In the summer of 2012, armed gangs began raiding the headquarters of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Tal Hadya, Syria, stealing vehicles, computers, and other equipment at night. Within a few months, ICARDA’s field trials were abandoned and the experiment station dismantled. In November, a video uploaded to YouTube showed a group of armed men in front of ICARDA’s vacant headquarters, declaring the institution a fallen bastion of Bashar al-Assad.Footnote ¹ An international research organization applauded for its advances in the interest of struggling farmers was recast as an instrument of oppression and corruption. In the following years, the facility remained occupied by the anti-Assad groups al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. By November, ICARDA had relocated operations to Amman, Tunis, and Beirut. The seizure, evacuation, and uncertain symbolism of ICARDA, however marginal to the story of the Syrian civil war, was a stark reminder of the embeddedness of international public organizations in nation-states, and of the sometimes fraught relationship of international research to global geopolitics.

This chapter explains how ICARDA came to be located in Syria by examining the broader geopolitical logic of international agricultural research. Ironically, Beirut had been the intended site of ICARDA’s headquarters in the early 1970s, but planners deemed Lebanon’s political situation too volatile as the country erupted into war in 1975. Ultimately ICARDA, then the newest of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centers, took root thirty-two kilometers from Aleppo in the village of Tal Hadya. Its mandate was to improve the livelihoods of resource-poor farmers in dry areas through research, working within national agricultural research systems and directly with farmers. Over the next thirty years, ICARDA became a research hub and home to a major international gene bankFootnote ² (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 A view of ICARDA’s facilities in Tal Hadya, Syria, 2007.

Photo by Global Crop Diversity Trust/Cary Fowler. By permission of Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the concomitant restructuring of a patchwork of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. In the aftermath of World War II and European withdrawal from formal governance, newly independent nation-states became battlegrounds of the Cold War. The southern rim of Asia, which provided a buffer to the Soviet Union, became a focus of US strategies of containment from the 1950s. Scholars have attended to the global movement of soldiers, arms, and aid that fueled Cold War conflict in the “killing fields” of the Asian rim.Footnote ³ They have paid less attention to the ways in which the institutional development of international research organizations served Cold War objectives.Footnote ⁴ The founding of ICARDA was part and parcel of the American effort to domesticate Western Asia and North Africa according to the geopolitical terms of the Cold War, bringing Syria from the sphere of Soviet influence and into the American one. Designated the “Middle East and North Africa” (MENA), the region ultimately became synonymous with the extraction of oil resources.Footnote ⁵

The framing of ICARDA in relation to the postwar MENA region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Under the charge of CGIAR, agronomists characterized these regions in the vocabulary of ecology, establishing them as a terrain for “dryland” agricultural science.Footnote ⁶ Planners, drawing on climatic models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But this rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. The remainder of this chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of how dryland agricultural science became the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.

Imperial Prehistories of International Agricultural Research

Orientalism suffused the disciplines of environmental science as they developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the historian Diana Davis has noted, “hiding power relations in specific forms of knowledge production.”Footnote ⁷ Europeans invoked biblical rhetoric to portray the dry lands of the Near East and North Africa as barren, desolate places of trial and suffering, in need of imperial intervention to reverse centuries of deforestation and desertification. European observers attributed environmental conditions to human degradation of the natural environment. In fact, the extent of both deforestation and desertification were exaggerated and often misrepresented a regional history of coping with the high temperatures and low rainfalls. As a region, Western Asia and North Africa can be characterized by thousands of years of sophisticated water control systems and agricultural practices adjusted to the natural environment.Footnote ⁸

Europeans reiterated myths of environmental degradation to justify imperial projects. Across the region, narratives of overgrazing and excessive irrigation facilitated imperial goals of improvement and resource management. In Algeria, the French rendered themselves the heirs of Rome, there to restore a deteriorated environment to its rightful state.Footnote ⁹ In Egypt, British colonizers saw land that needed to be made productive and irrigated for cotton production in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Meanwhile the French invested heavily in the Eastern Mediterranean, including the port of Beirut, railroads, and industry in the coastal region.Footnote ¹¹

