“Beware the Stories We Tell About Food”: Ben Stanley on Aaron Eddens, *Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa*

The Green Revolution is not only a constellation of technologies and economic relationships. It is also, crucially, a story. So Aaron Eddens argues in the persuasive monograph Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa (University of California Press, 2024). While many books have critiqued the Green Revolution, Eddens offers both an unusually accessible entrée for readers new to this topic, and a trenchant analysis of the Green Revolution as discourse. In so doing, Eddens directs readers to the power wielded by stories, including incomplete and biased ones. Eddens details how the Green Revolution story of saving the hungry with better-yielding crops extends Global North exploitation of sub-Saharan Africa, and furthers settler-colonial erasure of genocide in the Americas. This story is also key to how the financialization of agricultural development and climate risk align with the U.S. national security apparatus to make climate change profitable for U.S.-based corporations and to justify U.S. empire––all in the name of helping African smallholder farmers.

Seeding Empire begins by tracing how Green Revolutionaries Norman Borlaug and Bill Gates articulate a specific worldview, and how this mode of storytelling empowers the Green Revolution despite its critics. Chapter 1, “How We Remember the Green Revolution,” examines how Iowan scientist and Nobel laureate Borlaug became mythologized as “the man who saved a billion lives” with his high-yielding wheat.[i] This hero narrative both ignores Borlaug’s troubling Malthusianism and “omits much of the historical complexities and power dynamics of the Green Revolution,” so why, Eddens asks, has it “remained so durable” (18)? Eddens’s answer is to show how heroizing Borlaug takes part in larger U.S. memory-making projects, in which an account of an innocent “nation of immigrants” elides settler colonial violence (20).

Chapter 2, “A Green Revolution, This Time for Africa,” examines the uptake of Borlaug’s ideas by Bill Gates. Drawing on a personal visit to the Gates Foundation Discovery Center in Seattle, Eddens details how the Foundation hides the Global North’s role in causing poverty in the South behind a simplistic narrative of haves helping have-nots. Key to this problematic viewpoint is the concept of “yield gap” (45): the narrative that African agriculture is inefficient, meaning poverty can be addressed by implementing high-yield crops. Focusing on “yield gap” prevents agricultural development projects from asking other types of questions––questions about U.S. empire in Africa, for example (46). Eddens describes this kind of limited vision as “the philanthrocapitalist gaze” (51-2): a privileged (often White and male) way of seeing structured by the dubious assumption that the “profit motive” will inevitably offer “the most effective path to societal betterment” (44). Eddens situates the Gates Foundation as exemplary of the many institutions of environmental finance capitalism that operate with such a philanthrocapitalist gaze.

Eddens historicizes the racial and private-property logics undergirding this philanthrocapitalist worldview in chapter 3, “The Landraces are in the Hybrids,” turning to archival records of the Mexican Agriculture Program (MAP) from the 1940s and 1950s. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, MAP brought U.S. scientists to Mexico and Central America to collect indigenous maize varieties. Eddens documents how MAP scientists contrasted their work to Indigenous agriculture to articulate a civilizational hierarchy, in which eugenicist racial logics and possessive taxonomies of corn varieties co-produced one another. The program’s scientists disparaged Indigenous people as non-modern while claiming their knowledges and their corn for U.S. foundations and later seed companies, whose hybrid varieties still include this genetic material.

Having traced the Green Revolution’s inception in the Americas, Eddens pivots to examine Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA), a public-private partnership funded by the Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and utilizing Monsanto/Bayer’s patented drought-tolerant gene application (86-87). As detailed in chapter 4, “Seeing Like a Seed Company,” WEMA exemplifies how a capitalist ideology of “improvement” makes helping smallholder farmers “synonymous with … expanding private property regimes,” naturalizing a notion that farmers’ lives will be bettered (only) through corporate consolidations (101, 106). Based on interviews with fifty officials, this central chapter also describes institutional dynamics among biotech companies, U.S. funders, public sector organizations such as the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), and NGOs such as the Nairobi-based African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF). This relationship-mapping lends specificity to a portrait of the Green Revolution as a many-tentacled creature, helping show how claims like the “African-led” nature of WEMA or the focus on “bettering the lives of farmers” coexist with the control of U.S.-based corporations and their ultimate accrual of most profits (131, 106).

