The geopolitics of passive revolution and the ghost of Malthus in the American Century

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the re-emergence of Malthusian limits in the post-war period was universally accepted as a principal challenge to the integrity of the American Century, yet whose solution was refracted through competing ideological frameworks among development experts. In mobilising Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals and passive revolution, I offer an in-depth empirical analysis of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Rockefeller Foundation, both of which largely converged around the consensus on land reform as a means of attenuating the revolutionary potential of peasant grievance. Yet this solution to Malthusian limits became steadily eroded as a function of the contingent outcomes of class struggle and state-formation across the Global South. Through a focused examination of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, I show how the eventual decline of land reform in favour of more muscular modes of productivism in the guise of ‘Green Revolution’ technologies did not follow a straight path from networks of Western scientific knowledge to the fields of the Global South but resulted from the contingent transformations across Mexico’s state/society complex, and the ideological contestation among a network of ‘mobile experts’ comprising the fabric of the American Century.

Introduction

In a Foreign Affairs article of 1967, US Secretary of Agriculture, Orville Freeman, painted a bleak picture of the world’s future: ‘most of the frontiers have long since disappeared and the supply of new land which can be brought into production quickly and cheaply is fast diminishing’ (Freeman, 1967: 581). Facing the end of cheap and accessible land, Freeman feared the ‘Malthusian’ curse, particularly within the ‘less developed countries’ undergoing population growth ‘without precedent’. ‘To the agriculturalist’, Freeman wrote, ‘this Malthusian arithmetic is frightening’ (ibid). The rise in population growth across the Global South was largely due to advances in medicine and declining death rates. Yet precisely how this arithmetical problem was attenuated followed a complex and winding path.

The notion of the ‘American Century’ was coined by the proprietor of Life magazine, Henry Luce, whose opinion piece of 1941 noted a striking ‘paradox’. ‘[O]ur paradoxes today are bigger and better than ever’, wrote Luce. ‘Yes, better as well as bigger . . . We have poverty and starvation – but only in the midst of plenty’ (Luce, 1999 [1941]: 22–23). The world was now seen as one, even if constituted by many nations; the corollary was that ‘a free economic system’ in the West would fail ‘if it prevails nowhere else’ (ibid: 26). In order to make the world safe for capitalism, the US must assume the role of ‘Good Samaritan’ – ‘It is the manifest duty of this country to undertake to feed all the people of the world who. . . are hungry and destitute’. Extending US alms to fellow nations would be achieved by ‘send[ing] out through the world its technical and artistic skills’ (ibid: 27). ‘All of this will fail’, warned Luce, ‘unless our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals’ (ibid: 28).

What, precisely, were these ideals, and how did they factor into solving the Malthusian ‘curse’ of dwindling food supply, poverty and destitution? To address this question, the article revisits the well-trodden narrative of the Mexican Agricultural Programme as the epicentre of the Green Revolution in order to shed a different light on the why, how and by whom in the story of post-war agrarian development. Contrary to more conventional accounts (Evenson, 2005; Glaeser, 2011 [1987]; Ross, 1998; Shiva, 1991), the eventual ‘solution’ to feeding a seemingly hungry world – in the form of ‘Green Revolution’ technologies – did not take a straight path from the corridors of Western power to the fields of the Global South. In problematising the common understanding of ‘original sin . . . bred into the seeds [of Mexico] and carried . . . to Asian fields’ (Cullather, 2004: 229), the article takes a different perspective on how the geopolitics of passive revolution in the Global South during the early Cold War became refracted through the contingent and highly contested socio-economic transformations within specific domestic contexts, and the ways in which these transformations synergised with the wider transnational network of organic intellectuals tied to the project of the American century.

Drawing on more historicised accounts, (Cullather, 2004; Harwood, 2009; Matchett, 2006; Olsson, 2017), I show how the relatively united outlook among development experts – specifically within the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Rockefeller Foundation – eventually fissured as a result of the contingent class struggles and state strategies in Mexico. While the FAO was the vanguard institution for championing land reform as a central plank in rebuilding international order, it would be the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Programme and its contradictory outcomes that would eventually dislodge the ideological saliency of land reform as the solution to Malthusian pressures. This outcome, as we will see further, was not simply due to the actions of Western experts but the result of the shifting hegemonic project of the Mexican state, which eventually tipped the scales away from peasant producers and towards the cultivation of Green Revolution technologies that favoured large-scale landowners.

In putting forward this argument, I aim to contribute to ongoing debates on the origins and evolution of the Liberal International Order. In distinction to Liberal, Realist or IPE approaches (Flaherty and Rogowski, 2021; Glaser, 2019; Ikenberry, 2020; Lake, 2020; Mearsheimer, 2019; Norrlof, 2018), my analysis re-centres socio-political struggles in and through the land as foundational to the making of international (dis)order. As a corollary, I go beyond approaches that view the forging of the American Century as a function of US domestic politics (e.g. Trubowitz and Harris, 2019), by re-situating the dynamics of ‘developmentalism as internationalism’ (Thornton, 2023). Thus, I build on recent work that sheds new light on the role of the Global South in the making of international order (see, inter alia, Berger, 2022; Helleiner, 2014; King, 2022; Krepp, 2022; Roman, 2018). Exemplary in this regard is Amy Offner’s (2019) vivid portrait of the transnational circulation and evolution of development thinking across the borders separating the US and Colombia. Echoing Offner’s (2019) examination of the ‘mixed economy’ – as a terrain of ‘competing possibilities that lay within midcentury capitalism and midcentury statebuilding’ (p. 16) – this article traces the competing possibilities over the degree to which land reform might exorcise the ghost of Malthus.

To frame the following analysis, I mobilise a critical Gramscian perspective on the fractured ideological configurations of ‘populationism’ and the material practices of rural development. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ and its linkage with ‘organic intellectuals’, I aim to untangle the highly contested construction of a post-war agrarian order centred on the rise and (eventual) demise of the consensus on land reform as the cypher to political order in the Global South. The article thus seeks to further conversations on ‘passive revolution’ as a constitutive component in the making of world order and (inter)national development (Gray, 2010; Hesketh, 2017; Meulbroek and Akhter, 2019; Ryner, 2023). Here, I take inspiration from Morton’s (2010) notion of the ‘geopolitics of passive revolution’, tracing the ways in which the dominance of capital is established through ‘different scales between places’, and how these places ‘relate to one another differentially over time within conditions of uneven development’ (Morton, 2010: 216). Thus, the geopolitics of passive revolution expresses ‘the political rule of capital, emblematic in . . . “Americanism and Fordism”, that promotes an understanding of the states system in its internal relations with capitalist modernity’ (Morton, 2010: 216). Departing from this insight, my analysis makes more explicit the ways in which the contested politics of populationism and land reform in the early Cold War period expressed the internationalisation of ‘Americanism’ qua developmentalism (Thornton, 2023).