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire further emboldened orientalist and biblically inflected interpretations of the landscape. In Palestine, the British justified control of Bedouin populations with a mandate to counter deforestation and blamed environmental deterioration on Arab land use and Ottoman mismanagement. Reforestation projects, and the broader commitment to “make the desert bloom,” motivated early Zionists in the same region.Footnote ¹² International wheat-breeding initiatives and a focus on Palestine as a site of domestication helped remake drylands as targets of colonization.Footnote ¹³ Iraq, in turn, figured as a battered and degraded Babylonia, waiting to be restored to its former glory as a cradle of civilization.Footnote ¹⁴

Syria’s construction as a modern nation-state was the collateral damage of World War I, as European powers jockeyed for control of the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. British and French designs led to an array of shoddy plans to divide the region into spheres of influence, ultimately resulting in the interwar ordering that placed Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Egypt, and the Gulf within a British zone of influence, and Syria (including present-day Lebanon) within a French zone of influence. The mandate system established by the League of Nations in 1922 placed Palestine under British control and Syria under French control. These agreements, which fragmented traditional trade networks and cultural continuities, were accompanied by often disingenuous gestures towards Arab independence. The British and French “mandate” was a fig leaf for renewed imperial designs in a moment of political and economic disarray. Ostensibly installed to usher their charges into a new era of self-government, neither the British nor the French had any interest in stewarding national independence.Footnote ¹⁵

Ultimately, the modern nation-states of Syria and Lebanon were carved from the broader region stretching from the north of the Arabian desert through contemporary Israel–Palestine and Lebanon to the Tigris–Euphrates river system. The area, alternately christened Suri (old Babylonian), the Levant (Italian traders), and Bilad al-Sham (the “country of Damascus”), comprises the lands of the so-called “Fertile Crescent”: a term coined on the eve of World War I to describe the birthplace of agriculture in Western Asia. Amid a concerted policy of fragmentation, the French made sluggish and inconsistent gestures towards Syrian independence. This flip-flop exacerbated tensions between various groups who aspired to government and who expressed markedly different visions for Syria’s future as a nation-state. In 1946, the French, hobbled by war, formally withdrew from Syria, leaving a nation-state mauled by European invasion and mismanagement. Lebanon, too, emerged as an independent state with borders that had been drawn by the French mandatory government.

In the wake of World War II, as Britain and France ceded their spheres of influence in the former Ottoman Empire, the MENA region emerged as a theater of conflict between the USSR and the United States. The United States regarded the MENA region primarily as an oil-producing zone, with a handful of independent nation-states supplying newly insatiable Western European and American appetites. In 1956, fearing a loss of access to oil reserves in the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of the region, the United States repudiated a secretive British-Franco-Israeli invasion to reverse Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. In the wake of the Suez crisis, the United States entered a perceived vacuum of power in the Middle East, courting new governments as building blocks in its nascent strategy to contain global communist influence. As Nikita Khrushchev made overtures to support Arab states against lingering British colonialism and contain Israeli influence, the United States, under the direction of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, promised aid to any country requiring assistance to thwart communist infiltration. Anti-communism provided the conceptual language through which Americans framed their interest in the region. In practice, the Eisenhower Doctrine led the United States into successive machinations and interventions to impede Soviet influence and stave off pan-Arab realignment.Footnote ¹⁶ Syria and Lebanon found themselves tangled in these superpower rivalries, which in turn complicated regional relationships.

In the background, diplomats and their technical advisors reframed the region as the terrain of international development. Depictions of Western Asia and North Africa as degraded and in need of restoration continued during the postwar period, with little reference to the role of European invasion in their de-development. These characterizations, sketched by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other foreign assistance agencies, were shored up by novel social and economic theories. Modernization theorists such as Walt Whitman Rostow posited that all civilizations proceeded through one path of development and looked, at the end, eerily like the United States. In this reading, agriculture was a pit stop between nomadism and industrialization in the progress of civilizations.Footnote ¹⁷ The need to restore land could justify a wide range of interventions, from agricultural and economic reforms to sedentarization and military force. Nor were these arguments the sole province of colonizers. As Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s leadership would demonstrate, these same reforming projects could be reclaimed for nationalistic ends.Footnote ¹⁸ Nasser’s land reclamation projects were of a piece with his nationalization of the Suez Canal, and he played American and Soviet interests against one another.

