Timothy W. Lorek, <i>Making the Green Revolution: Agriculture and Conflict in Colombia</i> Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 342. ISBN 978-1-4696-7382-0. $34.95 (paperback).

Abstract

In Making the Green Revolution, Timothy Lorek makes a compelling case for the 'vital role' played by Colombia and Colombians (p.9).Not only did the Rockefeller Foundation's Colombian Agricultural Program (1950-64) undertake critical researchits maize lines figured prominently around the worldbut, more significantly, the country served as an 'essential hinge' in the transformation of the Green Revolution from its populist roots in Mexico to the Cold War politics of containment via rural development in Asia (p.3).Yet more than just correcting a case of 'historiographic amnesia', Lorek's novel perspective explores the local roots and long-term consequences of the Green Revolution in Colombia's Cauca Valley (p.9).By emphasizing the local scientific tradition that lured the Rockefeller Foundation to Palmira (Colombia), Lorek suggests, contra the postdevelopment literature, that the Green Revolution was more a process of negotiation than a Northern imposition.Nonetheless, in the Cauca Valley the main beneficiaries were not family farmersa purported focus from the early years to the founding of CIAT (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical) in Palmira in 1967but the sugar cane industry.Many histories of the Green Revolution emphasize its scale bias: large-scale farmers were best positioned to deploy its technology.By contrast, in this case the dynamics of social differentiation were indirectplaceless research agendas, the proliferation of private-sector agronomists, state biases and political violencesince sugar cane research was not a priority.The unintended effects were dramatic: CIAT, established to improve smallholder production in the tropics, sits in a sea of corporate-controlled sugar cane fields.This image captures the dual narratives -Colombia's role in efforts to modernize tropical agriculture and the monopolization of the Cauca Valley by large sugar cane producersthat Lorek deftly weaves together to underscore the contradictions of the Green Revolution.Making the Green Revolution is divided into three sections: the early history of agricultural modernization in the Cauca Valley (1920s-1930s), the consolidation of the valley's sugar cane industry (1930s-1940s) and Colombia's participation in the global Green Revolution with the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation and the founding of CIAT (1950s-1960s).The main story begins with the founding of the Palmira Agricultural Experimental Station in 1927 by Ciro Molina Garcs, a conservative Catholic who believed in the redemptive value of rural labour, and Carlos Durn Castro, a young agronomist who became its first director.Dismissing claims of racial degeneration to explain the fertile valley's stagnation, they sought salvation in tropical agronomy.Economic development and raising rural standards of living required both peasant and landed elite, under the