White Bread (25 page)

Of course, the promise of the MAP seeds could be realized only in conjunction with a full package of modern inputs. This was expensive and would have long-term consequences. In the short term, however, backed by subsidized credit, education programs, and infrastructure investment, “el trigo de Rockefeller”—Rockefeller wheat—spread faster than its creators could have imagined. By 1957, 90 percent of all wheat seeds planted in Mexico were the high-yield varieties supported by industrial inputs. Between 1940 and 1960, the index of Mexican fertilizer consumption soared 4,000 percent, while pesticide application increased eight-fold. In the space of just a few years, wheat yields more than doubled, and they would increase 400 percent over the next two decades. Despite the fact that Mexico experienced its highest ever population growth rates during the postwar period, wheat production far outpaced the number of new consumers. Indeed, from 1940 to 1970, thanks in substantial part to the MAP's work, overall
per capita
food production in Mexico increased from 1,991 calories and 54 grams of protein per day to 2,623 calories and 80 grams of protein. Mexico quickly erased its wheat deficits and by the 1960s joined the ranks of exporting nations, at least for a while.
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So incredible were the results that the MAP model eventually came to be called “the Green Revolution.”

The first Bimbo Bakery emerged out of the same early-1940s crucible as the Green Revolution. At some inchoate level, the company's founders understood something typically left out of histories of the Green Revolution: in order for Mexico's dreams of modernization and consumer affluence to succeed, someone would have to turn mountains of wheat into inexpensive sliced white bread.

Like nearly all Mexico City bakers, Lorenzo Servitje came from a tight-knit clan of Spanish immigrants. His father was born in Catalonia, and as a young immigrant in turn-of-the-century Mexico City, he worked his way up through a series of Spanish-owned bakeries. In 1928, Lorenzo's father managed to open his own bakery, with support of the Spanish community. He called it el Molino, the Windmill, to evoke images of Don Quixote and the rolling plains of La Mancha. But even amidst all those European influences, young Lorenzo Servitje set his gaze firmly on the north. After taking over el Molino in 1936, he began obsessively studying American-style industrial baking, reading every U.S. trade journal he could find and seeking out U.S.-trained bakery engineers. “I wanted to know every detail of the North American bread industry,” he recalled later, “[all] the newest technologies and cutting-edge machinery.” Eating U.S.-style industrial loaves, or
pan de caja
, “was not a tradition in Mexico,” Lorenzo acknowledged. But he believed he could change that.
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Along with three other members of the Spanish baking community, including the first Mexican trained in modern industrial techniques at the American Institute of Baking, Lorenzo began scheming in 1938. Wartime machinery shortages in the United States delayed his plans for Mexico's first American-style bread factory, but in 1945 Bimbo Bakery opened its doors with four bread lines: sliced white sandwich bread, an unsliced white “table” loaf, a soft rye, and packaged toast “for children and the sick.”

The sparkling new bakery sported dough-handling machines from American Machinery and Foundry, high-speed mixers from Readco, two Flex-o-Matic seventy-tray ovens from Union Steel, and a temperature-controlled proofing room installed by the Chicago Metallic Corporation. Two of the very latest bread-wrapping machines from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, would ensure that, unlike Ideal bread, Bimbo reached stores mold free. With almost three times more Ford delivery vans than Ideal, Bimbo bread would get there faster, too.

