Making the Green Revolution: Agriculture and Conflict in Colombia

By Timothy W. Lorek

In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As an important research center of the so-called Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, CIAT emphasizes its contributions to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where CIAT is physically located, a place that has been transformed into an industrial monoculture of sugarcane where thirteen Colombian corporations oversee the vast majority of this valley's famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the paradox Timothy W. Lorek describes in Making the Green Revolution: an international research center emphasizing small-scale and sustainable agricultural systems sited conspicuously on a landscape otherwise dominated by a large-scale corporate sugarcane industry.

Utilizing archives in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States, Lorek tracks the paradoxical but intertwined twentieth-century processes that produced both CIAT and sugar in the Cauca Valley. This history reveals how Colombians contributed to the rise of a global Green Revolution and how that international process in turn intersected with a complex and long-running rural conflict in Colombia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781469673837

Timothy W. Lorek

Timothy W. Lorek is assistant professor of history at the College of St. Scholastica.

Book preview

Making the Green Revolution

FLOWS, MIGRATIONS, AND EXCHANGES

Mart A. Stewart and Harriet Ritvo, editors

The Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges series publishes new works of environmental history that explore the cross-border movements of organisms and materials that have shaped the modern world, as well as the varied human attempts to understand, regulate, and manage these movements.

A complete list of books published in Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges is available at https://uncpress.org/series/flows-migrations-exchanges.

Making the Green Revolution

AGRICULTURE & CONFLICT IN COLOMBIA

Timothy W. Lorek

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2023 Timothy W. Lorek

All rights reserved

Designed by Jamison Cockerham

Set in Scala and Cassino

By Jamie McKee, MacKey Composition

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph by James Foote, Ford Foundation, International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Courtesy of Rockefeller Archive Center.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Lorek, Timothy W., author.

Title: Making the Green Revolution : agriculture and conflict in Colombia / Timothy W. Lorek.

Other titles: Flows, migrations, and exchanges.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2023] | Series: Flows, migrations, and exchanges | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022058212 | ISBN 9781469673813 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469673820 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469673837 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical. | Agriculture—Research—Colombia—Cauca River Valley—History—20th century. | Agricultural development projects—Political aspects—Colombia—Cauca River Valley. | Agricultural assistance, American—Colombia—Cauca River Valley—History—20th century. | Green Revolution—Colombia—Cauca River Valley—History—20th century. | Sugarcane industry—Colombia—Cauca River Valley—History—20th century. | Globalization—Colombia—Cauca River Valley. | Cold War. | Colombia—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC S540.8.C45 L67 2023 | DDC 338.109861/5—dc23/eng/20230103

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058212

In memory of my father,

Wayne Paul Lorek (1954–2015)

For my mother, Donna Lorek

And to Steph, with gratitude

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on the Text

Abbreviations in the Text

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE. Developing Paradise

1. The Paradise of America

2. Prophets of a Promised Land

3. The Most Necessary Occupation

PART TWO. Sugar

4. Sugarcane Genealogies

PART THREE. A Reservoir of Experience and Materials

5. Quixotic Developments

6. The Cold War Cauca Valley: From the CAP to CIAT

EPILOGUE. Beyond the Gates: Sugarcane Monoculture and CIAT in the Cauca Valley

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

Aerial view of CIAT and sugarcane fields, circa 1972

Campesinos de Cali, 1853

Abraham Nicacio and family with cacao sorting table, 1933

Ciro Molina Garcés with family and guests, 1933

Carlos E. Chardón, 1924

A Group of Peons Eating Sancocho, 1908

Vallecaucano worker, 1929

Cafeteria at the Andalucía Farm School, mid-1930s

Tobacco contrabandistas arrested near Tuluá

Graphic depicting distribution of seed packets by department, 1934

Manuelita S.A., 1951

Wild sugarcane, Saccharum spontaneum

Evaporating cane juice to make panela near Florida, 1933

National Geographic image depicting the harvesting of sugarcane, 1947

Samán (rain tree) at Ciro Molina Garcés’s hacienda, 1933

Thatched-roof house with large sugar mill in background

Bridge over the Cauca River with maize, plantains, and flood, 1933

Prizewinners with trophies and gasoline at a tractor demonstration event

Students at the Palmira Agronomy School try out a new tractor

Collecting maize for the Rockefeller Foundation in Palmira

Spraying DDT on Palmira maize fields as part of the CAP

Advertisement for Endrex Shell chlorinated insecticide and Dow Chemical products

CIAT entrance gates in the side-view mirror, 2022

El campo sin campesinos, School of Agricultural Sciences, Universidad Nacional, Bogotá

