The Co-Production of Technoscience and Social Science in Green Revolution Mexico, 1956-1979

Abstract

In 1943 the Rockefeller Foundation, nominally in partnership with the Mexican government, initiated its Mexican Agriculture Program (MAP). Over the subsequent decades, a complex network of worldwide inter-governmental/NGO relationships was formalized along the model developed in Mexico. The dissemination of this research-educational model of agronomic “rationalization” to much of the Global South became retroactively known as the “Green Revolution.” This paper argues that this imposition of “rational” agronomy and agricultural economics through mechanization, monoculture, and synthetic inputs is constitutive of “epistemic colonialism.” Despite the attention paid to the Green Revolution as an agronomic undertaking, using economics and anthropology case studies (1965-1979), this thesis argues that the Green Revolution was a both a technoscientific intervention and a social scientific intervention in indigenous Mexican agricultural knowledge making that combined to form a development regime. This co-produced development regime was embedded in a hierarchical set of nested co-productive relationships with Mexico’s desire to modernize through urbanization and national identity formation and with the United States’ Cold War geo-political strategy of pseudo-territorialization for the creation of a liberal-democratic capitalist bastion against Soviet expansion.