Up through the early 1950s, practically every Indian agricultural writer promoted composting according to Howard’s Indore Method as the best way to improve soil fertility and increase crop yields. They almost universally agreed that chemical fertilizers were too expensive for the average Indian farmer to afford. Many Indian municipalities even passed laws requiring that organic wastes and sewage be composted, though they were rarely enforced.
Then, in 1959, a team of agricultural scientists from the American-based Ford Foundation took a trip to India. Their mission was to advise the Indian government on the best way to increase agricultural production to help fund industrial development efforts. The American scientists, steeped in the anti-organic rhetoric that had thoroughly infiltrated American colleges by this point, must have been shocked when they saw that the Indian scientists had been focusing most of their energy on promoting composting.
“Fuller use of manures, composts, and green manures is commended,” the Ford Foundation scientists wrote in their 1959 Report on India’s Food Crisis and Steps to Meet It. But “only with more abundant chemical fertilizers will benefits from irrigation, bunding, improved seeds, and other facilities be realized.” When their Indian colleagues mentioned that chemical fertilizers didn’t always perform well in tropical conditions, the American scientists dismissed their concerns as “wrong interpretations of evidence from the occasional use of very unbalanced fertilizer practices.” The Americans told the Indian government that chemical fertilizers were the only way to increase yields and counseled them to deemphasize research on composting.
The American emphasis on chemical fertilizers fit well with the development theories of the time, summarized by Walt W. Rostow in his 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Ignoring the legacy of colonialism completely, Rostow and others divided the world into “modern” and “traditional” societies, with “traditional agriculture” as one of the main factors holding back development. In order to reach “take-off” and become a modern industrial society, developing countries had to modernize their agriculture and “accept the new methods and the deep changes they bring to ways of life.” That meant, in part, using chemical fertilizers. They called it the “Green Revolution,” and they claimed that it fed the world.
By the 1980s, it was becoming painfully obvious that Rostow’s development theory was flawed. Using more chemicals in agriculture didn’t turn most “developing” countries into affluent societies like the United States. Instead, as Vandana Shiva wrote in her 1991 book The Violence of the Green Revolution, India “has been left with diseased soils, pest-infested crops, water-logged deserts, and indebted and discontented farmers.” The problem, Shiva argues, was that “In mistakenly identifying the sustainable and lasting as backward and primitive, and in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable agricultural practices worldwide.”
Not that composting would have solved all of the social problems and inequality caused by colonialism, either. But if the American scientists would have looked at what scientists like Howard had already learned about what worked and what didn’t work in India, they might have been more cautious about recommending a system that caused as many problems as it solved.
My forestry scientist friend always advised his students: "When you are studying anything, a problem, a flourishing forest, whatever. . . always start by asking the locals what they know about it."