Nurseries of the revolution: international seed trials and the transformation of staple food crops

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the role of nurseries in the Green Revolution. Nurseries were sets of seeds assembled to test particular traits and sent to breeders around the world to trial. Focusing on wheat nurseries of the 1960s and 70s, I highlight the materials that were central to their distribution, as well as the breeders who planted them. Through this analysis, I trouble the common narrative of the Green Revolution as emerging from centers of international agricultural science, showing the networks of expertise, seed transfer, field trials, and data collection that underpinned this process of agricultural transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Green Revolution
• wheat
• plant breeding
• scientific knowledge

Acknowledgements

I thank Lee R. Hiltzik and Fabio Ciccarello for helping me navigate the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation and FAO. I also thank the anonymous reviewers, participants of the Cultural Processes of Global Development workshop, organized by Jessica O'Reilly and Ilana Gershon at Indiana University Bloomington in October 2021, and members of the Critical Ecologies Lab at the University of South Carolina for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This attention to how the new high-yielding varieties came into being speaks to a broader body of work that has underscored how seeds are far from stable objects, but rather, are shaped and reshaped under particular historical, social, and political circumstances (Kloppenburg 2005; McCann 2007; Head, Atchison, and Gates 2012; Fullilove 2017; Li 2022).

2 Visitor data from https://rockarch.org/about-us/overview/, last accessed 6/8/22. Notably, the Rockefeller Archive Center not only holds the records of the Rockefeller Foundation but also those of more than 40 other organizations and 100 individuals.

3 See mission statement on https://www.fao.org/library/fao-archives/about-the-archives/en/, last accessed 6/8/22.

4 For simplicity, I refer to the center of wheat breeding research in Mexico as CIMMYT, but this institution was only formally established in 1966, emerging from its predecessor – the Mexican Agricultural Program – a Rockefeller Foundation funded initiative to raise agricultural productivity, which operated from the 1940s through 1960s.

5 I refer to the archival citations from my two main sources – the archives of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome and the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) in Sleepy Hollow, New York – by record group (RG) and, where applicable, by box (B) and folder (F).

6 The Near East Wheat and Barley Breeding project, coordinated by the FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division and Regional Office based in Cairo, initially worked in six countries but this was later expanded to 14 (Afghanistan, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt). In 1961, the project was renamed the Near East Wheat and Barley Improvement and Production Project; in 1971, it was extended to encompass a number of other crops and renamed the Cereal Improvement and Production Project.

7 In some cases, national breeding programs also organized nurseries to coordinate within-country trials, but my focus in this paper is on nurseries that moved seeds across borders, which are those most discussed in the FAO and Rockefeller Foundation archives.

8 See https://cimmyt.formstack.com/forms/wheat_seed_request_form?Wheat_or_Related_Species_Purpose=IWN, last accessed 6/2/22. CIMMYT organized its 55th international spring bread wheat screening nursery, for example, in 2022. Breeders also see nurseries as playing an important ongoing role in adapting varieties for changing climatic conditions (Braun and Payne 2011).

9 While I limit my analysis to this period of pronounced yield increases, it is important to note that the processes of agricultural investment and agrarian change that came to be known as the Green Revolution have longer temporal trajectories that both precede and succeed the commonly demarcated period of transformation (Patel 2013).

10 ‘Talaat, Elham Hussein,’ F FA426, B2, Fellowship Recorder Cards, RG10.2, RAC.

11 Indicative of Egypt’s level of expertise in this area, when the Near East Wheat and Barley Project organized a training course for regional wheat breeders in 1962, Egypt hosted the training center and half the lecturers were Egyptian scientists. ‘Training Centers Held in 1963.’ Near East Wheat and Barley Improvement and Production Project Information Bulletin (hereafter NEWBIP Bulletin), 1964, 1(1): 3–6.

