THREE Green to Gene Revolution

It was July 2003 and I was deciding on where to spend the next half year of fieldwork. I had heard from many people that the villages on a road along the Sierra Santa Cruz were famous for their sorcerers. Having spent many happy days reciprocally sharing medicinal plant knowledge with healers and midwives farther north in Petén, I decided to hitchhike down that dirt road. I knew from government archives that Q’eqchi’ communities in these foothills had legalized their village lands collectively but during Guatemala’s civil war were forced to subdivide them into private parcels.

The mayor was absent in the first village, so the next day I proceeded down the road a few more kilometers to Agoutiville. Sitting down at the village store, I bought a bottle of Coca-Cola (which in Guatemala is made with real sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup). As luck would have it, Agoutiville’s mayor, Santiago Mo, was waiting to hitchhike in the opposite direction to sell an agouti (Dasyprocta punctata or “tepezcuintle”) that he had trapped that morning. Considered the most delectable of Guatemala’s wild meats, the agouti would fetch a good price.

Though he would miss the meeting himself, Don Santiago let me know the village elders were gathering that very afternoon to plan their planting ceremony. After introducing myself to the elders, one leader asked directly: Would I live in the village, and was I accustomed to rural life? I recounted the places I had lived before, and they recognized the names of the villages and some related families. After conferring, the elders welcomed me to do research in the village and recommended a four-generational host family. I merrily settled in. The next morning Santiago sent his daughter to invite me to visit his home.

The road I traveled had been a mixed blessing for the village. It allowed them to get crops to market but also brought cattle ranchers, who bought up land cheap. After selling half his parcel, Santiago began planting two acres of maize on the hill behind his house. Despite the steep incline, the soils looked rich and well drained. He excitedly showed me that most stalks had three, even four ears. It was blue maize that his wife liked to cook into tamales, but for the dry season he planted white maize for the family’s tortillas. I asked if he fertilized. No, he replied, that costs money. Instead he sows a green mulch cover crop (Mucuna spp., a nonedible nitrogen-fixing bean with medicinal properties) between maize seasons—just as his father taught him. In most Q’eqchi’ villages, maize planting is a communal and ceremonial activity, but prepping the ground, mulching or weeding throughout the season, and harvesting the produce are solitary tasks. Santiago said he enjoys the collective work because it is fast and merry.

Santiago noted that he sprayed the fast-acting herbicide paraquat before planting, but thereafter would weed his field by machete four times (twice as often as farmers in the north). Back at the house, I asked how much he expected to fetch at market. Oh no, he said, selling your maize is foolish. You only get 20 quetzals ($2.67) for a sack in August, but six months later you’ll be buying maize back at $10.67 or more. In his milpa he also grew sugar cane, four cacao trees, a patch of pineapples, and some watermelons, then intercropped soft squashes for “pepita” seeds, other pumpkins, and amaranth. The cacao trees came from the custom of mixing seven cacao seeds with one hundred ears of seed kernels: prior to planting, Q’eqchi’ women weave special planting bags and whichever neighbor finds the cacao in his bag (koxtal) plants the cacao. During the milpa’s fallow season those cacao seeds grow into fruiting trees. The number seven is significant because the couple must maintain abstinence for three days before and three days after the day of planting.

Back in the day, Don Santiago explained, if you needed money you had to carry a sack of maize on your back using a tumpline and walk four hours to the river port, where the maize would be sold downstream to banana workers on the United Fruit plantation. People also sold ancient artifacts they found in their milpas—a reminder of how long these lands have sustained Maya families. These days, he said, instead of selling some of the maize harvest for cash, he preferred to work as a day laborer for the ranchers, earning $3.80 a day for machete weeding. (For people willing to spray pesticides without protection, the ranchers would pay an extra $1.30.) If he got desperate for more money, he would hitchhike to the Belize border and take a 2:00 a.m. bus ride to the district capital to do construction or yard work for $10.30 a day.

Returning home, his vivacious wife, Rosa, offered us gourds of maize dough dissolved in water. Rosa was also president of the women’s club, which was trying to raise funds to buy a diesel cornmill they intended to operate communally to grind nixtamalized maize at a lower cost. Rosa explained that the private village mill was operated by a family who had sided with the military in the civil war. Twenty years later, many of the village women still felt uncomfortable going there.

Over the next few months I learned that other Agoutiville villagers planted hybrid corn during the wet season for market sale and planted their own saved heirloom seed during the dry season for home consumption. Squeezed among cattle ranches, nickel mines, sugar and banana plantations, and coffee farms, these farmers adaptively blended subsistence and cash cropping. Some sporadically used fertilizer and herbicides to save time to do off-farm cash labor, but most frowned upon the use of insecticides.

From conversations in Agoutiville, I learned to see how Q’eqchi’ maize farmers make improvised observational decisions from day to day and from one season to the next, and not as part of a grand ideological master plan. With agronomic bricolage they select and combine Western inputs in ways that may seem dissonant to an outsider but make contextual economic sense for subsistence farming.¹ From countless hours of conversation and observation with maize farmers across many villages, it became clear to me that the Green Revolution was not—and never will be—a permanent, linear transition.

While small farmers use some modern elements, genetic modification of their sacred maize remains anathema. Although the corporations hawking GM technology claim their transgenic seeds will reduce pesticide use and “green” the Green Revolution, mounting evidence shows that GM crops require even more herbicides than their predecessors. The differences between the Green and gene revolutions are better considered variations in the degree of the commodification of agriculture rather than differences in kind. Both have wrought greater corporate concentration, less farmer autonomy, higher costs of inputs, more economic precarity, and worsened health. Rather than constituting a momentous break from the past, GMO technology fell on “fertile ground”—or, rather, the eroded soil—of the Green Revolution. Despite Malthusian rhetoric of the necessity of GM crops to feed a climate-altered world, these chemical-seed packages offer little advantage to small farmers in countries like Guatemala, where grassroots leaders are already keenly aware of the dependency trap of pesticides peddled to them through US “aid.”

A MILITARIZED GREEN REVOLUTION

The many domesticated foods of the Americas—maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, vanilla, beans, avocados, and more—transformed the world’s cuisines, but lost much of their agrodiversity outside their places of origin. Euro-Americans were picky in the varietals they took from the Americas, and folly followed. Only two of Peru’s three thousand potato varieties made their way to Ireland. They brought a newfound prosperity for Irish peasants, until a disease wiped out half the 1845 crop and the entire 1846 crop. A million people perished in the famine.

