Has the Green Revolution been a Cumulative Learning Process?

Abstract

Most members of the development community take for granted that policy should be evidence-based. Accordingly declarations of the need to ‘learn the lessons of history’ are a commonplace in the literature. At the same time there are also indications that this task is not usually taken very seriously in policy formulation. Summarising the history of peasant-friendly plant breeding from Central Europe around 1900 to the global South today, this paper argues that attempts to assist smallholder agriculture since 1945 have repeatedly failed to take into account the success or failure of earlier approaches. The evidence suggests that this neglect has been the result less of ignorance of past experience than of indifference toward it. The paper concludes by briefly considering possible reasons for this.

Notes

I am grateful to Stephen Biggs for commenting on a draft of this paper.

1 C Eicher, Institutions and the African Farmer, Issues in Agriculture 14, Washington, DC: Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, 1999, p 7.

2 For example, A Waterston, Development Planning: Lessons of Experience, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.

3 World Bank, World Development Report 2008: Agriculture forDevelopment, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007, pp 226, 243.

4 N Uphoff, M Esman & A Krishna, Reasons for Success: Learning from Instructive Experiences in Rural Development, West Hartford, CN: Kumarian Press, 1998, p 214.

5 As two historians with extensive policy experience wryly put it: ‘Washington decision-makers actually used history in their decisions, at least for advocacy or for comfort, whether they knew any or not’. RE Neustadt & ER May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, New York: Free Press, 1986, p xii.

6 CA Bayly, V Rao, S Szreter & M Woolcock (eds), History, Historians and Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

7 J Harwood, Europe's Green Revolution and Others Since: The Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant-Breeding, London: Routledge, 2012.

8 An indifference toward past experience, needless to say, is hardly confinedto development policy. For a critique of US foreign policy along similar lines, see D Rieff, ‘Democracy no!’, DemocracyJournal.org, spring, 2012, pp 71–76, at www.democracyjournal.org.

9 This approach also proved effective when transplanted by the Japanese to colonial Taiwan after 1900.

10 World Bank, World Development Report 2008; UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (fao), How to Feed the World in 2050, briefing paper for High-Level Expert Forum, 12–13 October 2009, Rome: fao, 2009; and International Fund for Agricultural Development (ifad), Rural Poverty Report, Rome: ifad, 2001.

11 World Bank, World Development Report 2008, p 144.

12 Wolf Ladejinsky is reported as having said some time ago that, in order to be successful, planners had to ignore facts and rely on faith that approaches would work. N Cullather, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p 95. More recently the report from the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development has complained of a failure by policy makers to take into account the results of agricultural research. U Lele, J Pretty, E Terry & E Trigo (eds), Transforming Agricultural Research for Development, report for the Global Conference on Agricultural Research 2010, Rome: Global Forum for Agricultural Research, 2010, passim. My own discussions with those in the development community point in the same direction. As one academic in development studies told me with some exasperation, ‘Who reads programme reviews?!’. One American agricultural economist with intimate knowledge of the Indian Green Revolution programmes of the 1960s was equally blunt: ‘The Ford program people and their Government of India colleagues were hell-bent on “doubling food production within five years” but had never examined whether that had been accomplished elsewhere and if so, how. They had no interest in the success/failure of past development efforts.’ And a British economist who worked for the World Bank in the 1980s told me that it was not until the Bank had awarded its 13th loan to one developing country’s state railway that anyone bothered to check what had happened with the previous dozen loans.

13 S Biggs, ‘Reflections on the social embeddedness of science & technology in rural and agricultural transformations: learning from positive experiences of poverty reduction and social inclusion in Nepal’, Studies in Nepali History and Society, 12(2), 2007, p 277, emphasis in the original. Cf D Porter B Allen & G Thompson Development in Practice: Paved with Good Intentions, London: Routledge, 1991, p xv.

14 G Williams, ‘Rural development: a change in policy, why and how?’, in T Shanin (ed), Peasants and Peasant Societies, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, p 433. See also DM Warren, ‘Linking scientific and indigenous agricultural systems’, in JL Compton (ed), The Transformation of International Agricultural Research and Development, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1989, pp 153–170; and R Chambers, ‘Critical reflections of a development nomad’, in U Kothari (ed), A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies, London: Zed, 2005, pp 67–87.

15 J Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p 235.

16 World Bank, World Development Report 2008, p 257.