The Long Green Revolution

To combat climate change and hunger, a number of governments, foundations and aid agencies have called for a ‘New Green Revolution’. Such calls obfuscate the dynamics of the Green Revolution. Using Arrighi's analysis of capital accumulation cycles, it is possible to trace a Long Green Revolution that spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such an analysis illuminates commonalities in past and present Green Revolutions, including their bases in class struggles and crises of accumulation, modes of governance – particularly in the links between governments and philanthropic institutions – and the institutions through which truths about agricultural change were produced and became known. Such an analysis…