Lucky for Euro-American farmers and settlers, breeders were able to return to Peru to replace the blighted potato with more resistant varieties that Andean farmers had stewarded to grow along a four-mile-high vertical gradient. On the sides of the Machu Picchu ruins are ancient tiny terraces that appear to be experimental beds placed at different altitudes and angles of sunlight.² Here Michael Pollan nails it: “Instead of attempting as most farmers do, to change the environment to suit the single optimal spud—the Russet Burbank, say—the Incas developed a different spud [three thousand, in fact] for every environment.”³ Despite Ireland’s cautionary tale to the world, however, twentieth-century agricultural modernizers persisted in their vision to standardize, control, and manage nature scientifically to suit a homogenous seed.

The modernizers’ so-called Green Revolution refers to “improved” seeds bred to maximize yield when paired with other technological inputs manufactured from petroleum (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc.). A surprising number of these postwar technologies launched in the 1940s and 1950s derived from military-funded R&D.⁴ Financed with tactical philanthropic donations by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations to research centers and land grant universities, the Green Revolution deeply benefited the robber baron wealth of families whose fortunes were connected to oil. Had public institutions invested research into organic inputs and the breeding of open-pollinated plants with a zeal equal to how they touted agrochemicals and hybrids, the Green Revolution might not have resulted in the current threat of vertically integrated GM crop systems and extreme corporate profiteering.⁵

From the outset, agricultural industrialization had roots in war. In the post–US Civil War era, munition foundries were converted to produce steel farm tools. These inspired the first gasoline-powered tractor in 1903, which spread across rural America in the 1920s. In tandem with the Model T, Henry Ford commercialized small tractors for the everyday farmer. Hybrid seeds were developed in part to suit the machines.⁶ Small farmers who harvest by hand appreciate the fact that native maizes produce ears at different stalk heights that ripen at different times. For larger farms that can afford mechanical harvesting, however, crops need to mature uniformly. In 1938 only 15 percent of US corn production was harvested by machine, but in Iowa within a decade that figure had soared to 70 percent. Mechanization led to land concentration, because the wealthier farmers who could afford the newest machinery desired more acreage to make the most of their machines and the new seed offerings.⁷

The process of changing seeds began in 1917, when D. F. Jones, a graduate student working at a Connecticut agricultural experimental station, demonstrated that by detasseling corn, he could control male-female pollination. Doing so, he made a two-generational cross that resulted in progeny more vigorous and homogenous than the parents. However, because Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965) became the key political patron for hybrid corn, Wallace, and not Jones, is remembered as the “father of industrial agriculture.”⁸

Like the seeds he championed, Henry A. came from a long line of inherited “highbred” privilege. His grandfather, the first Henry Wallace (1836–1916), was the son of Irish immigrants. A newsletter and editorial writer, Grandfather Henry served on Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission and was president of Gifford Pinchot’s National Conservation Commission.⁹ Henry A.’s father, Henry Cantwell (C.) Wallace, was a professor at Iowa State University, where he mentored George Washington Carver between 1891 and 1894. Young Henry A. was allowed to tag along to the fields with Carver, to whom he credited his lifelong fascination with plant botany.¹⁰ When Grandfather Henry died, grandson Henry A. continued to work alongside his father, eventually converting the family newsletter into an influential newspaper, Wallace’s Farmer. Young Henry A. also devised a “yield” contest at the Iowa State Fair in 1920 to generate human-interest news stories around the harvest.

When father Henry C. became Warren G. Harding’s secretary of agriculture, Henry A. began selling hybrid corn, known then as “double-crossed seeds.” In 1923, he won a gold medal in his own yield contest. Soon thereafter, Henry A. founded Hi-Bred Corn, the first commercial company devoted to hybrid seed production, which later evolved into Pioneer Hi-Bred (and was acquired by DuPont in 1997, then merged with Dow in 2017).¹¹ By age forty-four, Henry A., like his father before him, rose to become secretary of agriculture (1933–40) in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first and second terms, then ascended to vice president during FDR’s unprecedented third term (1941–45). Harry Truman won the vice president spot during Roosevelt’s fourth term. Although Henry A. Wallace lost the chance to be president after FDR’s death, he left a different lasting mark on Cold War history through his support for Green Revolution research in Mexico that extended to Guatemala.

Intrigued by the Mexican Revolution and the diversity of that country’s domestic maize crop, Henry A. Wallace organized a Spanish-language luncheon for his USDA staff while serving as agricultural secretary. When FDR asked him to become vice president, Wallace agreed but asked to take a short sabbatical to tour Latin America to practice his Spanish before assuming the higher office. Because polio paralysis made it difficult for FDR to travel, Roosevelt asked Wallace to stand in for him at Manuel Camacho’s 1940 presidential inauguration. Taking a slow road trip through the countryside on his way to Mexico City, Wallace expressed pity for the poverty he witnessed but also admired the potential for land reform. Upon his return, Wallace met with Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick, with whom he shared Malthusian lamentations of Mexico’s supposed overpopulation.¹²

In this tight world of political and scientific elites, John D. Rockefeller’s grandson and heir, the young Nelson Rockefeller, was already coordinating FDR’s Inter-American Affairs, promoting technical exchanges (servicios) with Latin American governments to strengthen commercial relations and counter communism in the region.¹³ Even so, the Rockefeller Foundation was initially skeptical of extending its reach into Mexico. What eventually convinced the foundation’s leaders to proceed were the commonalities they saw in public health and agricultural problems among both African American sharecroppers and Mexican peasants. In 1941 John Ferrell, who directed the foundation’s health program, penned the proposal for an agricultural improvement project with FDR’s ambassador to Mexico, Josephus Daniels, who happened to be Ferrell’s old friend from North Carolina.¹⁴

Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick endorsed the proposal and allocated funding to dispatch a team of three scientists to Mexico, with the expectation that they would report back on agricultural conditions and problems. One of the trio was Paul C. Mangelsdorf, a central figure in research on teosinte.¹⁵ The trio’s report noted that Mexican farmers would be loath to purchase US seeds and recommended that programs should instead focus on distributing fertilizer and subsidized seed. Based on the scientists’ recommendations, the foundation entered into an agreement with President Camacho to open a Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) within the Mexican Department of Agriculture that became known locally as the Office of Special Studies (OSS).¹⁶

Led by J. George Harrar, the MAP initiative began with a direct operational budget of $100,000.¹⁷ Edwin Wellhausen was the program’s first hire; he was tasked with identifying native (criollo) seeds for improved breeding.¹⁸ Alongside Mexican scientists including Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi, Wellhausen’s team collected more than two thousand maize samples, about which they published the Spanish-language book Maize Races in Mexico in 1951, which was translated to English in 1952 along with another survey of Central America.¹⁹ Iowa State College and Henry A. Wallace’s Pioneer Hi-Bred company sponsored a parallel Guatemalan survey.²⁰ They found more maize varieties in Guatemala’s Cuchumatanes mountain range (an area about the size of Iowa) than exist in the entire United States.²¹ In both these salvage surveys, the white men’s ethnocentric naming nevertheless relegated maize varieties to a distant past (e.g., “Ancient Indigenous,” “Pre-Columbian Exotic,” “Pre-Historic Mestizo,” and “Modern Incipient”).²² Wellhausen doubted “that the Guatemalan Indian … played a conscious role in the creation of new races of maize.”²³

