BY KILUSANG MAGBUBUKID NG PILIPINAS
ALTERNATIVE READER
Posted by Bulatlat
Vol. VII, no. 40, November 11-17, 2007
*(An article written in the “Handbook on the impact of IRRI in Asia: The Great Rice Robbery”. The book is part of a continuing campaign of the Week of Rice Action (WORA) 2007 held from March 29 to April 4, 2007 in 13 countries across, to save the rice of Asia and to expose the corporate agenda of IRRI. This resource book on IRRI highlighted the serious impacts of IRRI’s actions and its close ties with the agrochemical industry. It is offered as a tribute to the hundreds of thousands of peasant rice farmers and agricultural workers especially in Asia who have suffered and are still suffering the full blunt of IRRI’s failed experimentation through the Green Revolution. The book was publicly launched on November 7, 2007 in Quezon City organized by RESIST (Resistance and Solidarity against Agrochemical TNCs. The book is available at RESIST secretariat office, 161-B Chico Street, Project 2, Quezon City, Philippines with tele-fax number at 632-9284184, and email a tkmp@pldtdsl.net and sect_resist@yahoo.com)
Rice is produced globally on more than 150 million hectares with an annual production of about 600 million tons. Asia produces more than 91 percent of the global harvest, accounts for up to half of its farm incomes and makes up 80 percent of people’s daily calories (GRAIN, 1998). The importance of rice and rice-based systems thus, is understood by multitudes of rice farmers all over the world to mean their food security and livelihood. Further, the rice crop is embedded as core of traditional agriculture, a fundamental link to the struggles for land and resources, and is the center of socio-cultural life and heritage of many Asian societies. It is best summed up by a statement from peoples’ movements and NGOs across Asia: “Rice means life to us in Asia. It is the cornerstone of our food systems, our languages, our cultures and our livelihoods for thousands of years.”
The place of rice in Asian agriculture has been radically threatened and transformed since the Green Revolution technology in the 1970s. This was upon the instigation of US corporate interests and agenda, and facilitation of their creation – the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
Green Revolution and IRRI
Green Revolution (GR) is both an ideology, defined as the large-scale application of modern agricultural science and technology in rural development, and a program package through the extensive and intensive use of modern production technology and of HYV seeds (D.N. Dhangare). Large economic interests by oil and chemical-based industries financed and pushed the scientific research and product deployment (introduction and widespread adoption) in the late 1960s and 1970s often exercising political maneuver to open up Asian agricultural markets.
IRRI was the primary institution, built to undertake research on the plant type that would be efficient in using solar energy and fertilizer to achieve high yields. The research activities by IRRI began in 1960, with a canvass made of the world’s rice repositories, then collecting 10,000 varieties in order to find the most suitable rice strain. The first HYV (International Rice 8 or IR8) was released in 1960 in the Philippines.
The adoption of HYVs spread quickly in Asia. By 1970, about 30 percent of the rice area in the Asian region was devoted to HYVs, increasing to 70 percent by 1990s. But more than the introduction of new seeds was the start of a transformation of many traditional agricultural systems, then the basis of food security and development of Asian rural societies. In the coming decades, GR became the dominant orientation and model for rural development programs in India (D.N. Dhangare) and in many Asian countries.
In the host country, the Philippines, GR was made as the centerpiece of a government countryside program to spruce up a sham response to the clamor of peasants for genuine land reform. At the same time, GR became a means for then President Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies to consolidate their power in the countryside as well as advance their business interests during the dictatorship era.
IRRI and the U.S. Agenda in Asia
It is important to understand that there was a hegemonic intent to impose GR in Asia and IRRI has played a major role in realizing this. U.S. corporations wanted new markets for their products, new investment opportunities for their surplus capital, and more favorable trade relations with the Asian neo-colonies. The “modernization” of Asian agriculture was essential to the U.S. to create an environment where foreign investment and export-oriented production can generate growth.
The U.S. also concluded that the political and economic unrest plaguing the poor nations in Asia (after the Chinese revolution and the Korean War), cannot be averted by military means alone, i.e., unless reforms are made in the backward agricultural sectors of the Asian countries under its control. At the time too, South Vietnam was rife with peasant unrest and the influence of communism was rapidly increasing.
Hence, the search for new products to placate the growing poverty-stricken populations, and open new markets in their countries connected well under the GR agenda. Thus, IRRI is said to have been established by its proponents to undertake scientific research where outcomes would help transform agricultural landscapes and the lives of agricultural producers in agriculture-dependent nations, as well as diffuse the peasant unrest brewing in their midst.
The U.S. picked the Philippines as IRRI’s headquarters because of the Marcos administration’s open and dependable predisposition to U.S. corporate dictates. Analysts further say that GR was evidently used as a reform campaign to dissipate peasant revolt in its hotbeds in major rice producing regions in Luzon. This could be affirmed by a statement made by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1951: “There was a special problem in the Philippines in regard to the relations of hunger and the appeal of communism, and that there was perhaps a special responsibility on the part of the United States government to do something about agriculture in the Philippines.”
