Green Crap and Weasel Words

I like weasels, though they of course don’t care whether I do or not. I once saw a weasel dancing in a country lane, observed by a crowd of curious sparrows. Country people have long believed that weasels dance to lure sparrows within reach, and this has given them a cunning reputation. They are said to be able to slide like faithlessness clean through a wedding ring. The last time I saw a weasel I was alerted by voles jumping out of the long grass in my woodland spring-flower garden, and faster than thought I saw the reason. They were being chased by a weasel along their runways in the grass. Jumping in the air was a measure of their hopeless desperation. A weasel is a quick bright-eyed merciless predator, from which there is no escape. It is a perfect little creature superbly adapted to its environment and, as if that mattered, probably beneficial to all humans other than pheasant shooters, who don’t count as far as I am concerned.  We talk of people weaselling and using weasel words, but weasels are creatures of pure integrity, straightforwardly and uncompromisingly living the life into which they have evolved. It is not fair to implicate the weasel when I am talking of our sneaky, crafty, deceiving or simply careless use of language in occasional pieces such as this, but I cannot think of another more suitable expression. I like to sneak in a weasel any chance I get, though to talk of human words instead of weasel words might make more sense.

Today’s weasel word is ‘green’ , freely sprayed around in order to sell a product or to indicate that an activity is supposedly not ruining the environment, even when that is fairly clearly not true. It is a powerful word, full of the vitality of growing shoots, of glossy young pine trees in the forest or all the shades of the countryside, and we are familiar with the word being used to signpost initiatives and movements aiming to redress the damage humans have been doing to the planet. It is deeply ironic then that the use of the word ‘green’ to describe changes to the environment goes back not to the dawn of the ecology movement but to US politics at the height of the cold war. The word had already been subverted by the ol’ US of A before environmentalists began to use it. The US Green Revolution, a project of quite astonishing and overweening arrogance, is now largely forgotten here, although the changes it brought about have been seriously damaging to environments worldwide.  The structures in place as a result of this so-called Green Revolution are now powerful obstacles to any attempts to build a genuinely green revolution,

The colour green was first politicised in March 1968 by Norman Borlaug, the director of the US Agency for International Development, who coined the phrase ‘Green Revolution’ to describe US plans to revolutionise world agriculture. It was called the Green Revolution to place it in the same geopolitical context as the Red Revolution of the Soviets and the White Revolution of the Shah of Iran, whose domestic politics and pivotal position in the oil industry were a source of some serious tensions in US foreign policy. The word Green was chosen to locate the programme in the same geopolitical context as these other colour-coded revolutions, within the politics of the cold war.

The aim of the programme was not ecological but political. The motive for a project ostensibly trying to increase food supplies for the people in ‘underdeveloped’ countries was not humanitarian, but an attempt to discourage the spread of communism. The US believed and feared that communism might spread as a result of food shortages in ‘underdeveloped’ (aww*) countries. The Green Revolution was explicitly designed to defend the capitalist system, and of course capitalism was seen as inseparable from the identity and interests of the US state. It was therefore quite neat that this Green Revolution aimed to create a new global agricultural system that would provide captive markets for the growing US chemical and agribusiness industries, and lead to the growth of international grain markets that could be dominated by US companies such as Cargill. The newly-developed high-yielding wheat and rice seeds that were central to the programme demanded artificial fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation in countries where water was often in short supply. The Green Revolution required mechanisation and a huge increase in the use of fossil fuels both to power machinery and for fertiliser and pesticide manufacture.  This was very good for business; so good, in fact , that US agribusiness now controls a dramatic concentration of mega-crop production—above all in the US, but also in Brazil, Argentina, Canada, France, Australia, China—under the aegis of a handful of powerful corporations that have gobbled up smaller players. Four companies, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus now control 90 per cent of the global grain trade; another quartet—Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina and BASF—have cornered two-thirds of the agricultural chemicals market, and the same handful own over half of the world’s seeds.

The US was able to use mechanisms such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which it largely controlled, as leverage to force poor countries to make the changes to their agriculture that it demanded, though it was not above using force either to achieve its objectives, as in Panama, and Grenada. The Vietnam War and the Green Revolution were parallel and contemporaneous strategies to impose the US world view on the rest of the planet, and the Green Revolution has had vastly more widespread and damaging consequences than the Vietnam War, though the weasel word green continues to lend to it an air of environmental respectability. The government of India, for example, under this pressure, forced through huge changes in agriculture that have had very damaging consequences both human and ecological, though maybe I should stress that ecological consequences are human consequences and the sooner we wise up to that the better. The Green Revolution is a term still used and remembered in India, where it was both blatant and obviously damaging; in the UK it is largely forgotten because we seem to have accepted it unquestioningly, and thought that it was just ‘progress’ (aww*).