Revisionist histories of this period have shown that the original scientific team were progressive New Dealers. In 1947, while operating out of a field station adjacent to the Chapingo National Agricultural School, the team named the first improved seed line Rocamex, in honor of their employer and host country. From prior experiences working in the poorest areas of the US South, they respected that the Mexican context was different from Iowa. They agreed with Mangelsdorf’s recommendation that the Rockefeller Foundation should support development of OPVs (open-pollinated varieties) that could be freely shared, rather than hybrid seeds that would have to be purchased anew every planting.²⁴

Iowan by birth and fresh from DuPont’s wartime labs, Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) saw things differently. He first demanded to move his wheat research to Sonora to work with large wealthy plantation owners, but MAP director Harrar reminded Borlaug that their job was to serve the poor. Borlaug threatened to quit, but a senior New York–based foundation manager sided with Borlaug. Seeing an opportunity to use seed distribution to secure political party loyalty, the incoming Mexican president Miguel Alemán (1946–52) also favored hybrids.²⁵ By the mid-1950s the maize team had abandoned their progressive ideals and shifted to research into commercial corn hybrids.

Increasingly concerned about “overpopulation,” the Rockefeller Foundation thereafter followed Borlaug’s elitist vision when setting up research centers in Colombia (1950), in Chile (1955), in India (1957), and in the Philippines (1960). Those programs emphasized yield above other social and cultural factors. As other donors (including the Ford and Kellogg Foundations) joined the Rockefeller effort, the Mexican research program evolved into a research program located in Mexico but no longer devoted to Mexico.²⁶ In 1966 Borlaug became the first director of the newly organized International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, pronounced see-MEET), sited outside of Mexico City. Under his leadership CIMMYT eagerly collaborated with the private sector. Three decades later, three-quarters of all seeds sold by private Latin American companies originate from CIMMYT germplasm.²⁷ Almost invariably these were chemical- hungry hybrids—which led to far-reaching consequences for human and planetary health.

HYBRID HOOPLA

Prior to 1935 the term “hybrid” colloquially referred to the crossing of any two different varieties. Maize’s unique genetics, however, gave new meaning and methods to the term. While maize can self-pollinate—as each stalk contains both male and female parts—it more typically cross-pollinates. Over five to six days the plants shed prolific pollen, most of which falls within a couple of feet of the “father” plant, but in moderate wind conditions pollen can travel as much as half a mile.²⁸ Promiscuous pollination is what produces the rainbow of colors found in traditional maize. However, by detasseling (demasculinating) adjacent rows, a corn plant can be forced to self-pollinate over seven or more subsequent generations.²⁹ This self-pollination produces a pure, or “inbred,” variety. Crossing two inbred lines creates stronger progeny, but the hybrid yield boost lasts only one season. When replanted to the F1 (first filial) generation, the yield drops by a third, and then drops again by a fifth in each of the F2 and F3 generations.

Although not biologically sterile, hybrid seeds are therefore effectively “economically sterile,” as famously argued by Jack Kloppenburg Jr. in his research on the political economy of seeds.³⁰ To avoid cross-pollination, farmers should either plant just one hybrid seed type or carefully control pollination timing according to distance between fields. Should hybrid seeds happen to cross-pollinate or open-pollinate, the harvest and its natural offspring will be less productive than the grandparents. Although theoretically any farmer could breed his or her own hybrid seeds, economies of scale favor corporate seed breeders that rely on machines and standardized processes to produce reliable hybrids. Hybrids also need consistent soil moisture, thereby begging for irrigation systems and fertilizers to maximize yield potential.³¹

Early hybrid corn breeders could have selected plants for any number of admirable agroecological characteristics such as drought resistance, taste, restoration of soil fertility, or longer storability. However, under the Wallace family’s leadership, the first-generation commercial seed companies created hybrids with excellent yield and suitable phenotypic qualities for machine harvesting (e.g., stiff stalks and strong roots). Seed companies strategically marketed these early hybrids to growers in states like Iowa, where they would lead to the most impressive harvest results. In the United States, the corn hybrid market share rose meteorically—from 0.4 percent in 1933 to 90 percent by 1940, and a near-universal 96 percent by 1945.³² This all happened so quickly that by the 1950s, Henry A. Wallace himself became alarmed by the growing genetic homogenization of corn seeds and predicted disaster if breeders continued altering “the plant irrevocably and, in evolutionary lingo, more ‘catastrophically’ than all the millennia over which it had evolved.”³³ He was right to be worried. Hybrids over the long term did not produce superior yields.³⁴ But private sector companies kept directing public scientific research toward the creation of “economically sterile” varieties.³⁵ Since commercial varieties have to be replaced every five to ten years, this kept professors busy.³⁶

WAR ON NATURE

Hybrid seeds demand one input after another. Having exhausted finite supplies of natural fertilizers like seabird and bat droppings (“guano”) at the end of the nineteenth century, US farmers needed a new source of fertilizer to optimize hybrid seeds. Once again, military R&D proved useful. In 1909 the German chemist Franz Haber had developed a method to synthesize ammonia out of nitrogen and hydrogen gases. Munitions factories seized the same technology to produce explosives.³⁷ After World War I, BASF and other chemical companies converted surplus ammonium nitrate into synthetic fertilizers that would enrich the nitrogen content of soils.³⁸ After World War II, the ten largest nitrate companies that had manufactured bombs pivoted their factories to produce chemical fertilizers.³⁹

Those synthetic fertilizers were a meteoric commercial success. In 1940 only seven corporations were producing ammonia; by 1966, sixty-five companies had joined the business of converting petroleum to fertilizer. Between 1950 and 1980, farmers’ application of nitrogen fertilizers increased by a factor of seventeen. The US corn crop yield doubled, and corn botanists like Mangelsdorf went so far as to suggest that fertilized hybrid corn had stopped the spread of communism.⁴⁰ With the subsequent overproduction of grains and falling commodity prices, however, US farmers found themselves obliged to apply more and more fertilizer to maintain a competitive edge, but with diminishing returns. The first time a farmer applies a synthetic fertilizer, it will produce twenty-four additional pounds of food. However, the next fertilized season renders a boost of only twelve pounds, then eight pounds, and eventually less than one extra pound by the fifth growing season.⁴¹

