IsisCB Explore

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

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

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.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB990001613

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Gabriela Soto Laveaga; (2020)
The socialist origins of the Green Revolution: Pandurang Khankhoje and domestic ‘technical assistance’ (/p/isis/citation/CBB758194610/)

Article Benjamin Siegel; (2020)
The Kibbutz and the Ashram: Sarvodaya Agriculture, Israeli Aid, and the Global Imaginaries of Indian Development (/p/isis/citation/CBB542794844/)

Article Helen Anne Curry; (2023)
Diversifying Description: Sweet Potato Science and International Agricultural Research after the Green Revolution (/p/isis/citation/CBB369452091/)

Book Joshua Eisenman; (2018)
Red China's Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune (/p/isis/citation/CBB393548124/)

Book Marci Baranski; (2019)
Globalizing Wheat: Success and Failure of the Green Revolution (/p/isis/citation/CBB650890415/)

Article Vincent Lagendijk; (2019)
Streams of Knowledge: River Development Knowledge and the TVA on the River Mekong (/p/isis/citation/CBB285282788/)

Book Marcos Cueto; (2007)
The Value of Health: A History of the Pan American Health Organization (/p/isis/citation/CBB692281581/)

Article John R. Garnett; (2023)
Winds of Change: Plant Pathology, Transnational Wheat Rust, and the Environmental Origins of the Green Revolution, 1904–1953 (/p/isis/citation/CBB134602862/)

Article José Miguel Chávez Leyva; (2021)
Powerful Disruptions: Braceros, Campesinos, and the Green Revolution in Mexico, 1940–1965 (/p/isis/citation/CBB721861059/)

Article Harwood, Jonathan; (2009)
Peasant Friendly Plant Breeding and the Early Years of the Green Revolution in Mexico (/p/isis/citation/CBB001020839/)

Article Baranski, Marci R.; (2015)
Wide Adaptation of Green Revolution Wheat: International Roots and the Indian Context of a New Plant Breeding Ideal, 1960--1970 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422121/)

Article Saha, Madhumita; (2013)
The State, Scientists, and Staple Crops: Agricultural “Modernization” in Pre-Green Revolution India (/p/isis/citation/CBB001212126/)

Thesis Marci Baranski; (2015)
The Wide Adaptation of Green Revolution Wheat (/p/isis/citation/CBB084124000/)

Article Gisela Mateos; Edna Suárez-Díaz; (2020)
Creating the need in Mexico: The IAEA’s technical assistance programs for less developed countries (1958-68) (/p/isis/citation/CBB486458390/)

Book John Tutino; (2018)
The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000 (/p/isis/citation/CBB767890902/)

Book Casey Marina Lurtz; (2019)
From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (/p/isis/citation/CBB931840786/)

Article Aravanitis, Rigas; Villavicencio, Daniel; (1998)
Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on Technological Learning (/p/isis/citation/CBB000340246/)

Book Jessica M. Kim; (2019)
Imperial metropolis : Los Angeles, Mexico, and the borderlands of American empire, 1865-1941 (/p/isis/citation/CBB726389675/)

Book Tore C. Olsson; (2017)
Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (/p/isis/citation/CBB691965950/)

Article Walter Bruchhausen; (2019)
Between Foreign Politics and Humanitarian Neutrality: Medical Emergency Aid by the Two German States before 1970 (/p/isis/citation/CBB920168526/)