“Stretching the Surface of the Earth”: The Foundations,

Neo-Malthusianism and the Modernising Agenda

NICK CULLATHER

Historians have identified the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as authors of a neo-Malthusian agenda that undermined humanitarian discourse and crippled the responseto famine. But foundation officials saw their own position as anti-Malthusian. Whilethey funded population control, they rejected “ecological hucksters” who warned ofconstraints on either growth or science. This article attempts to show how foundationsrationalised their policies amid mid-century debates on the limits to growth.

As grain production lurched into high gear across Asia in the early 1970s, the linkbetween this “Green Revolution” and birth control was so clear that rumoursspread through Pakistan, India, Vietnam and the Philippines alleging that thenew dwarf varieties of wheat and rice would make men impotent. The connectionwas also explicit in development propaganda, which paired unpopular fertilitycontrol measures with the new plants, machines, credit and tools that farmerswanted. It was evident in memos at the Ford and Rockefeller foundations,where it was hoped that a new scientific mentality would extend from farmingpractices to the most personal of decisions, leading peasants to optimise theirfamily size as well as their yields per hectare.

It was clear also to landless tenants who found themselves displaced by modernmethods. In their fury, they attacked the birth control clinics that were the mostvisible symbols of the new regime. After Nobel Peace Prize winner NormanBorlaug witnessed a clinic being sacked and burned in Lahore, journalistsreminded him of the rumour that coupled his miracle wheats to sterilisation.“God,” Borlaug replied, “if this could have just been true we would have reallydeserved the Peace Prize.”1

For many years, historians have identified the foundations as the source anddefenders of a neo-Malthusian strain that runs through the history of develop-ment.2 Thomas Malthus’s claim that natural laws placed an inescapable check

1. Ian McDonald, “The Man behind the Green Revolution”, London Times, 13 November 1970,p. 10.

2. Kolson Schlosser, “Malthus at Mid-Century: Neo-Malthusianism as Bio-Political Governance inthe Post-World War II United States”, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (October 2009), p. 478;Mohan Rao, “An Imagined Reality: Malthusianism, Neo-Malthusianism, and Population Myth”, Econ-

omic and Political Weekly, Vol. 29, No. 5 (January 1994), pp. 40–52; Michael Lipton, New Seeds and PoorPeople (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1989), pp. 210–211.

Global Society, 2014Vol. 28, No. 1, 104–112, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2013.848190

# 2014 University of Kent

on human progress has been modified by generations of followers into plans forcontrolling and organising the resources necessary for maintaining growth. Econ-omics and geopolitics, as Alison Bashford explains, sprang from this Malthusiantradition.3 The understanding of hunger conceived by Amartya Sen and otherresearchers in the famine studies movement of the 1980s aimed to turn the devel-opment community against solutions based around problematics of scarcity andpopulation and towards a discourse of entitlement and rights, but despite convin-cing arguments, the demographic worldview remains institutionally entrenched.4

Alexander de Waal and David Rieff call Malthusianism an “aberration”, an orig-inal sin at the heart of development, ordaining terms of debate on hunger, povertyand disease that have produced a half-century of failure.5 “All modernizationtheory,” Rieff contends “is in intellectual debt to Malthusianism, and is morallyand intellectually undermined by that debt.”6

Malthusianism is a broad category, but de Waal and Rieff take specific aim atthree positions: (1) a tendency to treat hunger and poverty as aggregate problemsof whole populations (thus disregarding context); (2) a concern for the limits, or“carrying capacity”, of natural systems (encouraging moral apathy); and (3) abelief that scarcity crises are both inevitable and imminent (fostering emergencystopgaps in place of systemic reform).7 While they see these as of a piece, thereare reasons to think they may be separable. The Rockefeller agriculture pro-grammes got underway in the interwar period when censuses around theworld showed stagnant or declining populations. Even population control wentahead without a Malthusian rationale. As Matt Connelly shows, the movementarose from concerns over the “quality” rather than the number of people, a biasit never entirely shed.8

It is no small irony that foundation scientists have been retrospectively lumpedtogether with people they considered their enemies. The population scares threwthe Rockefeller and Ford foundations on the defensive. They considered them-selves unfairly attacked by “ecological hucksters” and “pseudo-scientists”, andthe feeling was mutual.9 Paul Ehrlich was inspired to write The PopulationBomb10 after attending a lecture at Stanford by Chidambaram Subramaniam,

3. Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2014).

