Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
The relationship between climate colonialism and the Green Revolution was never a simple story of success or failure, conspiracy or pure progress. It was a complicated partnership.
Critical studies make clear that the real issue was not some open global plan to dominate developing countries.
It was the quiet creation of an international system that offered a handful of powerful actors far more control than others over how agriculture and climate policy would develop worldwide.
Historically, the Green Revolution did raise food production in several countries and helped reduce the threat of famine in places, such as India, Mexico and the Philippines.
Those gains, however, came with serious costs. Dependence on industrial fertilisers, pesticides and machinery grew.
Agricultural and biological diversity shrank in some regions. A small group of companies that owned the seeds and the technology gained increasing influence. Outside financing expanded, and with it came the power to shape the agricultural policies of many nations.
Judging the Green Revolution solely by how much grain it produced therefore misses the larger point.
What matters is how it changed the balance of power inside the global food system. States kept their formal legal sovereignty.
In practice, their choices on farming and climate became constrained by international trade rules, intellectual property rights, financing conditions, environmental standards and access to advanced technology.
Sovereignty was not seized by force. It was reshaped and absorbed into an economic and institutional structure that made independent options more expensive and less realistic.
Five mechanisms quietly erode national control and redirect it. The first is the monopoly of scientific knowledge.
Those who fund and produce the technology decide which research priorities matter and which policies will govern them.
Control over genetic resources and seeds redistributes power at the very start of the production chain.
International finance and structural reform programmes then weaken a country’s ability to set its own national policies.
The result is the outsized influence of multinational companies across food value chains, an influence that goes well beyond ordinary commerce.
Seen this way, the system has a clear structure. Multinational companies act as its executive arm. International financial institutions supply the financing. The scientific research apparatus provides the knowledge. Intellectual property rules and trade agreements form the legal framework.
When these elements pull in the same direction, the capacity of many countries in the Global South to shape their own agricultural and climate policies steadily declines.
Nations now face a new equation of international power, built under the banner of green transformation.
Climate technology, climate finance and carbon markets sit at its centre.
Climate change has already shown that protecting borders is no longer enough to guarantee a country’s security.
Food security, water security, technological independence and the ability to manage environmental change have become essential parts of national security itself.
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud is a writer and an international relations scholar.
