Re: [Marxism] World proletarianisation/Help Mr. Jurrian.

["Julio Huato" <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was born in 1960 in an impoverished, semi-arid region, near the
Guerrero-Michoacán border in Mexico.  My parents were traditional peasants,
mid-income by local standards.  It was in a pesant community where I grew
up.  When I was a kid, Mexico's agriculture was beginning to get ruined by
the import-substitution industrialization policies that Mexico's elites had
put into effect since the late 1950s.  This social catastrophe forced masses
of people to abandon the countryside, destroying along the way an enormous
stock of "human capital" in the form of historically-acquired farm skills
and know-how, and to migrate to large cities and the United States during
the 1960s and 1970s, thus fostering the chaotic urbanization of Mexico City.
 I know this because my family was one of these migrants.

It was only good luck that these events happened *after* the technologies of
the Green Revolution (GR) were adopted in Mexico, particularly higher-yield
corn and wheat.  Without these technologies, rural Mexico would have
suffered famines and an even worse environmental deterioration than that
actually experienced since the 1970s.  (By the way, it's also clear to me
that a lot of this deterioration and the health problems of Mexicans is
directly attributable to import substitution.)  Critics of the GR argued
that, technologically, it relied too much on a few crop varieties and on
chemical fertilizers while, socially, its benefits accrued exclusively to
the rich farmers who were in a position to modernize their farms.

A lot of the suspicion against the GR was due to its funding sources --
largely the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.  However it is not true that
the GR advocated chemical fertilizers over organic fertilizers.  For obvious
economic reasons, chemical fertilizers became popular among rich farmers.
The core of the GR were the improved varieties of corn and wheat; and among
traditional peasants the emphasis was on organic fertilizers, which were
more easily available.  That's as far as the technological package is
concerned.

The social critique is not entirely apt either.  It is a fact that, under
capitalism, technological advances tend to be appropriated by the
capitalists.  But unlike expensive machinery, GR's core technologies
(higher-yield crops and fertilizers) were readily accessible to a broader
range of producers.  That is why during these years, while Mexico was
transforming its farming practices (the 1940s and early 1950s), traditional
peasants were not being ruined or starved -- rural poverty actually declined
during those years (even though rural demographic growth was still pretty
brisky).

Overall, the Green Revolution was a technological and social success, to the
extent we can call it so under capitalism.  Unfortunately, much of its
success was undone by the adverse economic bias introduced by import
substitution after the mid 1950s.  The reason why so many people were forced
out of the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s was not the "spontaneous
logic" of capitalist development, but a very specific set of economic
policies that actually tried to go against the "spontaneous logic" of
capitalism (by altering the relative prices against rural producers) with
very little regard for social repercusions of the sort I described above.
Of course, not everything in import-substitution industrialization was
wrongheaded, but the negative side is often ignored by the advocates.

Now jump ahead 15-20 years.  In 1985 I became a college teacher at Chapingo.
 In 1976 the school had changed its name from Escuela Nacional de
Agricultura, as it had been originally named by its founder Antonio Díaz
Soto y Gama (an ideologist and official in the army of Emiliano Zapata) to
Universidad Autónoma Chapingo.  Near Chapingo, in the Valley of Texcoco, 25
miles east of Mexico City, there was a cluster of research centers and
schools, including the CIMMYT (International Center of Maice and Wheat
Improvement), the Colegio de Postgraduados (a spinoff of Chapingo), and the
INIFAP (Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agrícolas y
Pecuarias).

The CIMMYT played a crucial role in Mexico's GR.  One of its leading figures
was a no-nonsense, practical, hands-on, smart, dedicated microbiologist from
the Midwest, Dr. Norm Borlaug.  He won the Peace Nobel Prize in 1970 because
he and a team of Mexican scientists developed the higher-yield corn and
wheat varieties that sparked the GR.  While in Chapingo, I had the
opportunity to listen to Dr. Borlaug and couldn't help but be deeply
impressed by his wisdom.  Here was a guy who personified the strictest
standards of experimental science, first-hand knowledge of the dilemmas and
challenges faced by poor Mexico's rural producers in their daily lives, and
an honest eagerness to look at the bigger socio-economic consequences of his
work.  It was clear in his speeches and conversations that Dr. Borlaug's
sympathies were inequivocally with the direct producers, and among those
with the very poorest; that their needs and interests were the drivers of
his scientific work.

Dr. Borlaug was and is not a socialist or communist, although he lives
pretty much like one (he actually farms).  He is a social pragmatist, with
all the pluses and minuses that entails.  He has always insisted that, in
our times, a healthy, productive, and prosperous agriculture in the
developing world is unattainable without markets.  At the time I was very
skeptical of his social and economic views (I'm less so now), but I always
respected his views and recognized his authority in matters of technology
and rural production, because he did know much more than anybody I had ever
known.  Today Dr. Borlaug became 90.

And today on NPR's All Things Considered, Dr. Borlaug was interviewed by
Robert Siegal.  Click on the link below and scroll down to find the link
that will launch the audio file of his interview:

<http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgDate=26-Mar-2004&prgId=2>

Julio

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