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Article ID: CBB990001613

Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow: Octavio Paz, Indian Farmers, and the Challenge of Narrating the Green Revolution (2021)

Laveaga, Gabriela Soto (Author)

Agricultural History
Volume: 95
Issue: 4
Pages: 576-608
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2021.095.4.576

DOI: 10.3098/ah.2021.095.4.576

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Hybrid seeds Economic development Development aid Green revolution 20th century, late Mexico India

Known as “Mexican seeds,” the high-yielding wheat seeds that helped launch the Green Revolution performed a seemingly impossible act: they explicitly referenced Mexico yet at the same time shed themselves of any affiliation with Mexican expertise and domestic science. Ironically, when Mexican seeds arrived in India, they were divested of association with national agrarian reform programs and instead became a stand-in for capitalist development and the transformative American promise of technology. Indeed, the story of the arrival of high-yielding variety (HYV) Mexican seeds to India has often become a tale not of a nation’s agro-technological prowess but rather of a singular man, Norman Borlaug, and his outsized role in mid-twentieth-century agricultural practices. In this article I argue that including relegated figures, such as 1960s diplomats and Mexican agronomists in South Asia, in the account of those transferring agricultural knowledge reveals a more nuanced understanding of “development” aid and calls into question the early hunger narratives that came to define the way we tell histories of the Green Revolution today.

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