The luxuriant fertilized growth displayed by hybrid corn planted in dense rows invited new pests that had never been a problem in native maize fields. This created additional demand for newly invented insecticides, herbicides, and other pesticides (fungicides, rodenticides, and so forth).⁴² Again, these all derived from military research. For example, the commercial herbicide (2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, better known as 2,4-D) was originally concocted in a University of Chicago research lab, then was field-tested at both Bushnell Army Airfield in Florida and at Camp Detrick in Maryland as a tactical biological weapon for destroying Japanese rice fields.⁴³ When the war ended, the American Chemical Paint Company (AmChem, which later merged into Union Carbide) began selling 2,4-D as Weedone. Through a publicity stunt on the Washington Mall and at the Chevy Chase Country Club in 1946, Dow Chemical helped normalize the perceived “safety” of 2,4-D by popularizing it as a lawncare tool to “control” dandelions, despite internal evidence of its toxicity.⁴⁴

Meanwhile, the military continued its own internal research on tactical herbicides for combat in the Korean War and later in the Vietnam War. It also awarded contracts to private corporations to concoct new fast-acting defoliants and exempted those corporations from ordinary regulatory review under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). Monsanto submitted 2,183 applications, followed by Dow at 129.⁴⁵ The Department of Defense chose five herbicide formulations for the Vietnam War—Agent Pink, Agent Green, Agent White, Agent Blue, and the most frequently deployed, Agent Orange—that each combined different amounts of 2,4-D, picloram, and 2,4,5-T (2,4,5-Triclorophenoxyacetic acid).⁴⁶ The Pentagon hired Dow Chemical and Monsanto to manufacture these poisons. While 2,4-D’s companion ingredient, 2,4,5-T, was eventually removed from the market due to dioxin contamination, the manufacture of 2,4-D may create dioxin by-products in smaller quantities.⁴⁷ Internal Monsanto documents from 1983, in fact, discuss the presence of dioxin in 2,4-D at 10 parts per billion.⁴⁸

Such details were forgotten, perhaps because Monsanto paid epidemiologists like Sir Richard Droll, a retainer of $1,500 a day in the 1980s. Famous for helping establish a link between smoking and cancer, Droll changed tunes and began downplaying occupational chemical exposures as a cause of cancer. Reciprocating his corporate patronage, Droll also attacked a Scandinavian scientist researching links between dioxin and cancer.⁴⁹ Other civilian scientists, however, independently began to test 2,4-D for adverse health effects. A 1986 study published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association showed that a Kansas farmer who used 2,4-D twenty days a year had a sixfold higher rate of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma compared to all Kansas farmers.⁵⁰

Synthetic pesticides share a similar militarized history. As related in a riveting revisionist history of the pesticide industry by Adam Romero, US farms became “wastelands” for absorbing toxic by-products from war industries.⁵¹ To be sure, prior to the age of synthetic pesticides, US farmers were already spraying tens of millions of pounds of insecticides manufactured using heavy metals like lead and arsenic, as well as other more “natural” formulas from tobacco (for nicotine) and chrysanthemum flowers (for pyrethrins). The war on bugs, however, escalated with the wartime discovery of nerve gases.

Germany was the center of this experimentation, as the Nazis needed to develop insecticides that could be synthesized locally after Germany lost access to tobacco products from abroad.⁵² Bayer’s first pesticide was HETP (hexaethyl tetraphosphate), a synthetic substitute for nicotine that evolved into a broader class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids (now known to be responsible for bee colony demise).⁵³ Gerhard Schrader, another German chemist working for IG Farben (Bayer’s parent company), accidentally discovered one nerve gas so potent that it was fatal within twenty minutes. The Nazis named it “Tabun” for the German word for taboo.⁵⁴ Schrader also discovered sarin, a nerve gas that agrochemists later emulated to create carbamate insecticides like Sevin, which disrupt insects’ neurotransmitters (known in toxicology circles as “cholinesterase inhibitors”).

After both wars the Crop Protection Institute supported many land grant universities, especially in California, to screen toxic wastes from the military-industrial complex for their potential use as pesticides.⁵⁵ Military research also indirectly propelled the most famous pesticide of all time, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), into agriculture. An Austrian chemistry student by the name of Othmar Zeidler invented DDT in his laboratory in 1874. As a chlorinated hydrocarbon, it was insoluble in water and known to persist for a long time in the environment with a fifty-year half-life. A Geigy scientist based in Switzerland, Paul Müller, suggested in 1939 that it might be applied to killing bugs.⁵⁶ The US military then began researching DDT for use in protecting troops from malaria in the Pacific campaign. Toward World War II’s end the Swiss government collaborated with the US Department of Agriculture to test DDT on the Colorado potato beetle. Soon DDT became ubiquitous for insect control in farms, homes, and communities around the world. Although the United States banned DDT in 1972, we are still living with its adverse epigenetic health effects, including transgenerational cancers.⁵⁷

Although pesticides are not the only cause of exploding cancer rates, the correlation is strong—from a lifetime risk of one in thirty people in 1900 to one in five by 1980, one in four by 1990, one in three just five years later, and one in two by 2000. Today US farmers apply six pounds of pesticide for every man, woman, and child in the country. Globally that figure is one pound per capita. Even though impoverished countries use fewer agrochemicals, 99 percent of acute pesticide poisoning fatalities occur in the Third World due to lack of protective equipment.⁵⁸ This human toll appears to have been for naught. The late entomologist David Pimentel showed that pest-driven crop losses actually increased from 31 percent in 1942 to 37 percent by 1987.⁵⁹ Robert van den Bosch puts it bluntly: “Pesticides are an ideal product: like heroin, they promise paradise and deliver addiction. And dope and pesticide peddlers have only one cure for addiction: use more and more of the product at whatever cost in dollars and human suffering.”⁶⁰

LEGACIES OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION

The focus on maximizing yield on large monocropped farms was, above all, a political choice.⁶¹ When agronomists compare the yields of rainfed native maize per acre to that of petrochemically boosted US corn hybrids in the Great Plains, the US hybrids will, of course, win Wallace’s rigged contest. However, if they consider the nutritional and cultural value of the dozens of free species cultivated among maize plants and in the fallows of small but carefully tended swidden farms, then milpa and other polycropped systems would emerge victorious. Green Revolution technologies are clearly not scale (nor taste) neutral. Large agricultural operations that have the wherewithal to purchase the complete set of interconnected inputs—machinery, fertilizers, pesticides—benefit more from them than poor farmers.⁶²

TABLE 3. Crop loss before and after the Green Revolution

Source: Pimentel, “Is Silent Spring behind Us?”

