Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution

Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution By Hossein Ayazi A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Alastair Iles, Co-chair Professor Keith P. Feldman, Co-chair Professor Kathryn De Master Professor Thomas Biolsi Summer 2018 @Copyright by Hossein Ayazi 2018 Abstract Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution by Hossein Ayazi Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management University of California, Berkeley Professor Alastair Iles, Co-chair Professor Keith P. Feldman, Co-chair From roughly the early 1940s to the early 1970s, the United States led a set of international capital-intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer initiatives. These initiatives were designed to facilitate a more expansive market agrarianism, increase agricultural yields, and combat hunger amidst concerns of a rapidly growing population. Yet, named the “Green Revolution,” these initiatives, in their push for the development of industrial agriculture oriented to the global market, ultimately preempted peasant unrest and undermined larger revolutionary action as they reconstituted states as guarantors of agricultural markets in service of U.S. state power and transnational capitalism. This dissertation, Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution, recognizes the Green Revolution as an exercise in the risk management of racial capitalism during a period of great social upheaval: when overlapping, internationalized anticolonial and civil rights movements named the limits of racial democracy and risked undercutting postwar U.S. state power and transnational capitalism. Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution argues that the mid-twentieth century technical, scientific, and education cooperation efforts, and paired innovations in governance and administration, elaborated upon U.S. state-led and capital-intensive efforts to cultivate forms of Native and Black market agrarianisms developed in the early-twentieth century. Operating in service of the accumulation of wealth and the exercise of geopolitical power, the Green Revolution remade peoples and places in accordance with the anti-Black and settler colonial logics of the plantation and reservation. Additionally, the transit of the plantation and the reservation toward such ends was based upon domestic innovations in U.S. slave and settler capitalisms. The framework of agricultural technical and scientific cooperation and paired innovations in governance and administration during the mid-twentieth crystallized the emergent trope of “development.” Yet, problematizations of the plantation and reservation in the early twentieth century prefigured such developments globally. 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents (i) Acknowledgements (ii) Introduction. Agricultural Development and the Plantation and Reservation in Transit 1 Chapter One. The Reservation in Crisis: From “The Problem of Indian Administration” to a “Bold New Program” 22 Chapter Two. The Reservation as Crisis: Termination, (Non)Containment, and the "Indian Point 4 Program” 59 Chapter Three. The Plantation in Crisis: Liberian Rubber and “The Native Problem in Africa” 92 Chapter Four. The Plantation as Crisis: Racial Liberal Plantation Criticism and Liberia’s “Booker Washington Institute” 127 Conclusion. Liberal/Neoliberal Multicultural Plantations and Reservations 162 Notes 169 i Acknowledgements I owe many thanks to a number of people who have helped me on my journey toward becoming a better scholar, teacher, mentor, son, brother, partner, friend, and community member. First, I am grateful for my family: Akbar, Zohreh, Neda, Payam, Ghoncheh, Andrew, and Roshan. You have been my lifeline and champions when I have struggled, and have always been there to celebrate with me when I am ahead. You are everything to me, and you offer constant reminders of what true, unconditional love is. Alongside my family is my partner, Linda, who has aided my growth in countless ways, and whose patience, support, brilliance, and enthusiasm I can never take for granted. Thank you for all that you are. At the University of California, Berkeley, I am particularly grateful for Alastair Iles, Keith P. Feldman, and Elsadig Elsheikh. You are the reason I have made it this far, and you are the reason I can see the road ahead. Through your ceaseless commitment, energy, brilliance, balance, and integrity, you have been true mentors in every sense of the word. No words can adequately describe just how thankful I am to have worked with you and learned from you. Kathryn De Master and Tom Biolsi, you have both provided invaluable feedback on my dissertation. Thank you for your brilliance, sincerity, and confidence in me since day one. Carolyn Finney and Pedro Di Pietro, you constantly pushed me to ask the most difficult questions of myself and my work, and I am extremely grateful for having had the privilege of working with both of you while you were at Berkeley. Jeffrey Romm, Beth Piatote, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Ula Taylor, Kim TallBear, Lok Siu, Lila Sharif, and Tore Olsson—to all of you and everyone else, thank you for your invaluable insight and guidance. Last, but by no means least, I am also grateful for a number of colleagues at Berkeley that I had the great pleasure of working with and alongside: Maywa Montenegro, Patrick Baur, Jesse Williamson, Carolina Prado, Rachel Lim, Bayley Marquez, Sara Chase, Cherod Johnson, Tala Khanmalek, Daniel Woo, Darren Arquero, Kim Tran, Maria Faini, and Marisol Silva, to name just a few. Your brilliance and integrity in and outside of the classroom has truly sustained me. ii Introduction. Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution From roughly the early 1940s to the early 1970s, the United States led a set of international capital-intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer initiatives. Carried out in conjunction with corporate, philanthropic, and state actors around the world, these initiatives were designed to facilitate a more expansive market agrarianism, increase agricultural yields, and combat hunger amidst concerns of a rapidly growing world population. Later named the “Green Revolution,” such efforts resulted in the adoption of a number of new technologies and practices that supposedly superseded the limitations of “traditional” farming: high-yielding varieties of wheats, rices, and other cereals, in association with agri-chemicals, and with irrigated water-supply, and large-scale mechanized cultivation methods. Where enacted, such measures exponentially increased agricultural yields. Total food production in the Global South in particular more than doubled between 1960 and 1985.1 The Green Revolution was so successful in this regard that food production surpassed population growth. Between 1950 and 1990, the global population increased by 110 percent while global cereal production increased by 174 percent over the same period.2 Given the radical transformations in agricultural production that took place across the world, it is difficult to not find truth in the words of Norman Borlaug, an agronomist and the “father of the Green Revolution.” In his 1970 Nobel Prize speech, Borlaug stated that “to millions of these unfortunates, who have long lived in despair, the Green Revolution seems like a miracle that has generated new hope for the future.”3 Yet despite the oft-cited production gains of industrial agriculture and the fanfare surrounding the architects of the Green Revolution, it did not “solve the problem of hunger” long term. That is, while true that hunger has decreased over the Green Revolution decades, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the number of hungry people increased by more than 11 percent, growing from 700 million in 1986 to 800 million in 1998.4 This story continued in the twenty-first century. With the global economic crisis beginning in 2008, the number of hungry people reached an historic 1.02 billion despite record grain harvests in 2008.5 Thus, despite the lofty rhetoric of feeding an impoverished world through modernized methods and relations of agricultural production, the Green Revolution seems to have succeeded in producing more food without actually addressing the problems of hunger and poverty themselves.6 The Green Revolution did not simply fail to fulfill the oft-repeated promise of “feeding the world.” According to Raj Patel, the Green Revolution was itself a “moment in struggles around the creation of value, altering the balance of class forces, reconfiguring relations to the means of production, and setting the processes of production and reproduction on a new trajectory.”7 Most notably, the injection of high-yielding varieties of a few cereals coupled with the heavy use of subsidized fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and machinery into the agricultural economies of the Global South, enacted the global push for the development of industrial agriculture oriented to the global market.8 This shift in the technologies and practices of agricultural production had devastating impacts globally: it ultimately weakened peasant agriculture, 1 consolidated peasant lands in fewer hands and increased the power of large landowners, and it pushed peasants onto

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