Through this ‘critical theory route’ to global (agrarian) order (Bieler and Morton, 2004), the article also mirrors the sensibilities of Food Regime Theory (FRT), which sheds light on ‘the ways in which forms of capital accumulation in agriculture constitute global power arrangements, as expressed through patterns of circulation of food’ (McMichael, 2009: 140) However, pace Jakobsen’s (2018) Gramscian analysis of Food Regimes, my focus on historically situated actors and their connections to different scales and places seeks to articulate socio-political determinations that are found latent within FRT scholarship. In particular, Gramsci’s theory of ideology, organic intellectuals, and passive revolution offers a sharper lens for analysing the highly contingent evolution of the US-centred food regime. Thus, by bridging the national and international scales, my examination of land reform and agricultural science as passive revolution carries a sharp resonance with more recent Gramscian approaches to the international political economy of food and agriculture that integrate global dynamics of power, contestation and legitimacy within concrete domestic contexts (Brown, 2020; Tilzey, 2018; Tirmizey, 2023).

In the first part of the article, I introduce Gramsci’s notion of ideology, organic intellectuals, and passive revolution as a multifaceted framework that helps to weave together the development internationalism of the American Century. Gramsci’s writing on ‘Americanism’ and ‘Fordism’ in particular helps to sketch the material edifice of the American Century and its attendant discourses and practices of ‘development’. Second, I draw on archival material to examine the UN’s FAO and its early work on land reform as the solution to easing population pressures and enhancing rural welfare. For FAO officials and agents, ‘overpopulation’ in the countryside was less due to ‘natural’ demographic laws than they were the result of iniquitous regimes of property ownership on the land.

Third, I trace the emergence of a parallel network of intellectuals and development experts across the philanthropic foundations of the American Century. A variety of conservationists and demographers working in proximity and/or partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation saw the rural world as hopelessly stuck in a Malthusian trap. Much of this pessimism remained divorced from the material realities of the world they sought to describe. And yet, the Foundation was also riven with ambiguity as to how the appearance of population pressures on the land might be addressed.

To provide clarity on how this ambiguity played out, the fourth section analyses Mexican land reform in the early 20th century, and the subsequent Mexican Agricultural Programme (MAP) carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government. While the MAP is often characterised as a pre-meditated trojan horse of the ‘Green Revolution’ (e.g. Patel, 2013: 8–9; Shiva, 1991: 32–33), the course of this international partnership was shaped by specific state/society transformations in Mexico, as well as attendant reconfigurations within the MAP that saw peasant-centred research shift towards investment in capital-intensive production. This case study brings more clarity as to why neo-Malthusian pessimists viewed Mexico as a failure of land reform, a view that stemmed from ideological pre-dispositions towards the inevitability of population pressure and resource exhaustion, and a concomitant inability to parse the political dynamics that produced specific socio-ecological outcomes.

The idea of population and the politics of property: a Gramscian view

The question of population has accompanied the discipline of ‘modern’ political economy since its inception in the 18th century. Thomas Malthus’ (1798) Essay on Population became the cornerstone of populationist thinking within bourgeois intellectual circles (Szreter, 2018: 747), with his contrived ratio between the ‘geometric’ (exponential) growth of populations relative to the ‘arithmetical’ (linear) growth of food production. Malthus argued that the inevitably higher rate of population growth relative to food supplies would periodically incur ‘natural’ checks provided by nature, namely poverty and destitution. Ultimately, it was the physical checks on land relative to the seemingly unlimited growth of populations that led to this imbalance.

While Malthus’ argument was rejected by many of his contemporaries, it would be Marx and Engels who provided the most forceful critique, both of whom recognised the reality of ‘surplus populations’ as a result of class dynamics and property ownership, rather than a ‘natural’ law of society (Engels, 1887: 55, 176; Marx, 1982: 783). As David Harvey argued, Malthus’ ‘overpopulation’ and Marx’s ‘industrial reserve army’ are no more or less ‘scientific’ than the other. Rather, ‘the use of a particular scientific method is of necessity founded in ideology. . . There is. . . no such thing as a resource in abstract or a resource which exists as a “thing in itself”’ (Harvey, 1979: 156, 168). In this sense, rural populations may well eke out a living on too little land, and thus give rise to a Malthusian image of overpopulation, resource scarcity and starvation. Yet this social ‘fact’ is often a function of land ownership, and the ways in which socio-economic inequalities and political hierarchies flow from them. In simple terms, land inequality does not just mean too many people on too little land, but too few people on too much land. In order to situate the evolution of neo-Malthusian thinking within the American Century, and the network of development intellectuals within it, the work of Antonio Gramsci is instructive, particularly his writing on ideology/organic intellectuals, Americanism/Fordism, and passive revolution.

Organic intellectuals and the rise of ‘Americanism’

Gramsci’s approach to ideology goes beyond ‘mere illusions’, or a ‘willed and conscious deception’. Rather, ideas, as ‘historical facts’ (Gramsci, 1995: 548), gain traction when they ‘find their justification – and the means to assert themselves – in economic reality’ (Gramsci, 1994: 56). This process of justification is affected by the struggle of ideas among and between different sets of intellectuals, groups that are organically tied to specific class fractions. As an example of these organic ties, Gramsci noted the difference between the priesthood tied to Europe’s landed aristocracy with ‘[t]he capitalist entrepreneur [who] creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, [and] the organisers of a new culture’ (Gramsci, 1971: 5). This new cadre of organic intellectuals tied to the capitalist class cannot rest on qualities of ‘eloquence’ and oration, but must assume ‘active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader”’ (Gramsci, 1971: 10). Organic intellectuals thus help to fuse the politico-institutional with the material-productive, forging a hegemonic project that synthesises both coercive/violent and consensual/ideological forms of power (Gramsci, 1971: 268).

