Since 1971, international aid for agricultural research has been shaped by an unusual and ambitious partnership: an organization founded as an ad hoc consortium of national governments, foreign aid offices, philanthropies, United Nations agencies, and international financial institutions that is known today as CGIAR. At its founding, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research was tasked with fostering scientific research that would help “developing nations … increase and improve the quality of their agricultural output.” Representative of an era of broad multilateral cooperation, and reliant on complex international funding networks, CGIAR assumed the profoundly localized mission of reshaping farmers and fields across diverse cultural, economic, and environmental contexts. The tensions arising as researchers and institutions navigated the demands and expectations of these distinct scales form the crux of CGIAR history. They have affected the changing disciplinary orientations of research centers, the ecologies prioritized in breeding, the expectations for intellectual property management, and even the words used to describe crops.

What counts as a significant innovation in human history, and what might we identify beyond the topics included in this book? In our concept of progress are we too influenced by the sense of our own era as the culmination of history, and can we avoid a presentist bias?

Before the taming of horses, human lives and activities were limited by the speed of walking or boats, and without the wheeled vehicle transport of goods was restricted to human strength. All this would change when humans had finally established control of the horse, breeding, training and using this unique species, and in due course attaching it to haul chariot, cart and wagon.

Just a century separates the practical origins of radio transmission in 1895 and the first smartphone in 1997: a century which saw the rapid extensions of experimentation into widespread applications. The wireless revolution would transform almost every aspect of human interaction and society, from finance and business to political propaganda and the control of crime. Communication ceased to be a matter of space, and wireless communication was a revolution with as important transformative impact as any in history.

Historically, the use of legal frameworks to claim proprietary rights in the products of agricultural science was limited to the private sector. Public institutions, including CGIAR, treated their creations as the common heritage of humankind. Scientific, economic, and legal changes unsettled this public–private balance in the 1980s, provoking a reimagination of the role of intellectual property in research and development. Three distinct theories about how CGIAR should respond to the global expansion of intellectual property in agriculture emerged. Maximalists embraced proprietary legal claims, adaptationists advocated for cautious accommodation, and rejectionists viewed intellectual property as ancillary to the CGIAR mission. This chapter traces the history of intellectual property debates within CGIAR from 1990 to 2020, arguing that over time, the adaptationist approach prevailed as institutional governance structures developed. Although current policies permit each CGIAR center to embrace rejectionism or maximalism to a certain extent, the rejectionist theory has been marginalized at the system level, while a global capitalist approach to agricultural science has taken root.

The ability to create, manage and transport fire transformed dark into light, cold into warmth, formed a focus for the camps of hunter-gatherer groups and allowed management of landscapes to encourage browsing animals, while cooking expanded available foodstuffs and provided more energy for the brain. The taming of fire brought dramatic and long-lasting changes to human society, with immense impacts on personal, social and economic life.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is widely regarded as a global center of excellence for livestock-related development research. This chapter questions the notion of excellence by tracing the history of ILRI back to its conception as two separate centers: the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases (ILRAD) and the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA). It examines why ILRAD and ILCA were established as two distinct research centers and explores the impact this had on the conceptualization of human–livestock relationships, livestock diseases, and research excellence by CGIAR in sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter also presents two contemporary case studies – one examining the development of transgenic, trypanosome-resistant cattle, and the other exploring the establishment of CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) and their impact on agricultural research for development – to show the ways in which ILRI’s unique history continues to shape and affect its current projects. The chapter emphasizes the importance of recognizing the ways in which excellence is conceptualized and reflecting on the implications this has for research and development.

Central America was a “hot spot” in the Cold War, constituting a strategic zone for US campaigns against communism from the 1960s to the 1980s. During the same period, the region was also a “hot spot” due to the critical nutritional situation of its poorest populations. Informed by the idea of a “protein gap,” international organizations and scientific institutions carried out field investigations and nutritional surveys to identify dietary deficiencies, their causes, and possible solutions. This chapter explores the role that bean varietal improvement played in this situation of war and nutritional crisis, and the political and social conditions under which bean research took shape. It describes the research programs that the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) promoted in Latin America through the 1980s and Central American countries’ participation in these. It reviews the bean program established by CIAT in Latin America and Africa and a regional program created specifically for Central America and the Caribbean. It then interprets the evolution of these programs in the context of civil war and economic crisis in Central America between 1970 and 1990.

The circulation of data ranked high among the objectives adopted by CGIAR at its founding in 1971. This chapter considers how agricultural experts attempted to realize a desired “full exchange of information” among scientists working at geographically distant sites, in different languages and cultural contexts, with different organisms and research interests from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The chapter focuses on the historical development of “crop descriptors,” today defined as providing an “international format and a universally understood language for plant genetic resources data.” Developers of descriptors aspire to agree on traits and terms that will allow users from diverse institutions and backgrounds to contribute to and extract information from an integrated data infrastructure. The chapter examines crop descriptors as a critical component of CGIAR’s earliest efforts to create “system-wide” research tools and agendas, emphasizing the scientific and political agendas that shaped this top-down systematizing work, finding that it provided an opportunity for CGIAR to instantiate and consolidate its central position in a web of international development initiatives.