4. For a sample of the famine studies literature, see Michael Watts, “Heart of Darkness: Reflections onFamine and Starvation in Africa”, in R.E. Downs et al. (eds.), The Political Economy of African Famine (Phi-ladelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1991), pp. 23–68; Amartya Sen, “Famines”, World Development, Vol. 8,No. 9 (September 1980), pp. 613–621; Jean Dreze and Amaryta Sen, The Political Economy of Hunger,Vol. 2, Famine Prevention (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Rolando V. Garcia, Drought and Man, Vol.

1, Nature Pleads Not Guilty (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981); G.A. Harrison, Famine (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1988).

5. Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 20;Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-versity Press, 1997).

6. David Rieff, “Where Hunger Goes”, The Nation, 7 March 2011, p. 31.

7. David Rieff, “The End of Hunger?”, The New Republic, 2 January 2010, available: ,http://tinyurl.com/6tuhwmo.; David Rieff, “The Struggle for Daily Bread”, New York Times, 14 October 2011,available: ,http://tinyurl.com/7mbwn5s..

8. Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge:Belknap, 2008).

9. Frank Notestein to Lorimer, 10 February 1971, Notestein Papers, Box 8, Mudd Library, Princeton.

10. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

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one of the architects of India’s green revolution. As the Indian food ministerdescribed the bumper harvests that could be achieved through genetic science,Ehrlich considered the idea “insane”. More food would only lead to more repro-duction, and greater famines in the future. “Millions of Indians will die,” he con-cluded, “because of government attitudes exemplified by Subramaniam.”11

Malthusianism as a discursive category is certainly capacious enough to includethe range of antagonistic positions on resource limits, redistribution and growth inmodernisation thought in the mid-twentieth century, but not precise enough toaccount for them. The label explains little, by itself, about the origins or motivationfor the foundations’ programmes on food and population. In the decades in whichthe Rockefeller and Ford foundations dominated development policy as prac-titioners and policy innovators, they alternately embraced and disparaged Malthu-sian arguments. At times, they sought allies among environmentalists and thepopulation control movement, while at others they pilloried Malthusian charlatansfor misleading the public and perverting science. Their programmes were frequentlyattacked for accelerating runaway population growth and despoiling nature. Foun-dation positions on the evolving neo-Malthusian argument thus required continualrebalancing of programme commitments, agendas and justifications. Rather thandescribing a single stance on the question of limits to growth, this article willinstead examine three crises, in the late 1940s, late 1950s and late 1960s, when popu-lation anxieties had a pronounced effect on foundation policy and rationales. In eachcase, the foundations tried, not always successfully, to define a respectable, authori-tative position for themselves and their allies in policy and scientific communities.

Nuclear age anxieties about runaway science fed the 1948 population scare, thefirst of several that would mark the last half of the twentieth century. PresidentHarry S. Truman, in his radio address after the Hiroshima bombing, hailed “anew era in man’s understanding of nature’s forces”, but the atomic destructionof a city marked a turning point in attitudes towards science. Polls taken amonth later showed that 27% expected nuclear experiments eventually todestroy “the entire world”.12

The public was thus primed for the alarming message of two non-fiction best-sellers that appeared in 1948. William Vogt’s Road to Survival and FairfieldOsborn’s Our Plundered Planet warned that modern sanitation, medicine andnutrition had lengthened lifespans and contributed to a post-war spike in popu-lation growth.13 “We must realize,” warned Vogt, a scientific adviser to the PanAmerican Union who would soon be named director of Planned Parenthood,“that every grain of rice that man puts into his mouth, every bit of potato, mustbe replaced by another bit from the earth, somewhere.”14 Time magazinedescribed a “frightening, snowballing increase of the human population”similar to a “nuclear chain reaction” that had “been brought about by science’scontribution to human health and fertility”.15 Even before it had a chance for a

11. Paul Ehrlich, “Population, Food, and Environment”, Texas Quarterly, Summer 1968, p. 46.

12. George Gallup, “World Explosion by Misuse of Atom Feared”, Los Angeles Times, 16 September1945, p. 4.

13. William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: Sloane Associates, 1948); Fairfield Osborn, Our Plun-

dered Planet (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1948).

14. Robert C. Cook, “Two Billion People vs. Time”, New York Times, 8 August 1948, p. BR1.

15. “Standing Room Only”, Time, 20 September 1948, pp. 81–83.

