who can use it, with the request that the source (author and url) is cited. Food and Finance is an examination of the history of finance capital since WWII and how it is connected to the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture to increase the power of transnational capital and deepen the dependency of everyone from the third world peasant to the residents of US suburbs.
(You’ll find a link to a pdf of the pamphlet in the Analysis section.)
Robert Biel, author of The New Imperialism - Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations, writes:
About the Green Revolution, it’s quite interesting because since I wrote about it in my book I’ve started doing some farming on an allotment, so I can probably have a slightly more practical understanding of some of these issues. It seems to me the fundamental thing in US policy was social engineering. From a propaganda point of view it was supposed to demonstrate that hunger could be abolished without radical social change. Hence it would appeal to existing third-world elites, but it was also aiming to create a new elite, i.e., a middle stratum who would be beholden to US policy. The hidden agenda was to control the South through controlling food. One way this could be done was by the US exporting its own ’surplus’ food (the ‘food as a weapon’ strategy referred to by Kissinger), replacing traditional staple crops with wheat. The Green Revolution was complementary to this, in that it encouraged food to be produced in situ, so the problem was to ensure that it didn’t slip out of US control. The solution was [a] to market hybrid seeds which don’t reproduce true to type so that it’s impossible to save seed from one year to the next and you have to keep importing it [b] to produce strains which demand heavy use of machinery, fertiliser and pesticide, which the US can supply. The less obvious aspect which I think I’m understanding better now is the ‘dominating knowledge’ aspect. The traditional farmer gets a buzz out of experimenting, and I think this must be an innate human trait. Traditional systems keep alive a diversity of different strains of genetic material, so if faced with an unexpected challenge they can in a sense ‘breed their way out of trouble’.
My colleague who’s researching among pastoralists in East Africa has observed how, when faced with a threat of cattle-rustling, they managed to breed, in a very short period of time, a type of cow which is faithful to its owner but extremely savage towards strangers, and if by chance someone manages to rustle it, it will simply walk back to its original owner at the first opportunity! This encapsulates the traditional grassroots approach. Perhaps the most reactionary task of the Green Revolution was to undermine this autonomous popular command over the development of knowledge, and to replace it with dependence; and of course to replace a low-input organic agriculture with a high-input one which is unsustainable in the long term. On the other hand, the good news is that, although the direct link with tradition is hard to reconstitute, if the hypothesis is correct that love of experimentation is an inherent human trait, it will become resurgent whenever conditions permit. Thus Cuba, having been forced to do without inputs previously supplied by the USSR, has regenerated its agriculture in a remarkable way.
-Robert Biel
January 2, 2007
Posted by stan in Analysis