The Green Revolution Nightmare

Farmland, worldwide, has been on a course of destruction for millennia, dramatically expedited by the mining of fossil fuels and the destruction of communities.

Plantains in Las Marias that were blown over after a minor storm in spring 2022. By Steven Casanova

There are huge bananas plants (1) that line our farm’s perimeter, planted decades ago by ancestors of the community. The center of the farm was left open for the king cash crop - coffee - but the ancestors knew that bananas would always provide food, even when the coffee didn’t buy bread. Five years ago Hurricane Maria slammed into our town of Utuado at nearly 200 mph and tore the entire cash crop from the earth to such an extent that the landowner decided to just bulldoze the whole farm and start from scratch. Bananas, and their cousin the plantain, ensure abundance. Once established, they become permanent clumps that only need to be kept clean of vines and then harvested before the rats do. A single banana rack commonly has around hundred bananas and weighs nearly thirty pounds. And the ancestors planned wisely; with the cash crop all gone, and no cash to harvest, toxic weeds and intense grasses blanket the farm now, but the banana clumps remain. Some tower eighteen feet tall and produce racks of food monthly. Their survival illustrates farming’s duality, a balance between the realities of our food system: abundance and war.

Utuado is world famous for its landslides. After Maria, the reports that got out to the U.S. and beyond told how people were trapped after thousands of landslides blocked roads in every direction. After Fiona, just a few weeks ago, the world saw us lose the main bridge that led to our university. There are two reasons for landslides that damage infrastructure. One is that the infrastructure never should’ve been there, in that form; when the U.S. installed a hydroelectric dam in Utuado in the 1940s (2), it flooded entire towns (3), pushing people into the steep and fragile mountains, connected by roads that are built across occasional waterfalls. And the other is that the land has lost its forests, its trees that gripped the Earth with deep roots and also removed water from the ground through evapotranspiration, in order to plant endless acres of cash crops. Utuado isn’t a rainforest by USDA standards like El Yunque, but its annual rainfall is only a few inches shy of the qualification. So, when rain saturates the land and the weight becomes too much for the bushes to hold, the earth falls, buries, topples, and collapses. These two root causes- human displacement and reckless land use- have repeated themselves for centuries on our farm, like cycles of war and reconstruction. War, of course, is a principle author of history, as is, though less credited, erosion. (4)

 This was once a coffee mountain. Trees were cut to plant thousands of coffee bushes. Trees were cut to make room for oranges, chirongas, and grapefruits, to grow shade coffee and produce a second income. Trees were cut for roasting coffee. Trees were cut to make space, houses, and fuel for all the people who worked the massive coffee mountain. Forests were eliminated because it suited the markets of the colonial power. 

Now we live on a clay mountain. The world’s coffee addiction robbed Utuado of its topsoil, shipped across oceans or carried down river to the lake created by the dam. But the agricultural industry was never based on the merits of Puerto Ricans, and so when foreign imperialism found places to exploit even more efficiently, all those people who once tended the land were forced to leave. They migrated into the cities or afuera. (5)

An example of the pure clay of our farm. This extreme example is due to heavy machinery and subsequent erosion. By Steven Casanova 

The farmland that is left is acidic, barren clay with only a thin film of organic material, densely thicketed with thorny bushes and vines - not the most ideal place to grow food (6). Yet, the whole region is farmed. This story, with countless variations, exists throughout the Global South/Third World/developing/underdeveloped/low income countries (7), or more precisely: nations and lands that have been relentlessly extracted from to drive European and American economies. Or even more precisely: land that was stripped of its nature, which by the European definition included the Indigenous people and original caretakers, in order to pursue profit by any means necessary (8).

The 20th century response to these generations of endless extraction came in the form of the Green Revolution, which brought major changes to agricultural communities in the poorest nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The National Academy of Sciences explains the era as “an extraordinary period of food crop productivity growth…despite increasing land scarcity and rising land values. Although populations had more than doubled, the production of cereal crops tripled during this period, with only a 30% increase in land area cultivated.” (9)

The Green Revolution focused on new varieties and cultivation methods for corn, rice, and wheat, and is widely remembered as an unparalleled success in reducing hunger and poverty. So much so, that, as the N.A.S. puts it, the world is preparing for a new Green Revolution, especially as concerns rise regarding “sustaining productivity gains, enhancing smallholder competitiveness, and adapting to climate change” (9). These trends are worth paying attention to, and it is important that we situate this moment in its proper place in history. 

“Map of Puerto Rico Showing Distribution of Crop Lands, 1899.” By Herbert M. Wilson. This was created immediately after the U.S. takeover of Puerto Rico. 

Since the earliest days of colonization Puerto Rico has been chopped up by its extractable goods. The flat coastal lowlands were cleared for sugar, the midland hills plowed for bananas, oranges, and tobacco, and the mountains reshaped for coffee. These became the roots of ongoing segregation as enslaved African people were trafficked for the more difficult and often deadly labor of industrialized sugar, while poor Europeans could be lured to the hills and mountains to be paid minimal wages for the mind- and hand-numbing work of picking coffee and rolling tobacco. Africans that remained on the coasts after emancipation were pushed to the infertile flood zones at the edge of the ocean. Today, Airbnb is displacing their descendants in order to get beach front property. (10)

The sugar boom was short lived in Puerto Rico (11), it began after enslaved peoples liberated themselves and created the first free republic in America, Haiti, next door (12). Enslavers fled Haiti and tried to keep the business going here. Especially as the Haitian revolution led to the many wars for Independence from Spain throughout Latin America, Spain doubled down on their Caribbean cash cow, boosting and then keeping afloat the industry through tariffs, land grants, and ever harsher labor laws (13). But the combination of sugar’s heavy nutrient demand and the unsustainable rate of plantation development made possible only through enslaved labor, was destined to exhaust the soils despite colonial desires.

