Peasant Friendly Plant Breeding and the Early Years of the Green Revolution in Mexico

Abstract

Despite their success in boosting cereals production overall, the Green Revolution programs of the 1950s and 1960s were often criticized for failing to achieve their declared aim of alleviating world hunger. Most critics argued that the programs had produced a technology unsuited to the needs of small peasant farmers. This paper explores why such inappropriate technology might have been developed, focusing on the early years of the Rockefeller Foundation's Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP). It shows that some foundation officers as well as agricultural advisors had prior experience of the problems faced by small farmers in the United States and elsewhere. Moreover, the foundation's expressed concern for rural poverty does not appear to have been mere posturing by an organization anxious to be seen as an agent of philanthropy. Furthermore, the program's early work in maize-breeding was well tailored to the conditions of Mexican agriculture. Once the MAP was up and running, however, it became apparent that the task of getting new varieties and cultivation practices to small farmers was going to be difficult. Needing to make some kind of impact quickly, MAP staff chose to concentrate upon projects that were likely to find a rapid uptake. This meant setting aside the needs of peasant farmers to develop high-yielding varieties suited to large commercial farms.

Foundations and philanthropic organizations in the development of new science and technology: the case of micro-and nanotechnology in Mexico

“…3 Cueto, 1997;Harwood, 2009;Fitzgerald, 1994, Faria andda Costa, 2006;Solórzano, 1994), in Africa (Shrum, 2000;Toenniessen et al, 2008), in Asia (Brown, 1980) and in Europe (Stapleton, 2003;Buxton, 2003: Guilhot, 2007. Within this literature, the place occupied by philanthropic organizations in scientific and technological development shows them to be important actors in the periods during the First and Second World Wars, as well as during the Cold War (Abir-Am, 2002).…”

Bruno to Brünn; or the Pasteurization of Mendelian genetics

“…It is the most important, because the difference between laboratory spaces and field spacesdthe latter of which are fundamental in the history of plant breeding and geneticsdseems to actually matter in Latour's own account. "This movement from the laboratory to the field cannot be ignored" writes Latour, and later, "Just as some elements of the field were taken to the laboratory, so certain elements of the laboratory Fitzgerald (1990), Gayon & Zallen (1998), Hahn (2011), Harwood (1997, 2009), Iori (2013), Kimmelman (1983Kimmelman ( , 1987Kimmelman ( , 1992Kimmelman ( , 1997Kimmelman ( , 2006, Kloppenburg (1988), Maat (2001), Müller-Wille (2005, Olby (2000), Palladino (1990Palladino ( , 1993Palladino ( , 1994, Rheinberger & Müller-Wille (2012), Saraiva (2010), Wieland (2006). 6 On the notion of genetic modernisation in particular see Bonneuil & Thomas (2010), Berry (submitted for publication) and Thurtle (2011).…”

The history and future of agricultural experiments

“…According to Byrnes this was due partly to the successful release of the rice cultivar IR8, partly because of fears of rice scientists "to be contaminated with activities of lower-status extension workers" [39: 126]. Besides status differences, direct interaction between the international centres, national extension services and farmers was considered politically sensitive [40]. So the international research institutes relied on the various national research centres and related services to communicate research results to the field as well as getting feed-back from the various countries.…”