1950s Video: Americans Enter Farms in Iranian Villages
Following World War II, The Near East Foundation sent Americans to remote Iranian villages to promote "mechanized" farming. These engineers helped villagers pump clean drinking water but also promoted vaccines and synthetic chemicals like DDT and pesticides, which were associated in later years with harming some villagers' health. Non-regenerative, non-organic farming methods, relying on importing chemicals and tractors, made farmers more productive but also less sustainable and more dependent on non-local input controlled by Iran's central government and by American corporations. Farmers also started borrowing to pay for expensive tractors, fertilizers and chemical pesticides:
Crops in mechanized monocrop farms may be less tasty and nutritious than organically grown crops. Farmers, now mostly seated on tractors, gained weight and blood pressure. Many migrated to cities as their income expectations went up and their net incomes went down. A good portion of crop sales would pay for the cost of debt, diesel and gasoline, tractors, inputs (pesticides, fertilizers). Often distributors, supermarkets and chemical companies supplying fertilizers and pesticides earned more than farmers. As a result, similar to what happened in America, many monocrop mechanized farmers in Iran migrated to big cities and stopped farming.
And one last note. It is rumored that some of the agricultural experts had engagement with the security apparatus in curbing the communist/Russian influence in Iran and in supporting the 1953 CIA-staged coup against Mosaddegh.
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