Superpower rivalry and regional competition over the future of Arab nationalism exerted further pressure on Syria’s weak and dysfunctional government. In this climate, and amid successive coups, the secular, socialist Ba’ath Party took power in March 1963, with a slogan of “freedom, unity and socialism.” Within the party, traditionally marginalized minorities such as Alawite and Druze had entered positions of power, to the resentment of the Sunni majority. Two such figures were Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, who would jockey for power within the Ba’ath Party. In 1970, following the disastrous 1967 Arab–Israeli war, Assad, then minister of defense, wrested power from Jadid. Assad’s seizure of power was an outcome of long rivalry between an urban mercantile class dominated by Sunni Muslims, French, Islamists, and fascists, and a younger generation of Marxists (soon to form the Ba’ath Party) who rejected accommodations to imperial rule. As Assad faced growing isolation within the Middle East, global recession, and persistent sectarian and economic division within Syrian society, pragmatism over idealism was to be his governing strategy.Footnote ¹⁹

The rivalries that brought Assad to power superimposed a deep divide between urban and rural Syria. Prior to World War I, the southerly city of Damascus had been linked to Beirut, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, all of which fell within the British zone of influence. Meanwhile, Aleppo, in the north, shared with its Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish neighbors an orientation towards Central Asia along the path of the Silk Road, as well as to the Iraqi city of Mosul. Modern-day Syria is made up of semi-arid and arid land (the Syrian desert), along with a narrow coastal plain on the Mediterranean Sea. Populous urban centers constitute a vertical line from north to south, linking Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus. Syria’s agricultural sector consisted of cotton, wheat, barley, sugar beet, and olive production. Rainfed agriculture predominated, as it does to this day. The gulf in wealth between the cities of the west and the rural land to the east contributed to longstanding tensions in Syrian society, compounded by the balkanization of historical trade routes to constitute French and British spheres of influence.

The CGIAR network came into being as Assad seized power; legacies of empire, Cold War development, and Arab nationalisms shaped its agenda. Withdrawing from formal empire, Europe and the United States competed to be the dominant exporters of food, then of agricultural inputs, based on a model of input-intensive industrial agriculture. As several contributors to this volume chart, the 1950s and 1960s saw the export of high-yielding seeds and agricultural methods, attributed to American agronomists and celebrated as the Green Revolution (see Prakash Kumar, Chapter 2, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Chapter 4, this volume). Aiming to build on the alleged successes of the Green Revolution, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) supported programs of agricultural modernization and the free exchange of germplasm between countries for the use of breeders. By the 1970s, decolonized lands were the sites of modernization projects premised on genetically uniform, high-yielding monocultures and the prospective hosts of CGIAR centers for research on food security, rural poverty, and sustainable development. It fell to CGIAR’s technical advisors to justify their designs.

At the inaugural meeting of its scientific advisory body, the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), in November 1971, the FAO director general and Dutch agronomist Addeke Hendrik Boerma applauded the “new international approach to agriculture” for its promise to build on Green Revolution successes in “other regions of the world maintained on a global basis.”Footnote ²⁰ On behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), Director of Development Services Richard Demuth envisioned an application of the model “developed by the international cereals institutions” to other crops and livestock.Footnote ²¹ Focused initially on the increased production of cereal crops in the “Third World,” the TAC attended to regions not yet served by CGIAR’s four established research centers. After a series of TAC, working group, subcommittee, and donor meetings, ICARDA was established, with the Canada-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC) as executing agency. In January 1977, ICARDA assumed operations to pursue research into the agricultural systems of the MENA region. The technocratic process through which the center was founded and administered obscured the extent to which the war on hunger in which CGIAR centers participated was an aspect of an anti-communist project. Its architects and technical advisors linked the perceived successes of the Green Revolution to a vision of international development that would make Asia and North Africa after a Western European and American image.