106 Nick Cullather

vote in Congress, President Harry S. Truman’s new initiative for global develop-ment, Point IV, came under attack for inflaming the population crisis.16

Osborn and Vogt identified science and economic growth as the chief culprits,stressing the “silent war” waged by technology against nature. Depleted soils,silted rivers and new dustbowls across large areas of Asia, Africa and LatinAmerica demonstrated that scientific efforts to wring more from the land onlyexhausted the earth’s biotic potential faster. The earth had a fixed “carryingcapacity” that could not be artificially expanded by chemical fertilisers, and theouter limits were looming.

The warning could not be dismissed as idle pessimism. Food emergencies inItaly and India led Truman to ask Americans to go meatless on Tuesdays. StateDepartment analyst George Kennan assessed the deterioration in China as “clas-sically Malthusian—a teeming population pressing against the limits imposed bydisease, poverty, and recurrent wars”, while Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State,identified hunger as the common characteristic of all Asian countries: “There arejust too many people to be fed under their present system, their present organiz-ation, the struggle with nature”.17

Most disturbingly to officials at the Rockefeller Foundation, both prophets ofdoom singled out Mexico to make their point, portraying it as the nation furthestadvanced towards despoliation, its deforested hillsides presaging an imminentecological collapse. Osborn cited the Mayan empire, victim of a pre-Columbianpopulation explosion, as a harbinger of “nature’s final retaliation”.18 Mexicowas home to the Rockefeller Foundation’s biggest and most successful venture,the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP), which was being touted as a modelfor agricultural reform in Europe and Asia. The programme pioneered the tech-niques of plant breeding and chemical use later hailed as the Green Revolution.

Vogt had stayed at the MAP headquarters in Chapingo a few years earlier. Rock-efeller launched the initiative in 1939 to exploit advances in breeding and teamresearch, and to maintain momentum after losing its projects in China andEurope. Mexico had many problems, but overpopulation and food scarcity werenot among them. The country was more thinly populated than the United States,and it was a major exporter of food of all types, and a major supplier of rubber,hemp and other war goods. By 1948 the programme had developed strategiesfor raising yields of corn and wheat, and the foundation promoted it as a modelfor Europe and Asia. Foundation officials saw Vogt’s prediction that Mexicowould “be a desert in 100 years” as a frontal attack.19

The foundation trustees might have been less concerned had internal discus-sions not already raised the alarm. A barrage of reports from overseas staffdepicted an unprecedented surge in population growth in many of the poorestcountries and speculated that disease eradication programmes had been the

16. Eugene M. Kulischer, “Point IV and the Population Problem”, Washington Post, 9 March 1949,p. 13.

17. Department of State, The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers (New York: Garland Pub-lishing, 1982), Vol. 2, p. 413; Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Reviews of the World Situation,1949–1950, 81st Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., 1974, p. 86.

18. Osborn, op. cit., p. 137.

19. William Vogt, “A Continent Slides to Ruin”, Harper’s, June 1948, p. 481; Chester Barnard to WarrenWeaver, “‘Road to Survival’ by William Vogt”, 31 August 1948, Rockefeller Foundation Archive Center(hereafter RFAC), RG 3.2, series 900, box 57, folder 310.

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trigger. Demographic surveys revealed a startling picture of crisis along the ColdWar front lines: the introduction of modern medicine and nutrition in Asia hadcaused rural populations “to uncoil” with disastrous political effects. At the Sep-tember meeting in Washington of the American Association for the Advancementof Science (AAAS) attended by President Truman, the charge came into the openas speaker after speaker blamed Rockefeller campaigns against yellow fever andmalaria for unleashing runaway population growth. In an age of geopolitics andglobe-girdling air transport, it was difficult not to see the earth as a finite systembounded by inescapable limits.20

The Rockefeller Foundation, which had done more than any institution to encou-rage a biological outlook on social problems, now found itself under attack from thatangle. Over the next two years, it struggled to reconcile its mission with the growingconviction that improvements in health or agriculture only worsened the inevitablecatastrophe. John D. Rockefeller III and a few trustees argued for redirecting effortstowards birth control, a direction Warren Weaver and the Natural Sciences Divisionstaunchly opposed. The president, Chester Barnard, wavered between the twocamps. If one assumed the earth had a limited carrying capacity, he askedWeaver, “how do we justify the Mexican Agricultural Program?”21

