Under Nehru, there had been no attempt to introduce publicly financed social policies for the rural poor. Instead, social policy focused on activating a ‘duty to work’, while the absence of a model of labour-intensive industrialisation ensured there was no mass movement from rural areas into urban employment. The green revolution in the mid 1960s initiated a new form of agrarian capitalism but also drove rising inequality and endemic unemployment. This created pressure for new social policies to address rural poverty and support rural consumption. The erosion of patron-client relations in rural areas intensified competition for the votes of the rural poor as the Congress Party’s dominant position came under serious pressure for the first time. It was the emergence of stronger multi-level, or Centre-State, electoral competition that provided the political impetus to expand social policy into rural areas as political parties competed for the votes of the rural poor, without alienating agrarian producers. The chapter explains why employment on rural public works became the dominant approach to social security in this context.

After the Green Revolution successfully raised wheat and rice yields in more auspicious farming contexts, attention in agricultural development turned to crops that grew on poorer soils and in regions of indifferent rainfall. When Rockefeller Foundation agronomists reached out to India with an urge to establish an international center for research on such crops in the 1970s, they found eager hosts. The foundation’s agronomists had been active in India during the 1950s and 1960s and built a community of local collaborators. Indian scientists saw the proposal for an international center as offering the next frontier in crop development. The possibility of a center also met with considerable appeal among the political establishment in India. Two prime ministers from opposite political camps, Indira Gandhi and Chaudhary Charan Singh, came to support the eventual International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) due to common ground in their respective politics of the poor and farmers’ politics. As the chapter shows, the circumstances of postcolonial India allowed for the emergence of institutionalized expertise outside the direct realm of the local state.

Central America was a “hot spot” in the Cold War, constituting a strategic zone for US campaigns against communism from the 1960s to the 1980s. During the same period, the region was also a “hot spot” due to the critical nutritional situation of its poorest populations. Informed by the idea of a “protein gap,” international organizations and scientific institutions carried out field investigations and nutritional surveys to identify dietary deficiencies, their causes, and possible solutions. This chapter explores the role that bean varietal improvement played in this situation of war and nutritional crisis, and the political and social conditions under which bean research took shape. It describes the research programs that the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) promoted in Latin America through the 1980s and Central American countries’ participation in these. It reviews the bean program established by CIAT in Latin America and Africa and a regional program created specifically for Central America and the Caribbean. It then interprets the evolution of these programs in the context of civil war and economic crisis in Central America between 1970 and 1990.

Summary: After 1960, India experienced a transformation in production processes across the agricultural sector. Large investments in engineering water access, particularly investments in dams and groundwater extraction, altered South India’s rural landscapes. New seed types and spread in the use of fertilizers combined with irrigation infrastructure contributed to output and productivity growth. Expectedly, some groups of farmers grew richer. We see little change, however, for low-income groups. This chapter analyses major credit suppliers including cooperatives, commercial banks and microfinance institutions to show that capital expansion in agriculture benefitted some and not others. The cycle of high risk, credit exclusion and low investment became a problem of the past for the wealthy but remained a reality for large groups of poor farmers throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Governments continued to react to harsh borrowing conditions in a similar pattern, often causing supply to contract further and access to become more selective.

Chapter 5 shows how the aftosa outbreak shaped the Mexican state’s efforts to modernize and regulate livestock from the 1950s to the 1980s. By disrupting existing methods of production and consumption, creating new technical capacities, and offering an example of effective state action, the crisis prompted officials to contemplate more ambitious state intervention. At the same time, the aftosa crisis offered painful lessons about the kind of political compromises and alliances – international and domestic – upon which government action rested. Along with the wane of Cardenismo, the Second World War, and the so-called Green Revolution, the aftosa campaign helps explain why Mexico’s developmental state took the shape it did, and illuminates its strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions.

Chapter 21 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet begins a four-chapter segment on the Greatest Acceleration, the sheer explosion of cities that began after 1945 and picked up at an even greater pace after 1980, resulting in the first megacities and several enormous contiguously urbanized regions. It surveys the vast built realm of Cold War-era imperialism and the increasingly centralized power of global finance capital to clarify the changing political economic conditions – first driven by ideologies of plenty, then “austerity” – under which the Acceleration took place. It also begins to explore the global development work of post-War imperial states, multilateral organizations and corporate foundations, focusing on transformations of public health infrastructure and of “Green Revolution” agricultural environments. All of these were crucial to the broader explosion of global population, the growing immiseration of the rural poor, and the city-ward migration that undergirded the Acceleration.

Chapter 5 tells the story of how, with the full support of the state and amidst a new push to further industrialize, fossil fuels powered virtually every aspect of life in Mexico by the 1950s. Transport systems became increasingly energy intensive. Vehicles with internal combustion engines drove down asphalt roads. Cars reshaped Mexico’s culture, class and gender divisions, and the way people experienced the nation’s territory and environments. Mexican cities entered a period of exponential physical and demographic growth, their layouts rapidly reorganized to accommodate increasing numbers of motorized vehicles. Industrial manufacturing and electricity generation used fossil fuels at virtually every stage of production and distribution, while the Mexican food system underwent a Green Revolution featuring fossil-fueled agriculture. Mexico had become a fossil-fueled society.

The monsoon has changed significantly over the past century. In particular, Northwest India and Pakistan have dried in the latter part of the twentieth century along with northern China. The Indian Peninsula and South China have however become wetter. Some of the aridification is the result of increased aerosol concentrations due to industrialization as well as the southward migration of the Westerly Jet in northern China. The Indus basin is particularly susceptible to drying. Changes in atmosphere circulation have pushed typhoons away from the South China Sea and towards eastern China, although rainfall in South China has strengthened due to locally sourced storms. Dry years in South Asia resulted in significant reductions in the food production. Increased agriculture linked to deforestation has reduced soil moisture and has a negative impact on the climate, especially in Northwest India. Times of drought and poor food production push up prices and have resulted in civil disturbances exacerbated by policies introduced during the Green Revolution. Reduction in biodiversity on farms has reduced resilience to future climate change and caused more harm than changes in the environment over the recent past.

Critical literature on the history of developmentalism in the Global South has so far laid emphasis on the authorising force generated by the future telos of attaining the status of a ‘developed country’, by various developmental institutions and their violently transformative programmes for well over the previous century. Much like other significant utopias of the twentieth century, this promised telos was very rarely (if ever) actualised – its persistent quest has, instead, generated several monumental calamities. But, this is where the similarities between developmental futures and ‘mass Utopias’ come to an end. For while these other dreamworlds have, under the burden of their catastrophes, become ‘futures past’ in a ‘post–Cold War’ world, developmentalism has only tightened its grip, seemingly impervious to the vast catalogue of failures of its promises in this ‘age of catastrophe’.