4.21.2009

The green revolution was a complicated blend of altruistic and imperial motives, played out through seeds. The notion that humans now had the power to banish the spectre of starvation and famine, which has haunted our species for millennia, was a potent one. The green revolution is estimated to have fed roughly a billion people who might otherwise have starved....But the development and distribution of the superseeds, which was funded by the World Bank, the United States seed trade, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, was also a clever way of planting American-style agrarian capitalism in developing nations that might otherwise be in danger of succumbing to Communism. In Fowler’s 1993 book “Shattering,” written with Pat Mooney, a Canadian activist, he points out that the new hybrids “produced not just crops, but replicas of the agricultural systems that produced them. They came as a package deal and part of the package was a major change in traditional cultures, values, and power relationships both within villages and between them and the outside world.”

--John Seabrook, Sowing for Apocalypse

Also, on a related note [via Boyland :)].

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