Gramsci was prescient on the shifting tectonic plates of hegemonic order, particularly in his writing on ‘Americanism’ and ‘Fordism’. With reference to the automobile sector led by Henry Ford, the specific features of American capitalism ‘derive from an inherent necessity to achieve the organisation of a planned economy’ (Gramsci, 1971: 279). The scale of production necessary for cost-effective industrial goods required a new cadre of organic intellectuals – managers, technicians, statisticians, as well as sociologists – all for perfecting the conduct and physical integrity of the collective worker (cf. Gramsci, 1971: 303; Grandin, 2009: 35–39). The particularity of ‘Americanism’ stemmed from the unique political history of North America; as the Liberal IR scholar Daniel Deudney once suggested, in contrast to the clergy or nobility, the centrality of private property in the early Republic meant that ‘lawyers were the Gramscian organic intellectuals of [American] capitalist society’ (Deudney, 1995: 215). Gramsci noted that US state-formation was largely devoid of ‘passive sedimentations’ – social classes that are parasitic on society’s economic activity, including ‘clergy and landowners’ (Gramsci, 1971: 285). These sedimentations represented:

. . . the most hideous and unhealthy means of capital accumulation, because it is founded on the iniquitous usurial exploitation of a peasantry kept on the verge of malnutrition, and because it is inordinately expensive, since the small saving of capital is offset by the incredible expenditure which is often necessary to maintain a high standard of living for such a great mass of absolute parasites. (Gramsci, 1971: 283; see also Snowden, 1979) ¹

In order to convert ‘savings’ from ‘parasitic classes’ engaged in conspicuous and unproductive consumption into a ‘function of the productive organism’, the interventionist State must carry out a number of anterior social policies, including the promotion of ‘agrarian reform (involving the abolition of landed income of a nonworking class, and its incorporation into the productive organism in the form of collective savings to be dedicated to reconstruction and further progress)’ (Gramsci, 1971: 315). All of this, Gramsci notes, is engineered towards ‘reorganising [the productive apparatus] . . . in order to develop it in parallel with the increase in population and in collective needs’ (ibid).

Land reform and the geopolitics of passive revolution

Gramsci’s political theory, centred on hegemony and the state, was principally organised around the historical conjuncture through which he was living, characterised by the internationalisation of ‘passive revolution’. This concept describes a potentially revolutionary situation that is mollified by molecular, piece-meal reforms from above, which simultaneously pushes through transformations towards capitalism while partially restoring the power of the old ruling class fractions (Gramsci, 1971: 109). As well as describing specific social transformations within domestic contexts, Gramsci situated passive revolution within the geopolitical dynamics of capitalist competition from Europe’s first-movers, (Netherlands, England and France), which placed pressure on Europe’s fragmented, feudal states to unify and modernise (Gramsci, 1971: 119; cf. Morton, 2010: 218–20).

Yet Gramsci’s classic example of passive revolution – centred on the Risorgimento, the moment of Italy’s national unification – contains a fundamentally agrarian problematic, one that closely paralleled the challenges faced by US post-war planners. Peasant rebellion and the intransigence of landlords in the South of Italy posed a fundamental challenge to liberal bourgeois ‘urban forces’ in the North seeking to create a hegemonic nationalist project based on industrialisation (Gramsci, 1971: 99). The failure of the liberal Partito d’Azione (Action Party) to ‘pose the agrarian question’ on the terrain of struggle thus left the door open for the Partito Moderato (Moderate Party) to seize the initiative, forge an alliance with the Southern bourgeoisie, and thereby cement a class project organised around ‘a bloc of all the right-wing forces – including classes of the great landowners’ (ibid: 100). Ultimately, the Moderates engineered a ‘“politico-economic neo-Malthusianism”, in other words, the refusal even to hint at the possibility of agrarian reform’ (Gramsci, 1996: 181). The Risorgimento thus converges with one of two forms through which passive revolution emerges, that of a ‘revolution from above’ in which popular demands are deflected in favour of elevating the old ruling class into a new governing elite. The other form, however, assumes a more progressive ‘revolution-restoration’, in which popular insurrections and demands are partially integrated into the passive revolutionary strategy of the state (Bieler and Morton, 2018: 102).

At the turn of the 20th century, passive revolution was entering into a new phase, one characterised by the emergence of ‘corporatism’ – the increasing subsumption of capital accumulation and the popular classes under the state. Gramsci identified the differential yet parallel developments of European fascism and Americanism as corresponding to the two types of passive revolution (cf. Schivelbusch, 2006). The rise of Italian fascism was merely the repetition of the Risorgimento, a revolution from above that ‘decapitates [the opposed classes]. . . by force and repression’ (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 321). In contrast, the ascendance of Fordism, and its politico-institutional expression under the New Deal, embodied a type of ‘revolution-restoration’, particularly within the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) comprised of a cadre of radical organic intellectuals dedicated to assisting American farmers (Gilbert, 2015). The subsequent post-war period would come to be significantly shaped by the geopolitical reverberations of passive revolution under a ‘New Deal for the world’ (Borgwardt, 2007; Hesketh, 2017: 402).

From Americanism to the American Century

Gramsci’s conceptual palette of ideology/organic intellectuals, Americanism/Fordism, and passive revolution anticipated the contours of the American Century grounded in the politics of development. While extensive work has been done on the role of development during the Cold War (see, e.g., Ekbladh, 2010; Latham, 2011; Lorenzini, 2019), far less has been said regarding Gramsci’s observations on agrarian reform as one of the foundations of Americanism. In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, US policymakers came to believe that ‘Bolshevism thrives only on starvation and disorder’ (US diplomat; cited in Levin, 1968: 139). Unsurprisingly, concerted US policy in the Global South crystallised only after the communist revolution in China, the largest peasant revolution in history (Kapstein, 2017: 30). As one National Planning Association report noted:

The docile masses of the world are no longer docile . . . There are many self-appointed leaders in this century who recognize that the world is in revolution, and try to capitalize on the dissatisfaction of humanity and its envy of America. Their leadership does not seem to be leading anywhere but to war, which the world fears; but the real leadership, the effective leadership, has not yet appeared. ²

In the absence of US hegemony, or ‘effective leadership’, the ‘self-appointed leaders’ of the Soviet bloc would likely triumph. These ruptures across the Western-dominated international system thus came to be increasingly understood through a ‘population-national security theory’ (Perkins, 1997: 119). As Kapstein (2017: 38) observes, ‘the [national security] problem became aggravated during periods of rising population, as after World War II, when the increasing demand for land was not being met by the landlords who owned the bulk of fertile soil’. As a means of avoiding the trap of ‘politico-economic neo-Malthusianism’ (Gramsci, 1996: 181), US foreign policy officials spearheaded the internationalisation of a ‘revolution-restoration’ in the countryside, with land reform seen as satisfying three strategic ends: secure land tenure, boosting production and ensuring equitable share of output. ³ In this sense, land reform became a type of ‘third way theory’ between individualism and collectivism (Guldi, 2022: 241).

