Ulhas,
I do not think that bio-technology will make the lives of the poor (farmers) any less difficult. I have had an extensive discussion on the Borlaug article with some of my colleagues that I believe might be of some interest to you and others. You can read the archived discussions at:
http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~vikash1/sasia/2002_06_23_blog_archive.html
If you would indulge me, I would like to repost some extensive thoughts from my colleague, Conrad Barwa, on the Borlaug article:
--
The Technocratic View of Agriculture in the Developing World:
The following is a preliminary list of my initial thoughts on Norman Borlaug’s view of the Green Revolution and the application of Science to agriculture as evinced in his letter regarding transgenic crops:
1) Three scientists advised the US government on the research centre set up by the Rockefeller Foundation to develop HYV (High Yielding Varieties) of seeds in the 1950's: Elvin Stakman, Richard Bradfield and Paul Mangelsdorf. Mangelsdorf was known for his pioneering work on corn hybrids, which he argued prevented the spread of communism by ensuring that post-war Europe was well fed. The three scientists emphasise the importance of the contributions of science, technology and education to the progress of agriculture in the US in the 25 years preceding 1941 - but they fail to mention any of the dislocating social effects of these changes: including growing influence of corporate interests in agriculture, indiscriminate use of energy-intensive inputs and chemical fertilisers, growth of regional stabilisation, enormous increase in the concentration of land ownership, displacement of millions of the farm population, squeezing of family farmers. The result is a sector dominated by the corporate suppliers of machinery and chemical inputs on the one hand and the corporate purchasers of output on the other.
2) The technocratic approach to agriculture has an unabashedly Malthusian view of the Third World. The entire argument for increasing food output is couched in terms of meeting the rising population demands. The narrative relies on the motif of a race, which pits food production against population: in one lane is the Western Scientist, putting his imagination and dedication to work in inhospitable conditions and in the other lane is the dark challenging threat of population growth which threatens to undo all the Progress by Development.
3) The question of distribution is completely set aside. Land reform is said to only satisfy the hunger for land and not for food. This completely disregards the importance of land reform in making the increases in food output sustainable and broad-based in the NICs such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea - for all the talk of state directed capitalism these countries saw a land redistribution programme that has been unprecedented outside Communist countries. Moreover, the problem of food hunger is seen as a production problem not as a distribution problem - this is questionable. Amartya Sen's work on famines has pretty much demolished the Food Availability Decline (FAD) theory of hunger which argues that is the fall in supply of food which leads to hunger + Famine - Sen has shown how food production in various famines from the infamous Bengal Famine of 1943 to the 1980's famine in Ethiopia was due not to a disastrous harvest/drought and decline in food production but rather to a collapse in the purchasing power of those who were net purchasers of food - a collapse in the entitlement demand over food. In fact Sen has shown that many "famine regions" were food exporters during a time when they were manta to be suffering from a shortage of food stocks.
4) Increasing food production is no guarantee to removing hunger. Bob Currie's recent work on the Kalahandi region in Orissa shows very clearly how starvation deaths still occur on a regular basis in India - this during a time when food stocks kept on climbing year on year. Very often those who die come from tribal communities who are not involved in commercial agriculture but follow forest-harvesting agricultural practices; with the HYV-system of food production this forest land is now converted to farmland to produce more surpluses which never reach the food-deficit households.
5) The whole discourse of Borlaug et al. is a self-serving one which bestows enormous moral and political legitimacy to narrowly defined, technocratic work that more often than not disempowers and depoliticises the poor and leads to increased inequality. The "angel" in this narrative is the idealised Western scientists with the "population bomb" being the diabolical enemy that threatens the modernist project. This also leads to a top-down and technocratic approach to beat the clock - involving ordinary people farmers and labourers would take to long and the results would be uncertain runs the argument!!!!
6) The approach completely ignores the success of Japanese farmers and East Asian cultivators in disseminating knowledge and producing hybrid varieties of seeds in the pre-Green Revolution period. Much of this work was done through farmers’ societies and landowners who paid itinerant specialists to spread best practise techniques across the countryside. A model of slow diffusion from the grassroots level up rather than the top-down revolutionary HYV strategy is presented here.