During Bimbo's early years, many Mexican bakers avoided flour made from the new Green Revolution wheat. Modeled after U.S. wheat varieties and bred with the rigors of industrial processing in mind, flour made from el Trigo de Rockefeller didn't work well with traditional Mexican baking practices. As one small-town baker complained to an anthropologist, “You have to be a chemist” to bake with the new wheat. Bimbo, on the other hand, had scientists on staff, and in keeping with its embrace of all things modern and North American, was the first major bakery in Mexico to embrace the nontraditional wheat varieties. By the mid-1950s, Bimbo had established strong ties with the most modern milling companies in northern Mexico, paving the way for widespread acceptance of the new wheat.
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Lorenzo's admiration for the U.S. baking industry also extended to its ingenious use of advertising, and from its first days, Bimbo plastered its name across newspapers, comic strips, and radio. Later, it would be the first Mexican bakery to appreciate the power of television. As a result, the cuddly bear mascot that bore the name Bimbo didn't take long to become one of the most-loved characters in Mexican commercial pop culture. Beyond the bear, Bimbo's campaigns touched all the same themes as early industrial bread advertising in the United States: the hygienic nature of factory bread, the importance of modern bread in building a strong nation, and the ultra-squeezable quality of industrially baked loaves.

There was one thing, however, that Bimbo did better than any North American counterpart, right from the start: distribute its product to the far-flung corners of a rapidly expanding city. Bimbo delivery trucks relentlessly plied the city in search of new sales points, and within a few years soft packaged bread had saturated the nation's capital. In 1947, Bimbo bought twenty-six new trucks and opened routes into nearby cities and state capitals. Photos from the period show Bimbo trucks sharing rutted roads with ox carts and being ferried across rainforest waterways on rafts. Oscar Lewis, in his classic ethnography of a small village outside Mexico City, noted that less than a third of townspeople ate bread in 1940. By 1950, according to Lewis, that had changed completely: almost everyone ate bread regularly.
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As pan Bimbo spread throughout Mexico and the country's first (and only) wheat-export freighters set sail for distant lands in the early 1960s, so too did the Rockefeller-Mexico model. Heralding it as the template for successful agricultural development, U.S. government agencies, foreign governments, the United Nations, and nonprofit organizations such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations worked to replicate Mexico's plant research program from India to Algeria. Following similar lines of government-private sector collaboration, researchers also turned their sights on other staples: rice in Asia, potatoes in the Andes, millet in Africa.

Thanks to improved seeds and modern input packages, world per capita food supplies climbed steadily in the postwar decades. In the United States, fears that the world was about to run out of food still enjoyed considerable popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, appearing everywhere from apocalyptic Hollywood movies to best-selling nonfiction, but these Malthusian nightmares never came true. Recognizing the scale of this achievement, in 1970, the Nobel committee awarded Norman Borlaug its Peace Prize. “More than any other single person of this age,” the prize's citation read, Norman Borlaug “has helped to provide bread for a hungry world.”
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Humanitarian causes aside, policy makers in the United States credited the Green Revolution with staving off Red Revolution around the world, and Mexican officials saw it as a stepping-stone to even grander things. For them, rural-development programs held the key to dreams of rapid industrialization.
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Regardless of its effects on the countryside, Green Revolution wheat would ensure steady flows of cheap food into the country's cities. Since Mexico's growing urban industrial workforce still spent the majority of its wages on food, these flows would, in effect, subsidize factory owners, keeping labor costs low without provoking political unrest. Not having to import wheat would also free up currency that could be channeled to pay for even more direct industry subsidies.

In many ways the Mexican government's gambit worked. Orthodox economists today ridicule Mexican policies of that era, reveling in their inefficiencies and heavy-handed state interventions, but Mexican officials had grasped something important that mainstream U.S. economists often forget: no country in history had ever industrialized through laissez-faire and free trade. Active state intervention was necessary to achieve the promises of modernization. And despite their inefficiencies and limits, the government's cheap food policies, promotion of basic education, investment in infrastructure, and extensive trade protections did, in fact, usher in Mexico's most explosive period of economic growth. Automobile, steel, and electronics factories rose up in what had been a largely rural country. Modern highways, electrical grids, and ports connected its far-flung corners, and Mexicans could, increasingly, buy their own appliances instead of importing them. But the Mexican Miracle had an Achilles' heel: the peasant countryside.