The constellation of organic intellectuals leading the new paradigm of international development were diverse, operating across a number of different (if not overlapping) institutions, and advocating a variety of approaches to rural problems. What united this motley cadre were two common denominators. First, the issue of population growth and the concomitant pressure on land was universally accepted as one of the principal challenges of post-war development in the Global South. Second, the techniques of science and economic planning were considered the cornerstone of hegemonic stability, both domestic and international (Augelli and Murphy, 1988: 79; van der Pijl, 1998: 36-9). Consonant with Gramsci’s writings on Fordism, Kees van der Pijl (1998) speaks of a ‘managerial cadre’ specific to post-war capitalism, in which the socialisation of production summons ‘the need for control and direction of collective labour’, as well as ‘maintaining social cohesion under conditions of advanced division of labour’ (p. 136). The managerial cadre thus becomes a class of socialisation, in which the ‘coherence of the cadre stratum . . . develops historically, often in the context of class struggles in which the cadres are assigned tasks of mediation, arbitration, and imposing discipline’ (van der Pijl, 1998: 139; cf. Gramsci, 1971: 116–117).

The post-war assemblage of development officials thus became a network of ‘mobile experts’, mediating, arbitrating and disciplining subaltern classes to the imperatives of capitalist development (Meulbroek and Akhter, 2019). The geopolitics of passive revolution across the Global South unfolded via the differential synthesis between the transnational circulation of ideas and mobile experts within territorially specific centres of state-building and class struggle (cf. Gramsci, 1996: 180). Conversely, organic intellectuals were also instrumentalised by post-colonial elites ‘treat[ing] economic and planning experts as vectors of a legitimate and politically stable path to economic modernity’ (Meulbroek and Akhter, 2019: 1248; cf. Parmar, 2012). Thus, the integration of the Global South into the infrastructures of the American Century was not simply a one-way, top-down process from ‘centre’ to ‘periphery’, but a geopolitically dynamic unfolding of class struggle and ideological contestation across a variety of political scales. The immediate post-war years saw a relatively united front among FAO, Rockefeller and US foreign policy officials, each seeking (in their own ways) to render peasant life less arduous, and thus less prone to revolutionary temptations. However, the (geo)politics of passive revolution in Mexico radically overdetermined the evolution of the global agrarian order, from one focused on land reform and peasant-centred development, to a more muscular vision of capital-intensive productivism.

The FAO and the third way theory of land reform

At a meeting of what would become the Bretton Woods ‘moment’, delegates gathered in Hot Springs, Virginia in June 1943 to establish one of the first post-war global governance institutions. The final act at Hot Springs was not concerned with population per se, but with the global challenge of ensuring adequate nutritional intake for the world’s people. Only by the end of the final act does the problem of ‘overpopulation’ emerge, due to ‘Too many people on too small units’ (FAO, 1943: 53). The solution would encompass several approaches, from ‘wide-spread adoption of more efficient agricultural techniques’, to ‘the development of owner-operated family-size units and the development of new lands’ (FAO, 1943: 53-4).

At the inaugural FAO session in 1945, delegates nominated the Scottish nutritionist John Boyd Orr as the first Director-General (FAO 1946a). One of Orr’s first acts was to carry out a ‘World Food Survey’, with significant assistance from the USDA (Boyd Orr, 1967: 168), as well as ‘population experts’, who reportedly noted that world population was increasing by 22 million per year. The Survey suggested that ‘about half the world’s population was subsisting before the war at a level of food consumption which was not high enough to maintain normal health, allow for normal growth of children, or furnish enough energy for normal work’ (FAO, 1946b: 8). Yet rather than a straightforward Malthusian tale, the ‘heart of the problem’ came down to ‘individual productivity’ connected to ‘unjust and oppressive systems of land tenure which give the cultivator neither opportunity nor incentive to improve his lot’, a situation that ‘will need to be swept away’ (FAO, 1946b: 22).

It would be the second FAO Director-General, Norris E. Dodd, who sought to transform the FAO into ‘a global department of agriculture based on the U.S. model’ (Jarosz, 2009: 43). Dodd’s ideological framework germinated from his experience within FDR’s USDA – arguably the most radical federal department in US history (Gilbert, 2015). As a former farmer himself, Dodd joined ‘a cadre of left-leaning U.S. reformers’, many of whom were deeply inspired by Mexico’s sweeping land reforms that tackled problems similar to those in the US South (Olsson, 2017: ch. 2). From this milieu of intellectual socialisation, Dodd focused his efforts on technical assistance to increase production, statistical data-gathering to combat market volatility, and proposals for the distribution of surpluses – in effect extending the principles of the USDA before and during the Great Depression (Sayward, 2000: 394-5). Assistance to member countries was conceived along lines of a cadre of mobile organic intellectuals, ‘an expert technician living with the local people, showing them how to improve their methods’, which was ultimately ‘better than grants or guns or big shows’. ⁴ In common with some of his former colleagues at the USDA, as well as from extensive conversations with Indian development economists, Dodd engendered a type of ‘low modernism’ (Gilbert, 2015; Guldi, 2022: 127), emphasising ‘simple, inexpensive improvements, that can be made immediately and which would result in quick increase in the production of food’. ⁵

The principal challenge facing the FAO in the aftermath of World War II was precisely that identified by Luce in 1941: ‘The well-fed are better off than they were; the poorly fed for the most part are worse off’. ⁶ The ‘terrible paradox’ of food surpluses and rampant hunger was therefore the most pressing issue. ⁷ But Dodd was not a Malthusian ‘prophet of doom’. ⁸ From his first days as D-G, he held out the promise of ‘modern science’ and ‘international goodwill’ as a means of feeding a growing world population. ⁹ Dodd’s view of technical assistance (or ‘international goodwill’) was underpinned by his fervent belief in redressing rural injustices by ensuring that ‘rural people. . . share in the additional proceeds of their labour. As they are better fed, housed and provided with more community services which others enjoy, they will make a more effective and a more willing contribution to further advancement’. ¹⁰ From this broader understanding of the social and technical aspects of agricultural production, Dodd saw the challenges of global food governance as merely a question of committed action, rather than Malthusian pessimism: ‘Until we have really tried to put mankind’s knowledge, ingenuity, and human goodwill to work, I am not ready to say that Malthus’ thesis stands proved’ (Dodd, 1949: 86).