At the next AAAS meeting, in 1949 in New York, the MAP’s Elvin Stakman ven-tured a defence, arguing that scientific advances would “stretch” the surface of theearth, making abundance possible for a larger population. But it was Weaver, amathematician, who articulated the post-Malthusian counter-argument the foun-dation would use for the next 30 years. In a July 1949 internal memo he concededthe point that the earth was a closed system, but argued that its fixed limits werefar larger than Vogt or Osborn had recognised. From a mathematical standpoint,the principal limitation was not crops or soil but energy, and the potential supplyof energy was vast and largely unused. Humans used only one ten-thousandthof the radiant heat supplied by the sun. The problem was not limits, but distri-bution. The collapse of colonial empires and rising nationalist agitation meantthe international system could no longer “stably tolerate” wide differences in theratio of population to resources. The “tragedy of regions (India is an example)where people are now growingly aware of the rest of the world” but unable toduplicate its wealth would be a source of increasing tension. The task for sciencewas to tap the solar reservoir to grow more food, to “buy time” for a demographictransition to occur in these critical regions. With imagination and existing technol-ogies, he estimated, scientists could double food production, assuring a respite of adecade or more. Weaver’s formulation, which he called “human ecology”, co-optedthe conservationists’ arguments while defining a new and urgent mission: to win arace between population growth and food supply.22

20. Notestein to Willits, 1 November 1948, RFAC, RG 1.2, series 600, box 1; Willits to Notestein, 7December 1948, RFAC, RG 1.2, series 600, box 1; John Ensor Harr and Paul Johnson, The RockefellerCentury (New York: Scribner, 1988), pp. 459–560; N.S. Haseltine, “Dire State of the Future World Pic-tured by Scientists Here”, Washington Post, 15 September 1948, p. 6.

21. Barnard to Weaver, “‘Road to Survival’ by William Vogt”, op. cit.; Chester I. Barnard, The Rocke-feller Foundation: A Review for 1948 (New York: RF, 1948), pp. 14–20.

22. William L. Laurence, “Scientists Promise More Food For All”, New York Times, 28 December 1949,p. 27; Weaver, “Population and Food”, 17 July 1949, RFAC, RG 3, series 915, box 3, folder 23; Weaver toBarnard, 21 June 1951, RFAC, RG3, series 915, box 3, folder 23; Weaver, “Human Ecology”, 4 May 1955,RFAC, RG 2, series 100, box 6, folder 30; Weaver, “People, Energy, and Food”, Scientific Monthly, Vol. 78,No. 3 (June 1954), pp. 359–364.

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Human ecology became the basis for a division of labour between a new fund—the Population Council, which supervised international fertility control pro-grammes—and the foundation’s public health and agriculture programmes.Food and population were inextricably paired, and the Mexico programmecame to be seen as the “solution to the over-all population problem”. Demo-graphic transition theory indicated that improved diets and health were a formof birth control, allowing “modification through education of the habits and pre-dilections of the people concerned”. Malthusianism did not come from the organ-isation but from its critics; the foundation’s response, however, reinforced itsalready pronounced tendency to address itself to global-scale problems. Ratherthan encouraging complacency or stopgaps, as Rieff and de Waal suggest, thefoundation appropriated the ecologists’ moral urgency and directed it towardscomprehensive reforms, but reforms aimed at supply rather than entitlement.23

While Malthusian ideas gained acceptance among scientists and policymakersin the 1950s, they had little traction among economists until late in the decade.Both Keynesian and classical economists saw an enlarged labour pool as a prere-quisite for development. A high birth rate was thus a stimulant to growth, anddevelopment policy was fashioned around releasing human capital from theland and stoking industry with “unlimited supplies of labor”. Michael Liptonhas argued that a Malthusian “population argument was, from the start, at thecenter” of Ford Foundation efforts in India, but throughout the 1950s the commu-nity development and village industry programmes, cornerstones of the FordFoundation’s “quiet Revolution” strategy in India, envisioned surplus populationas an engine for growth.24 By creating “opportunity ladders” of increasing skilland wages leading from the village to urban mills, the foundation sought toharness population pressure to build a modern industrial sector.25