Classification of Dry Areas

In institutional terms, the CGIAR TAC’s recommendations determined the site and remit of ICARDA. As it mapped priority areas onto the world, the committee flagged the semi-arid and arid regions of the Near East and North Africa as “a major research problem which had not yet received adequate study.”Footnote ²² It anticipated that a single center could not address the diversity of conditions of the region but nevertheless speculated that centralized research could accelerate agricultural development in low-rainfall areas.Footnote ²³ By identifying low rainfall as the primary source of low agricultural productivity in the region, the committee incidentally disregarded institutional and political conditions, including colonial and postcolonial fragmentations of landholding and technocratic projects to exert greater control over agricultural resources.Footnote ²⁴

Although the TAC flagged the MENA region as understudied, the region was already populated by international organizations. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) had outreach programs there, as well as links with the FAO Near East Wheat and Barley Program. The Ford Foundation–funded Arid Land Agricultural Development program (ALAD) operated in the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon. Meanwhile, FAO was in the midst of a survey of existing research organizations in the Near East. As the TAC planned an exploratory mission, observers noted an upcoming meeting in New York attended by FAO, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), USAID, and Ford and Rockefeller Foundation representatives to discuss “responsibilities and means of improving collaboration” among organizations pursuing agricultural projects in the region.Footnote ²⁵ All of these activities marked the longer history of Euro-American involvement in the MENA region, and the persistent interest in its development.

To evaluate the research needs and priorities, the TAC commissioned a team led by Professor Dunstan Skilbeck of Wye School of Agriculture, University of London to visit countries in the MENA region in spring 1973.Footnote ²⁶ The Skilbeck Committee, reporting in June 1973, recommended the establishment of a new center, internationally supported and multidisciplinary in approach, to serve the needs of the region. It recommended that the center assume global responsibility for select staple crops, including barley and durum wheat, and that it take a holistic approach to the needs of farmers on arid lands.Footnote ²⁷

The Skilbeck mission’s report designated the region as a coherent one for reasons that were equal parts environmental and political. While the Near East and North Africa shared some problems of development with other regions, it also had a unique “agricultural environment and consequent research needs” arising “partly from its geographical location and partly from its long and sometimes turbulent history.”Footnote ²⁸ Moreover, these conditions were ones of degradation and marginality with social and cultural roots:

The committee attributed low yields, even in irrigated areas, to “social and structural rigidities and the persistence of traditional cultural practices.”Footnote ³⁰ The vague reference to Ottoman institutions and folkways omitted a more granular discussion of French and British interventions to restructure local landholdings and productivity.Footnote ³¹ Instead, the committee leapfrogged over recent colonial and postcolonial history to assert that population growth and urbanization exerted further pressure on resources. In the face of growing deficits, attempts to expand cultivation intensified conflicts between farmers and pastoralists shepherding sheep and goats.Footnote ³²

The region’s agro-ecology defied reduction to climate classifications, combining a Mediterranean climate zone with harsh, arid conditions and searingly hot summers. While the majority of the target region, apart from Sudan and the southern Arabian peninsula, was within a Mediterranean climate zone characterized by rainfall in the winter and early spring, its environment was harsh and arid rather than temperate, marked by severe winters and unreliable precipitation.Footnote ³³ The designation of a Mediterranean climate zone misrepresented agro-climatic conditions. In spite of this climatic diversity, there were many common features of the countries surveyed: chiefly, “searing summer temperatures” with low precipitation, making irrigation “pre-requisite for the production of most summer crops.”Footnote ³⁴ In the view of the committee, these common conditions should be made into a single culture of production: that is, “the ecological complementarities between zones of different production potential must be translated into production complementarities if the overall productive capacity of the region’s agriculture is to be mobilized to meet its socio-economic goals.”Footnote ³⁵ This oblique analogy of production and ecology omitted a discussion of politics in structuring production, including the historical roots of inefficiencies and the capacity of states, land legislation, or specific configurations of land tenure to manage access to resources.

The struggle to name the center signaled a mismatch between the political and ecological orderings of the landscape. In its November 1973 meeting, the TAC adopted the working title International Center for Research in Arid Lands.Footnote ³⁶ It was a short-lived designation. In successive meetings, members of both the Skilbeck mission and the TAC Working Group on the Research Needs of the Near East and North Africa, which was appointed to review the mission’s findings, objected to the inclusion of the terms “Arid Lands” or “Arid Zone” in the title. On the one hand, it portended conflict or redundancy with CGIAR’s International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which had been founded the year prior to address the requirements of arid lands in the tropics (see discussion in the chapters by Prakash Kumar, Chapter 2, and Lucas M. Mueller, Chapter 5, this volume), as well as the Institute for Arid Zones in New Delhi managed by the Indian government. Moreover, many contended that the designation “arid” was “inaccurate as applied to the agro-ecological areas under consideration,” inasmuch as these areas encompassed a diverse range of climate conditions in the Mediterranean. While some suggested the inclusion of “Mediterranean” in the title, others objected that parts of the region were outside the Mediterranean climate zone and that such a designation applied a “narrowly regional connotation to a centre whose work might have much wider application.” The committee eventually accepted the term “dry areas” as the “most descriptive of the probable focus of the centre’s work,” and the title “International Research Centre for Agriculture in Dry Areas” was suggested.Footnote ³⁷