However, Dodd’s optimism was tempered by lingering demographic trends. In the FAO’s ‘Second World Food Survey’ of 1952, he noted that ‘the demographical picture, though still imperfectly understood and interpreted, adds a note of urgency to the task of expanding world food production’ (FAO, 1952: 2). To increase rural output, the Survey noted both improved production techniques as well as land reform ‘not only to remove injustices that have made progress impossible but also to ensure that farming efficiency is preserved and increased’ (FAO, 1952: 34). The overarching context to all of these issues was the return to peace and international order; as Dodd put it to a Kansas audience, ‘world peace grows on good farms’. ¹¹ For Dodd and other FAO agents, good farms grew from widespread and secure land tenure.

The network of organic intellectuals at the FAO, led by Dodd, were certainly progressive in their approach to issues of population, land ownership and poverty. Yet their work was but one arrow in the quiver of passive revolution as a principal geopolitical strategy shaping the American Century. Indeed, while certainly sensitive to the ethics of land reform, Dodd’s views on land tenure squared neatly with his vision of peasants as ‘the potential head of a miniature factory’ (Guldi, 2022: 120), imbued with all of the rationality of an American entrepreneur. What Dodd envisaged was ‘a new kind of capitalism’, one that grew directly out of his experience in the USDA (Guldi, 2022: 26, 135–136). Thus, the FAO came to affect an internationalisation of the New Deal’s revolution-restoration, by mediating capitalist development in the countryside by egalitarian means.

Nevertheless, the initial momentum behind FAO activities eventually abated as the contours of global agrarian order began to shift. As Dodd later lamented, despite a promising first decade, the FAO began to lose its energetic initiative, drifting into ‘a general neglect of field activities in favor of projects of general character with doubtful benefit’. ¹² Part of this malaise can be put down to the underfunded nature of FAO work, which ‘seriously jeopardized’ the internationalisation of agrarian reform. ¹³ However, as we will see further, this neglect resulted from the geopolitically mediated reverberations of passive revolution across the Global South. As the enthusiasm for land reform began to wane, new techno-fixes entered the fray as a means of attenuating the Malthusian challenge.

Rockefeller and the (re)emergence of Malthusianism

Despite sporadic references to population pressures across the FAO, Malthusianism (re)emerged from a different corner of the American century. Philanthropic foundations like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie ‘were at the heart of the Establishment’s efforts to strengthen and mobilise, as necessary, the American academy behind its programmes for American-led global hegemony’ (Parmar, 2012: 2). This is not to say that neo-Malthusianism can simply be traced back to Foundation officials. Indeed, those working under Rockefeller ‘alternatively embraced and disparaged Malthusian arguments’ (Cullather, 2014: 106). But the Foundation had been mulling over populationism for some time, having chartered a wide-ranging demographic study across Southeast Asia, headed by the American demographer Frank Notestein. As head of the Milbank Memorial Foundation’s research into the roots of population growth among different social classes, Notestein was one of the leading neo-Malthusians within the American academy (Hoff, 2012: 64-5). As he concluded from the Rockefeller mission, ‘[m]uch of Asia seems to be perilously close. . . [to] mounting [population] densities [and] ever narrowing bases for future economic development’ (Notestein, 1948: 252). To attend this perceived challenge, John D. Rockefeller established the Population Council in 1952, which identified both short and long-term problems, namely, increasing the food supply and population control, respectively (Rockefeller, 1977: 494).

Among Rockefeller’s initial Council Committee of three (including Notestein and Rockefeller himself) was the conservationist Fairfield Osborn, whose 1948 book, Our Plundered Planet, became a national best-seller, and one of the most influential texts for post-war demographers. Osborn hailed from a well-to-do family in New York, connected to both railroad money and Congressional politics. His father, Henry Fairfield Osborn, subscribed to the notion of racial hierarchies, and co-founded the American Eugenics Society. But Osborn sr.’s rigid adherence to ‘race science’ chaffed against the liberal sensibilities of his contemporaries and peers, which ultimately cost him his position as head of the American Museum of Natural History. While Osborn jr. did not subscribe to his father’s racialised eugenic world-view, he was similarly obtuse with regards to the socio-political determinations of population, resources and poverty. Founding the Conservation Foundation in 1948, Osborn’s work ‘popularised global political ecology for the post-war world’ (Bashford, 2014: 280), which leaned away from racialised arguments for population control, and towards the centrality of soil conservation as the cornerstone of demographic balance with nature (Osborn, 1948: 178, 186–9). Principally concerned with the nexus between population, resource consumption and ecological integrity, Osborn frequently referenced Mexico as a nation bereft of arable land and prone to hillside erosion, forcing peasants into ‘land that is totally unadapted to the growing of crops’. If left unattended, such pressures could bubble over into political disorder: ‘It may be recalled that land hunger was one of the principal dynamics of the Mexican Revolution’ (Osborn, 1948: 170).

It would be another best-selling book, published in the same year, that pushed much more forcefully on population control. The ecologist William Vogt’s (1948) Road to Survival rearticulated Malthus’ notion of checks on population growth derived from his equation on the carrying capacity of the earth relative to biotic potential and environmental resistance, often wrapped in racist and classist discourse (Vogt, 1948: 16, 282–3; cf. Robertson, 2012: 53; Schlosser, 2009: 473–4). With a background in ornithology and conservation, Vogt travelled to the Guano Islands in Peru – and farther afield across Latin America – heading up a variety of conservation programmes. Yet his in-depth knowledge of wildlife and ecology led to a somewhat blinkered understanding of broader socio-political contexts through which environmental changes take place. Like Osborn, Vogt also had close ties to the Rockefeller network, having served in Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (Robertson, 2012: 40–44). He was highly dubious of Dodd’s ‘international goodwill’, even criticising the FAO for shipping food to India and China, lest ‘fifty million. . . die five years hence’ (Vogt; cited in Connelly, 2008: 129; see also Davies, 2022: 114). He believed Mexico would ‘be a desert within one hundred years, unable to supply even the fifteen hundred daily calories’, a view informed by his dismissal of Indigenous methods of ‘milpa agriculture’ as ‘destruct[ive] of the land’ (Vogt, 1948: 152, 156). Yet Vogt was critical of both campesino and hacendado alike: ‘Many landholders would rather spend money on a trip to New York than on the maintenance of farm fertility’ (Vogt, 1948: 162). In his view, Mexican land reform under Cárdenas, which attempted to right the wrongs of land inequality, led merely to a nation of small farmers ‘so uneducated that they do not know how to manage their land’ (Vogt, 1948: 163). To Vogt, it seemed as if not a single Mexican, rich or poor, was capable of protecting the soil.