7) Population is seen as an exogenous variable - ignoring all the research done by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze that links decline in fertility rates to factors such as female literacy and reproductive health care - decisive in Kerala's ability to achieve population replacement ratios more characteristic of a developed country than and LDC. Borlaug should remember that the Green Revolution areas of the Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh and Haryana now for the notorious "Bermuda Triangle " of missing women in India - the sex rations within this area is so low that the govt. has had to ban natal gender tests and prosecute anyone found aborting female foeticides. The abortion of unborn female children has seriously unbalanced the gender profile of the population - much of this has to do with the social structure of a patriarchal peasant society which transformed by the Green Revolution now values land inheritance as a crucial indicator of wealth and income -girl-children in this regard have a limited utility and thus are unwanted. The Green Revolution heartland's in India have also been less successful than other areas such as the southern Indian states which have increased welfare spending on female literacy, health care and even social security systems such as old age pensions and widow maintenance payments. Where is this in Borlaug’s entire scheme for food security; population is not just an exogenous factor.
8) The use of HYVs also requires intensive use of water resources all year round; given the limited impact of canal irrigation much of the recent impetus comes from tube well irrigation. However, uncontrolled use of this irrigation source has led to regional imbalances with areas such as eastern Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat near exhausting their groundwater table within 20-30 years at the current rate of water resources. You already know the problem that surround the dam-building projects which penalise forest-dwellers in the highlands to reward cash crop farmers in the parched lowlands - where is the equity in all this? Water is a shared and a public resource; use of HYV and technocratic style development privatises this resource without considering the long-term implications or a real Cost-Benefit analysis.
9) The imbalanced regional development of agriculture as a result of this kind of growth is not good for anyone. It penalises and retards growth where there is no or little of the rural infrastructure needed and where water is scarce by undermining food production there and it puts enormous pressure on the well-endowed regions. Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, now produce over 80% of the total foodgrains procured by the govt. which have led to stocks of over 40 million tonnes. This is not good for these regions as well as it drives farmers to utilise the land very intensively much more than the carrying capacity of the land can bear. This has led to problems such as water logging, salinity, falling levels of micronutrients and soil erosion. These are long-term costs which are not easily apparent but which will destroy the productivity of these regions in the long run.
10) The recent spate of suicides in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka reveal the human costs of these strategies. Farmers often get into debt to buy the Chemical inputs and the GM crops to ensure a good harvest; when these crops fail they are often left with no income and with all their assets such as land and equipment mortgaged Over the last three years there have been over 2,000 farmer suicides in Karnataka, forcing the govt. to set up a commission to enquire into the causes behind it. Use of GM and HYV crops while more productive are more unstable, prone to less immunity to pests and to changes to the weather unlike natural varieties and show production instability has increased over time even though yields and trend output have risen - the large corporations involved in selling machinery and the seeds have benefited as have selected financial institutions from the increases in average output but the risks have been borne by the farmers and labourers who suffer from the greater temporal instability of production.
11) Given the fact that the state subsides food production by giving free water and electricity as well as cheap fertilisers and then by offering generous and ever increasing procurement prices to surplus farmers one can ask how successful a HYV strategy really is given the fiscal subsidies involved. Borlaug is decieving himself when he argues that the inequities of distribution have nothing to do with the Green Revolution - who procures the food - the state, why is this not distributed more fairly? Why have the wages of agricultural labourers failed to keep up with the increases in yields and output? Why is it that the level of subsidies to maintain increases in food production has kept on increasing year after year? Where are the assessments of environmental damage done by the changes in the countryside? Finally despite there being enough food in the world to feed everyone - why is there still mass hunger; while states such as the EU have difficulty in affording the costs of wheat mountains and lakes of milk, there is endemic food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa? One should ask Borlaug given the number of times distribution questions have always been delayed under the rubric of more production will solve the problem, is it not time we at least paid some attention to distributing the ever-growing surpluses we already have rather than just pursuing in a narrow-minded fashion the elusive Holy Grail of evermore food production.
Conrad Barwa