Although the TAC had noted that a single center could not address the diversity of ecological conditions in the region, the Skilbeck mission nevertheless reiterated the TAC’s preference for a centralized organization to address major problems in low-rainfall areas. Following the Skilbeck mission, the TAC appointed a subcommittee to make recommendations for the location and staffing of the prospective center. The subcommittee sought “proximity to a broadly representative range of ecological conditions.”Footnote ³⁸

Since it defined water as the limiting factor of agricultural production in the region, it elected to prioritize climate in choosing a site. Its agro-ecological mapping borrowed the Troll climate classification, which had also been used in the mission that established the parameters for ICRISAT.Footnote ³⁹ Carl Troll and Karlheinz Paffen’s 1965 classification of the “Seasonal Climates of the Earth” (Figure 1.2) divided tropical climates by the number of humid months, where humid months were defined as those in which mean rainfall exceeded potential evapotranspiration.Footnote ⁴⁰ The tropics of South America and Africa provided the reference point for the model.

Figure 1.2 Detail of Troll and Paffen’s “Seasonal Climates of the Earth.” C. Troll, “Karte der Jahreszeitenklimate der Erde, mit einer farbigen Karte von C. Troll und K. H. Paffen,” Erdkunde 18 (1964): 5–28.

By permission of Erdkunde.

The Troll classification imperfectly represented the broad range of climate conditions in the MENA region. These included tropical dry climates with 2 to 4.5 humid months (in summer) and tropical dry climates with 2 to 4.5 humid months (in winter). The zones included a narrow strip of true Mediterranean climate and the semi-arid zone, and constituted “a certain degree of uniformity over the bulk of the area defined under this classification, which stretched from Afghanistan to Morocco.”Footnote ⁴¹ In a quinquennial review of ICARDA, conducted by the TAC in 1984, the review panel found the division by altitude oversimplified, preferring distinctions which had relevance for crops and livestock: for example, between areas suitable for autumn sowing of wheat versus those with winter and spring plantings, or between those areas where livestock could graze in winter and those where they must be protected and fed.Footnote ⁴² ICRISAT agro-climatologists, too, later disputed the applicability of the Troll classification to the climate of India, framed as it was in relation to the tropics of Africa and the Americas.Footnote ⁴³

However imprecise, the very capaciousness of the Troll classification recommended it as an umbrella for the broad range of climate conditions in Western Asia and North Africa. ICARDA would ultimately address agricultural practices in littoral areas at altitudes of up to 1,000 meters, which had a Mediterranean climate of cool, moist winters and hot, dry summers, as well as areas with altitudes of 1,000 to 2,000 meters, which had extreme winter cold and summer heat and snow cover for up to five months of each year. The precipitation of the latter ranged from 200 to 600 mm rainfall equivalent per year. As the quinquennial review committee later described, ICARDA’s work involved a “spectrum of environments,” including the “warm winter littorals of North Africa, the medium altitude environments, such as the Algerian steppe, Syria and Iraq, and the true high altitude highlands of Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In the absence of agro-ecological uniformity, the subcommittee charged with recommending a location for the new center asserted that political criteria were likely to outweigh ecological ones, although the exact nature of the former remained unspecified. The subcommittee identified “no single country in which an International Research Centre would be able to conduct a programme representative of the entire range of climate, soil, and resultant agricultural usage in the Near East and North Africa.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Since multiple substations were bound to be required for coverage, the subcommittee concluded that no “technical evaluation [would] produce a more definitive answer.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Rather, the decision was likely to be made according to “other criteria involving political, ethnical and other factors; external accessibility; working and living conditions; local availability of research infrastructures, and facilities such as universities; and the adequacy of land and water resources to support a major station.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The Skilbeck report had also readily acknowledged that site selection for the center was likely to be made for reasons other than environmental ones, but these reasons went largely unnamed. There were exceptions, as when Z. H. K. Bigirwenkya, secretary general, East African community, suggested to the acting regional vice president of Europe, Middle East, and North Africa for IBRD that “assuming that there are no scientific reasons to the contrary, establishing the center in Iran could facilitate tapping of the oil financial resources to benefit all the three states [Algeria, Lebanon, and Iran].”Footnote ⁴⁸ That financial interests, and the region’s identification with oil resources, were not routinely named does not indicate their absence. On the contrary, the effort to fund ICARDA accompanied multiple overtures to Iran to join CGIAR as a member state. For some time, Abdul Majid Majidi, minister of plan and budget in Iran, expressed Iran’s interest conditional to its designation as headquarters for ICARDA.Footnote ⁴⁹ A number of donors also expressed the conditionality of their funds based on contributions from oil-rich states.Footnote ⁵⁰ CGIAR also made overtures to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to join as donor members during site visits in search of a host country for ICARDA.Footnote ⁵¹ The financial underpinnings of international agricultural research and its geopolitical constitution were a matter of ongoing discussion, and this was especially the case in the context of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) crisis of 1973.

The subcommittee tasked with siting the new center nevertheless proceeded through prospective locations by process of elimination, presenting its recommendations “excluding political considerations, except for an assumption that the headquarters should be in an Arab country.”Footnote ⁵² Iraq was eliminated because Kurdistan, which had the best ecological profile, was comparatively inaccessible. Iran and Turkey were eliminated because they were not Arab countries. The subcommittee saw merit in an Algerian or Tunisian location, but in the subsequent discussion regarded the Maghreb as a secondary research area to the Near East. Syria, like Tunisia, did not possess the full range of climate conditions, but it did have representative soils and both irrigated and rainfed agriculture. Aleppo provided a good site with a strong university and was home to Ford Foundation–funded development. Damascus boasted a new Arab League–funded center that planned to research agriculture in arid lands.Footnote ⁵³ Although air access was poor, Beirut was a five-hour drive from Damascus. Lebanon had far and away the easiest access, living conditions, facilities, schooling, and university system, as well as a cooperative government interested in hosting a center. Many governments were amenable to hosting an international center, but established relations of European and American organizations with the Lebanese government made its availability apparent from the outset. However, Lebanon was considerably smaller, lacked irrigated land, and only represented a certain range of growing conditions. None of the options considered, with the possible exceptions of Iran and Algeria, had conditions ecologically representative of the entire region, largely because of the absence of cold plateau areas. Ultimately the subcommittee offered as recommendations several groupings of headquarters and substations in Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Turkey, and Iran.

Although the subcommittee ranked Algeria first among options for headquarters, the working group chose Lebanon.Footnote ⁵⁴ Located in the most prosperous region of early twentieth-century greater Syria on the Eastern Mediterranean, Lebanon’s independence had been recognized with the removal of the last French troops in 1946. Dominated by a Christian Maronite government, the country was an ally of the United States, and among the most diverse and prosperous of the new nation-states of the Middle East. By the early 1970s, Beirut had become a destination for tourists, banks, and diplomats.Footnote ⁵⁵ It prevailed as a choice of headquarters largely because of the maturity of existing research networks and ease of living, including issues of staffing, communication, and international transportation. ALAD had a station in Lebanon’s Beka’a valley; ICARDA would take over the station’s operations. The committee recognized “that conditions in the valley, although offering a fairly wide range of elevation and rainfall (from 200 to 600 mm), were not typical of the area, particularly with regard to rainfed farming systems and cropping patterns.” Therefore, it determined to establish a subsidiary site, probably near Aleppo, Syria, where land was abundant and the agro-ecological conditions were more typical of the region as a whole.Footnote ⁵⁶ The committee also emphasized the need for a station to address the conditions of winter rainfall and snowy areas typical of mountainous Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan, with Iran as a prime candidate due to its robust research network, abundant capital, and a government amenable to cooperation.

