How the "Green Revolution" was sold to India

In "The Historical Context of International Communication" Daya Thussu gives what I feel is a biased and misleading account of India's "Green Revolution" of the 1970's and the country's attempts at using communications strategies to convince farmers of its relative worth.

Thussu is writing about the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) that the Indian government helped launch in 1975.  The idea was to borrow a NASA satellite from the U.S. and use it to beam "public interest" news into dozens of the most impoverished farming communities in India.  This was to be "the world's largest techno-social experiment" at the time, costing $6.6 million.

Thussu paints a picture of this project as benign government campaign intended to improve the lives of India's farmers, while glossing over the heavy-handed propaganda implications of having a state-controlled satellite beaming "news" into thousands of communities, to be captured by  government-installed television sets that are set up in these villages.  I would argue that while individuals "communicate" governments never do.  Instead they set agendas, and a major agenda that governments tried to push beginning in the 1970's was the so-called "green revolution" which was created for the benefit of agricultural and chemical corporations. 

The goal of the green revolution was to destroy the ability of the developing world to feed itself, replacing farmers that had once been self-sufficient with farmers that grew cash crops for the export market.  It was also meant to make these countries dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced by Western corporations, consolidate small family farms into large agribusiness conglomerations, force smaller farmers to sell off their lands, and drive them into the cities to seek work in sweatshops.

It's interesting to see how the words the author uses to describe this process portray his inherent biases.  Thussu has a catch-all word for this process: "modernization."  He seems to accept the idea implanted by the creators of SITE; that modernization means pesticides and industrial corporate agribusiness.   I realize that his article wasn't meant to debate the relative merits of the green revolution, but for him to gloss over a media campaign that has resulted in such negative environmental and economic effects on India straddles the line between sloppy scholarship and outright misinformation.

The "green revolution" is a concept that was sold to many countries in the developing world and continues to this day in the form of the "gene revolution", led by genetic engineering companies like Monsanto.  It would be interesting to look at this global campaign and the different "communications" strategies that were used to implement it in not only India but the rest of Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well.  I'm putting "communications" in quotes, because I think that in order to have genuine communication a two-way flow of information is necessary.  In top-down approaches, such as the one taken by SITE, this is impossible.

-Dan Gordon