Protests against the Farm Laws: The Political Ecology of the Green Revolution and the Limits of Agrarian Populism

India witnessed the largest mobilisation of farmers since its independence from roughly September 2020 until November 2021. They were agitating against the Indian government’s passage of three agricultural marketing laws in September 2020. This chapter contextualises the protests in the political, cultural, and ecological transformations wrought by the Green Revolution. I provide a political ecological reading of the Green Revolution to argue why its model is fundamentally flawed. Specifically, I interrogate the notion of the “high-yielding variety” and the related but incomplete concept of “productivity, " which became the reigning paradigm for agricultural research and policy on account of the Green Revolution. Further, I show how this unscientific measure of productivity helped establish capital-intensive agriculture across the country, marginalising large sections of farmers. In effect, the Green Revolution paradigm contributed to transforming producers into subaltern communities. As the government scaled back public investment in agriculture starting in the mid-1980s, the capital-intensive model ran into a crisis. The crisis intensified as the social and ecological costs of the Green Revolution caught up with agrarian landscapes. However, even as the metabolic rift intensified, farm movements emerging since the 1990s rallied the vast majority of farmers under the leadership of the beneficiaries of the Green Revolution. These movements emphasised support prices and loan waivers at the expense of concerns about ecology and justice. This diagnosis of the structural factors underlying the crisis reveals why present-day farmers, particularly in the North, are agitating against the three laws and, at the same time, why the repeal of the three laws will neither address the agrarian crisis nor rescue producers from their subaltern subjection.