From green revolution to GM crops: Trail of damage caused to world food and farming system

By Bharat Dogra 

A strange and disturbing situation has arisen as the USA has been exerting undue pressure on other countries to buy some of its farm products, particularly corn. At times this may be stated politely, but mostly the tone has been arrogant. Should a seller bully a reluctant buyer, or even corner him in the market and threaten to thrash him if he refuses?

The situation becomes even more unjust when what the seller wants to sell poses a serious danger to health and the environment. The USA has been the world leader in growing several GM crops, including corn and soybeans, despite increasing evidence of the health hazards posed by GM crops and the inputs used for cultivating them. A very large number of legal cases relating to serious health harm caused by these crops have been filed against companies based in the USA and the wider West, which unleashed highly damaging and disruptive efforts to spread these crops worldwide.

This, along with wider efforts by multinational companies based in the West to control the seed sector—where four corporations already control about 56% of the commercial seed market—has been disastrous for the global food and farming system. Yet the governments of these rich countries remain eager to promote these already powerful corporate interests, as they share the same goals of relentlessly increasing profits and control. It must be understood very clearly that their aim is not food security or reducing hunger, but maximizing profits and control.

This has been the situation for a long time. The so-called “Green Revolution” was promoted by the USA and the West in the name of helping farmers and saving the world from hunger. In reality, it was designed to create permanent business for agro-chemical companies, as the new Green Revolution seeds had to be grown with high doses of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and weedicides. In the process, the rich diversity of crop varieties nurtured and evolved over hundreds of generations was pushed aside, along with the invaluable heritage of traditional wisdom handed down through generations. Local elites, guided by a neo-colonial mindset and self-interest, became the cheerleaders of this project.

When I began my work as a young journalist during those years, I saw clearly that, contrary to claims that the Green Revolution was launched to prevent mass hunger in India, our country had already been steadily increasing productivity after independence. Moreover, India was close to achieving a much bigger breakthrough through indigenous rice varieties, led by a top scientist who was deeply committed to advancing the real interests of farmers, his country, and the Third World. However, with the advent of the Green Revolution, his entire program was disrupted, and he lost his job. Realizing the significance of this, I spent a few days with this great scientist, learning both about his achievements and the obstruction he faced.

It soon became clear that he was not alone in his victimization. Other scientists who dared to question the Green Revolution’s false claims faced similar persecution. Some were even driven to take their own lives, and their plight was discussed in Parliament. I met several of them to understand what was happening. Some had exposed the fake research of the Green Revolution’s top promoters. Their criticism was validated by an official expert committee, which also indicted the research system in key ways. Yet the powerful promoters of the Green Revolution brushed these aside as minor irritants and marched on. Similar distorted models were later used to launch the so-called “blue,” “white,” and other “revolutions,” which aborted and disrupted development models aligned with the real needs and strengths of the country. This was not help but harm for developing nations like India.

Later, the West devised new ways to broaden the scope of trade, including agriculture and plant patents. There was no genuine rationale for this, but once the Western authorities and multinationals decided their course, justifications were quickly manufactured by highly paid “experts.” Soon, in the Global South, we were being invited to workshops where we were told that to prevent catastrophe, it was essential to endorse the shift from GATT to the World Trade Organization.

This process had several aspects, but a crucial one was extending the disruptive model of the “color revolutions” in the development sector (akin to later political “color revolutions”) to trade and intellectual property rights. These were increasingly weaponized to undermine the self-reliance and well-being of farming communities. As a participant in resistance and fair-trade campaigns, I realized that many harmful decisions were being made without most affected people even knowing what was happening—just as during the Green Revolution. So much for democracy.

Ultimately, the USA and the West created the WTO in line with their vision of a trade system they thought they could dominate for a long time. However, when cracks appeared in this domination, they quickly abandoned even the rules and systems they had created. Then came Trump aides, announcing arbitrary decisions one after another. They could insult one day, turn polite the next, and shatter trust in the process. Countries that carefully tried to protect their citizens’ health from GM food suddenly found themselves pressured to import large quantities of it simply because the USA had created a highly unsafe and unstable food and farming system of its own, which required regularly offloading hazardous products onto distant nations.

Make no mistake: the corporate-dominated food and farming system being created in the USA is harmful not only for the world but also for its own farmers and people. Huge numbers of American farmers have been displaced or bankrupted in recent decades. As the farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry wrote: “The supermarkets are at present crammed with food, and the productivity of American agriculture is at present enormous. But this is a productivity based on the ruin both of the producers as well as of the sources of production.”

Clearly, what has been promoted in the name of aid, help, and fighting hunger has harmed food and farming in the Global South and, in fact, the entire world. It must be changed in fundamental ways to move toward a global food and farming system based on the production of safe and healthy food, the livelihood security of small farmer communities, sustainability, and environmental protection.

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The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food, Man over Machine, A Day in 2071, and Planet in Peril