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The Green Revolution imposed a part of American scientific agrarianism on the global South, and did so by ignoring some American scientific agrarianism that listened to the needs of the farmers.

"Though...recent studies have answered many nagging questions, they also pose new dilemmas. Particularly, what I want to focus on here is the common assertion that the Green Revolution was at its heart a project of “Americanization.” In reading recent histories, we learn how a confident and hubristic United States attempted to remake the world in its image. We learn how U.S. planners drew lessons from an American agriculture they believed to be the world’s most productive and stable. Yet in these accounts, “America” comes off as a homogenous and static entity with an uncheckered past of success and growth, ready to be transplanted elsewhere. These narratives seem to suggest that there was one “American experience” to be exported abroad after World War II.

"This strikes me as deeply problematic, and I believe that one important way to push beyond such monolithic portrayals is to grapple more seriously with the role that regionalism played in these so-called “Americanization” campaigns. At the middle of the twentieth century, at the dawn of the development project, the U.S. was a patchwork nation of rich and poor, rural and urban, whose complex history of growth and stagnation shaped how the architects of development looked out onto the world beyond. Acknowledging this can make our understanding of U.S. philanthropy’s Third World interventions much more nuanced."--Tore Olsson, HistPhil.org


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