MAPS

Map of Valle del Cauca

Carlos Durán Castro’s itinerary, 1927–28

Gini coefficients of Cauca Valley land distribution and the location of the agro-industrial sugarcane sector

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From where I am writing in Duluth, Minnesota, a Blackburnian warbler is dancing out the window and distracting me from this task. Its striking orange-and-black color contrasts with the dewy green of a late spring morning on the western shores of Lake Superior. And now I am thinking about connections. Blackburnian warblers migrate between the conifer forests of northern North America and the montane forests of Central America and the northern Andes. It is entirely possible that this warbler out my window is a recent arrival from Colombia, though likely not the Cauca River Valley, where the wetlands and forests have largely been drained and cut during the historical period described in this book. Still, it is a reminder of the profound connections between seemingly distant landscapes. Tracing these connections is what originally attracted me to environmental history and the history of the Americas. This book is the result of that interest sparked long ago. In these brief pages I will attempt the impossible task of thanking some of those who have helped me along the way.

I have benefited from a wealth of serendipitous good luck and generous people. My academic journey began at Ohio University, nestled amid the Appalachian foothills in the small town of Athens. There I learned from a number of wonderful faculty and teachers. Some of these made an outsize mark on me and my future work, including Art Trese and his courses on plants and organic agriculture; Brad Jokisch and his classes on geography and Latin American migration; and Jeff Marks and Emilia Alonso, who drilled Spanish phonetics and stylistics with discipline and led the Pamplona, Spain, study abroad program with passion. Beth Clodfelter deserves a trophy case of awards for her unsung work guiding Ohio University students like me through the international grants and awards application process, particularly the Fulbright Program. Finally, I had the incredible fortune that Patrick Barr-Melej made his way to Athens in time for my senior year. Patrick offered more guidance and mentorship to me in that one year than most undergraduates get in their entire four. He graciously introduced me to his wide academic network in Chile and guided my novice scholarly interest in Latin American history.

Thanks to Beth’s and Patrick’s tutelage at Ohio University, I spent 2008 in Santiago de Chile trying my hand at historical research on a Fulbright grant. Although I was clearly learning as I went, a number of Chilean historians, social scientists, archivists, and librarians nevertheless supported my aspirational work. In particular, I owe Fernando Purcell from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile a debt of gratitude. Many others met with me in their offices, invited me to onces at Santiago cafés, photocopied drafts of their unpublished research for my benefit, or accompanied me on the urban explorations and wide-ranging travels that are not considered academic work but are nonetheless essential to understanding a place. The meandering path that led to this book began there, in those places.

I earned a master of arts at the University of New Mexico and learned from a tremendous cohort of scholars and students. In particular, Judy Bieber, Kim Gauderman, Sam Truett, the late Linda Hall, Durwood Ball, and Jason Scott Smith shaped my intellectual maturation and historiographic wanderings. Above all, Elizabeth Hutchison was the fulcrum of my master’s work at UNM. The generosity of Dr. Liz’s commitment helped me find my academic voice. In fact, the very first round of research and writing for this eventual book began in one of Dr. Liz’s seminars in the fall of 2010.

Beyond the classroom, I spent one year working and learning from the people with the Agri-Cultura Network, a community brokerage of mostly indigenous and nuevo mexicano farmers in Albuquerque’s South Valley. Together, the farmers of ACN creatively pool their resources and harvests to improve their marketability and protect their cultural heritage, historic land-grant titles, and acequia water rights from outside commercial development. Much of my education in agrarian issues is thus from this and other work in the soil. I think an extended thank-you in this space is more than appropriate for the formative role of that New Mexican farming community in how I think about issues of agriculture, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. Their names are too many to list here individually, but I will never forget them.

