At the outcome of the Second World War, major international organisations such as the World Bank and private bodies such as the Ford and Rockerfeller Foundations funded agronomical research greater towards greater agricultural productivity in developing countries. This enabled the setting up of several international research centres such as the International Rice Research Centre in the Philipinnes in 1959, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico in 1963. The objective driving this research, an objective which was met, was to create varieties of high yield cereals allowing a very rapidly growing population in developing countries to be fed. This ‘Green Revolution’, as it has been called, enabled yields of wheat and rice to be at the minimnum doubled and agriculture to be modernised in the countries of the South.

Critics of this revolution for their part pointed out that it had increased the countries of the South’s technological dependency on those of the North, and above all on their large multinationals (seeds, farming machinery, fertilisers, etc.), encouraged the peasants to fall into debt, many of whom had to sell their land and migrate to the cities and destroyed the ecological balance of many farming regions (an impoverishment of the biodiversity, monocultures, the polluting of the water and the soil).