The Green Revolution wasn’t universally applied throughout poor and hungry nations, it was strategically used to quell rebellion. The initiative was conceived in the 1960’s as a capitalist counter to socialism’s Red Revolutions. Instead of promising food for hungry people via land access, it promised food via fertilizer access, genetically modified crop varieties, and neoliberalism. Production climbed and prices dropped, profits were traded in the cities and abroad. Someone had to pick this expanded yield, albeit at a lower pay rate than before. The real legacy of the Green Revolution was to squeeze land and land-working peasants more efficiently while promising abundance to the cities. As Raj Patel explains in his book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, “The long Green Revolution… did not reduce hunger. [Excluding China, the global] ranks of the hungry swelled by more than 11 percent over the course of the Green Revolution. And while reporters are happy to celebrate the fact that ‘India’s wheat production doubled from 1965 to 1972’ and rose steadily throughout the 1970s, the amount that Indians actually ate hardly improved over the same period”. Likewise, the increased wheat yields in Mexico still receives accolades, yet wheat was virtually nonexistent in the Mexican diet before and immediately after the Green Revolution transformed their lands (14). The N.A.S. admits that in the poorest areas of the world which rely on rainfall and cannot afford to build irrigation systems, the Green Revolution actually did not reduce poverty or hunger, and instead expanded wealth gaps (9). As farms have been pushed beyond their capacities and their topsoil continued to be exported wholesale in the form of commodities, the Green Revolution responded by sending fertilizers, GMOs, and compact farm machines around the world in order to keep crop yields just above revolution-level. A new iteration of the Green Revolution threatens to once again ramp up pressures on small farmers and peasant farmworkers to take on the brunt of the problems facing the workers of the cities and First World/Western Countries/Global North/developed nations: food price inflation, supply chain monopolies, and climate change.

So when we moved here we came with all of this in mind. We are on this land because it is no longer viable for other people to make a living from farming here. Centuries of colonial war has deprived the people of economic value just as equal time of war on the land has robbed the land of its natural value. A forty-pound rack of bananas, raised for nine months in degraded soil, harvested and hauled to town, might sell for $8 on a good day. It requires a pick up truck completely full of bananas, ass nearly scraping the street, to make $200, a teenager’s weekly pay at McDonalds. The fruits of twenty five bananas trees would be necessary, and a farmer would need to maintain 1,500 banana trees to sustain that minimal weekly pay - an unbelievable amount of work. Instead, it makes more sense to farm coffee for people around the planet, rely on the store for an imported grocery supply, and use chemical fertilizer to counter the affects of soil degradation and a destroyed labor market. We are living in the Green Revolution’s neoliberal nightmare. 

This blog post was made available courtesy of the author, Steven Casanova. It is part one of the article “The Pee Plantain and Endless War.” The article was edited by Alex Matzke, Caron Swanson, and Pam Roberts. To read the entire article, see all the photos and footnotes, go to StevenCasanova.substack.com

Footnotes:

1. Hola! Welcome reader. Thank you for being here, and an extra thank you for reaching the footnotes and not giving up. Here I will give further context, explanations, and reading suggestions. The idea of doing footnotes differently came to me from Max Liboiron’s incredibly important book on doing science differently, Pollution is Colonialism. Go read it. They write with such clarity about issues that we must grapple with to be able to build anything restorative. But they also keep it real and I think about their writing frequently when working on my own. We are going to start with an easy note: bananas and plantains are the largest herbaceous food crops on earth - they are tree-sized but make instead of soft plant cells. So huge banana plant is redundant, but I am writing this for mostly people who do not live where banana plants can grow to maturity.

2. The Lago Dos Bocas reservoir was built in Utuado, in the center of the mountains, to supply electricity only for the coastal capital San Juan, 30 miles away. The access to and destruction of Utuado’s most fertile river basins was a mere side affect of electrifying the capital for the wealthy. 

3. Technically they were not “towns” in the legal and political sense, but they were entire communities and economic centers established along the rivers. The factory smoke stack still shoots out above the water, and when devastating drought hits the area, the church steeple becomes visible. 

4. While the official story of Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Caribbean is that he was searching for shorter trade routes, it should be contextualized that the previous centuries of European wars and land degradation led to the transfer from feudalism to capitalism, and the fate of this new structure would depend on exploiting other lands, and therefore it was worth betting on an idiot’s voyage across the Atlantic.

5. In some cases, Puerto Ricans left by the thousands to work those other lands, as was the case when 10,000 Puerto Rican farm laborers were shipped to Hawaii in the early 20th century and eventually becoming a major demographic there. 

6. If you judge by looks alone, the area is rich with green vegetation. But common among tropic (and therefore colonized and exploited) lands globally is that 90% of the life is above ground, in the vegetation. The warm and wet climate encourages constant growth, but that fragile vegetation is misleading.

7. These terms are not actually interchangeable. Some are based on national GDPs and others on whether a country was on team capitalist or team socialist. But all are causally used interchangeably to refer to, as the most recent U.S. president termed them, “shithole countries.”

8. Raj Patel’s History of the World in Seven Cheap Things spends a considerable amount of time illustrating the tactic of making Indigenous African and American people a part of nature, rather than human, a distinction reserved for certain Europeans and simultaneously cheapening nature to be something that must be tamed or removed in pursuit of profit and power.

9. Pingali, Prabhu L. “Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead.” 2012 Jul 31. National Academy of Sciences.