Could the adverse consequences of the green revolution have been foreseen? How experts responded to unwelcome evidence

ABSTRACT

By the late 1960s, it was becoming clear that the Green Revolution (GR) had succeeded only in part. Although crop yields, total production and food-per-capita were substantially higher, GR programmes were also increasing social inequality and damaging the environment, both of which began to attract attention in professional journals and the popular press. In this paper I examine the ways in which the GR’s advocates responded to criticism during the 1970s. Of particular interest is their defense that they were unprepared for the adverse effects of the new technology because these effects could not have been anticipated. I argue, however, that this claim is untenable because the negative effects of the technology had been pointed out from an early stage but were largely ignored. That experts reacted in this way derived in part from the narrow scope of their training and experience but also from a professional tendency to oversimplify the nature of development problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Green Revolution
• global South
• modernisation
• experts
• agricultural development

Acknowledgments

Part of the research and drafting of this paper took place while I was a visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institute for History of Science (Berlin), courtesy of Prof. Dagmar Schaefer. A first draft was presented at the conference ‘Contested Agronomy’ which took place at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 23–25 February 2016. For helpful comments on a subsequent draft, I thank Dominic Glover, Harro Maat, Erik Millstone, Peter Moser and two anonymous referees for this journal. More generally, I am indebted to Prof. Johan Schot (former Director, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex) for his support over the last few years.

Notes

1. In the early 1970s a Ford Foundation official persuaded the trustees of the International Center for the Improvement of Wheat and Maize that until they hired an economist, the Center would be ‘vulnerable’ to criticism by outsiders (Jennings 1988, 169–170).

2. Rather surprisingly, the only attempt so far to analyse the reasons underlying this controversy was written some time ago by an insider: an agricultural economist who had worked on the Mexican Agricultural Programme during the 1950s (Freebairn 1995). From a large statistical study of the social scientific literature from the 1970s and ‘80s which assessed the impact of GR programmes upon income-distribution, he concluded that authors’ (sharply differing) stances on this issue were correlated with their country of origin, the area in the South they had studied, and the methodology used. Though illuminating, this study was rather narrowly focused in that it did not address agronomists’ views of the GR nor its environmental impact.

3. Some development experts have suggested that the criticism came primarily from social scientists (Chambers 1984; Orr 2012), but as will become apparent below, this generalisation is too unqualified.

4. Oasa (1987) does focus upon defenders of the GR, but his analysis is pitched at a different level than the one offered here. It is not a close study of the intellectual strategies with which individual defenders attempted to deal with counter-evidence (nor an assessment of their arguments’ validity) but instead an examination of how the research agendas at some international agricultural research centres shifted in response to criticism during the 1970s.

5. ‘Many’ but not all. Several advocates of a new GR have endorsed environmentally-friendly technologies which are designed to avoid some of the adverse consequences of those deployed in the 1950s and ‘60s (eg, Conway 1997).

6. One defender of the GR dismissed critics as ‘utopians’ who had no idea of the constraints which nature imposed upon plant breeding (Jennings 1988, 178). Another dismissed environmentalist criticism as a ‘vicious, shortsighted propaganda campaign’ (quoted in Cotter 2003, 286). A third argued that some early criticism from social scientists ‘reflected little more than interdisciplinary pique or aggression’ prompted by this group’s resentment at having to play a secondary role in the early GR programmes; other critics were said to be ‘clearly … ideologically motivated’ (Ruttan 1977, 16).

7. An IRRI economist recalled that in the early 1970s no attempts were made to develop rainfed rice varieties because staff were confident that IRRI’s varieties were excellent; the problem lay in farmers’ failure to adopt them (Robert Herdt, comment in discussion, Anderson et al. 1982, 251).

8. Some would say that this dilemma was self-inflicted. Numerous observers have pointed out that a fundamental feature of neo-classical economics is that it focuses narrowly upon economic growth, leaving the social and political dimensions of the process to other disciplines. (Myrdal 1968, ix-x; Kapp 1983; Ellis 1993, 46). But economists were not the only group of experts who were caught unprepared for the social consequences of the GR. As two IRRI staff observed, ‘It seems fair to say that those who developed the initial GR technology, principally biological scientists, gave little consideration to the socioeconomic implications of their work, although their broad goal was that of increasing food production so as to reduce human misery. (Barker, Herdt, and Rose 1985, 141). Nor were all economists blind to the social dimension. At the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement, from the 1960s several agricultural economists were taken to task by agronomists for raising doubts about the social impact of the Center’s work (Jennings 1988, 163ff).

9. Implicitly he also drew upon the use-abuse model, worrying that the GR might be derailed unless ‘sensible’ institutions and policies were put in place by host governments. ‘If poorly managed’, the GR would lead to unemployment and misery (Brown 1970, vii).

10. For other early references to ‘second generation problems’, see Dalrymple (1969, 1–2); Moseman (1971); Ladejinsky (1973); cf. Anderson et al. (1991), 68. Some economists essentially adopted Falcon’s stance though without using the term ‘generations of problems’: Brown (1968, 692–694); Barker (1970, 75); Ruttan and Hayami (1973, 146–147).

