At Odds over Inbreeding: An Abandoned Attempt at Mexico/United States Collaboration to “Improve” Mexican Corn, 1940–1950

Abstract

During the first years of organized agricultural research in Mexico in the 1940s, two agencies ran separate programs for corn improvement. The Rockefeller Foundation's Office of Special Studies and the Mexican government's Office of Experiment Stations (later called the Agricultural Research Institute) carried out research on corn with distinct aims and methods. That they differed strongly is well established in the literature. Many authors have discussed a Rockefeller Foundation program that reportedly emphasized hybrid corn, a technical choice that embodied a preference for assisting wealthy farmers who could afford hybrid corn and the necessary agricultural inputs. Conversely, these authors attribute to the Mexican program a focus on open-pollinated corn, which presumably manifested its concern for Mexico's small farmers who saved seed. This article argues that the reverse was true. The Rockefeller Foundation program initially was committed to a type of improved open-pollinated corn while the Mexican program proceeded with a strict, U.S.-style hybrid program. I try to illuminate each group's priority on yield, as well as additional significant, and complicating, breeding priorities that precluded any collaboration between the two.

The Long Green Revolution

“…Ironically, there were actual foreign revolutionaries engaged in plant breeding in Mexico before the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation, and they were keen on corn. Indian revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje was one of many breeders involved in corn research in Mexico's Instituto Biote´cnico, a research institute founded in 1934 by the Ca´rdenas government as part of a strategy to improve peasant maize cultivation through improved knowledge (Matchett 2006, Ramnath 2011. The Instituto Biote´cnico was closed after Camacho took office.…”

Animal breeding in the age of biotechnology: the investigative pathway behind the cloning of Dolly the sheep

“…3-4;Russell 1966). For other studies of the political and economic use of agriculture in France, Germany, Italy, the US, Mexico, Portugal and Spain see Harwood (2005), Matchett (2006), Bonneuil andThomas (2009), Saraiva (2010), Camprubí (2010), Santesmases (2013), von Schwerin (2013) and Barahona et al (2005). financially significant community at that time. He persuaded the University to establish the first Lectureship in Genetics in the UK (1911), and then lobbied for the creation of a research department, capitalising on the increasing financial support that the British Government was providing for agricultural and rural modernisation.…”

From working collections to the World Germplasm Project: agricultural modernization and genetic conservation at the Rockefeller Foundation

“…Many scholars have looked to this effort as the starting point of the so-called Green Revolution—that is, of the striking increase seen in the production of certain economic crops in Latin America and Asia in the late 1950s and 1960s that resulted especially from the introduction of higher-yielding crop varieties and the agricultural technologies and financial structures needed to cultivate these (Jennings 1988; Perkins 1997; Cotter 2003; Harwood 2009, 2012; Cullather 2010; Patel 2013). In establishing this narrative, historians have traced the foundation’s efforts from Mexico across Latin America in the 1940s and 50s, to India, Pakistan and elsewhere in Asia in the 1960s and 70s, and finally to Africa where these faltered in the 1980s and later (Oasa 1981; Fitzgerald 1986; Matchett 2002, 2006; Cullather 2004; Shepherd 2005; Smith 2009; Baranski 2015). The outcomes of these activities remain contested, hailed by some as having prevented global food crises and decried by others as the source of innumerable social and environmental problems 1…”