As argued by Vandana Shiva’s in her prescient book, The Violence of the Green Revolution, to convince government policymakers in the Global South to ignore the clear advantages of millennia-tested local agricultural knowledge required significant Western propaganda.⁶³ Building on Rockefeller-funded conferences and scholarships, the World Bank underwrote this process of agricultural concentration. As both a lender and knowledge broker the Bank played a critical role in touting the superiority of Green Revolution technologies to Third World elites.⁶⁴ Former secretary of defense Robert McNamara was the first non-Ford person to be president of the Ford Company, before becoming president of the World Bank.⁶⁵ At McNamara’s initiative, the World Bank championed the creation of a consortium of research groups modeled on CIMMYT in Mexico. Established in 1971, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) now coordinates fifteen such research centers.⁶⁶

Through workshops, training sessions, conferences, exchanges, papers, and more mechanisms of groupthink, these institutional assemblages crafted an intellectual apparatus to bolster the Green Revolution against a growing body of evidence of its adverse social and ecological impacts. Prior to the advent of social media and other improvements in telecommunications, the ability to travel and connect ideas was once a privilege of the elite only. Although peasant and food movements have recently been able to connect their ideas across borders through umbrella organizations like Via Campesina, grassroots networks remain at a comparative disadvantage to the highly endowed and globally institutionalized system that promotes biotech.

The geopolitical impacts were significant. Green Revolution proponents espoused that modernizing agriculture would free labor for industrialization, provide food for growing urban areas, and boost national income from the export of new cash crops. By reframing the discussion as a technical problem of production, they diverted attention from the grassroots clamor for land redistribution and agrarian justice. Just when developing countries declared independence from colonial empires in the 1950s, the Green Revolution unfortunately preempted true democratization and decolonization.

The shift to industrial agriculture left new nation-states in the Americas, in Asia, and in Africa beholden to geopolitically controlled oil extraction systems overseen by world powers. Both communists and capitalists alike crushed their countries’ small farms (Mao and Stalin, infamously so) and subsidized large-scale industrial agriculture. To draw the Third World into their orbit, Western development banks proffered credit schemes that left developing countries hopelessly indebted and beholden to structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in the 1980s.⁶⁷ Government policies favoring export crops became one way impoverished countries could generate dollars to settle interest on those debts. Guatemala’s history shows that fertilizer distribution was another key Cold War weapon in the 1980s Maya genocide.

A CAMOUFLAGED GREEN REVOLUTION

After the 1954 CIA coup that halted President Jacobo Arbenz’s land reform in Guatemala, US intervention into the country’s agrarian affairs proceeded apace. Between 1954 and 1957, the United States channeled $100 million in aid to Guatemala’s military junta for large agro-export plantations of cane and cotton on the south coast.⁶⁸ Through the Cold War–inspired Alliance for Progress, the US government also poured funds into projects to convert the rich volcanic soils of the Maya highlands into producing pesticide-laden vegetables and fruit for export.⁶⁹ Although these cash crops initially brought increased incomes for highland Maya farmers, those who also continued to plant native maize por el gusto (“for enjoyment”) and por el gasto (“for frugality and autonomy”) have greater food security today.⁷⁰ The photo of one urban road blockage (see fig. 14, chap. 6) shows that just meters from the edge of any highland town are traditional milpas.

As chronicled by a Catholic priest who witnessed the early stages of the Green Revolution in the highlands of Guatemala in the 1960s, Maya farmers were initially skeptical of fertilizers.⁷¹ The bumper harvests of early converts, however, encouraged others to jump on the input treadmill. Following a typical Green Revolution pattern, production boomed and then stagnated.⁷² Within a few years the fertilizer seemed to have “burned” the soil, compelling farmers to double or even triple its application to maintain yields.⁷³ Even while the acreage devoted to maize production remained constant, the national use of chemical fertilizers increased nearly sevenfold during the 1960s and 1970s.⁷⁴ By creating top-heavy plants, fertilizers exacerbated small farmers’ losses to strong winds.

US agribusiness corporations flooded the Guatemalan market with pesticides in the 1970s, including DDT even after it was banned in the United States. A 1979 WHO study showed that Guatemalan women had the highest documented levels of DDT in breast milk in the world: ninety times higher levels than recommended by the WHO.⁷⁵ The US government also sponsored aerial bombardments of malathion to protect commercial crops from the Mediterranean fruit fly. To this day many Maya highlanders believe that this pest control program brought snakes, worms, and more pests to their fields that can only be combatted with costly chemicals. As Nicholas Copeland notes, such conspiracy theories are a way of describing “an unjust and racist political order motivated by greed” and identifying “states and corporations as interlinked and intentional agencies … willing and able to destroy Mayan life to turn a profit.”⁷⁶

To offset the conversion of highland subsistence farms to cash crops, the gringos recommended bulldozing roads into the northern lowland rainforest to attract colonists who might plant commodity corn or establish cattle ranches to satiate the rising US demand for cheap beef in fast food.⁷⁷ With sweat, axes, and machetes, Q’eqchi’- and Spanish-speaking settlers began to transform the northern lowlands from a region of dense tropical forests into the breadbasket, or rather the “tortilla basket,” of Guatemala. Ranchers followed behind, buying up the cleared land and displacing the agricultural frontier northward.⁷⁸

The United States supported agricultural modernization through a parastatal Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology (ICTA) that was loosely managed by Guatemala’s Ministry of Agriculture.⁷⁹ Although ICTA initially tried to develop hybrids for the highlands, this majority-Maya region tried and then rejected them.⁸⁰ Today less than 1 percent of highland Maya farmers plant hybrid corn. Under military control, the lowlands became Guatemala’s dynamic new zone for national corn and bean production. Here ICTA had better luck introducing hybrid seeds (one colloquially called Selection in 1978 and another known by its number, HB-83, in 1995). Many Q’eqchi’ and even poor ladino (mestizo) farmers disclosed to me that when agronomists representing a genocidal state showed up with seeds, they felt compelled to obey and try them.

To give one example that happened in the Ixcán lowlands, the right-wing coffee planter José Luis Arenas Barrera (aka “the Tiger of Ixcán”) administered the government’s corn seed distribution program during the Castillo Armas dictatorship, before presiding over the Ministry of Agriculture (1970–72). For his “crimes against the poor,” including the theft of Maya lands and chronic underpayment or use of fake money to pay plantation laborers, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor famously assassinated Arenas Barrera in 1975. His sons became born-again Christians, ran a CIA front, and turned the family coffee plantation into an “Armed Evangelical Military Camp” staffed with missionaries from the Wycliffe Bible Translators (an organization loosely connected with Nelson Rockefeller) and the Church of the Word.⁸¹

