At 11:43 PM -0500 7/28/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Anyone who has followed >the experience of the 'green revolution' (sic) knows about the >problems that it has produced and the fact that it has exacerbated >class problems by displacing the poor farmers and giving control to >the rich. The development literature has been reporting this for >twenty years or so.
I don't speak for others, but I'm not objecting to all criticisms of the "Green Revolution." Simply put, what's wrong with the "Green Revolution" is that the power elite seek to substitute a technological fix for a political solution; that the idea of a technological fix helps the power elite to divert attention away from the root causes of hunger and malnutrition -- i.e. class and gender relations. Reading Vandana Shiva, though, makes you think that what's wrong is technology in itself, rather than those who have social power -- be they capitalists, landlords, or powerful patriarchal men -- to make it serve their ends, rather than the ends of workers and peasants of both genders. Observe the way Shiva writes: ***** War And Peace On Our Farms And Tables by Vandana Shiva Director of Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, India Edited version of the speech delivered at the Women's Conference on Environment in Asia and the Pacific, 3 September 2000, Kitakyushu, Japan ...The first one, is the group of technologies that came to be known as the "Green Revolution". This was not a very green transformation of agriculture, and it was definitely not revolutionary. It basically increased the control of powerful corporations and countries, and rich landlords in the Third World over food production and agriculture, displacing women and poorer peasants, and removing poor consumers from their entitlements to food.... ... As chemicals take over in agriculture, women are displaced, and as women are displaced they are made to look like the redundant sex. They become dispensable. A new phenomenon started in Punjab that had never taken place before, namely female feticide (killing female foetuses).... ***** With all due respect to Shiva and her fans, it is not chemicals and technologies, be they good or bad or ugly, that "increased the control of powerful corporations and countries" and "rich landlords"; nor is it chemicals that are displacing women or causing gender-selective abortions of female fetuses. A mirror image of the power elite who have sought to offer the "Green Revolution" as a miraculous fix, Shiva portrays "chemicals" and "technologies" as the primary agent of negative social change, obscuring the root causes of the problems: capitalism and patriarchy. Why not fight holders of class power and patriarchal power instead? -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>