Across the two most influential books on neo-Malthusianism during the early Cold War, one finds frequent references to the limits and downfall of land reform and peasant production in Mexico. To be sure, these authors considered many other parts of the world as hopelessly doomed, particularly India and East Asia. Yet the routinely pessimistic references to the Mexican experience help to shed light on the ideological foundations of neo-Malthusianism. What Osborn and Vogt took for granted was the historical sedimentation of class struggles across the entire political terrain of Mexico.

The Mexican Agricultural Programme: from passive revolution to green revolution

Mexican land reform finds its origins within one of the most significant peasant revolutions of the long 20^th century. By 1910, through a protracted process of primitive accumulation among political elites appropriating ever-more Indigenous and village lands, 1 percent of the population owned 97 percent of the land, while 92 percent of the population were landless, leading to ‘overcrowded comunidades, [and] traditional underused haciendas’ (King, 2018 [1977): 94).

From a Gramscian perspective, Adam David Morton (2011) characterises this phase of Mexican history as a long arch of ‘passive revolution’. The ‘state-building Sonorans’ (Morton, 2011: 49) confronted decades of class conflict among urban workers and landless peasants, as these ‘northern entrepreneurial elites’ lurched from one set of reforms to the next, all the while aiming to incorporate popular demands into the reproduction of capitalist development (Fox, 1993: 44; cf. Hesketh, 2010; Soto Reyes Garmendia, 2016). The transnational reverberations of the Great Depression fomented new cycles of class struggle across city and countryside, prompting further domestic reforms on labour law and land reform (Thornton, 2021: 41). The agrarian code of 1932, implemented under General Abelardo Rodríguez sought to re-energise the process of land redistribution – over 2 million hectares were given over to 161,327 rural families (Calvert, 1969: 514). Only with the election of Rodríguez’s Secretary of War, Lázaro Cárdenas, would Mexico’s land reform come into full swing. The 1934 agrarian code contained provisions for ‘fractionating’ the great haciendas into cooperative farms under collective ownership (ejidos), while streamlining the process of titling. Between 1934 and 1940, some 18 million hectares were distributed to 2¼ million beneficiaries (King, 2018 [1977]: 93).

The global context of the 1930s significantly shaped the circulation of ideas across the Global North and South concerning more progressive modes of passive revolution. As noted above, figures like Dodd and others within the USDA had paid much heed to the Mexican land reform programme, while the Mexican Foreign Secretary, Eduardo Hay, noted during the ‘agrarian dispute’ over expropriations of US-owned land that ‘[t]he enumeration made by your Government. . . of social reforms recently carried out in the United States of North America demonstrates to what point the present hour demands a fundamental readjustment in the methods of government’. ¹⁴ Thus, parallel to FDR’s New Deal, the specificity of cardenismo emerges precisely through its ‘revolution-restoration’, in which ‘progressive’ policies were forced onto the political terrain by popular social forces and subsequently integrated into the state as a means of bringing those forces under the hegemony of ruling PRM (Partido de la Revolución Mexicana) (Morton, 2011: 55-7; Otero, 1999: 39). ¹⁵

In December 1940, US Vice President Henry Wallace visited Mexico for the inauguration of Cárdenas’ successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho, who promised to ‘govern[. . .] by technicians, not ideological reformers’ (Perkins, 1997: 111). Previously Secretary of Agriculture under FDR, Wallace was impressed by peasant maíz agriculture, but urged the Rockefeller foundation to embark on a technical mission to help improve seed varieties and yields in order to offset what he considered to be an expanding rural population (Cullather, 2010: 54–6; Jennings, 1988: 48). As Arturo Warman (2003) noted, by the early 1940s Mexicans received 60 percent of caloric intake from corn, yet consumed just over 10 ounces of corn a day per capita (p. 143). Added to this was the continuing problem of land inequality, in which relative food scarcity and underconsumption were less reflective of ‘backwards’ agriculture than it was ‘a rural economy in overdrive, straining to export as much as it could’ (Cullather, 2010: 56). Thus, MAP protocols were specifically geared towards national food supply, rather than export agriculture (Harrar, 1950: 12).

A 1941 Rockefeller Survey Commission in Mexico was carried out by three plant scientists, E.C. Stakman, Richard Bradfield and Paul Mangelsdorf. The Rockefeller mission did not imbue a ‘straightforward application of “science”’, but ‘contained several competing ideas about what sciences were necessary for Mexican agriculture’ (Jennings, 1988: 45; cf. Stakman et al., 1967: 36). Like their FAO counterparts, officials working in the early days of the MAP were far from Malthusian pessimists (Perkins, 1997: 137; Ross, 1998: 168). During their travel across Mexico, the team frequently encountered dismissive attitudes towards the ejidos from large landowners. But the team’s view of small-scale peasants was far more generous (Olsson, 2017: 124–125). Similar to the ‘mobile’ organic intellectuals working under Dodd, it was well understood, as they survey team later recalled, that ‘the transfer value of foreign prescriptions is limited’, thereby putting a premium on ‘specific knowledge derived from adequate regional and local experimentation’ (Stakman et al., 1967: 29–30).

With the onset of World War II, the Roosevelt administration secured a variety of strategic resources from Mexico, including 70,000 bracero labourers for American fields. However, the unintended consequence of Mexico’s support for US war efforts was the drastic decline in rural labour supply, grain cultivation, and purchasing power as prices for corn quintupled. As a result of this disruption to the Mexican countryside, the Ministry of Agriculture doubled-down on its cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation, with the signing of the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) in 1943 (Cullather, 2010: 58–9). The initial aim of the programme was to strengthen Cárdenas’ land reform with the application of rural extension and demonstration in order to help raise yields across the most important staples (corn and beans) (Olsson, 2017: 100, 139). Heading up the MAP’s corn breeding programme was Mangelsdorf, a Harvard-trained botanist with extensive experience in agricultural experimental stations and corn farmers across East Texas. Though certainly possessing an untrammelled faith in scientific agriculture, Mangelsdorf’s outlook was significantly shaped by his time spent with sharecroppers and tenant farmers who grew corn for domestic consumption. From his experience with farmers’ resistance to double-cross hybrid strains (whose seeds required repurchasing every year), Mangelsdorf promoted synthetic corn varieties, which were open pollinated, adaptable to new environments, and promised 30 percent more yield compared to benchmark varieties (Harwood, 2009: 392; Matchett, 2006). For Mangelsdorf, synthetic corn was ideally suited to the class structure of rural Mexico, which would benefit not only from new strains, but comprehensive extension services staffed by organic intellectuals working with local farmers on issues of soil health, crop rotation and composting. The MAP sought to exchange both seeds and knowledge to the peasantry through field days, oriented towards ‘the leaders of the ejidos, the agricultural teachers, [and] the leaders in the Ejidal Bank’ (Richard Bradfield; cited in Olsson, 2017: 145). As a result of these efforts, the Camacho administration subsequently put its best efforts towards promoting synthetic corn across Mexico (Olsson, 2017: 142–144).

