"Climate-Smart" Seeds: Race, Science, and Security in the Global Green Revolution

Abstract

This dissertation connects the racial logics and transnational ties of the Green Revolution—Cold War-era American-led agricultural development projects across the Global South—to a range of contemporary Western development projects seeking to cultivate a “Green Revolution for Africa.” Scholars have critiqued the Green Revolution’s links to U.S. foreign policy, exacerbation of rural inequalities, and environmental impacts. Yet, for the world’s most powerful development institutions, it remains a “success story” that guides policy and practice. Understanding this staying power, I argue, demands asking how the prevailing knowledge about the Green Revolution is inextricable from racial logics. Combining archival research from the records of the earliest Green Revolution projects with in-depth interviews with agricultural scientists working on development projects in East Africa, I show how Green Revolution projects are rooted in racialized thinking about poverty, security, and development. Drawing on history, geography, critical race studies, and indigenous studies, the dissertation’s chapters provide an intellectual genealogy of the key ideas that have shaped the global Green Revolution. Chapter one compares the Green Revolution’s central figure, Nobel Prize-winning plant breeder Norman Borlaug, to the Green Revolution for Africa’s most recognizable backer: Bill Gates. Both figures, I argue, share racialized framings of poverty as a security threat and Africa as a “frontier.” Chapter two shows how American scientists working in Mexico in the 1940s used ideas about the racial inferiority of indigenous people to justify their efforts to collect indigenous varieties of maize from throughout the country. Chapter three examines a contemporary effort to bring genetically modified maize to smallholder farmers in East Africa. I argue that the project’s mission to improve the plight of smallholder farmers with biotech crops reproduces racialized narratives that yoke improvement and the expansion of private property. Finally, chapter four traces parallel logics across U.S. Global Food security strategy, national security strategy, and new crop insurance schemes in East Africa, connecting this intersection to histories of racialized finance and U.S. Empire. Ultimately, the dissertation insists on the need to foreground discussions of race and racialization in debates about agricultural development in an era of climate change.