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In the mid-twentieth century, researchers at an experiment station in Sonora's Yaqui Valley designed high-yielding wheat seeds with the promise that increasing crop productivity would end world hunger. The seeds made their way across the world, where accompanying inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation systems transformed global farming in what came to be known as the Green Revolution. Gabriela Soto Laveaga challenges this history—often told from the point of view of philanthropic organizations, development proselytizers, or heroic American scientists—by placing native lands, Sonoran farmers, Mexican innovation, and Mexico-India connections at the center. Presenting groundbreaking archival research, The World in a Wheat Field sheds new light on how global initiatives changed a local place and points to why so many development projects failed to eradicate hunger worldwide.
Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico at Harvard University. She is the author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill.
"Deeply researched, critical but compassionate, and beautifully written, The World in a Wheat Field will undoubtedly become a touchstone reference in the histories of science, agriculture, and international development."—Helen Anne Curry, author of Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction
"Gabriela Soto Laveaga brings newly discovered and fascinating Mexican materials to the Green Revolution story, making this book essential reading for everyone interested in the complexities of international agriculture."—Deborah Fitzgerald, author of Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture
"The World in a Wheat Field is a meticulous and fascinating dive into the conditions that allowed the Green Revolution to emerge from central Mexico. Taking on a history that has long been dominated by heroic scientific tales and simplistic critiques, Soto Laveaga offers us a complex portrait of the revolutionary wheat program that is both profoundly local and global."—Kregg Hetherington, author of The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops
"Soto Laveaga dispels the fables technocrats tell and offers us an intimate, human story of development and resistance reaching from Mexico to the Punjab. The reader is witness to the Green Revolution, its hope and violence."—Nick Cullather, author of The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia