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The Green Evolution that preceded the Green Revolution

ResearchBlogging.org The standard litany against the Green Revolution is that it failed to banish hunger because the technologies it ushered in were no use to small peasant farmers. Farmers with access to cash and good land did well, but poorer farmers on marginal land got nothing out of the revolution, and if they did somehow buy into it (subsidies, handouts) they were worse off afterwards. That’s not to deny that the Green Revolution increased yields, especially of wheat and rice. Just to say that it did nothing for most smallholders.

A wonderful paper by Jonathan Harwood, in Agricultural History, demonstrates that this wasn’t always so. 1 In the early days of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, starting in the 1940s, the target was “resource-poor farmers who could not afford to purchase new seed annually”. The MAP’s advisors put improving cultivation practices at the top of their list, with better varieties second. And the improved varieties were to come from “introduction, selection or breeding”.

Accordingly, the MAP initially devoted considerable effort to testing existing Mexican varieties of maize to identify the best one for each locality. Simply by redistributing these to the most suitable locality, one advisor recommended, the quality of maize cultivation could be improved quickly without having to wait years for the development of new varieties. This approach was richly rewarded when it was discovered that yield in some regions could be increased by 20 to 30 percent by introducing a variety native to another region.

The MAP was pragmatic and focussed on farmer needs in other ways too. Breeding was based on synthetic varieties rather than F1 hybrids, which could take a decade or more to deliver. The first of these improved varieties yielded about 30% more than the benchmark variety.

So what changed? Harwood identifies an overall shift in the relationship between the MAP and its host government in Mexico, in particular over the role of extension. At first, the Rockefeller Foundation’s advisors were convinced that extension was the most important activity for them. As Harwood writes:

This initial emphasis upon extension is significant because it reflected the advisors’ concern to reach small farmers. Large farmers, in Mexico as elsewhere, were much better placed to look after themselves. Unlike their smaller brethren, they could afford to take risks with new methods and had the capital to invest in them; many were thus keen to cooperate with the MAP by offering land for field trials and adopting new varieties. But to disseminate the requisite knowledge to small farmers required a functional extension service, which Mexico did not yet have. The existing service … was totally unsatisfactory. Since its staff had no means of transportation, they never came into direct contact with farmers and were thus reduced to distributing leaflets and answering letters. Given low levels of literacy among peasants, this was not a viable way of reaching the vast majority of farmers. Nor was the MAP ever likely to have either the resources or the manpower to take on such a huge job itself.

The Mexican Government, despite advice to improve extension, preferred to support large landowners rather than peasant farmers. And it was, of course, the large landowners (and business in general), who supported the Mexican government. The strange part is that while the MAP publicly said its goal was to alleviate poverty, in private its officers had additional motivations. Harwood quotes a 1951 Rockefeller Foundation note:

Communism makes attractive promises to underfed peoples; democracy must not only promise as much, but must deliver more. … [U]nderprivileged people attribute their present plight to the domination of the capitalist colonial system. … In this struggle for the minds of men the side that best helps satisfy man’s primary needs for food, clothing and shelter is likely to win. … Appropriate action now may help [people of developing nations] to attain by evolution the improvements, including those in agriculture, which otherwise may have to come by revolution.

And so the plant breeders formented their own revolution, instead of continuing to help peasant farmers evolve. MAP staff began to concentrate on problems they could solve, rather than problems that needed solving. The Mexican government wanted exports, to fund industrialization. MAP scientists turned their attention to wheat, and in just ten years Mexico’s output of wheat had trebled and by 1958 the country was indeed exporting wheat.

Are there lessons here for today? Extension continues to be neglected by countries and donors alike, and many breeders do their best to improve yields while remaining outside the economic and political arenas where the battles to end hunger must be fought. Complex problems require complex solutions. It would be nice to think that rather than new Green Revolutions, today’s moving spirits might eventually return to their roots and seek Green Evolutions again.

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Another critically endangered crop wild relative

Like London busses in days of old, the IUCN’s endangered species doodad is featuring another crop wild relative just days after the previous one. This time it is Ramosmania rodriguesii, a somewhat distant relative of coffee, at one time reduced to a single tree on the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues.

RBG Kew has been propagating the plant, and has this to say about its uses:

Locals on Rodrigues believe that a tea made from the leaves of café marron is an invigorating drink that can treat venereal diseases and hangovers, although this has not been scientifically proven. An even more fanciful story is the ability of café marron to prevent children from having nightmares, but only if the child’s cuddly toy is thrown at the plant!

Café marron clearly hasn’t had much opportunity to contribute to coffee breeding programmes — it only set its first seed after being brought into captivity in 2003 — but you never know.

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The Viking in the wheat field on the radio

Alerted by a colleague I listened to a little bit of a long radio programme featuring Susan Dworkin, author of The Viking in the Wheat Field, and assorted luminaries. The Viking in question was Sir Bent Skovmand, a plant breeder extraordinaire, and what I heard of the programme indicated that there is still profound ignorance out there about plant breeding, about agriculture, about genebanks, about GMOs, about the Global Crop Diversity Trust, about just about everything.

Of course, I have no idea what to do about any of that (other than to keep plugging away). I did like one metaphor that Per Pinstrup Anderson, former director general of IFPRI used when asked about the “problem of hunger”. Imagine yourself in a room of seventy people, he said. Ten of those won’t have enough to eat today. That’s pretty good. To which I’d add that another 10 are obese or overweight. And 20 suffer the hidden hunger of missing micronutrients.

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Seed systems and survival

Two recent documents address seed systems in sub-Saharan Africa. One, from the Drylands Coordination Group in Norway looks at the relevance of the informal seed sector to farmers in southern Tigray, Ethiopia, using the famine of 1984 as a boundary across which to compare results. It’s a complex story that would repay study by someone expert in the subject matter, but this is striking:

Five cultivars of sorghum, one cultivar of tef and four cultivars of maize have been lost and others are on the verge of being lost from the farming system of the area. Early maturing sorghum cultivars from the informal seed are gaining upper hand and have already replaced the old but late maturing types.

It is tempting to see those changes as a response to changing weather patterns, and the study recommends research to make older varieties “as productive as they used to be”.

In Zambia, Danielle Nierenberg reports on her blog, the aid charity CARE is fostering a business-like approach to increasing the production of staple crops.

One way they’re doing this is by creating a network of agro-dealers who can sell inputs to their neighbors as well as educate them about how to use hybrid seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs. At the same time, “we are mindful” of the benefits of local varieties of seeds, says Harry Ngoma, Agriculture Advisor for the Consortium for Food Security, Agriculture and Nutrition, AIDS, Resiliency and Markets (C-FAARM).

Right on, Harry! Sounds very like the approach being promoted by AGRA in its pursuit of an African green revolution. And CARE is also promoting indigenous crops such as sorghum to complement Zambia’s appetite for maize. But is there a danger that this network of agro-dealers will be promoting the inputs that make them the most profit? There must be a way of tying rewards for advice to the practical outcome of following that advice.