Along with distribution of chemicals to eradicate mosquitos and flies, the Ronald Reagan administration militarized Guatemala’s Green Revolution by giving armaments to General Efraín Ríos Montt, who seized power in 1982–83. Ordained as an evangelical minister for Church of the Word while in exile in the 1970s in Eureka, California, Ríos Montt became friends with Jerry Falwell, who with other televangelists had helped elect Reagan. Also trained in counterinsurgency at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, Ríos Montt launched a scorched earth campaign that he branded “rifles and beans” (fusiles y frijoles). With support from missionaries, Ríos Montt preached to the Guatemalan public in televised addresses, saying, “If you are with us, we’ll feed you, if not, we’ll kill you.”⁸² During his regime the army killed about seventy thousand people, most of whom were Maya.⁸³ During this period USAID generously funded the Committee of National Reconstruction, which was under the command of air force colonel Eduardo Wohlers (another School of the Americas graduate), to continue convincing highland Maya farmers to convert to agricultural export crops amid the violence.⁸⁴

War eroded other structures of food security. Besides delivering machine guns, the Reagan administration began selling food “aid” in 1985 to Guatemala through PL-480. Prior to this, Guatemala had a decentralized maize storage system run by the National Agricultural Commercialization Institute (INDECA), which bought grain at guaranteed prices and was able to store up to 820,000 quintals.⁸⁵ However, Ríos Montt raided the national silos to distribute the grains to military sympathizers as part of his rifles-and-beans campaign—but then never replaced the grain. The silos fell into disrepair. With a population of 17 million today, Guatemala now has storage capacity for only 302,000 quintals across just three sites. After 1997 the silos stopped buying local maize and have since only served as temporary storage places for food aid.⁸⁶ Small maize farmers are left to fend for themselves. INDECA’s silos once strictly controlled humidity below 14 percent to prevent mold. However, maize sold today through private middlemen without regulatory oversight often becomes a breeding ground for aflatoxins, which when consumed can cause liver damage and other ailments.

All told during the civil war, the Guatemalan military attacked some six hundred villages, killing an estimated two hundred thousand people, 83 percent of whom were Maya.⁸⁷ Troops often burned subsistence crops of communities they merely suspected to be guerrilla sympathizers. The military’s scorched-earth policy is one of many reasons why the United Nations’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded the Guatemalan government had committed genocide, as this military memo attests: “Their sowings must be destroyed to cut them off from their sources of supply and to oblige them to surrender due to hunger or to reveal themselves for their movements through the areas they visit and thus be able to fight them, with the objective of disorganising them.”⁸⁸ More than a million people (in a country of just seven million in the early 1980s) fled for their lives, taking refuge in the forests or migrating northward to refugee camps in Chiapas, Mexico.⁸⁹ With aid from missionaries, the military also resettled “pacified” communities (mostly Q’eqchi’) into “development poles” across Guatemala’s wide lowland zone south of the Petén panhandle.⁹⁰

In the context of this mayhem and forced relocations, maize diversity suffered.⁹¹ A team that returned in 2001 to the villages originally surveyed in the 1940s by US scientists found only thirteen of the thirty previously recorded maize varieties.⁹² Military violence curtailed collective rituals and community labor, interrupting intergenerational learning that occurs during those events. In every village where I worked, Q’eqchi’ elders lamented the loss of traditional maize varieties they had planted before the war.

Q’eqchi’ farmers call modern hybrids “seven-week corn” because the plants mature faster than native varieties. As I learned in Agoutiville, villagers who grow hybrids for market can fetch a higher price because their crop is ready before the slower-growing highland maize is ready for harvest. ICTA’s hybrids also produce a maize plant with a shorter stalk, a smaller cob, and larger kernels, making the ears easier to shuck for commercial sale. Genetically uniform hybrids may yield more total quantity but they are also vulnerable to pests in storage and in the field. For example, since 2008 a “tar spot” disease (mancha de asfalto, Phyllachora maydis) has caused losses among Petén farmers planting hybrids.

Many small farmers want to return to the old ways of planting. As one Guatemalan woman eloquently explains, “Before we stored our [maize] in the husk to keep the seeds, but then they convinced us that hybrid seeds were better, produced more. We’ve learned now that if you don’t apply all the inputs, this hybrid corn doesn’t work and is very expensive, but now we’ve lost our local [creole] seeds.”⁹³ During my ethnographic research, many Q’eqchi’ farmers were disillusioned with hybrids but could not source the native seeds they once planted. After the promising new NGO REDSAG (National Network for the Defense of Guatemala’s Food Sovereignty) was founded in 2004, Maya farmers throughout Guatemala responded enthusiastically to traditional seed exchanges and other regional seed fairs.

Maya farmers have resisted the Green Revolution in other ways as well. As documented by myself and others, small farmers “recycle” hybrid seeds despite yield losses upon replanting.⁹⁴ In the north I found similar practices of small farmers replanting corn hybrids for commercial sale, but also planting native maize varieties for local consumption. At least 91 percent of highland farmers who apply fertilizer save their own seeds. Although small-scale maize farmers have engaged with the Green Revolution, “they have done so in ways that intersect with rather than subsume traditional practice”—to the displeasure of agricultural attachés posted to the US Embassy who monitor agricultural trends for gringo “gain.”⁹⁵

GLOBAL AGRICULTURE INFORMATION NETWORK

The USDA has an unusually long history of donating self-interested “aid” to the Global South. The US State Department began formally placing employees abroad in 1901 through its Section of Foreign Markets. Then in 1930 the Herbert Hoover administration signed into law the creation of an agricultural attaché service that held diplomatic status, which became known as the Foreign Agricultural Service division (FAS). Four years later Congress passed another trade law requiring the US president to consult with the Department of Agriculture about agricultural tariffs. Agricultural Secretary Henry A. Wallace delegated this responsibility to the FAS. He also sent Lester D. Mallory to Mexico in 1939 as agricultural attaché to pursue food, rubber, medicinal plants, and other strategic war commodities. In that role Mallory served as Wallace’s personal escort on his famous 1940 tour of Mexico that led to the creation of CIMMYT. After a stint in Jordan, Mallory was promoted to Ambassador to Guatemala in the post-coup years of 1958–59.

FAS personnel also gather data on foreign markets on behalf of US agricultural interests, which is collated and organized in a searchable database through the Global Agriculture Information Network (GAIN). The Guatemalan FAS currently boasts six full-time employees who produce annual reports on sugar, coffee, processed food ingredients, retail foods, hotel and restaurant procurement, and import-export regulations. The team’s incredibly detailed “Grain and Feed” newsletters pimp intimate details about seasonal maize farming of subsistence farmers to US corporations and farm lobby organizations.⁹⁶ The FAS’s Agricultural Biotechnology Annual report overtly mulls how to force Guatemala to lift its tacit ban on GM crops.