Between Beirut and Aleppo

So it was that ICARDA was planned in 1974 as a tripartite center, with its headquarters in Beirut, a main station in Lebanon’s Beka’a valley, a substation for low-altitude research in Aleppo, Syria, and a substation for high-altitude research in Tekmeh Dash (Tabriz) in northwest Iran – and a possible third substation in the Maghreb. However, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 summarily terminated CGIAR plans to establish a substation of ICARDA in Iran and scuttled plans to bring the country to CGIAR as a member state.Footnote ⁵⁷ Plans to locate in Lebanon, too, would run aground, leaving only two small stations at Terbol and Kfardane in the Beka’a Valley.

Beirut’s prosperity and diversity concealed the extent of rural poverty and the fragility of its representative government. On the basis of decades-old census data, the form of government granted Maronite Christians a permanent majority over Sunni Muslims. Territorial redistribution during the French mandate period had added large Muslim and Druze populations to the Maronite Christian communities on the coast, but the latter continued to enjoy the greatest political and economic power. The persistent privilege of Maronite Christians sowed discontent that ultimately undermined the fledgling nation’s stability. Tensions had already once boiled over into civil war in 1958, leading the United States to intervene on behalf of the standing government. The move had deepened the alliance between the two countries, contributing to its large community of European and American foreign service personnel and its advancement as a likely base for an international research organization in 1974.

In 1975, the country plunged again into civil war. Jordan’s expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from its borders in 1970 hastened its relocation to Lebanon. Lebanon’s 100,000 Palestinian refugees tipped the country’s demographic balance, lending credence to claims that new census data would require a new representative government acknowledging a Muslim majority. Commitments to Palestinian liberation and pan-Arab nationalism more broadly threatened to destabilize the Maronite Christian government and remake the political landscape of the Middle East. Closer to home, tensions with the PLO demonstrated the weakness of governments assembled according to European imperial designs. In 1975, Maronite and Palestinian forces clashed. Leftist and pan-Arabist groups joined the Palestinians. The commercial heart of Beirut near the port was destroyed within months as the country descended into sectarian violence. The PLO came to patrol the “Green Line,” a buffer zone between the Muslim West and the Christian East. Syria, which entered the conflict to check the growing power of the PLO, emerged as a guarantor of security in Lebanon.

Lebanon had become a failed state and a symbol of sectarian violence in the postcolonial world. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 only reinforced Western fears of sectarianism and religious fundamentalism. By comparison, Ba’athist Syria, a secular regime with progressive aspirations, appeared to move away from its Marxist origins in the direction of accommodation to international capital. With Arab unity as its guiding principle, Ba’ath leadership had initially rejected the existence of Israel as a Western puppet and paid lip service to the Palestinian Arab cause as married to its own. This doctrinaire foreign policy concealed rivalries within the Ba’ath party between the older urban elite and the younger rural population, who had been empowered by their military training to rise through the ranks of the party. Hafez al-Assad’s seizure of power in an intra-Ba’athist coup ushered in a retrenchment away from radical foreign policy predicated on anti-imperial, anti-Western, pro-Palestinian, and pan-Arab nationalist ideology. His pragmatism ultimately translated into a more moderate foreign policy. Rather than throw Syria’s lot in with the cause of Palestinian Arabs and pan-Arab nationalism, he broached a more moderate stance towards Israel and the West.

It was in this context that Assad invited ICARDA to set up operations in Syria. An agreement with the Syrian Arab Republic was signed in 1975 for the establishment of a principal station in Syria, with a separate agreement for a long-term loan of land in Aleppo province, spanning “a rainfall transect from an average of 200 mm per year in the south-east to 600 mm per year in the northwest.” In November 1981, ICARDA’s headquarters were formally moved from Beirut to Aleppo, leaving only the Terbol station operational (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 A row of greenhouses at ICARDA’s research station and “temporary headquarters” (since 2012) in Terbol, Lebanon, 2018.

Photo by Michael Major/Crop Trust. By permission of Global Crop Diversity Trust.

But what was Syria to ICARDA, and ICARDA to Syria? A frank answer to this question requires more attention to the “turbulent history” to which the Skilbeck report alluded. For if it was too little to attribute the destruction of the “granary of ancient civilization” to “historical processes” or “social and structural rigidities,” neither was it sufficient to assert that agricultural development projects could translate “ecological complementarities [into] production complementarities” without reference to political power.

