Revisiting the Legacy of the Green Revolution: The Mexican Agricultural Program
The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1943 Mexican Agriculture Program (MAP) launched the worldwide agricultural movement known as the Green Revolution. The MAP has retained a master narrative, securing its place in historical memory as a great success—a prototype to be replanted throughout the world. In an attempt to understand this legacy, one can only turn to comedian Stephen Colbert, who coined the term “truthiness” to mean a subjective or intuitive understanding of truth. Merriam Webster awarded it “Word of the Year” in 2006, defining it in two ways: as "truth that comes from the gut, not books" and as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts of facts known to be true." [1] The Green Revolution exemplifies a similar(ly made up) term: peaciness . Pursued in the name of improving nutrition for the poor, of lightening the burden of importing food, of increasing profit and investment, and of providing employment in indu