11. Several staff and trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, expressed reservations during the 1940s and ‘50s about whether the Mexican Agricultural Program was devoting enough attention to the needs of resource-poor small farmers (Jennings 1988, 78–83, 122–135).

12. In Pakistan locals joked that the new miracle wheat had given rise to a new miracle locust (Garrison and Wilkes 1972, 38).

13. On Philippino rice breeders’ similar reservations in the early ‘60s, see Oasa (1981, 190–201); Anderson et al. (1991, 65–67).

14. Although the existence of expert criticism is acknowledged in this literature, it is sometimes treated more as resistance or vested interests rather than as reasoned argument which derived from an alternative strategy (eg, Lele and Goldsmith 1989; Cullather 2010, 198–202).

15. Although the Agriculture Minister ignored this critique and implemented the GR as planned, it soon became clear that the critics’ analysis was well-founded. During the 1970s a series of field trials comparing GR wheats with improved Indian varieties confirmed that the latter did, in fact, generate higher yields at low doses of fertiliser (Rudra 1987; Baranski 2015, 179).

16. The problem was evidently quite widespread. During the 1950s the UN’s technical assistance programmes were prepared to hire experts who had little or no knowledge of the host country or its language (Mehos and Moon 2011, 61).

17. This lack of curiosity seems to have extended to IRRI’s founders. In the late 1950s the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations sent their directors of agricultural sciences (Forest Hill and J. George Harrar, respectively) on a fact-finding tour to assess the state of Asian rice research. Their conclusion was that, apart from Japan and Taiwan, the amount and quality of rice research on the continent was inadequate (Chandler 1982, 6). As we saw in the previous section, however, by about 1980 IRRI staff had concluded that this judgment failed to do justice to research in either Sri Lanka or Bangladesh.

18. As James C. Scott memorably put it in his classic analysis of high-modernist development schemes, experts tend to suffer from a ‘systematic, cyclopean shortsightedness’ (Scott 1998, 264).

19. This mind-set was not restricted to IRRI. In the late 1960s when Rockefeller staff were confronted with Indian fears that the distribution of GR technology solely to farms in favourable conditions would provoke political unrest, Norman Borlaug was unconcerned. As he later remarked ‘I wasn’t worried a damn bit about equity at this point…. I just wanted to provoke shock’ (quoted in Cullather 2010, 201). An agricultural economist at another international research centre, similarly, dismissed criticism of the GR as unimportant because ‘I’m not interested in theories of how the rich screw the poor’ (interview with Donald Winkelman, quoted in Jennings 1988, 173).

20. I am indebted to Christophe Bonneuil for alerting me to this book.

21. That alternative forms of technology might be preferable was evidently difficult for many to imagine during the 1960s. When E.F. Schumacher gave a paper in 1965 at a UNESCO conference on development, he found it widely assumed that the latest agricultural technology from the West was also the best. Accordingly, his suggestion that it might not suit conditions in the South was met with ridicule (Schumacher 1993, 140).

22. As one CGIAR volume put it, ‘In sum, agriculture in the developing countries can take one of two directions. It can stagnate, or it can gradually be transformed in a manner analogous to the transformation of Western agriculture over the past century and a half’(Anderson, Herdt, and Scobie 1988, 13). On the similar convictions of Western economists posted to South Asia in the 1950s and ‘60s, see Rosen (1985, 239).

23. Although the volume contains useful reflections on the expert mind-set (Harremoes et al. 2001, 201–202, 204, 209), on occasion it is rather more optimistic about experts’ ability to foresee problems than my own analysis would suggest (eg, ibid., 196).

24. In addition, it goes without saying that in some cases individual responses to criticism may be explicable in terms of personal idiosyncrasy (arrogance, self-aggrandisement).

25. As suggested by one historian of Western development programmes in India many years ago (Rosen 1985, 233).

26. A reluctance even to collaborate with social scientists is also noticeable. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, was slow to appoint a social scientist to the Mexican Agricultural Program, despite repeated requests from its advisors (Harwood 2009, 395–396). On the absence or marginalisation of social scientists (other than agricultural economists) from development projects through the 1960s and into the 1970s, see Oasa (1981, 419ff); Cernea and Kassam (2006).

27. While the argument for a socially responsible development science advanced by Robert Anderson and colleagues (Anderson et al. 1991, 13–17, 368–378) bears certain similarities to the one presented here, they assign responsibility not just to scientists but to donors and foundations as well. Moreover, the solution they envisage would require collaboration and dialogue between natural and social scientists rather than a fundamental redefinition of the expert’s role.

28. Ironically, GR varieties often did not make even economic sense for those farmers best placed to exploit them. As various economists have pointed out, although high-yielding varieties were promoted on grounds of profitability, whether or not a profit in fact arises obviously depends not just upon yield but upon input costs and commodity prices. As a result, despite their very high yields, the new rice varieties often did not generate a profit (Herdt 1987, 1997; cf. Janzen 1973). Thus it would seem the GR’s breeders had forgotten an elementary point made two centuries ago: that the aim of ‘scientific’ agriculture in a capitalist society is to maximise profit rather than production.