agrotóxicos

Last Sep. 12, Norman Borlaug died. He was known as the “father of the Green Revolution” -although he preferred the term “modern agriculture”-, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (no less) in 1970 for his supposedly huge contribution to humanity, as his work is said to have saved “millions of people” from death by starvation. But not only did Borlaug not prevent such deaths, he contributed to cause the deaths of millions of human beings who fell victim to famine, social and political conflicts and contamination, all product of the massive and planetary application of the technological and financial package called the “Green Revolution”.

At the end of the Second World War, numerous new compounds developed by the military chemical research complex were stored away in laboratories, ready to be turned into deadly weapons for human beings and/or crops. They represented enormous amounts of money that had been invested in “science and technology,” too much money to simply let all of these developments “go to waste.” So a business plan was drawn up to make a profit from these findings.

With just a few minor adjustments to the formulas, many could be used as insecticides or herbicides. But for this to be profitable, a market for large-scale consumption of such products had to be created. The agricultural model that would be christened “Green Revolution” emerges from the convergence of these and other circumstances, including the decision of the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States government to foster a group of agronomists -among whom was Borlaug- who had set up a research center in Mexico and were working fast to develop new hybrid varieties of wheat that could withstand the massive use of fertilizers and produce higher yields.

This team achieved tremendous success with the “dwarf wheat” variety developed through the insertion of “Norin genes,” a booty taken from the Japanese at the end of the war. Dwarf wheat plants have a much shorter and thicker stem than other varieties of wheat, making them wind-resistant and more responsive to fertilizers. But Borlaug didn’t just develop these crops, he envisioned their expansion throughout the world, and thus set in motion the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, which “official historians” not only continue to deny but are bent on presenting as completely the  opposite.

Borlaug’s invention had several problems: In addition to demanding enormous amounts of fertilizers and intensive use of agrotoxic substances, as its cultivation was only profitable on a large scale, it required huge extensions of land devoted to single-crop plantations. To achieve this, agricultural labor had to be mechanized.

Agricultural production turned into an activity with a high use of machinery and consumption of fuel. Productivity increased spectacularly in certain regions of the United States and Europe and in countries, such as Argentina, that supplied wheat to the global market.

However, while Northern farmers were heavily subsidized by their governments through bank systems that granted the loans necessary for investments in production, under the condition that they apply the “Green Revolution” package, governments in the South were unwilling to support agriculture, but still imposed the “Green Revolution.” As a result, practically any investment made by farmers in the South had to come out of their own pockets.

Consequently, Borlaug’s hybrid crops rarely produced the same yield in the South as they did in the North. The increase in yield in developing countries was much smaller than in the developed countries.

At the same time, this system of industrial agriculture pushed production costs up and made it impossible for many small and medium-sized farmers -the vast majority of the world’s farmers at the time- to stay in the countryside, and they were forced out along with rural laborers. In just a few years, rural migration to the cities took on calamitous proportions.

To make matters worse, the chemical products used by agricultural establishments proved to be extremely hazardous for those who apply them, for the environment and for consumers in general. According to conservative estimates, three to four million rural workers are poisoned with agrotoxic substances every year, and an average of 3,300 laborers die each month as a result of their use.

In almost every country of the so-called Third World, the Green Revolution has caused hunger, abject poverty, loss of ancestral knowledge and biodiversity, land erosion, environmental contamination, greater dependency on fossil fuels, chronic indebtedness, and other tragic consequences.

But for the transnational corporations that produce agrotoxic substances and seeds, the worldwide imposition of their model represented a huge accumulation of capital and the beginning of a process of concentration that is still going strong, leaving the world’s food needs in the hands of half a dozen global companies.

Norman Borlaug was not at the helm of this process, but he was one of the key cogs in the machinery. He was a hired scientist who practiced a “science without conscience,” at the service of those who always paid his bills: the transnational corporations.

His active commitment to the cause of the powerful led him in the last years of his life to tour the world defending the use of genetically-modified crops, the second “Green Revolution,” which, according to Borlaug, had come to “eradicate world hunger.”

Can all those who now hail him as “the man who saved more lives than any other single individual in the history of humanity” be really blind to the fact that 50 years after the first “Green Revolution” hunger in the world has increased with no sustainable solution in sight? That the poorest countries have become exporters of agricultural commodities while at the same time being forced to import food for their people, and that the technological dependency of their agricultural production condemns them to a constant state of food insecurity?

In 1945, the United States dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and instilled fear around the world with its exemplary punishments. The “Green Revolution” -synonymous with hunger for the poor- has since then been the complementary lethal weapon used to win the “peace war.” Borlaug, after all, has taken more than a Nobel Prize to his grave.