The first time I talked to Gilbert Joseph on the phone, I was sitting in my work truck outside the Bernalillo County agricultural extension office on a chilly winter morning in Albuquerque. Later, at Yale, I soon discovered that Gil has a habit of constantly surpassing his own high bars for kindness and professional advocacy on his students’ behalf. As he has for so many before me, Gil has guided this project and watched it grow and change in unexpected ways. I could not ask for a more personable and encouraging mentor. Stuart Schwartz also offered sage advice that significantly enhanced this project from its beginnings. Stuart’s encyclopedic knowledge of Latin American history and historiography helped bulk up this project’s foundations and inspired key questions. James Scott’s fingerprints are all over this project too. Although Jim’s canon of books and poignant observations certainly influenced this book, I am even more indebted to his disciplinary border crossing and community building. I gained more than I could ever quantify from year after year of attendance and participation in Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies, which I coordinated in 2016–17 and which formed my home outside the Department of History throughout my time at Yale. I likewise thank Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan for his co-directorship of agrarian studies and his support of my research. Paul Sabin’s leadership with environmental history, both at Yale and in the field at large, tethered my aspiring work to that community and encouraged me to pursue avenues that most interested me. Marcela Echeverri’s knowledge and professional network of Colombian historians helped keep me grounded in place when my transnational wanderings threatened to steer me away. I had the good luck to be in New Haven during several semesters when Reinaldo Funes-Monzote served as a visiting professor. His encouragement and sharing of sources and resources on Caribbean environmental history significantly improved this project. Jean Silk offered support through her administrative capacity with the Council for Latin American and Iberian Studies. Lisa Brandes and Jen Mendelsohn worked hard to make graduate student life better and more inviting and lobbied hard for benefits such as parental leave and partner health care, which made my time at Yale much more comfortable. Finally, the Department of History staff, and most especially the tireless Marcy Kaufman, made the confusing and sometimes precarious graduate school experience navigable.

Many scholars and friends read and commented on chapters or talks and improved this book in myriad ways. My Latin American history cohort at Yale, first and foremost, became close friends and intellectual co-conspirators. Thank you to Andra Brosy Chastain, Adrián Lerner Patrón, Santiago Muñoz Arbelaez, and Michael Rom. I am especially grateful to those thematic fellow travelers who have read or commented on extended parts of this book during its formation, including Scott Crago, Ray Craib, Helen Curry, Netza Gutiérrez, Mark Healey, Stuart McCook, Diana Méndez Rojas, Tore Olsson, Wilson Picado, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga. As I worked on the final stages of editing, I was invited to present to scholars with the Seminario Interinstitucional on La Revolución Verde en América Latina, held virtually via the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Instituto Mora, and to the Semillero Estudios Sociales y Críticos sobre Nutrición/Alimentación, held virtually through the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá. Thanks to the organizers and participants for their feedback. For taking an interest in this project and discussing it with me via email, telephone, conference panel, or over beer or coffee, I also thank Anthony Acciavatti, Ricardo Álvarez-Pimentel, Tony Andersson, Chris Boyer, Ally Brantley, Darryl Brock, Eve Buckley, Geoff Burrows, Michael Bustamante, Derek Byerlee, Sabine Cadeau, Matthew Caire-Pérez, Mark Carey, Patrick Chassé, Jorge Cuéllar, Kate de Luna, Alba Díaz Geada, Becky Ellis Dodson, Julian Dodson, Paulo Drinot, Jennifer Eaglin, Anne Eller, Bart Elmore, Sterling Evans, Margarita Fajardo, Deborah Fitzgerald, Courtney Fullilove, Julie Gibbings, Jess Gilbert, Jonathon Graham, Tiffany Hale, Ryan Hall, Jonathan Harwood, Chris Hebdon, Viridiana Hernández, Sarah Hines, Teresa Huhle, Marta Kalabinski, Alder Keleman, Prakash Kumar, Jennifer Lambe, Keri Lambert, Nancy Langston, Casey Lurtz, John Lynam, Harro Maat, J. R. McNeill, Eden Medina, April Merleaux, Ian M. Miller, Gabriela Morales, Ryan Nehring, Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, Rachel Nolan, Amy Offner, Chris Otter, Steve Palmer, Jayson Porter, Javier Puente, Alfredo Pureco, Fernando Quesada, Megan Raby, Marco Ramos, Sayd Randle, Thom Rath, Tom Rogers, Karin Rosemblatt, Juan Ruíz, Eric Rutkow, Nicole Sackley, William San Martín, Diana Schwartz, Perrin Selcer, Ashanti Shih, Colin Snider, Daniel Tubb, Pedro Urquijo, Heather Vrana, Emily Wakild, Bert Way, and Faizah Zakaria. In Puerto Rico, I especially thank Manuel Rodríguez for his generosity and time welcoming me to Río Piedras and driving me between archives in San Juan. I’m honored that Carlos Chardón Jr. shared his biography of his father with me. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the many other friends (including my OU family), graduate students at UNM and Yale, and colleagues at CSS that I’d like to thank for the music, pickup basketball, softball leagues, hikes, and general camaraderie to take my mind off history things.

In the United States and Canada, my work has received support and helpful suggestions from many outstanding colombianistas. Thanks especially to Catherine LeGrand and Mary Roldán who have offered contacts and valuable feedback through email, Zoom, and in person in Montreal and New York City, respectively. Thanks also to the transnational Colombian studies community who have helped this project in various ways, including Nancy Appelbaum, Carolina Bonilla-León, Lina Britto, Lorena Campuzano Duque, Lina del Castillo, Mariana Díaz Chalela, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Martín Giraldo-Hoyos, Pablo Gómez, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Robert Karl, Ricardo López, Nikki Moore, Kaitlin Simpson, Rebecca Tally, Jenniffer Vargas Reina, and Amanda Waterhouse.

In Colombia, my research and visits were aided by many people. Liceth Garcia and Bryan Turo have been my friends since our Albuquerque days, and Liceth and her mother Martha went above and beyond to help me during my first research trip to Bogotá. Santiago Muñoz and Juana Salcedo opened their homes to us and shared many contacts. Shawn Van Ausdal and Claudia Leal have provided suggestions and commentary time and again. Stefan Pohl-Valero has also been generous as a frequent resource. María Camilo Nieto and Vladimir Sánchez introduced me to Bogotá graduate student life and the Universidad de los Andes. Sonia Jaimes, Juan Pablo Ardila, and Mónica Moreno shared sources and stories. Alejandro Guzmán Maldonado offered resources and enthusiasm for Valle del Cauca. Giovanni Anzola welcomed me to Universidad de La Salle and the Utopía campus in Yopal. Hugues Sánchez Mejía helped me get oriented in Cali and at the Universidad del Valle. Olga Lucia Villa Vinasco answered repeated messages during my time in Cali. Douglas Laing invited me to his home for lunch and shared a lifetime of stories about CIAT. Jaime Ibarra facilitated my visit to the Manuelita casa museo and company archive, and María Teresa gave me a tour and helped me get started. Olga Lucía Delgadillo at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali inspires me with her collaborative and interdisciplinary projects. I am also thankful for the work of Rusbel Salazar and the ecology and environmental education team at the CVC’s Centro de Educación Ambiental Buitre de la Ciénaga for protecting and working with local communities to keep the Laguna del Sonso as one of the last remnants of wetlands in the Cauca River Valley. Similarly, the caretakers at the Reserva Natural Regional El Vínculo, south of Buga, deserve recognition for providing public access to one of the last stands of tropical dry broadleaf forest in the valley. The staff at the Jardín Botánico Juan María Céspedes in the foothills east of Tuluá, particularly César and Isabela, devoted an entire workday to showing me around the garden and talking about conservation in the valley. They also trusted me with free time to dig through their herbarium. These committed scientists, conservationists, and environmental educators define stewardship. Pat Wand reminisced about her Peace Corps experience with me over the phone and informed me about archives. Many librarians and archivists in Bogotá, Cali, and Palmira helped along the way too, often making welcome suggestions for further research. The archival staff at the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia assisted with the images, as did staff with CIAT and the Instituto para la Investigación y la Preservación del Patrimonio Cultural y Natural del Valle del Cauca.

Beyond Colombia, librarians and archivists have made my work easy. The attentive archivists at the Fundación Luis Múñoz Marín and the Jardín Botánico de la Universidad de Puerto Rico helped make my limited time at their sites as efficient as possible. A grant-in-aid from the Rockefeller Archive Center supported part of my research. Lee Hiltzik, in particular, aided my research and continues to ensure that I have everything I need for image reproductions and permissions. I’m also grateful to the staff with Special Collections at the University of Miami, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, and the Michigan State University Archives and Special Collections for their assistance with images after my visits. I was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow with the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden in 2017–18, and I thank the staff and librarians of the NYBG Mertz Library, in particular Vanessa Sellers, Susan Fraser, and Stephon Sinon, for the opportunity. Laura Briscoe helped me retrieve herbarium specimens, and Samantha D’Acunto and Esther Jackson answered my questions about the stacks and helped keep me company by the scanner. J’Nese Williams became a steadfast officemate and friend at NYBG during our fellowship year. I’m also grateful to Alana Rodríguez and Tori Langland for their support during my time with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan. I learned much from working with Edras Rodriguez-Torres, Darin Stockdill, and the late Juan Hernández-García at UM and was fortunate to connect with César Augusto Acevedo, Laura Alhach, and other Colombian filmmakers, artists, and scholars through the Colombian film series I organized with Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola at UM in 2021.

At Yale, this project received funding from Tinker, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Department of History, the Mellon Fund for Latin American History, and the Program in Agrarian Studies. The final stages of this project were completed thanks to various funders, including a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an Albert J. Beveridge grant from the American Historical Association, and a Samuel P. Hays Research Fellowship from the American Society for Environmental History. Further assistance came from a faculty development research grant and faculty development small grant from the College of St. Scholastica. Not to be overlooked, my children’s childcare providers make our work possible. We are lucky to live in a place with a wonderful community of nature schools and forest kindergartens. Thanks especially to Lane Schraufnagel and Zach McAlear for their nature school and the care they provided during this last year.

It has been an honor to work with the team at the University of North Carolina Press. Thanks especially to Brandon Proia for his early support of this project and the Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges series editors Mart Stewart and Harriet Ritvo for their interest. The entire editorial, sales, and marketing teams have made this a clear and smooth process. Three anonymous readers provided detailed and important commentary at multiple stages, and this book is greatly improved thanks to their effort. All errors or oversights that remain are exclusively my own.

The College of St. Scholastica has welcomed me and my family to Duluth, which is something like a homecoming for me having grown up in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I would like to thank Randall Poole and Bret Amundson, in particular, for their confidence in me. We wear many hats at a small college and Bret, Randall, Martin Pflug, Karen Rosenflanz, Stephanie Johnson, and Tom Morgan have been wonderful colleagues in guiding my adjustment to working with their respective programs. Angie Mason does the important work behind the scenes for the School of Arts and Letters. In this time of scarce resources, the staff at the CSS library, especially Heidi Johnson, Todd White, Julie Rustad, and Kevin McGrew, have gone above and beyond to help me with acquisitions, interlibrary loans, course reserves, and image scans. Finally, thank you to the students whom I have had the privilege to work with at CSS and beyond and who help keep the ideas flowing.

Most important, to my family. Thanks especially to Linda and John Turvy and Jay Bevard for their unwavering support for my family. I’m also grateful for my sisters Anne Reiman and Emily Schleh, along with their partners Danny Reiman and Mike Schleh and their children. We look forward to each visit. My parents, Wayne and Donna Lorek, provided a steady foundation, and to them I owe my earliest interests in history, geography, books, gardening, cooking, and travel. It is my deep regret that my father did not live to see this book. I know that he would have taken great pleasure in reading it. His comments on early chapter drafts helped improve my writing, temper my claims, and clarify my argument. And to Steph and our children, Claire and Jaime, who joined us along this journey: Thank you for your love and support, your patience, your refuge. From Albuquerque to New Haven, from the Bronx to Bogotá, from the playgrounds of Ann Arbor to the forests of Rib Lake, and from the warm waters of Puerto Rico to the icy shores of Duluth, thank you for the memories we’ve made along the way.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The Cauca Valley (Valle del Cauca) is both a geographic region and a political department in southwest Colombia. In Spanish, the upper Cauca River Valley is referred to locally as el valle or el valle del río Cauca, while the department is usually Valle. To avoid confusion in English, I refer to the geographic upper Cauca River Valley throughout the text as the river valley, the valley, or the Cauca Valley. When referring to the political unit, I will use its Spanish name, Valle or Valle del Cauca. A person or thing from Valle del Cauca is known in Colombia as vallecaucano or its apocope valluno.

I will refer to the violence and complex social and political conflicts that raged unevenly within Colombia in the second half of the twentieth century as the Colombian armed conflict or, simply, the Colombian conflict. I avoid the phrase civil war because that terminology is suggestive of a conflict between sides each with their own political power, as in the Thousand Days’ War between political factions in Colombia from 1899 to 1902. Further, civil war reinforces Cold War– and U.S.-centric notions of a struggle between leftist guerrilla insurgents and the state. Civil war does not properly account for the complex and changing cast of armed actors in the conflict and conceals the violence of non-guerrilla groups as peripheral to the central action. Instead, the Colombian armed conflict offers a better shorthand description for the complex situation that has evolved since the period remembered as La Violencia beginning in the late 1940s.

In these pages I refer to a specific twentieth-century phenomenon and process of agricultural intensification through the widespread adoption of hybrid and high-yielding seeds, mechanization, and petrochemical inputs as the Green Revolution. There is some scholarly debate over the proper labeling of this process, particularly since Green Revolution was a phrase coined late in the process and from within the movement. As I hope the arguments of this book will make clear, I prefer the uncapitalized and plural green revolutions as a better label that speaks to the diversity, expanded timeframe, and changes over time and across space within this transnational process. However, I have adopted the industry label Green Revolution when referring specifically to the institutions, programs, and development schemes of the United States, the World Bank, and allied agencies and foundations in the post–World War II era. My use of this phrase is not intended as an adoption of its social and political prescriptions or as an acceptance of its official historical narrative. Rather, I use it to speak directly to such a particular historical narrative and explain it via Colombia.

ABBREVIATIONS IN THE TEXT

Making the Green Revolution

Aerial view of CIAT and sugarcane fields, circa 1972. This view of the new International Center for Tropical Agriculture, surrounded by sugarcane fields, could be seen while flying over the Cauca Valley in the early 1970s. Both CIAT and the geometric monocultures of sugarcane that surround it grew out of processes of state investment in agricultural science and institutions, beginning in the 1920s. Photo credit O. Moll González, International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Informe anual, 1972, 1.

Introduction

Descending toward Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport outside the sprawling Colombian city of Cali, passengers look down upon vast fields of sugarcane like square and rectangular puzzle pieces resting within a border of mountain peaks and ridges. The jagged peaks of the western cordillera, one of Colombia’s three Andean ranges, loom out one window. The tall central range dominates out the other, toward the high country and the capital, Bogotá. Below, infinite rows of cane stalks blur the valley floor green under the bright morning sun. The depleted Cauca River meanders through the fields. Straight, dusty farm roads carry tractors and semitrucks like little sandstorms toward the highway. This is the upper Cauca River Valley in southwest Colombia: a flat tropical floodplain of legendary fertility and romanticism. Jorge Isaacs’s classic pastoral novel María described this valley during the nineteenth century, and the book continues to be a portal to this landscape for secondary school students around the Spanish-speaking world in the twenty-first. But the romanticism associated with this valley sits uncomfortably with the present reality of an industrial landscape that produced 24.3 million tons of sugarcane in 2020.¹

A first-time visitor might be excused for feeling a tinge of familiarity upon seeing the Cauca Valley from the air. Encased in a climate-controlled airplane, still too high in the air to decipher samán trees or hear the calls of the atrapamosca and sirirí, the observer instead notices the vast geometric green fields.² From the air, the Cauca Valley looks remarkably like so many of the other landscapes of industrial agriculture that have proliferated around the world since 1950.

Upon landing, most travelers step out of the airport into a blast of humid air and take a long bus or taxi ride accompanied by the rhythm of salsa on the radio. They cross a bridge over the brown Cauca River en route to the bustling, noisy streets of Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, approximately twenty-five kilometers distant. Some passengers have a much closer destination in sight, however. Less than ten kilometers down the highway toward the smaller city of Palmira, buzzing past the cane fields now at ground level, agronomists, geneticists, diplomats, and philanthropists arrive at the gates of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical; CIAT). A modern, clean campus welcomes them, tended by custodians and cafeteria workers bused in from Cali and Palmira. Here an international scientific community considers how the world of the future might grow and eat food from the tropics.

On November 8–9, 2017, CIAT celebrated fifty years of its footprint in global agriculture.³ A contingent of distinguished guests followed the itinerary described above to commemorate the moment at the site. Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos spoke, as did other national, departmental, and municipal government officials.⁴ The head of the Colombian government’s team negotiating peace with the ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrilla group was there. The ambassador of France joined too, along with leaders of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank Group, and the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), of which CIAT forms one of fifteen member sites. Officers and representatives of nongovernmental organizations such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Global Harvest Initiative assembled with corporate executives from the likes of DuPont Pioneer and professors from the usual assortment of U.S. public land-grant universities and elite private institutions, including Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Rutgers University, Cornell University, and Columbia University.

The attendees spoke triumphantly of fifty years, fifty wins.⁵ Speakers and the conference program largely organized their message in the funding language of contemporary concerns, such as building a sustainable food future, leading the future of climate change research, and aligning public and private interest to scale up and deliver impact.⁶ The framing language has certainly changed over CIAT’s fifty-year history, but the institution’s global ambitions have remained. For five decades, scientists, academics, politicians, and corporate executives have converged upon CIAT from afar, pulled by the institution’s centripetal position in an orbit of tropical agricultural science. In turn, the research and technologies advanced at CIAT have radiated out to the tropical world like a centrifugal force. Apply your buzzwords of choice, CIAT has made the Cauca Valley a critical node in a contemporary global food system.

But the story of agricultural science and development in the Cauca Valley, including its implications for tropical food production, does not begin with CIAT or even its precursor, a project known as the Colombian Agricultural Program (CAP), run by the Rockefeller Foundation from 1950 to 1964. The Cauca Valley has had a much deeper and more complex relationship with scientific agriculture and modernization ambitions than a familiar narrative of post–World War II north-to-south development aid and investment might suggest.⁷ This history may be discerned in the speaker list for the celebrations of CIAT’s fiftieth anniversary: corporate executives, regional and national politicians, a peace negotiator with the guerrilla, international aid workers, land-grant academics. Their convergence in the agricultural history of the Cauca Valley binds the experiences of Latin American agrarian politics and the Colombian armed conflict to global networks of science, development, and capitalism.

Looking out from CIAT’s gates in the Cauca Valley, I argue for seeing Colombia as an essential hinge in the opening of a global Green Revolution in agricultural technologies during the Cold War. But not only that. In 2017, as in 1967 at CIAT’s founding, foreign visitors to the institute first fly into and navigate a landscape of corporate monoculture sugarcane before arriving at a research center ostensibly organized to advance the science of staple food production, particularly beans, cassava, rice, livestock, and forage crops. CIAT does not pursue research in sugarcane, yet it is an island in a sea of cane.⁸ In the twenty-first century, as the institution’s work is increasingly digital and data driven, CIAT even leases many of its fields to private sugarcane producers.⁹ The coexistence of CIAT and corporate sugarcane in the Cauca Valley landscape displays in miniature the tensions, contradictions, and accommodations of contemporary agriculture and the global food system. Like class identities, landscapes are made.¹⁰ This book describes the making of the contemporary Cauca Valley sugarcane agro-industrial landscape, specifically focusing on its relationship to the making of a global Green Revolution.

Standing at the gates to CIAT, the visitor is surrounded by an industrial monoculture of sugarcane, owned outright or grown for a dozen Colombian corporations that now control the vast majority of this famously fertile valley’s production. This is the paradox of the ambiguous and conflicted landscape in the Cauca Valley: a place at once home to an international research center emphasizing the language of small-scale and sustainable, albeit market-oriented, agricultural systems, while functionally hosting a large-scale sugarcane sector that dominates the landscape beyond (and even now inside) the research center gates. How did this valley become both Colombia’s primary sugarcane zone as well as an international node in the continuing Green Revolution to produce higher yields of some of the world’s most consumed grain, protein, and starch crops? How did the Green Revolution, ostensibly designed to eradicate hunger, contribute to the making of a landscape dedicated to a sweetener? How are the histories of these two defining features of the contemporary Cauca Valley landscape—sugar and CIAT—intertwined?

