April 3, 2007: Filipino children demonstrate for PAN Asia/Pacific’s Week of Rice Action. Photo: Ilang-Ilang Quijano/PAN A/P

PAN A/P poster from the 1980s illustrates the biological backlash from the “Green Revolution.” Art by Anna Fer

Twenty-five years ago, in 1982, the luster of the “Green Revolution” had faded to a dull finish. The promised dramatic increases in yields from “miracle” hybrid grains that required high inputs of water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides had been revealed to be campaigns to sell technology to people who couldn’t afford it. The green was going into the pockets of the corporations pushing the technology.

That was the world when PAN was founded.

Chemical-intensive, hybridized, mono-crop irrigated agriculture, introduced in the Global South in the 1950s, boosted crop yields at first, but by the ’70s, the costs in health, ecological damage, and lost biodiversity were mounting—and pests were growing resistant to pesticides. Meanwhile, trans­national corporations and local elites profited at the expense of local communities who were losing control over food production. Women and children shouldered most of the fieldwork—and bore the brunt of the pesticide exposure.

In the years since PAN was founded, the Green Revolution has been reassessed and new approaches have been added. When rice production was collapsing in the 1980s due to pest resurgence from resistance to pesticides, Indonesia needed alternatives. A combination of community-scale peer-learning projects recaptured indigenous farming knowledge woven together with new ecological pest management. “Farmer Field Schools”—today adapted to local needs in many countries—returned bountiful crops of rice while expenditures on agrochemicals were slashed. Meanwhile, Indonesia and other countries began banning PAN’s “Dirty Dozen Pesticides.” By 2002, more than a million Indonesian farmers had participated in Field Schools that became models for localized sustainable agriculture in other countries.

But the companies that profited from the Green Revolution—today consolidated into six mega-corporations—have opened a second front in their ongoing effort to control the world’s food supply. The “Gene Revolution” is designed to make farmers dependent on patented seeds “owned” by the corporations. Many of these biotech seeds are genetically engineered to withstand heavier applications of proprietary herbicides produced by the same transnationals. The goal is to colonize Nature while perpetuating the pesticide treadmill.

On March 28, PAN Asia/Pacific and South Korean partner groups convened a seminar in Seoul on “How to Secure the Safety of Rice”—one of many events in the first “Week of Rice Action” across 13 countries. Addressing the conference, Vice-Minister of Agriculture Park Hae Sang declared his government’s intent “to prevent importing GMO rice.”

PAN North America links these struggles in the Global South with similar battles in our own region. On Native lands, inside urban canyons and across the face of rural America, our scientists and partners are testing the air for pesticide drift. We’re joining neighbors from Canada to Mexico in resisting further imposition of genetically engineered crops. And we’re helping create a domestic Fair Trade movement to support family farms and guarantee living wages and safer conditions for farmworkers. Our commitment is to a truly green revolution, one that includes not only a sustainable agriculture, but most important, expansion of human rights to food, justice and self-determination.