The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

308 the world according to monsantohave had tragic environmental and social consequences, particularly for smallfarmers.” For our second meeting, in December 2004, the militant Indian intellectualhad invited me to the farm of Navdayana (Nine Grains), an associationfor the preservation of biodiversity and the protection of farmers’ rightsthat she had established in 1987, located in the state of Uttarakhand, innorthern India, on the border of Tibet and Nepal. Here, a few miles fromDehradun in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she was born, she has establisheda center for agricultural education intended to promote the growingof traditional wheat and rice crops that the green revolution almost caused todisappear, replacing them with high-yield varieties imported from Mexico.The agroindustrial concept that in 1968 was labeled the green revolutionwas born in 1943 in the capital of Mexico.* That year, Henry Wallace, vicepresident of the United States (and co-founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred, whichinvented hybrid corn), offered to his Mexican counterpart a “scientific mission”designed to increase national wheat production. Sponsored by theRockefeller Foundation, under the auspices of the Mexican AgricultureMinistry, this pilot project was set up in a Mexico City suburb, where in1965 it adopted the name of the International Maize and Wheat ImprovementCenter (CIMMYT, Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maízy Trigo).In October 2004, I visited this renowned research center, which still operatesas a nonprofit organization and now employs a hundred highly qualifiedinternational researchers, as well as five hundred associates from fortycountries. In the entrance hall, a huge painting pays tribute to the father ofthe green revolution, Norman Borlaug, born on an Iowa farm in 1914, whowas hired by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1944 and won the Nobel PeacePrize in 1970 “in recognition of his important contribution to the green revolution.”2 For twenty years, this agronomist, who is now an ardent supporterof GMOs, had a single obsession: to increase wheat production by creatingvarieties permitting a tenfold increase in yields. To reach the goal he cameup with the idea of crossing CIMMYT’s varieties with a Japanese dwarf variety,Norin 10. Increasing yields involves forcing the plant to produce largerand more numerous kernels at the risk of causing the stem to break. Hence*The expression was used for the first time on March 8, 1968, by William Gaud, administratorof the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in a speech delivered inWashington.