12 Charles Krull oral history, 29 and 30 June 1966, 49–50, B17, RG13, RAC.

13 Norman Borlaug oral history, June 1967, 284–285, B15, RG13, RAC.

14 Tessi to Leegering, 1 November 1962, Cereal Breeding Wheat and Barley 58–65, PL3/3, RG10-AGP, FAO.

15 Borlaug oral history, 282.

16 Harrington to Phillips, 21 November 1958, Wheat and Barley Breeding Near East Project 1958–1960, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

17 Abdul Hafiz to Tahir, 10 September 1969, Seeds 67–69, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

18 Borlaug to Harrington, 10 August 1960, Nurseries 60–62, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

19 Harrington to Borlaug, 1 September 1960, Nurseries 60–62, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

20 Borlaug to Covor, 5 November 1964, Seeds 63–65, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

21 Telegram Borlaug to Abdul Hafiz, 30 September 1964, Seeds 63–65, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

22 Borlaug to Abdel Hafiz, 30 September 1964, Seeds 63–65, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

23 Covor to Borlaug, 29 January 1965, Seeds 63–65, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

24 Borlaug to Covor, 12 February 1965, Seeds 63–65, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

25 Krull to Covor, 13 September 1965, Seeds 65–66, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

26 Krull et al. (1968).

27 Borlaug opening remarks to International Nursery Conference, El Batan, Mexico, 15 August 1979, F17, B17, Norman E. Borlaug Papers, ua-01014, University of Minnesota Archives.

28 These varieties did not necessarily have such high and stable yields in marginal lands – a point that Baranski (2015) makes in her critique of ‘wide adaptation’ as a core tenet of the Green Revolution. Looking at the case of India, Baranski shows that the search for wide adaptation led to a problematic focus on highly fertile irrigated environments. It is notable, though, that the 1964–1965 spring wheat yield nursery did include sites that were both rainfed and irrigated as well as those that were both fertilized and unfertilized.

29 Tahir (1969, 1–6). FAO.

30 Hafiz (1971, iii) and Hafiz and Shukry (1971a, 19–22, 22).

31 Krull to Covor, 13 September 1965, Seeds 65–66, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

32 Hafiz and Shukry (1971b, 1–3).

33 Hafiz and Shukry (1975, 46–58).

34 Harrington to Cooperators, 8 January 1961, Nurseries 60–62, PL3/4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

35 Tahir to Abdul Hafiz, 6 March 1972, 1st FAO Conference on Cereal Improvement and Production in the Near East, Lahore, Pakistan, PL3/2, RG10-AGP, FAO.

36 Hafiz (1969, 17–22).

37 Hafiz (1970, 24–29).

38 Hafiz (1971, iii). Hafiz and Shukry (1971a, 19–22).

39 Harrington to Cooperators, 1 November 1960, Wheat and Barley Breeding Near East Project, General 1958–1960, PL3-4, RG10-AGP, FAO.

40 This problem was persistent. In 2010, Byerlee and Dubin (2010) noted that usable data was being returned from about half the nurseries. The problem, they saw, was a lack of training of the cooperators, observing that the quality of the data had declined with the decline of the CIMMYT training programs.

41 Charles Krull oral history, 49–50, B17, RG13, RAC.

42 Tessi to Abdul Hafiz, 11 April 1963, Cereal Breeding Wheat and Barley, PL 3/3, RG10-AGP, FAO.

43 Borlaug oral history, 318.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies; George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation; Office of the Vice President for Research, University of South Carolina; and Rockefeller Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Jessica Barnes

Jessica Barnes’s research focuses on the everyday practices of resource use and differential experience of environmental change. Her work employs ethnographic methods to examine the uneven distribution and quality of resources that are fundamental to life – water, food, and air – and their impact on social worlds. Her publications include Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt (Duke 2014), Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Duke 2022), and a volume coedited with Michael Dove, Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change (Yale 2015). She is currently developing a new project in London, which explores how air pollution is woven into the fabric of daily lives in racialized and class-inflected ways. Dr. Barnes received her PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, Masters in Environmental Management from Yale School of the Environment, and BA in Geography from Oxford University. She is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina.