MEXICO—The “Green Revolution” of the 1950’s was a ploy of the Rockefeller Foundation to sell high-yield wheat—along with fertilizer and pesticides—to Mexico. In 1938, President Cardenas nationalized the oil industry, cutting out Rockefeller’s Standard Oil interests. Cardenas promoted land reform, but restricted it under the laws of capitalism. Later in 1943,  President Manuel Ávila Camacho, promoted industrialization. Camacho saw Rockefeller and his Green Revolution as a way to move the workforce off the urban farmlands into the factories as cheap labor.
Capitalists make deals like this all the time, at the expense of the working class. It soon became clear  that capitalist land reform in Mexico yielded quickly to the pressures of imperialism. Only communist collectivization of the land—not for profit, but to promote healthy organic farming—can provide nourishment to the working class and sustain the earth.
At first, in the 50s, farmers grew more wheat, some of it to make cereal. Mexico became self-sufficient in wheat production by 1951 and began to export wheat thereafter.
Hybrid maize and wheat required pesticides and fertilizers that the original Mexican wheat didn’t need. Meanwhile, thousands of farmers couldn’t afford the pesticide/fertilizer packets  and the hybrid seeds that had to be purchased year after year. Just as Camacho predicted, they went bankrupt and had to leave the farms for the factories in the city.
But the ruling class revolution didn’t stop in Mexico. Rockefeller spread the petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides and profitable hybrid seeds to India next, and then to Pakistan, Southeast Asia and Africa.  In all these places, only big farmers could afford to grow wheat and rice, and millions of farmworkers, saddled by debt were forced to sell their land and go work for factory bosses.
The pesticides were bad for many reasons.  They poisoned the field workers’ skin and seeped into the water, poisoning the drinking supply. The insects which they were supposed to kill became resistant. The pesticides killed the fish and green weedy vegetables that families in Southeast Asia relied on for food. The fertilizers also contained petrochemicals (from Rockefeller oil, of course).  The hybrid plants become completely dependent on yearly fertilizing, which ruins the soil, making the earth less able to hold its own water, air and nutrients.
The heavy reliance on irrigation has compromised large swaths of arable land in India and Pakistan through the process of salinification, wherein salts build up in over-watered soil. Africa for its part has fared particularly poorly from the Green Revolution. African soils are generally unsuitable to intensive monoculture because of insufficient or excessive rains, high incidences of pests and diseases.
Today, in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico, of 225,000 acres, only 23 percent  can be farmed because the water reservoirs have been depleted to 13 percent .  The hybrid plants require vast amounts of water, and only a few farmers can afford to pump water from wells.  Ultimately, the biggest yield from this impoverished land has been unemployed workers, because the industries of the 1960s couldn’t employ many of the displaced farmers. Consequently Mexico’s farmers began a mass emigration to the United States to feed their families.