Description
At the dawn of the post-war international order, the challenges of food and agriculture were formidable. Seeking to tackle the contradictions of surplus production and starvation, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was created as a vehicle for bringing order to the world’s fields. Yet 20 years after its inception, the FAO was suddenly eclipsed by the World Bank as the world’s leading global governance institution for agricultural development. While initially hostile to food and agriculture as a target for development assistance, the Bank’s approach to lending turned on a dime, with enormous sums poured into agricultural assistance and lending for small farmers. This curious transformation in both Bank policy and international development more broadly has been radically neglected within the IR/IPE disciplines. I argue that the catalyst for this transformation in Bank policy can be traced back to the entanglement between fields of postcolonial India and the geopolitics of development during the early Cold War. Those at the helm of the emergent ‘American Century’ put every effort into stabilising India’s development as the counterweight to the peasant-led communist revolution in China. I therefore read India’s road to development as refracted by a mutli-scalar process of ‘passive revolution’. While US officials (including those in the Bank) sought to engineer a passive revolution of ‘developmentalism’ across the Global South, Indian officials were pursuing their own passive revolutionary strategy for the purpose of nation-building. Early encounters between the Bank and Indian development officials brought to light the indispensable role played by the countryside in the making of (inter)national order. Yet in seeking to implant capitalist ‘rationality’ into Indian soil, rural development policy undermined the twin goals of equity and stability among rural classes. The paper thus brings into sharper focus the long-neglected agrarian roots of post-war international (dis)order.