In this book, I argue that the domestic formation of agricultural research institutions and the adoption of new agricultural technologies beginning in the 1920s forged new international connections that inadvertently benefited a budding large-scale capitalist sugarcane industry, despite populist rhetoric advocating for diversified agricultural scales and systems. The further internationalization of these Colombian agricultural research centers during the early Cold War positioned the Cauca Valley as a global center for research and development in small-scale agriculture and rural livelihoods across the tropics. And yet this process of internationalization also contributed to the triumph of large-scale sugarcane locally by sidelining site-specific political agendas from research programs in an era of intensifying rural volatility and violence in Colombia. International agricultural development projects became untethered from, even allergic to, the politics of agricultural production at site. The Cauca Valley’s history thus reveals how the Green Revolution and its architects were lured through partnerships to places and people with rich local traditions of scientific and technological initiatives as well as state-sponsored public research and outreach. The agencies and philanthropies behind the Green Revolution eventually eclipsed these local orientations and political projects, however, casting deep shadows over regional histories and actors as they formed and celebrated their own Cold War narratives of technological triumph in feeding the global tropics. But this triumphant narrative, the one on display during the CIAT at 50 celebrations in 2017, could not and cannot reconcile with the realities of today’s Cauca Valley: an agro-industrial sugarcane monoculture that contributes to the rural inequities undergirding conflict and displacement in Colombia.

CIAT’s project, of course, is not at odds with the commercialization and marketization of agriculture and the capitalist transformation of the global tropics. Agricultural science was a tool for boosting rural economies and capitalist agricultural systems, from the beginnings of state-funded research in the 1920s through the establishment of CIAT in the 1960s. Although the stakes and the means of delivery would change throughout this period, investments in science maintained an intention to bolster capitalist producers as a means toward addressing social, political, and economic issues, thereby avoiding more radical structural transformation through agrarian redistribution. Large-scale sugar agribusiness was only one version of capitalism fostered by an embrace of agricultural science and technology in the twentieth century, though for the Cauca Valley, sugar proved to be the most transformational.¹¹ Rather than see the road to CIAT and the road to big sugar as oppositional, I present these as sometimes contradictory but mutually reinforcing processes, a Janus-style duality, an open gate. It is the project of this book to show how uncovering the Colombian roots of CIAT helps to denaturalize the rise of sugarcane monoculture in the Cauca Valley and how the history of sugar here adds an important dimension to the story of an international Green Revolution.

GREEN REVOLUTIONS

William Gaud of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) coined the term Green Revolution in 1968 to describe a friendly alternative to the Cold War specter of communist-inspired red revolution in the hungry countryside.¹² As commonly understood, the Green Revolution refers to transformations in agricultural production, particularly in the Third World or Global South, via the adoption of new technologies (such as high-yield seeds, often hybrids as opposed to open-pollinated varieties), mechanization, and synthetic petrochemical inputs of fertilizer and pesticides.¹³ To these critical ingredients of the Green Revolution, some analysts also add complementary political adaptations, including new forms of agrarian credit, large-scale irrigation projects, or the privatization of public or communally held land. When described in its singular, capitalized form, the Green Revolution forms part of the United States’ broader Cold War developmentalist platform, in this case to develop market-oriented countrysides resistant to the allure of more radical revolutionary alternatives.¹⁴ Although science is at the core of the Green Revolution, it is, by definition, a political project.

Certainly there were many green revolutions across time and space. Historians debate the intellectual and material origins of the package of agricultural technologies comprising the so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s and ’60s.¹⁵ Some identify the mid-nineteenth-century trade in guano fertilizers and their formation of the first global market in agricultural inputs, freeing farmers from locally bound nitrogen cycles and reinventing labor regimes.¹⁶ Others describe shifts in public health and nutrition, such as the invention of the calorie in the late nineteenth century, as setting the stage for a new political discourse of hunger and food security.¹⁷ Still other historians describe the annihilation of space that railroads, steamships, refrigeration, and mass marketing brought to agricultural economies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁸ And historians of science have focused more determinedly on genetics, including the hybridization of maize and its distribution through publicly funded agricultural colleges and extension sites and its marketization via the