However, the early initiatives of the MAP’s maize programme soon turned sour. Albert Mann was replaced by Warren Weaver as head of the MAP after the former’s sudden death (Olsson, 2017: 147). With a civil engineering degree and a background in computational mathematics, Weaver looked at the population/food binary as a simple a matter of scientific manipulation. As Alison Bashford (2014) writes, ‘Unlike Boyd Orr’s vision of equitable global satiation and health . . . Weaver’s was a bare life of calculation of needs’ (p. 290). Weaver’s mathematically-minded approach was fixated on fine-tuning scientific agriculture to ensure a ‘demographic transition’ that mirrored the Western experience: greater consumption and lower birth rates (Cullather, 2010: 187–8).

Alongside this shift in MAP leadership was the changing configurations of Mexico’s state/society complex. Already by the Comacho presidency, the hegemonic bloc of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) began to shift towards the urban middle-classes (Ross, 1998: 171–2). The election of Miguel Alemán Valdés to the presidency in 1946 saw the completion of this process by pledging to carry on Mexico’s industrialisation drive from its war-time expansion, with little indication of how this was to be achieved concretely (Barta, 1993: 119; Cuellár, 1989: 53). Yet there was a clear challenge to the state’s development policy. The Workers Unity Pact (Pacto de Unidad Obrera) of 1942, struck under the Camacho administration as an emergency measure seeking national unity, was not enough to avert several strikes across key industries during war-time (Cuellár, 1989: 52; Loyo and Pozas Horcasitas, 1977: 85). In the post-war climate, workers sought to fiercely protect their wages and standard of living. Subsuming the popular classes under the state – either through consensual or coercive means – was thus a fundamental precondition for economic growth based on foreign and domestic capital investment. In the end, the expansion of national industrialisation would stem from the squeeze on working class living standards. As Fortune magazine noted in 1952, ‘. . . the true hero of the Mexican investment boom is the ordinary Mexican worker, whose acceptance of a declining real income has in effect “subsidized” much of the nation’s building’ (cited in Russell, 2010: 432). By waging a political struggle against radical elements within the broader labour movement, Alemán shifted state strategy from the revolution-restoration of cardenismo to a revolution from above that re-valorised the political power of capital (Cuellár, 1989: 61; Hamilton, 1982: 269; Otero, 1999: 42).

Mexican campesinos were not spared this assault on the popular classes, with a substantive reversal of Mexico’s land reform that offered greater protection for hacendados. Against prevailing MAP practice, Alemán established the Comisión Nacional del Maíz (CNM) to promote double-cross hybrid seeds, a strategy less centred on economic efficiency as it was on subsuming the peasantry under state-patronage networks. If economic dependency was materially inscribed in double-crossed hybrid strains, then state control over seeds meant control over campesinos (cf. Cotter, 1994: 106; Kloppenburg, 2004: 128–9; Olsson, 2017: 147-9). Aleman’s protracted turn towards a type of ‘revolution from above’ thus prefigured the steady ‘proletarianization and pauperization of the lower strata of the peasantry’ (Barta, 1975: 136), as a result of the changing balance of class forces between peasants and landowners (Otero, 1999: 42–43).

As the MAP’s synthetic corn strategy waned, another group of MAP scientists working on improved wheat varieties entered the fray. The cultivation of corn and wheat mapped onto Mexico’s racial and class differentiation, with small-scale Indigenous ejidos producing maíz in the central plateau around Mexico city, while large-scale wheat farmers across the northern arid regions utilised irrigation systems and mechanisation (Olsson, 2017: 150). Minister of Agriculture, Marte R. Gómez (hailing from the wheat-growing northern regions) claimed that defeating wheat rust was the surest path to national prosperity. But local director of the MAP, J. George Harrar, was unconvinced, believing corn to be the foundation of national consumption. Like Mangelsdorf, Harrar brought his experience working with poor farmers in Virginia to the fields of Mexico, which ultimately led to the downgrading of wheat as a secondary priority. Nevertheless, wheat breeding was already contained in the articles of agreement for the MAP. To catch up on their promised work, the Rockefeller foundation appointed Norman E. Borlaug to head up wheat research. Like MAP-head Warren Weaver, Borlaug had no experience working within rural communities, while previously employed by the American chemical firm, E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. He was immediately dismissive of ejidos as uneconomical, while developing strains of wheat that required substantial inputs of irrigation and fertiliser, wholly unsuited to small-scale production (Olsson, 2017: 150–2). Against the wishes of Harrar, Stackman supported Borlaug in the hope of attaining ‘an overnight miracle’ (Olsson, 2017: 154).

By the end of the 1940s, the MAP’s programme had morphed form a project based on peasant-friendly plant research to a neo-Malthusian quest to boost yields no matter the cost (Cullather, 2010: 62-63). This was the scene that Vogt witnessed and subsequently published in his best-selling book – a landscape of overburdened small farmers forced onto marginal lands, ascendant large-scale agriculture, and pervasive soil exhaustion (Otero, 1999: 43). Yet absent any sense of history or sociological insight, Vogt’s portrayal of Mexico led ineluctably to Malthusian pessimism. Incidentally, Vogt’s uncontextualised portrait of Mexican agriculture would come full circle: ‘[o]nly after the publication of Vogt’s book [in 1948]. . . did [Rockefeller] foundation officers incorporate the issue of population into their thinking’ (Perkins, 1997: 138). While Vogt may have shifted the balance of ideas among the network of organic intellectuals across the MAP, in the end it was the specific socio-institutional transformation of Mexico’s state/society complex that provided the necessary space for such ideas to become ‘historical facts’ (Gramsci, 1995: 548).

