There's a famine in Somalia, and the World Bank has issued another stern warning about global food prices. Asia Sentinel admits concerns, but their headline reads, Global Food Crisis Fears Abate:

Fears of a major global food shortage appear to have abated since the first part of the year, with food prices declining slightly from their peak and prospects for the overall supply slightly brighter.

After that reassuring paragraph, the Sentinel does report the disturbing news. The Daily Nation doesn't hesitate, writing, World Bank sounds alert on food prices:

The price of maize in the Horn of Africa has doubled over the last year, the World Bank has said. In Kenya, it has increased by 89 per cent, according to the bank’s Food Price Watch report. This is the fourth highest increase in the price of maize in the world behind Uganda (122 per cent), Somalia (107 per cent) and Rwanda (104 per cent). Overall, the Food Price Watch says global food prices in July 2011 remain 33 per cent higher than a year ago.

It seems like a good time to consider Nick Cullather's book, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia which is reviewed in Mother Jones article, Why the "Green Revolution" Was Not So Green After All.

[The Green Revolution's] technological architect, the Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, was all but beatified upon his death in 2009. In its obituary, Reason Magazine proclaimed him "the man who saved more human lives than anyone else in history," while The New York Times wrote that he "did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself."

Upon his death, I wrote a TPM piece noting Borlaug's reputation, but questioning whether the increase in world population that his Green Revolution crops enabled would cost us more lives, and our habitat, in the long run. Cullather goes farther, questioning the very motives behind the high-yield agricultural movement.

In 1941, when the Rockefeller Foundation sent its first set of ag technologists south of the border, Mexico was hardly a seething hotbed of population overshoot and food scarcity, Cullather shows. Quite the opposite, it was a net food exporter, sending vegetables, fruit, cattle, and coffee to the United States. The USDA had deemed it "largely self-sufficient" in food and fiber, he reports; and population, while growing, was less dense than than that of its would-be savior, the United States.

Whether it needed help or not, Mexico was to be a convenient test case for Big Ag. But there were unintended consequences:

And here is where Cullather's critique is damning. Borlaug's innovations in Mexico, impressive as they were technologically, were "an answer in search of a riddle," he argues. That is, they focused on problems that didn't exist and ignored ones that did, in the process exacerbating them. Not only was Mexico growing sufficient food for its population when the Rockefeller team alighted, it was also devoting much of its richest agricultural land, still largely owned by wealthy landowners despite recent land reform, to non-food industrial crops bound for export. And it was then taking some of that foreign exchange and using it to buy corn, beans, and wheat from the US, which drove crops prices steeply downward for Mexico's small-scale farmers. In response, they "switched to the more profitable export crops and shifted grain production onto marginal lands: the steep hillsides Wallace had seen."

As farmers switched from corn to export crops, Mexican food production declined, causing a vicious cycle: The government had to "import even larger grain quantities the following year." Thus, Mexico's food problems, insofar as they existed, did not stem from lack of US technology or scientific know-how. They resulted from unequal land distribution and domestic economic policy, Cullather demonstrates.

And the Rockefeller effort to ramp up production, as it took took hold in the countryside, only accelerated those trends. Crop prices fell as yields rose, pushing peasant farmers off the land. By the 1950s, Cullather reports, US policy analysts were fretting about what they called the "wetback problem"—1.5 million migrants crossing the border each year in search of gainful work. Savoring the irony, he quotes Rockefeller Foundation paper from the time blaming a "growing oversupply of cheap, unprotected labor" in rural Mexico for the phenomenon.

So our long and noxious national debate over illegal immigration, undocumented workers, and perhaps even our national concern about the violent narcotics trade just across the border may be traced back to our own Norman Borlaug and our own Big Agriculture disrupting and displacing Mexico's rural farmers.