In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The physical landscape of Mexico was transformed by the way the Mexican government responded to the nation’s age-old problem of soil degradation. The response involved a commitment to large-scale irrigation works and the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. This transformation of the landscape has multiple economic, political, and cultural implications not only for Mexican society but also for the entire planet. Mexican leaders and technical advisers from the United States justified their chosen path of agricultural development based on a view of Mexico’s soils as naturally poor and severely degraded by use and abuse. The strategy was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States government both because it was seen as desirable for Mexico and because the Mexican case was seen as an experimental testing ground for American policy that could prove favorable to American commercial and foreign policy goals. As such, it was perhaps the most significant example of a much larger effort to promote the purposes of the United States government and private interests around the world through the use of technological and scientific expertise exercised, at least in theory, in the mutual interests of all involved. Although it had deeper roots, the design of the specific strategy emerged from the political situation in Mexico at the beginning of World War II and became the template for what would come to be called the Green Revolution, which transformed economies and landscapes around the world chapter two Downslope and North How Soil Degradation and Synthetic Pesticides Drove the Trajectory of Mexican Agriculture through the Twentieth Century Angus Wright 22 Mexican Agriculture · 23 as the dominant model for international agricultural development and a central element of Cold War American foreign policy. It was a major factor in the great worldwide exodus of rural people to cities, but it also had other results for the movement of people and transformation of landscapes . As in Mexico, throughout the tropical and subtropical world one result was the tendency to drive economic development downslope into humid lowlands and desert valleys, with a variety of political, cultural, and economic consequences.1 Seeing the traditional areas of Mexican agriculture as naturally inadequate and exhausted by use, Mexican leaders and their foreign advisors in the twentieth century looked north toward desert valleys where state-financed large-scale irrigation projects could take advantage of land that had been relatively lightly used and little damaged, as well as to humid tropical lowlands farther south. The farming technologies developed to take advantage of these northern desert valley and humid tropical soils were integrally dependent on the use of newly invented synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. This is the story of how the approach taken to deal with soil degradation in Mexico became intertwined with pesticide use in a way that shaped the fate of Mexico’s countryside and rural people. The new synthetic pesticides, in addition to being a key part of what would come to be called “the package” of Green Revolution technologies, also seemed to offer an apparently simple solution to insect-borne Old World human diseases, particularly malaria and yellow fever. These diseases had been introduced into Mexico at the time of the Conquest and had tended to push dense human populations in humid lowlands upslope, away from mosquito-infested humid tropical areas. If both tropical crop pests and epidemic illness among the agricultural labor force could be controlled, a new era would open for the humid tropics. Based on this view of Mexico’s problems with soils and disease, by the mid-twentieth century, synthetic agrichemicals had become an important tool in overcoming a variety of barriers that stood in the way of a fuller use of Mexico’s land resource and its expanding human population. Exhausted soils could be left behind and land put into production in developing economic frontiers. The strategy of opening new frontiers was to be significantly undermined by a combination of ecological, economic, and health problems inherent in the newly adopted crop production technologies. It supported rapid economic growth by exploiting and in some ways widening the already deep inequalities in Mexican society. The beginning of the twenty-first century found many Mexicans looking for new political arrangements while 24 · Angus Wright at the same time searching for more sustainable solutions to the ancient problem of maintaining the health of the soil and, with it, the health of human society. The Pre-Columbian and Colonial Background The people of ancient Mesoamerica were intensely interested in...

Share