Both theory and practice changed in the course of a few months in 1958 as a resultof two influential reports. A US government review of foreign aid headed by WilliamDraper highlighted the Indian subcontinent, once seen as a strategic backwater, asgeopolitically vital, the “schwerpunkt” of a Soviet–Chinese strategy for Asian dom-ination. Draper stipulated, however, that no aid could be effective without dealingfirst “with the problem of rapid population growth”.26 In the same month, theWorld Bank published a report by demographer Ansley Coale and economistEdgar M. Hoover challenging the conventional wisdom that surplus labour wasan asset for India’s development. It quantified, with ostensible precision, the econ-omic advantage of contraception by plotting a “high” population trajectory basedon continuation of current patterns and a “low” figure assuming a 50% decline in fer-tility alongside calculations of India’s national income, welfare expenditure andinvestment for each trend. The difference was dramatic. With birth limitation,Indians could expect a demographic bonus of almost 40% more income by 1986.27

23. Barnard, The Rockefeller Foundation, op. cit., p. 21; Lorimer to Weaver, “WFL Notes on World Popu-lation and World Food Supplies”, 22 November 1949, RFAC, RG 3, series 915, box 3, folder 20.

24. Lipton, op. cit., pp. 210–211.

25. W. Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor”, The ManchesterSchool of Economic and Social Studies, Vol. 22 (1954), pp. 139–192.

26. President’s Committee to Study the United States Military Assistance Program, Composite Report

(Washington: USGPO, 1958), Vol. 1, p. 97; Vol. 2, p. 24.

27. Ansley J. Coale and Edgar M. Hoover, Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-IncomeCountries: A Case Study of India’s Prospects (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958).

The Foundations, Neo-Malthusianism and the Modernising Agenda 109

These studies reversed an academic and policy consensus that regarded accel-erating trade and rising populations as initiators of development. Keynes himselfassociated high fertility with economic vigour, and for years economists hadapplauded the demand-side effects of “dynamic” populations.28 This reasoningnow struck World Bank president Eugene Black as backward: “The more depen-dents in a poor society—the more children to be fed, clothed, and educated—theless savings are available for investment”.29 President Dwight Eisenhower hadadvocated trade as the primary driver of development. Until 1959, aid missionsactually discouraged recipient countries from growing more wheat, because itwas an internationally traded commodity. In July the administration changedcourse, redirecting funds towards the goal of food self-sufficiency. If underdeve-loped economies could not withstand “free enterprise in the forms we under-stand”, Vice President Richard Nixon conceded, the United States might have toaccept or even promote trade restriction.30

The Ford Foundation followed suit. A “Food Crisis Report” for India issued inApril 1959 forecast an impending gap of 28 million tons of grain by 1965. A team ofAmerican and Indian experts identified “the crux of the problem” as a gapbetween food supply and “a rapidly increasing population”. It recommended acrash programme of irrigation, fertilisation and mechanisation to feed the extra80 million Indians who would be born by the end of the Third Five-Year Plan.All three reports focused concern on India but ignored exacerbating factorsspecific to India, particularly the huge amount of US food aid, which suppressedagricultural investment by pricing locally grown food out of the market, and thefive-year plans which diverted even more revenue from agriculture.31

Aid and the plan were cornerstones of Cold War containment policy for theregion, and India was a critical symbolic counterweight to China. So in the caseof the green revolution, Malthusian ideas did not result in bad policy; instead,bad policies (dictated by geopolitical rather than local or economic considerations)made it inconvenient to dwell on explanations that were not Malthusian. A goodexample of how wagons were circled against alternative theories can be found inthe response, or absence of response, to eminent British economist Colin Clark.Amartya Sen’s anti-Malthusianism draws on a long intellectual lineage, goingback to Jasper Rogers and Romesh Dutt in the nineteenth century.32 Clark wasthe unlucky guardian of this position in the 1950s and 1960s, maintaining withwry consistency that forecasts of scarcity were likely wrong, that rising birthrates generated growth and that rather than a “global” food crisis there wereonly local crises for local reasons, in China because of communism and India

28. John M. Keynes, “Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population”, Eugenics Review, Vol.29, No. 1 (1937), pp. 13–17.

29. Eugene R. Black, The Diplomacy of Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1961), p. 7.

30. “US Policy Liberalized on Aid to Foreign Agriculture”, 7 July 1959, in Department of State, ForeignRelations of the United States, 1958–1960 (hereafter FRUS) (Washington: USGPO, 1998), Vol. 4, p. 337;“388th Meeting of the NSC”, 3 December 1958, FRUS, Vol. 4, p. 339.

