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IPFS News Link • NATO

No, The Green Revolution Is Not A 'Stunning Success'

• BY: KRISTOFFER MOUSTEN HANSEN

American liberals/progressives, fresh from imposing the New Deal in the thirties and planning and directing a world war, turned their eyes to international affairs: the United States had a world historic mission of messianic proportions: lifting developing countries into modernity by remaking them (and all other countries, for that matter) in America's own image.

The Cold War era was rife with projects and organizations to carry out this vision, from Bretton Woods and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the area of international finance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in military affairs to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom used to spread progressive, US-friendly propaganda. These organizations all had mainly deleterious influences—I have previously indicated how Bretton Woods and the modern international financial system can best be described as financial imperialism—but in one area American interventionism is to this day universally acclaimed as benign: the Green Revolution.

The Official History of the Green Revolution
Population growth was considered a major problem in the sixties. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University in his 1968 Population Bomb predicted widespread hunger as soon as the 1970s and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. The world simply could not feed a larger human population. Although mainly focused on environmental damage from pesticide use, Rachel Carson's famous 1962 book, Silent Spring, made similar points. Human population was bound to continue to grow, and this would result in untold suffering and environmental damage.

A key and imminent danger in the 1960s was India: always on the verge on starvation, only massive imports of American wheat kept the specter of mass death away. Then, in 1965, catastrophe struck: drought across most of the subcontinent caused the Indian harvest to fail. As the drought continued into the two following years, it appeared that Ehrlich's and the other Neo-Malthusians' predictions had come true.


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