The Green Revolution encouraged the use of unsustainable industrial techniques to power inappropriate agricultural developments. In India subsidised electricity production enabled the pumping of groundwater to near-exhaustion in order to grow new cereals in unsuitably arid regions**, and small farmers were overwhelmed by new agricultural monocrop prairies. In Brazil the ecologically rich Cerrado region, regarded as infertile and quite unsuitable for agriculture, was treated from the 1960s with vast quantities of lime poured on the soil to reduce acidity. The effort went on for decades; by the late 1990s, between 14 million and 16 million tons of lime were being spread there each year. The quantity rose to 25 million tons in 2003 and 2004, equalling around five tons of lime per hectare. As a result, Brazil has become the world's second biggest soybean exporter, and a major source of the nutrients which, via the intestines of industrially-farmed chickens, go on to destroy rivers such as the Wye on the UK’s Welsh border. The phosphates causing this pollution are increasingly desperately sought after to power this kind of farming, leading to impure phosphate sources containing dangerous heavy metals being exploited and quietly contaminating the countryside.

Much of this ‘improvement’ (aww*) drove peasants into debt, often forcing them to sell out, which encouraged the growth of larger agricultural businesses, disrupting traditional peasant societies that were living in relative harmony with the environment. The Green Revolution led to rural impoverishment, increased debt, growing social inequality and the displacement of vast numbers of peasant farmers, but it was good business for huge US agrochemical corporations and large farming operations. It was frequently enforced by governments without consideration of the needs and views of rural communities, who were generally the losers and continue to be so. Many peasants became landless labourers often suffering from the effects, for example, of being forced to spray poorly-regulated pesticides on industrial monocultures on what was once their land.

It is now increasingly clear that this revolution was anything but green and that it has led to huge declines in wild  biodiversity and in farm crop biodiversity as well as to soil  pollution and depletion, greenhouse gas production, damage by eutrophication of lakes, rivers and seas, and the domination and disruption of rural communities worldwide. The pollution of the Wye Valley by a Cargill-dominated chicken industry is an illustration of the reach of this ‘revolution’.

The Green Revolution may have temporarily reduced some food shortages, which allowed governments to postpone dealing with the issue of population growth. This was compounded because similarly ‘Western’ (aww*) programmes to control population were discredited because they were widely (and rightly) seen as focussing on population control of black and brown people. Now almost half the people on earth depend on food produced with the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. The legacy of the Green Revolution is a huge impediment to making the changes in worldwide agriculture needed if we are to combat biodiversity loss and climate change.  That food cannot be produced without large inputs from fossil fuels and chemicals is the dangerous orthodoxy that continues to power soil degradation, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution and climate change.

The UK was never likely to turn to communism and nor was there any shortage of food, but we nevertheless became entangled in the ‘Green’ Revolution. I am not entirely sure by what mechanisms this was imposed on us, though I sure as hell think I know why. I suspect we were fairly willing victims - in a world where the US was enforcing this ‘revolution’ it was predictable that we should have been swept along with it. It has largely moulded current agricultural practice in the UK - we have, for example, enthusiastically taken on industrial farming techniques such as the broiler chicken units pioneered in the US at that time. Agricultural advisory services encouraged these changes, and we now know that The Archers was encouraged to become involved in spreading ‘information’ (aww*) to farmers about how to ‘modernise’ *.

The use of the word or the colour green should not then be uncritically accepted. We need to be wary, for example, of the way the Tory Party, renowned for attitudes typified by Cameron’s dismissal of what he called ‘green crap’, is now sending out election leaflets coloured green and mimicking those of the Green Party in order to mislead voters. Before you buy or believe any green claims, you need to read the small print, and to be particularly suspicious of green claims made by corporations and governments.  Genuine green change is more likely to come, appropriately, from the grass roots than from big undemocratic companies. Those involved in the new Regenerative Agriculture movement, which is tentatively challenging the notion that farmers cannot produce food without chemicals, may need to beware of large companies trying to subvert or mislead this movement, and to look out for the weasel words of big-ag propaganda.

*aww – another weasel word.

** https://journalofethnicfoods.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42779-019-0011-9