31. Agricultural Production Team, Report on India’s Food Crisis and Steps to Meet It (Delhi: Governmentof India, 1959).

32. Jasper W. Rogers, The Potato Truck System of Ireland, the Main Cause of her Periodical Famines and the

Non-Payment of her Rents (London: Ridgeway, 1947); Romesh C. Dutt, Open Letters to Lord Curzon onFamines and Land Assessments in India (London: K. Paul, 1900).

110 Nick Cullather

because of caste.33 Development experts generally found Clark’s findings unargu-able, and so did their best to ignore them.34

Dark prophesies of limits, population explosions and coming famines had mostcurrency in Washington and New York when they provided neutral cover for pol-itical aims. In the mid-1960s, Lyndon Johnson ginned up a “world food crisis” towrap an unpopular farm bill and US intervention in Asia in a cloak of humanitar-ianism. The great Bihar famine of 1967, which by official estimates killed as manyas zero people, allowed Johnson to push India to liberalise its economy, Congressto pass foreign aid and farm legislation, and Europe to join in an American-ledrescue. In his memoirs, Johnson counted it among his greatest successes.35

The foundations, as we have seen, were ready to go along and, to the dismay ofsome scientists, they increasingly found their work cast in this light. Rural devel-opment initiatives in Asia pursued a variety of conflicting objectives—self-suffi-ciency, increasing exports, improving peasants, supplying factory labour,encouraging scientific collaboration, building national scientific establishments,democratising villagers and strengthening central governments—but increasinglythey were judged by a single goal: increasing food supply faster than population.

Borlaug, who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the green revolu-tion, scripted this narrative. In his acceptance speech, he ignored decades of argu-ment over means and goals and portrayed a steady, single-minded movement oforganisations, officials, “thousands of scientists and millions of farmers”. Takinghis listeners from the Neolithic revolution to the present, he posed the historyof civilisation as an unbroken struggle between “two opposing forces, the scienti-fic power of food production, and the biologic power of human reproduction”.36

He followed up a year later in the McDougall Lecture at the Food and AgricultureOrganization by attacking the environmental movement as “social drop-outs,social parasites in reality” who failed to recognise that human needs for food out-weighed any damage DDT might do to birds.37

But this time, Malthusian pronouncements met with a different response. Thelanguage of limits had been changed by a new environmental movementinformed by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring38 of the deadly effects of chemicalspoured by farmers into the soil and water. The United States and the EuropeanUnion were moving to ban DDT. The New York Times, which had hailed Borlaugas an innovator less than a year before, concluded that “this sadly misinformedNobel laureate” had lost touch with reality.39 The Ford and Rockefellerfoundations quietly cut their ties to Borlaug’s institute. The whole developmententerprise came under attack in the 1970s from ecologists who foresaw imminentcrises arising from resource exhaustion and from dependistas who saw

33. Clark took particular aim at the “hysterical” concern with fertility trends and “the fashionableidea that Americans ought to send what might be called missionaries of contraception to inform thebenighted Asiatics”. Clark, “Review”, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 48, No. 262(1953), pp. 374–376; Clark, Population Growth and Land Use (London: MacMillan, 1962).

34. “The Population Bogey”, The Economist, 15 July 1967, p. 221.

35. Cullather, The Hungry World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 205–231.

36. Norman Borlaug, “The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity”, 11 December 1970, RFAC, RG6.7, series 4, subseries 6, box 88.

37. Norman Borlaug, “Mankind and Civilization at another Crossroad”, 8 November 1971, FAOLibrary, Rome.

38. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

39. “Norman Borlaug, DDT”, New York Times, 26 November 1971, p. 36.

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underdevelopment as structural. In response, the United Nations’ BrundtlandCommission began to define a way forward that was “sustainable”, but thegreen revolution remained saddled with an outdated narrative.

Today, the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are co-sponsoring an Alliance fora Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA). The focus is on boosting production, butthe Malthusian rhetoric is gone. In its place is the neoliberal language ofmarkets, downsizing, individual enterprise and exports. Ultimately, however,the greatest difference between the old and new green revolutions is theabsence of the Cold War. Fears of communism released levels of aid for Asia farbeyond anything proposed for Africa, and they were spent on initiatives designedto build strong, autonomous economies and states. If there is an aberration at theheart of development, it is not Malthusianism but the changing imperatives ofAmerican supremacy.

112 Nick Cullather