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I recently met up with one of the masterminds of the Green Revolution - a man who was mentored by Norman Borlaug himself for decades. He told me that when the Green Revolutionaries first got to India, they found that the Indians were growing all of the wrong crops and crop varieties in all of the wrong places. Oh, those stupid Indians! You have to wonder how an ancient civilization managed to make it to present day without starving into oblivion if it can't feed itself.
As it turns out, once upon a time, India could feed itself. The book Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis tells the story of how the British robbed the Indians of their wealth, wrecked their agricultural system (in order to serve the needs of industrial Britain), and then watched as millions of Indian people starved. The book also covers other countries - mainly China and Brazil, but also African nations, and the Philippines. Each nation has a similar story to tell, but for this diary I am going to focus on India.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, there was a series of abnormally strong El Nino cycles. Famine erupted around the world, in each of the places I named above. Some of the disaster is due to El Nino, but the magnitude of the disaster - the difference between a drought and a famine - is manmade.
This story is very relevant now, sadly. Except now it's the U.S. (on behalf of multinational corporations) who is plundering the developing world.
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