White science and indigenous maize: the racial logics of the Green Revolution

ABSTRACT

Indigenous maize from Mexico has become crucial for a wave of contemporary agricultural development initiatives seeking to cultivate a ‘Green Revolution for Africa’. Plant breeders developing disease-resistant hybrid maize for Africa use cutting edge technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 to mine the genomes of maize collected in Mexico 75 years ago, during the Green Revolution’s earliest incarnation. Historicizing this transnational linkage, this paper argues that Green Revolution science appropriates indigenous maize through racial logics rooted in whiteness. In the 1940s, American scientists sent by the Rockefeller Foundation to improve Mexico’s agriculture negotiated their own racial subjectivity through their encounters with Mexico’s indigenous people. In the process, they constructed a racial hierarchy that equated whiteness with scientific superiority and indigeneity with underdevelopment. This racialization undergirded a maize program led by E.J. Wellhausen that collected and catalogued hundreds of varieties of Mexico’s maize – and then distributed them to American seed companies. Wellhausen’s seeds formed the genetic backbone for subsequent Green Revolution projects. The ‘white science’ he embodied expanded as the Revolution sought out nonwhite agriculture across the global South. Today, the Green Revolution’s racial logics are re-articulated along its geographical and technological frontier, as indigenous maize provides the seeds for the African Green Revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Green Revolution
• race
• whiteness
• indigeneity
• maize
• Mexico
• CRISPR
• Green Revolution for Africa

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Rachel Schurman, Bianet Castellanos, Tracey Deutsch, Susan Craddock, Evan Taparata, Laura Matson, Heidi Zimmerman, Alex Liebman, Jen Hughes, and Raj Patel for providing feedback and encouragement throughout the writing process. Thoughtful suggestions from two anonymous reviewers helped to tighten the article's argument and bolster its analysis. I also wish to thank my interviewees at CIMMYT. I am grateful for fellowship support from the University of Minnesota's Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and Mark and Judy Yudof Fellowship. Finally, I would like to thank the Rockefeller Archive Center for a generous grant-in-aid.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Aaron Eddens http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4009-3737

Notes

1 WEMA operates in Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and South Africa.

2 At the time, the Rockefeller Foundation did not conceive of what it was doing in terms of a ‘Green Revolution’. That phrase is often attributed to a comment made in 1968 by United States Agency for International Development administrator William Gaud at a meeting of the Society for International Development in Washington DC (Patel 2013, 5).

3 This is a simplified account of the beginning of the MAP, which has been widely covered in scholarship on the Green Revolution (see Jennings 1988; Wright 1990; Perkins 1997; Cotter, 2003; Patel 2013).

4 The commission noted that the Suburban was ‘originally red in color but repainted green, possibly more in keeping with the mission’ (Stakman, Bradfield, and Mangelsdorf 1967, 25).

5 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helping me make this point.

6 We should not, of course, examine the land grant movement solely through the lens of race. Race always intersects with and operates through other forms of social difference such as gender, class and sexuality (see HoSang, LaBennett, and Pulido 2012).

7 Reflecting their keen interested in genetic heritage, they also doubted that he was ‘pure bred’ Aztec, as he reportedly claimed, because he had ‘blue eyes’ (Mangelsdorf 1966, 65).

8 Steve Gliessman shows how Hernández Xolocotxzi came to be quite critical of Green Revolution programs later in his career and was influential in starting the agroecology movement (2013, 25).

9 Donna Haraway (1997) reminds us that ‘a gene is not a thing’ in itself, but must be made legible through social and technical processes. This does not mean that they are not real, she insists. Being ‘made’ is not the same as being ‘made up’.

10 Wellhausen’s Officer Diary (n.d.) details extensive correspondence with company leadership from the burgeoning American hybrid seed industry. Wellhausen sent maize varieties to companies like Pioneer, DeKalb and Northrop King.

11 Such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’s Program for Africa’s Seed Systems, CIMMYT’s Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (now Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa Seed Scaling), and Water Efficient Maize for Africa.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Graduate School, University of Minnesota; Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnnesota; Rockefeller Archive Center; Yudof Fellowship in Science Policy and Ethics, University of Minnesota.

Notes on contributors

Aaron Eddens

Notes on contributor

Aaron Eddens is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His research theorizes the political economic landscape of contemporary Western-led agricultural development efforts aimed at transforming African agriculture in the context of climate change. His dissertation analyzes contemporary ‘Green Revolution for Africa’ development in the context of longer transnational trajectories of race, science and empire. He is also working on a project that interrogates the politics of recent ‘science communication’ projects that support agricultural biotechnology.