From Cotton Farmers to Campesinos: Rockefeller Rural Development in the American Mediterranean

Of the many campaigns associated with the project of “development,” none have been more widely celebrated or bitterly criticized than the Green Revolution, the United States’ Cold War-era exportation of agricultural technology to the Third World.  Yet both proponents and detractors of that project have agreed that its origin and process may be found in the Global South, with its birthplace in Mexico under the Rockefeller Foundation’s (RF) Mexican Agricultural Program. This paper claims instead that the agrarian development model employed in Mexico and beyond was profoundly shaped in the United States before it was exported abroad, specifically within the early twentieth-century American South. Between 1903 and 1914, and then from 1935 to 1946, the Rockefeller philanthropies engineered vast programs of rural reform in the U.S. cotton South, a region that served as a domestic laboratory wherein they incubated ideas that would later transform much of the rural planet. When the RF planned a Mexican program in the late 1930s, their approach was explicitly fashioned as a transplanting of U.S. southern models onto the Mexican landscape and its farmers.

The American South and large parts of Mexico, like other postcolonial regions of the Caribbean basin, had each inherited the ills of the plantation system. Uneven land tenure, racialized systems of labor, and soil exploitation haunted both societies in the early twentieth century. Initially, the Rockefeller philanthropies targeted their rural development campaigns in both the United States and Mexico at reversing these social and environmental problems. However, by the time that their program was exported to Asia in the 1950s, the Green Revolution’s emphasis was on neutralizing rural radicalism rather than easing hunger and poverty. Following the RF’s trail across the American Mediterranean, this essay seeks to explain why this came to be.