The FAS bureau also sponsors high-level exchanges between Guatemalan and US business interests.⁹⁷ Invitation lists that I trawled from deep within the USDA website show that Guatemalan ministers, journalists, and other political appointees are regularly invited to agricultural expositions, where they are wined and dined by representatives from Monsanto, Pioneer, and other transnational corporations.⁹⁸ The USDA office of the undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs, led by Ted McKinney, recently arranged 450 personal meetings for a delegation of thirty-four agribusiness companies to Guatemala.⁹⁹

Other USDA-sponsored training programs include the Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship Program for early- to mid-career research scientists and faculty to spend six to twelve weeks with a US mentor, who will reciprocate with a visit to Guatemala. According to the program’s flyer, the program explicitly seeks to “address obstacles to the adoption of technology such as ineffectual policies and regulations” and expand research into “GM corn adaptable to the highlands or remote areas of Guatemala.”¹⁰⁰ In another case, Madelyn E. Spirnak, biotechnology advisor to the US State Department, met in 2005 with Guatemalan congressional representatives to promote GM technology during a vulnerable moment of hunger crisis following Hurricane Stan.¹⁰¹ Two other embassy fellowship programs connect policymakers from developing countries with US experts through exchanges to “strengthen and enhance trade links with the United States.”¹⁰²

The US Embassy regularly hosts academic speakers like Dr. Wayne Parrott from the University of Georgia, to parrot corporate talking points.¹⁰³ Descended from Guatemalan plantation owners, Parrott posts regularly on the website AgBioChatter to harass scientists like Gilles-Éric Seralini, the French scientist who first documented Roundup’s carcinogenicity.¹⁰⁴ Parrott’s university website shows he regularly trains postdocs, who then go on to work for Bayer-Monsanto on maize genetics.

Surveys show that Guatemalan farmers almost universally reject the hypothetical prospect of planting GM corn. One intriguing nuance is that they are less concerned with the ethical issues of trans-species genetics that seem to mesmerize their gringo consumers.¹⁰⁵ They are also more concerned about yield instability and dependence on foreign inputs.¹⁰⁶ For certain, they have justifiable historical reasons to be wary of a gringo gene revolution designed for US growing conditions.

GMOS 101

The gene revolution began when the founders of Genentech, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer, developed a technology that could splice genes into bacteria for the development of pharmaceuticals and medical treatments in the 1970s. A key US Supreme Court ruling in 1980 allowed corporations to patent living organisms (Diamond v. Chakrabarty); that case involved a bacteria designed to break down crude oil spills but said nothing about food. The food question fell to the FDA, which made an administrative decision in 1992 that GM crops were “substantially equivalent” to other crops and needed no special regulation.¹⁰⁷ Two years later the FDA rubber-stamped the first commercial GM food crop, Calgene’s Flavr Savr tomato, whose genes were engineered to delay ripening and maintain a longer shelf life.

Unlike the implicit promise of its nomenclature, the Flavr Savr tomato had little flavor and proved to be a commercial disaster. Monsanto gradually bought the company for $320 million between 1995 and 1997 and pulled the product from the market in 1997.¹⁰⁸ However, for a brief period Flavr Savr seeds were being produced in Guatemala outside of the Q’eqchi’ capital of Cobán. When Guatemalan environmentalists inadvertently learned the seeds were being sent through regular mail without respect for biosafety protocols, they triggered a policy review that led to the country’s tacit ban on GM crops.¹⁰⁹

Corporations raced during the 1990s to genetically modify key grain and fiber crops paired with their signature weed killers. As Monsanto CEO Bob Shapiro commented in a World Bank group magazine, “It is truly easy to make a great deal of money dealing with very primary needs: food, shelter, clothing.”¹¹⁰ Monsanto soon pushed to the front of the pack and emerged victorious with the first major herbicide-resistant crops—Roundup Ready soy (1996), then canola and cotton (1997), corn (1998), and eventually alfalfa and sugarbeets (2005). These GM seeds were born addicted to chemicals. Monsanto also became the first major purveyor of another type of GM seed: Bt technology (marketed under the name YieldGard), which integrates a protein from a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, that produces a toxin lethal to some insects. Every cell of a Bt crop, including the edible parts, contains tiny amounts of this toxin.¹¹¹ This proved hazardous to nontarget species, like Monarch butterflies, which can be killed by Bt-laced pollen that falls on their milkweed foliage.¹¹²

Both types of GM crops disrupt the ecological balance, whether via toxic herbicide residue or toxin-infused plants.¹¹³ Glyphosate and its metabolites can persist in the soil longer than originally imagined. In fact, British Columbia scientists found glyphosate residue in wild species harvested by First Nations more than a year after aerial spraying.¹¹⁴ Besides being absorbed by nontarget plants and being toxic to fish and mammals, the herbicide can harm beneficial insects.

As any entomologist or plant scientist knows, bugs reproduce within days or weeks and weeds sprout at least annually, so the question is not whether pests and weeds will become resistant to Bt or herbicide packages, but “how fast.”¹¹⁵ Could crops themselves become weeds? Can herbicides affect beetles and insects that otherwise might eat weed seeds?¹¹⁶ Can trace amounts of these chemicals alter human (or animal) microbiomes at levels that are not considered carcinogenic but which can nonetheless harm their health?¹¹⁷

Most of these systemic questions remain unanswered, in part because Monsanto has sustained a revolving door with the key government regulatory agencies tasked with overseeing its technology. Michael R. Taylor, for example, worked at the FDA between 1976 and 1980 and then moved to a private law firm whose clients included Monsanto. A decade later he returned to the FDA as deputy commissioner for policy; for three years he helped Monsanto win approval for its bovine growth hormone. After working at the FDA, he published a toxicology article that helped persuade the FDA to allow low-level carcinogens in food.¹¹⁸ After his next stint at the USDA, Monsanto hired him as a vice president for public policy, where he served from 1998 to 2001.¹¹⁹ Taylor reappeared in 2009 in the Obama administration, where he acted as a senior food safety advisor to the FDA commissioner.

Another former Monsanto lawyer and board member, Michael “Mickey” Kantor, chaired the Clinton-Gore election campaign in 1992, went on to become Clinton’s trade representative from 1993 to 1996, and was then promoted to US secretary of commerce between 1996 and 1997. Yet another Monsanto scientist, Margaret Miller, became deputy director of the FDA. Rufus Yerza, former chief counsel for Monsanto, became Clinton’s appointee to the World Trade Organization. The EPA has also employed former or soon-to-be Monsanto officials in top leadership positions. Assistant Administrator Linda J. Fisher left the EPA in 1993 to become a Monsanto vice president from 1995 to 2000; she then returned to the EPA in a higher position.¹²⁰ The EPA’s first director, William Ruckelshaus, went on to serve on Monsanto’s board after leaving government service.¹²¹

Last but not least, US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas worked for Monsanto between 1977 and 1979. Despite his infamously long silence on the court, Thomas nevertheless volunteered to write the brief in a 2001 case for Pioneer Hi-Bred that solidified GMO patent rights, and then wrote another brief in 2013 in a ruling for Monsanto against seventy-five-year-old farmer Vernon Bowman for patent infringement. Bowman’s crime? In 1999 he bought generic soybeans destined for market, sprayed them with Roundup, identified the resistant seeds, and replanted them.¹²²

Farmers are clever folk and love frugal hacks.¹²³ GM seeds are, therefore, a tricky business, because “seed is grain is seed is grain” and thus every corn kernel “is both means of production and, as grain, the product.”¹²⁴ Because seeds naturally regenerate themselves, they resist subsumption to the commodity form. Although replanting hybrids makes little economic sense, GM varieties can in theory be replanted year after year with no consequence for production (although, in the case of corn, the GM product is based on a hybrid variety).

