What Are Improved Seeds? An Epistemology of the Green Revolution

Abstract

After four decades of planned economic development, large numbers of people in the Third World still lack the basic means of subsistence. Broadly speaking, the academic debate on poverty has revolved around the type of development: free-market, planned socialist, or environmentally sustainable. It may be argued, however, that the principal problem lies in the very process of development, and that modern poverty is a form of development-induced scarcity. If this is true, our view of poverty must be radically altered to include its epistemology—that is, the intellect of “how we know poverty.” This position is clarified with an example from agricultural modernization, using a story about the Green Revolution and its epistemic transformation from seeds of plenty to seeds of scarcity.

Key words:

• improved seeds
• Green Revolution
• nexus of production relations
• epistemology
• scarcity
• poverty