Week 10 Colonialism to the New Green Revolution

Week 10 March 27-29

From colonialism to the Green Revolution to the New Green Revolution

Davis, Mike. 2002. Late Victorian holocausts: El Niño famines and the makingof the Third World. London, Verso.  

Cullather, Nick. 2010. The hungry world: America’s Cold War battle against poverty in Asia. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Both of these readings are about the making of hunger in different epochs. Both acknowledge that the response of people to famine can be seen as a "war over the right to existence" (Davis 2002, p. 13). According to Mike Davis, his thesis "is that what we today call the "third world" (a Cold War term) is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities--the famous "development gap"--that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated into the world economy." In 1877 (the Late Victorian period to which the title refers), a confluence of the El Nino Southern Oscillation that brought drought across Africa, South Asia, SE Asia and East Asia and colonial policies resulted in the deaths of some 50 million people around the world. These were avoidable, having resulted from decisions to export grain, British resistance to setting food prices, the opening of markets to foreign trade, technologies enabling speculation and the shift from food crops to cotton. Nick Cullather's book is about the Cold War ideologies undergirding the Green Revolution. The chapter you'll read is about the discovery of world hunger and its measurement in the form of the calorie. The New Green Revolution is a push to encourage higher levels of production through the use of new communications and genetic technologies. 

Your objective is to determine how food production, distribution and consumption occur on the spatial and temporal scales we're reading about. How do chronic hunger and episodes of famine happen? How are farmers connected into global food markets? What are the forces at work that link them in ways that make their lives difficult? How did British policy toward India change from that documented by Davis to Cullather's observations?

Link these readings to Kaufman on speculation, Lappe on climate change and earlier readings from Guthman and Freidberg on standards (food quality, body mass) that hide social norms and result in more difficult lives for people outside the norm and Global South farmers seeking sustainable livelihoods.  What are the big ideas/points of note? What lessons can we take away? How do the ideas proposed in the readings have relevance today? Crucially, what could have been changed and what might be changed to ensure that people who grow food and all of us who need to eat can do so in ways that allow farmers to make a living and eaters to eat enough?