Troubled Harvest: Agronomy and Revolution in Mexico 1880–2002 by Joseph Cotter (review)

Book Reviews 125 tently, this book draws our attention for the need for more careful scholarship on the violence that everyday Mexican women and men experienced during the war. Such a work would ideally seek the middle ground between heavy handed depictions of American soldiers as barbarians and the sometimes oblivious accounts that present these same men as good natured tourists. Jonathan D. Ablurd University o f West Georgia Joseph Cotter,2003. TroubledHarvest: Agronomy and Revolution in Mexico 1880-2002. New York: Praeger. Troubled Harvest argues, “...the Green Revolution did not target campesinos or make them more prosperous, rather, it contributed to their political and economic disempowerment” (324). It is during the Green Revolution (1940s- present) when agriculture turned to petrocheinical biocides, fertilizer, and hybridization of “high-yield” crops. A second stage of the Green Revolution now addresses the use of genetically modified organisms. The rationality and politics of the first stage of the Green Revolution remain unchanged. Therefore, lessons from Cotter’s work, should seriously temper those hoping for poverty and hunger relief as a result of this latest strain of agronomy. In order to make his argument, Cotter follows the influences of liberalism, agronomy institutionalization, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mexican “Revolutionary Family,” and the United States agricultural establishment. Cotter draws primarily on municipal and Mexican federal archives, presidential papers, agricultural journals, Mexican Agricultural Project (MAP) records, and monographs from agricultural scientists among other primary documents obtained through several trips to Mexico. At first, Mexican agricultural scientists, agronomos, affiliated themselves with land reform, but at the same time initiated a cultural campaign against peasant agriculture that labeled the corn-beans-squash diet as backwards. The “tortilla discourse” focused its attention on replacing corn, with wheat and other crops with European middle class affiliations. This is one of the strongest points in the book. Efforts by the agricultural scientists were by-in-large made on behalf of industry and job promotion, not on behalf of the Mexican peasantry or its food security. In the case of early land reform, agronomo interests established a strong The Latin Americanist Winter/Spring 2004 relationship with the party in power and consequently favored land reform in the early half of the 20thCentury. However, peasant farming techniques which did not use or need technological “advances” and which came to define agronomy, was maligned by the scientists despite vast local environmental, economic, and health advantages of traditional methods. The Green Revolution replaced indigenous agricultural knowledge with foreign science, alien species not acclimated to the Mexican climates, and with economic dependence in the form of expensive chemical applications and hybrid seeds. Again, “...the Green Revolution was not an anti-poverty program” (251). Rather, the goals were to serve the agricultural scientists, the Mexican State, the chemical industry, and the fickle Cold War geopolitical desires of the United States. Lowest on the list, if not entirely absent, were the actual needs of the Mexican subsistence peasants and indigenous peoples. One mechanism which forced these technologies on camposinos was agricultural loans which required their use, and which were directly influenced by chemical companies and U.S. based interests perpetuated through the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation. In the conclusion, however Cotter warns that these programs were not absolutely Machiavellian and U.S. based. The Mexican State and Mexican scientists were “equally culpable for the spread of agrochemical farming and for causing problems when it is practiced irresponsibly” (327). Also, the Rockefeller Foundations’ MAP did eventually support the study of traditional methods like intercropping, and indeed, some agro-chemical applications did increase the volume of overall production. By 1968, MAP wheat accounted for 90% of Mexican wheat and probably contributed to its “economic miracle ” (shortlived though it was) and a correspondent (1950-1968) 4.6% per year increase in agricultural output which outpaced population increase by 1.3%per year. Importantly, Cotter describes how Mexico, through the USDA, the US. Department of State and the Rockefeller Foundation, was the springboard for the global spread of Green Revolution technologies to other Third World countries such as India and Pakistan. The spread of these technologies also spread industry dependency and revenues which later mobilized activists like Francis Moore Lappe who argued for...