For its part, the FAO established an office in Mexico only in 1954 (Pernet, 2019: 395), well after the moment in which the fate of the MAP’s peasant-centred research had been sealed. In previous years, the FAO had established an earlier cooperative project with the Mexican government on pasture and livestock production, ¹⁶ while also spearheading a broader focus on Central America (including Mexico) centred on nutrition. ¹⁷ Yet by the early 1950s, the ossified outcomes of the MAP were presented as fait acompli, much as they had to observers like Osborn and Vogt. A joint ECLA/FAO report on Latin America in 1950 noted the ‘excellent results’ in the Mexican countryside: ‘Ten per cent of the 3.5 million hectares of maize are planted with hybrids and it is hoped that within three years, hybrids will be used throughout the country’ (UN, 1950: 4). More remarkably, issues of land/labour ratios were seen in quasi-Malthusian terms, with colonisation of new lands or off-farm employment as the only solutions to ‘continued pressure of population’ (UN, 1950: 85); the possibility of land reform went unacknowledged. It was concluded that, ‘[t]he smallness of the farms or operating units in many parts of the region. . . [are] an impediment chiefly to the use of power-machinery’ (UN, 1950: xii).

This did not signal the immediate death of land reform; even Dodd and the US foreign policy establishment more broadly were hopeful that the redress of inequities in the countryside could lead to a more lasting international order. Yet by the end of the 1950s, the relative consensus on land redistribution was beginning to wane. The further intensification of Cold War battle lines increasingly cast the politics of agrarian reform as a communist plot, or an unworkable geopolitical strategy thwarted by the contingencies of class struggles and passive revolution (particularly within Southeast Asia) (Gawthorpe, 2022; Gray, 2024). The Asian crucible thus created a vacuum into which new ‘historical facts’ entered the fray, namely, genetic varieties conducive to large-scale landowners.

Reflecting on this embattled legacy, FAO Director-General Edouard Saouma recalled in 1979 how the immediate post-war years of ‘community development’ were slowly eclipsed by ‘the arrival of the so-called Green Revolution’, favouring ‘large-scale investment and application of new technology’. Given the failure of the Green Revolution to reduce rural poverty, development experts adopted a new paradigm of ‘integrated rural development’, and finally, by the mid-1970s, to a ‘target’ approach to rural development (FAO, 1979: 2–3). This terminological zig-zagging revealed the impossible task of ensuring peasant equity under conditions of a technological regime more suited to structures of land inequality. In effect, the project of land reform qua passive revolution saw the geopolitically mediated transmutation of revolution-restoration into a more generalised form of revolution-from-above, leading irrevocably towards a ‘global depeasantization’ (Araghi, 1995).

Conclusion

Orville Freeman’s perception of a ‘frightening’ Malthusian future was far from an isolated over-reaction. The first decades of the American Century were, as Luce pointed out, indeed paradoxical; haunted by the ghost of Malthus, even in the face of a veritable agricultural revolution. Perhaps unwittingly, Luce himself struck upon the cypher to this puzzle: ‘The trouble is not with the facts. The trouble is that clear and honest inferences have not been drawn from the facts’ (Luce, 1999 [1941]: 13).

In taking a cue from Luce’s innocuous statement, this article offered a critical Gramscian approach to Malthusian thinking across the infrastructures of global food governance during the first phase of the American Century. For the extensive and varied cadre of organic intellectuals, the trouble of post-war development was not with the facts of rapidly growing populations in the Global South; the trouble lay in how differentially situated actors made divergent inferences from those facts. This divergence ultimately reflected the ways in which scientific practice was refracted through specific ideological frameworks. Whether from direct experience with farmers, working within the FDR’s USDA, or from corporate scientific networks, organic intellectuals emerge from a milieu of socialisation that predisposes a particular ideological framework applied to a given problem. And yet, the ideological contestation between different groups of intellectuals did not exist within a vacuum. The contours of the American Century, as an internationalist project of development, were fundamentally shaped by specific class struggles and state-society transformations, creating the political terrain upon which certain ideas became historical facts (Gramsci, 1995: 548).

On the one hand, the FAO was dedicated to bettering the lot of the world’s peasants. Heralding from backgrounds within New Deal politics and agrarian sociology/history, FAO agents were more attuned to the socio-economic realities of land use, and the historical legacies of property ownership. While cognizant of population growth in the Global South, the FAO’s mobile experts sought to ease the burden of the world’s farmers through land reform and rural extension. In contrast to the mobile experts within the FAO, post-war neo-Malthusians ‘put their trust not in history but in numbers’ (Guldi, 2022: 245). Thus, while leading conservationists like William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn had intimate knowledge of biological science and ecological dynamics, they abstracted resource constraints from their historico-political contexts.

The case study of Mexican land reform offered one vantage point through which we can appreciate the complex historical processes that Vogt and Osborn overlooked. Their emphases on low land/labour ratios and soil depletion in the Mexican countryside were astute, yet their conclusions stemmed from wilful ignorance. Problems of soil, peasant production and food supplies were not merely the inevitable result of population growth and negligent husbandry, but emerged from the concrete class struggles and institutional transformations across Mexican society. Indeed, the Rockefeller Foundation’s MAP did not abandon peasant-friendly projects because of lingering Malthusianism. Figures like Mangelsdorf and Harrar were far closer to FAO officials in their expertise and outlook, in marked contrast to more technically-minded figures such as Weaver and Borlaug. Yet, in the end, it would be the reconfiguration of the Mexican state’s hegemonic project, more firmly dedicated to taming rebellious social forces, that allowed Borlaug’s miracle wheat to win out over Mangelsdorf’s synthetic corn. The decisive shift in strategic priorities among Mexico’s ruling class led to a concerted instrumentalisation of the mobile experts working within the MAP (Cotter, 1994: 106). This winding path along which the American Century unfolded thus helps to illustrate how the contested circulation of ideas, discourses and practices across the Global North and South forged the decidedly internationalist basis of post-war developmentalism.

The eventual crystallisation of Americanism in the form of the Green Revolution exacerbated the ‘various problems’ encountered with ‘the passage from the old economic individualism to the planned economy. . . [those] problems being difficulties inherent in both the societas rerum and the societas hominum [natural/human worlds]’ (Gramsci, 1971: 279). The ‘modernity’ unfolding in front of Gramsci’s eyes, shaped by ‘complications, absurd positions, and moral and economic crises often tending towards catastrophe’ (Gramsci, 1971), carries a sharp resonance with the current dilemmas faced by humanity as a result of marked inequalities on the land, and the consequent resurgence of a ‘politico-economic neo-Malthusianism’ (Gramsci, 1996: 181), packaged through the current ‘New Green Revolution’ (Morvaridi, 2012).