After following the Green Revolution story from 1940s Mexico to present-day WEMA, Seeding Empire finally turns to its interaction with discourses of climate risk. Chapter 5, “Securitizing Smallholder Farmers on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis,” examines U.S. framings of climate change as a national security issue in tandem with “weather index insurance” schemes in Africa (107). Weather index insurance, accessed through a farmer’s phone, provides a payout if a nearby weather station measures drought conditions. Eddens explains this phenomenon as part and parcel of logics of financialization: “much of the discourse about index insurance describes risk as a kind of untapped opportunity,” given the economic value of risk evolved from what Jonathan Levy has described as “an international trade in ‘risks’ that emerged in eighteenth-century maritime insurance” (Eddens 114). Risk becomes profitable for somebody, but not necessarily for the small farmer, who beyond climate risk must take on the different “risk” that “what happens in their field” will not correlate to the “statistical measurements at the weather station or satellite” and thus that they might suffer a loss without getting a payout (115). For Eddens, this exemplifies how financialization casts certain populations––such as small farmers in the Global South––as “subprime” or “at risk” (120, 122). Eddens also situates this financialization of agricultural development and climate risk as dovetailing with U.S. national security logics. As described in chapter 5 and in the conclusion, the U.S. national security apparatus presents climate change as occasioning a new type of “risk environment,” likely to produce sudden “shocks” to the food system against which the U.S. must cultivate global “resilience” (123). For Eddens, this discourse seeks to justify U.S. militarism while paralleling financialized agricultural development projects: both construct “Africa as a space of unending crisis that demands securitization” (125). Eddens’s compelling (if familiar) concluding message is that U.S. Americans concerned about poverty in Africa should turn their scrutiny back on the United States: take seriously that the Global North owes the South a “climate debt,” and consider the “US military’s growing … footprint across the [African] continent” (139, 136).

Rather than an attempt to represent small farmers, Seeding Empire is an exercise in what anthropologist Laura Nader has called “studying up”: turning the lens of inquiry onto the powerful actors within a hierarchy, recognizing that power has enabled them to evade scrutiny, and reversing that dynamic (see Eddens 12). We learn from this approach that many players at the Gates Foundation or Monsanto/Bayer apparently believe that their efforts will benefit smallholders because, as Eddens explains it, they have accepted the philanthrocapitalist premise. This leads readers towards a possible understanding of how corporate greed may not inhere in individual intentions but instead in what Charles W. Mills has described as “white ignorance” (Eddens 35): in this case, a systemic failure to look at the histories that produced poverty, or to scrutinize the story that generating profit for U.S. corporations also benefits smallholder farmers in Africa.

Eddens’s story of the Green Revolution compelled me because it is so clearly articulated, well-substantiated, and granular in its examples. As a food scholar already critical of the Green Revolution, I did not feel challenged in my ideas by reading this monograph; however, I did think, “This is the book I wish my friends and colleagues in synthetic biology would read, in order to understand biotech in its social, political, and economic contexts.” Seeding Empire would teach well in a graduate seminar or advanced undergraduate course, both in order to help students understand the Green Revolution and to introduce concepts key to social and cultural theory more generally. Seeding Empire not only leverages terms such as racial capitalism, White ignorance, racial geographies, resilience, and risk in order to assess the Green Revolution, but also uses the Green Revolution as a case to exemplify such concepts in action, making them easy to understand. Seeding Empire does not assume specialist knowledge so much as invite potential new readers to begin understanding those broader scholarly conversations, and to see the Green Revolution as a key example of how power operates through storytelling.

[i] Aaron Eddens, Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa (University of California Press, 2024), 16. Subsequent references are indicated parenthetically.