To prevent shrewd farmers like Bowman from replanting any of these GM seeds, farmers must sign legal agreements not to replant “second generation” seeds. Monsanto has ruthlessly pursued and prosecuted farmers for patent infringement and once even employed the infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency to enforce its patents. Former CEO Bob Shapiro claimed that farmers wanted this surveillance: “No one is eager to pay fees, but have accepted that that’s the price of getting better quality and new traits. What the farm community has been very emphatic on is that they don’t want to have some farmers paying and other farmers cheating by retaining seed and not paying for its use.”¹²⁵ As of this writing, Bayer still maintains Monsanto’s convenient 1-800-ROUND-UP phone number for anonymous snitching: just press (option) 3 to inform about the “misuse of seed.” Farmers report having been tailed, having their phones tapped, having their signatures forged, or being entrapped by Monsanto agents posing as black-market seed sellers.¹²⁶

Most North American farmers who find themselves in Monsanto’s crosshairs settle in arbitration, paying on average $412,000.¹²⁷ By 2006 Monsanto had collected between $85 and $160 million from out-of-court settlements. One notable exception was Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser who refused to be silenced when Monsanto sued him. Monsanto also ruthlessly prosecutes seed sellers, cooperative silos, and even country stores¹²⁸—claiming that it must do so to offset the $2 million a day it reportedly spends on research. However, Bill Freese from the Center for Food Safety estimates that Monsanto spends more money harassing farmers than it spends on its R&D budget.¹²⁹

Beyond legal bullying, Monsanto has made other troubling moves to force farmers to pay for seeds year after year. Monsanto acquired a small biotech company, Delta & Pine Land, which had patented “genetic use restriction technology” (GURT) (pat. no. 5,723,765) to produce sterile second-generation seeds. The public outcry that this “Terminator” technology could irreversibly threaten the world’s food supply led Monsanto to pledge that it would not move forward with commercializing GURT products. However, the other major players—Syngenta, Pharmacia, DuPont, and BASF—independently developed this same technology and filed fourteen GURT patents by 2001.¹³⁰ Despite current industry promises not to market these sterilizing seeds, agribusiness corporations have a strong profit motive to oblige farmers forevermore to purchase their patented seeds.¹³¹

To be sure, control of seeds is just a conduit for the greater profits to be made in complementary agrochemical inputs. Roundup Ready crops introduced in 1996 were a salve for the expiration of Monsanto’s patent on its signature Roundup herbicide in September 2000. For another fifteen years they obliged farmers to continue buying Monsanto’s proprietary herbicide. Starting in 2015, however, the Roundup Ready seed patents themselves began to expire, meaning farmers like Bowman could then legally buy and replant the seeds. How then to compel farmers to continue purchasing their complete packages? Monsanto began launching new products with more than one genetic modification known as “stacked traits.” More, however, is not always better. In the American Midwest, one of Monsanto’s newest genetically modified corn products, SmartStax, which has eight stacked genes, yielded no more than a less expensive product with only three inserted genes.¹³²

Argentina’s experience with Roundup Ready soybeans is another illustrative example of Monsanto’s false promises. When acquiring permission to enter the Argentinean market in 1996, Monsanto lowered seed prices by a third, waived all royalties, and promised government officials that it would never sue farmers who replanted the seeds.¹³³ Through backchannels, however, Argentina was compelled to establish a registry of “seed users” to help breeders enforce their patents.¹³⁴ Breaking its promise, Monsanto then attempted to levy patent infringement fines on any soy being sent to European ports, threatening an important source of expected revenue (worth $10 billion annually) of an Argentinian state budget still in recovery from its 2001 financial crisis.¹³⁵

A decade later, Roundup Ready soybeans had spread to 60 percent of the country’s cultivated land. The average farm size in the country more than doubled and almost a third of farmers (160,000 families) went out of business.¹³⁶ Surviving farmers had to increase herbicide applications dramatically to combat the glyphosate-resistant Johnsongrass spreading across at least ten thousand hectares of the pampas. Annual use of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) increased from just one million liters before the introduction of Roundup Ready soybeans to 150 million liters by 2005.¹³⁷ Scientists also began noticing increased occurrence of health problems in Argentina’s soybean production zones, including reproductive, thyroid, respiratory, kidney, and dermatological diseases.¹³⁸

In consolidating the corporate monopoly over the agricultural cycle, GM seed technology is perhaps more an accelerant than a break from the past. Both the Green and the gene revolutions homogenized crops on a massive scale.¹³⁹ The tight coupling of seeds and proprietary agrochemicals with GMOs intensified the pace of major corporate mergers and acquisitions—more than four hundred consolidations between 1996 and 2018.¹⁴⁰ Despite corporate name changes, most of the original chemical companies involved with military R&D in the world wars remain key players.

Monsanto would like us to believe that “sustainable agriculture is possible only with [continued advances in] biotechnology and imaginative chemistry.”¹⁴¹ But the obsession with genetics to solve world hunger ignores the greater potential of land reform, fair markets, or other state interventions to support small farming systems. Both the Green and the gene revolutions aim to replace farmer knowledge with the “mental monoculture” of standardized advice from agricultural extension agencies and pesticide vendors.¹⁴² Yet, blindly following recommendations narrowly focused on crop yield would be folly for small farmers who must also worry about storability, drought resistance, seed variety against pests, culinary preferences, and harvest time. Above all, peasants must try to reduce risk, because ill health or crop failure can mean starvation for people living off the land without government subsidies.¹⁴³ As a people historically subjected to debt peonage, self-reliant Maya farmers like Don Santiago Mo have an understandable aversion to spending money on seeds.

If not for Maya farmers, perhaps we ought to be worried for ourselves. Although it is hard to measure, according to 2015 data from the FAO, humanity has already lost three-quarters of the seed diversity that existed prior to the Green Revolution.¹⁴⁴ If the center of the world’s genetic maize diversity in Mesoamerica gets irreversibly contaminated by homogenous GM strains, humanity’s third-largest food crop could become susceptible to an unsolvable plague.¹⁴⁵ Have we learned nothing from the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine or the 1970s corn blight?