How Technology Drives the History of the Green Revolution

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that histories of the Green Revolution are often underpinned by commitments to theoretical models of technology and science in ways which shape the parameters of such narratives in politically normative ways. This paper explores the accounts of the Green Revolution in India given by Vandana Shiva and Govindan Parayil and demonstrates the ways in which these accounts are influenced by their models of technology and science. It is argued that Shiva and Parayil represent key theoretical positions in technological theory, determinist and instrumentalist, respectively, and that examination of their Green Revolution narratives clearly indicates the ways in which such theoretical commitments can determine the scope and content of analyses of technology-driven development, and thereby exclude political content necessary for the evaluation of the efficacy of such development and the validity of the theoretical model.

KEYWORDS:

• Green Revolution
• Vandana Shiva
• Govindan Parayil
• technological determinism
• instrumentalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A clarificatory point on the use of the terms instrumentalism and determinism in this context. Technological determinism tends to be conflated in the popular imagination with what Reinfelder (1980) terms the technicist position, the belief that technology is the major driver of societal change and has its own teleology. In practice, however, most advocates of a determinist position hold that technology has the power to shape rather than determine societal development, and either reject, or severely qualify, the idea that technology has its own autonomous course of development (Swer 2014). And instrumentalism, as a position in technological analysis, is often held to have been superseded by social constructionist approaches that explore the design process of technological artefacts (see McCarthy 2017). I argue, however, that social constructivism is itself a form of instrumentalism in that it too views technology as inherently value-neutral and pays little heed to the application of that technology or the materiality of engagement with it.

2 The Green Revolution narratives given in the following sections are those of Parayil (sections 4 and 5) and Shiva (sections 2 and 3). They are intended to exemplify the ways in which their historical narratives are shaped by their concepts of technology. I take no position on the truth of their individual historical claims or the veracity of their historical accounts, and merely recount their technological positions and the key features of their technological Green Revolution narratives. Thus any pronouncements made in these sections should be taken to represent the views of Parayil or Shiva only.

3 Shiva does at times write as if these exploitative features were necessary features of modern western technology. I suspect that she is being hyperbolic in these instances, as opposed to making an essentialising claim about all modern Western technology sub specie aeternitatis. Of course, this defence in turn raises questions about which Western technologies can be held to have deterministic properties and what it is that differentiates them from other, non-deterministic, Western technologies. And whether it is only modern Western technoscience that has these deterministic capacities or whether the technologies/sciences of other times and cultures have such capacities as well. Such questions are perennial issues in the Philosophy of Technology and whilst I do not doubt that a justification of Shiva’s position could be constructed, it is the case that Shiva does not attempt to provide one. Consequently, her version of technological determinism verges on the monolithic and ahistorical. In this regard, Shiva’s account might well benefit from engagement with more dialectical determinist accounts with a broader historical scope, such as those of Lewis Mumford (1934, 1967) or Herbert Marcuse (1964).

4 Parayil uses the term “interactive” interchangeably with the term “dialectic” in describing the relationship between science and technology, and between the various components involved in the development and application of technology. “Dialectical,” for Parayil, has no deliberate Hegelian connotations, and instead refers to a dialogic process between parties involved in the development and/or application of technology that is governed by rational considerations.

5 Tiles and Oberdiek (1995, 47) note the contradiction involved in considering something that owes its form and existence to human design, i.e., was brought into existence for a particular purpose, as a natural object.

6 Parayil seems to view the peasant farmers as being a relatively homogenous group, representative of “Indian culture” in general. No ethnic, religious or caste distinctions among peasant farmers are considered.

7 This does not mean that Shiva’s analysis is beyond criticism. One might, for instance, question the centrality of the role she accords Western political interests in the development of Green Revolution technology, given the concurrent development of similar technology under the decidedly non-capitalist and non-Western political system of Chinese communism (Patel 2013; Schmalzer 2016; Kilby 2019).

8 See for instance Evenson (2005) or Evenson and Gollin (2003).

9 Since the so-called empirical turn in the 1990s, technology studies have prioritised descriptivism over critique. See Du Toit and Swer (2020).