Every member of the U.S. MAP team had been formed in American land grant universities and spent time in the USDA, bastions of industrial agriculture. The scientists brought with them a strong cultural bias toward large-scale projects, and they also faced stiff pressure from the Mexican government to produce dramatic results quickly. As a result, the MAP, and its descendants, often ignored the mandate to improve the lives of peasant corn farmers, focusing attention on the country's few large commercial wheat farms. Rather than design technologies accessible to poor farmers, they pushed packages of expensive inputs. And they got exactly the results you would expect: a water-, machinery-, and chemical-intensive Green Revolution package capable of out-of-this-world yields—with out-of-this-world production costs. To realize the promise of Green Revolution technology, farmers didn't just have to purchase new seeds; they also needed to install modern irrigation equipment, apply heavy doses of synthetic fertilizers, and control pests with chemicals.

Paying these costs required continual access to credit. And in the Mexican countryside, that meant only larger farmers with disposable wealth and close ties to private banks or government bureaucrats could grow Green Revolution wheat over the long haul. Smaller farmers without access to subsidized credit could try, but this meant turning to rapacious moneylenders. So, as much as it increased productivity, the Green Revolution also reinforced rural inequality, creating a new class of wealthy U.S-style industrial farmers, coddled with subsidies, and masses of peasants who couldn't compete in the debt-driven race. Worse still, the new mechanized and chemically dependent commercial farms required less labor—meaning fewer jobs and lower wages for rural workers, and these changes impacted women disproportionately. The few jobs created by the spread of Green Revolution technologies—driving tractors or working with irrigation equipment—tended to be seen as “men's work,” while traditional hand labor that women counted on for income shrank. As was the case in many countries adopting the new agricultural model, declines in women's incomes had devastating consequences for family nutrition, health, and opportunities.
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Taken as a whole, Mexico's efforts to facilitate industrialization and urbanization with Green Revolution seeds and U.S.-style farms resulted in what Harvard-trained biologist turned social scientist John H. Perkins called a “tragic irony”: increased hunger in the presence of rapidly growing agricultural productivity.
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During the 1950s and 1960s, peasants and landless workers, displaced from the countryside by these forces, streamed into the cities faster than even the country's record economic expansion could create new urban jobs. Mexican industrial policies bear some of the blame for this—they tended to favor more glamorous heavy industries over labor-intensive production, even though the former generated fewer jobs—but the U.S.-style approach to agricultural development exacerbated the problem. The glut of rural refugees—a classic army of surplus labor—kept wages low in cities, despite record increases in industrial productivity. This stymied the creation of a large, self-sustaining society of middle-class consumers.
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Recognizing the tragic bias of its past efforts, the MAP initiated a new project in 1970—the Plan Puebla—targeting small-scale peasant corn producers.
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It had some success, but by that point the association between large-scale industrial agriculture, progress, and national security was too deeply engrained to turn back.

In India, where the Mexican Green Revolution model was exported first, the results were even more ambiguous. Indeed, the Punjab region—considered a “success story” of South Asian agricultural development—has emerged as the ultimate case study in the failings of a productivity-focused approach to rural poverty. There, Green Revolution wheat programs helped food supplies increase at double the rate of population growth. Yet, as even one pro-Green Revolution scholar acknowledged soberly, “There may have been no improvement at all in human nutrition, in the proportion of poor people, or in the average severity of their poverty.” Ardent Green Revolution critic Vandana Shiva put it more bluntly: the introduction of new agricultural technologies in Punjab, she argued, displaced farmers, created intractable rural unemployment, increased the proportion of people living in poverty, and sparked violent conflicts over resources.
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By the 1970s, knowledge of the Green Revolution's negative effect on rural equality and its failure to alleviate poverty had become widespread, thanks in large part to work done around the world by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.
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U.S. policy makers, agribusiness, and many development practitioners, however, had a hard time seeing beyond the mantra of higher yields. They saw a world where exploding population growth threatened to outrun food supplies and trigger revolution at every turn. The answer was obvious: the world needed more food to feed more mouths.