Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty

Post 3: Hunger is Man-Made - Part 3: The Green Trap: How Modernization Concentrated Land and Poverty

For decades, the core question driving global food policy has been: “How can we produce more food?”. This focus on aggregate production, rather than equitable access, created an era of “agricultural modernization” which replaced the goal of true rural development. This process ignores the social reality of hunger—that the hungry are precisely those who control little to none of the food production resources.

The Illusion of Neutral Technology

The great technological achievement of this modernization effort was the creation of what are commonly called “High Yielding Varieties” (HYV) of seeds, often associated with the Green Revolution. The authors argue that this term is misleading. These seeds are not inherently high-yielding, but rather “High Responsive Varieties” (HRV).

The distinction is crucial:

1. Dependency on Inputs: HRVs require an optimal, expensive package of inputs, including irrigation, specific fertilizers, and pesticides, to deliver their high yields.
2. Environmental Vulnerability: These new varieties are often less resistant to flooding, disease, and high temperatures than traditional seeds, making them impractical in many regions like parts of Thailand, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. Furthermore, their genetic uniformity, when planted across large tracts, makes them highly susceptible to massive crop loss from epidemics, as seen during the Southern Corn Leaf Blight in the US in 1970.
3. Limited Reach: Due to these biological requirements, by 1972-1973, HRVs covered no more than 15 percent of the world’s cultivable land (excluding socialist countries).

The Green Revolution’s Fundamental Bias

The sources assert a fundamental law of development: The introduction of any profitable technology into a society marked by widespread inequality (in terms of land, money, and influence) inevitably worsens the situation for the less capable majority.

The Green Revolution technologies were designed to be profitable, but only for the elite:

• Financial Gatekeeping: Small farmers lack the capital or the land collateral necessary to obtain loans for the expensive inputs required by HRVs. Even when government loan programs existed, they often had minimum landholding requirements that excluded smallholders.
• Monopoly on Inputs: Large landowners gained significant additional profits by monopolizing the distribution of essential inputs—fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery—that the new seeds required. They also typically monopolized access to government agricultural extension services and instructional materials necessary for using the technology efficiently.
• Engineered Distress: Wealthy farmers could actively manipulate government systems to increase their landholdings. For example, in Mexico, large landowners used their influence with the National Agricultural Credit Bank to delay crop loans to smallholders, forcing those small farmers to sell their land cheaply to avoid catastrophe.

Creating the Landless Class

The profits generated by these technologies further fueled the concentration of agricultural land and the displacement of workers, which the authors term the creation of the landless class.

• Mechanization and Eviction: Large landowners invested in machinery, often subsidized by governments, as a means to increase their profit margins and reduce labor costs. Mechanization provides the landowner with more profit per worker and frees them from the “management problem” of a large, low-wage labor force. In India’s Punjab region, farms that mechanized experienced a 240 percent increase in average size over just three years.
• Displaced Workers: This mechanization directly displaces farmworkers and tenants. In Latin America, conservative estimates suggest 2.5 million workers were displaced by tractors. In Chile, each tractor displaced about three workers. The landowner profits, but the tenant loses the ability to feed his family.
• Exacerbating Scarcity: This focus on production for profit meant that wealthy owners diverted resources away from essential food crops. In parts of Thailand, the production of cassava (a poor person’s staple crop) exploded as it was used as cheap cattle feed for European markets.

The ultimate result of this agricultural modernization, the sources conclude, is that the wealthy elite—including landowners, industrialized food corporations, and international investors—enrich themselves at the expense of the majority. The true solution is not to find a “magic seed,” but to confront the sense of powerlessness imposed on the hungry. Democratizing the control over food production resources is the only way to achieve long-term agricultural productivity.

The complexity of food insecurity, which relies heavily on interconnected political and economic structures, can be compared to a seemingly efficient irrigation system:

A farmer builds a high-tech pump and piping network (the modernization). The water flows abundantly (high production), but because the pipes are routed exclusively through the fields of the richest landowners, and bypass the plots of the poor farmers entirely (inequality), the vast majority of the land stays dry. The problem isn’t that water doesn’t exist, but that the control system ensures that only the privileged few ever benefit.