The political economy of Syria as a modern nation-state was a collage of state-centered and imperial colonial Ottoman, French, and British projects to make agrarian networks in the Eastern Mediterranean amenable to extraction. As the competition of Ottoman and French visions for agricultural productivity was made inert by the post–World War I fracture of the land into French and British mandate regions, the succeeding order facilitated intensified extraction according to technocratic and capitalistic forms of land and resource management.Footnote ⁵⁸ The cumulative destabilization of land tenure systems, fragmentation of trade networks, and reintegration of territory into a nation-state divided between Mediterranean coastal plain and Syrian desert had created the preconditions for political, economic, and sectarian crisis. These same conditions provided the justification for renewed attention to agricultural development projects, framing the problem as one of low productivity with climatic and cultural causes.

Hafez al-Assad came to power as an outcome of sectarian and parliamentary rivalries; and ICARDA implanted itself into a Greater Syria de-developed by imperial reconstructions. Each provided the overall structure in which ICARDA would operate in Syria proper, as a polity marked by ethnic rivalry and economic inequality entered a period of rapprochement to Western capital. Assad was no liberal progressive. He ruled through military force, a secret police apparatus, and patronage arrangements rife with corruption that placed the merchant class, and anyone else who would deign to do business, in the pocket of the state. When Assad faced a challenge from the Islamist forces of the Muslim Brotherhood, he responded by shelling the city of Hama for days, sending in infantry and tanks to finish the job and pick through the rubble for surviving militants. Initial diplomatic reports understated the death toll at around 1,000. The actual loss was in the tens of thousands.Footnote ⁵⁹

In many respects, the embrace of Assad’s Syria as a home for an international research organization mirrored US support of authoritarian governments that furthered national interests. After the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon, US President Gerald Ford, with Henry Kissinger at the helm of foreign policy, had concluded that Assad’s defeat would threaten geopolitical security in the Middle East. Kissinger further held that Syria’s intervention in Lebanon had the added benefits of challenging PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s supremacy and widening a rift between Syria and the USSR, which disapproved of Assad’s attack on the PLO. Syria’s antipathy to Israel and ongoing conflict over the Golan Heights gave Kissinger little pause. US support of the Assad regime was consistent with Kissinger’s realpolitik approach to managing Cold War rivalries and served a broader project of containment of Soviet influence in the Middle East and southern Asia.

For Assad, international organizations had other potential benefits. In a narrow sense, the presence of an international agricultural research institute offered practical solutions for an agricultural sector besieged by successive droughts, offering to bridge the gap between the urban elite and the impoverished rural areas to the east. More broadly, it offered the prospect of foreign investment and alliances to counter Syria’s increasing isolation in the Arab world. In either sense, it was a potential source of capital for a deeply divided country. Even so, the terms of the agreement did not always favor local people. Apart from the potential for foreign investment and benefit to the agricultural sector, the exchange rate for ICARDA was set at 3.9 Syrian lira per USD, instead of roughly 5.4 SL per USD as of the time of the quinquennial review in 1984. This agreement had a detrimental effect on local staff and purchasing arrangements within Syria.Footnote ⁶⁰ Could such an institution heal the rift between the urban west and the rural east inscribed by Ottoman, European imperial, and postcolonial designs on the landscape?

Farming Systems

While the FAO director general had applauded CGIAR for its promise to build on Green Revolution successes, members of the Skilbeck mission and other observers saw no such revolution forthcoming. Those who had studied the agricultural conditions of the MENA region warned that social and political factors, rather than technical ones, constrained production, even as they rarely specified the nature of those factors. Asserting stagnation due to traditional cultural practices, they counseled a primary emphasis on farming systems as a whole, rather than genetic improvement of selected crops. In his commentary on the Skilbeck mission, Professor M. Nour of the FAO office in Cairo warned that “socio-economic realities must be taken into account if technical transplants were not to be rejected.” He lamented a general neglect of rainfed areas, which constituted a “long history and tradition which would not be easily changed.” Nour’s commentary included only the most glancing reference to Ottoman, French, or British institutions or agronomic styles. He observed in passing that “in the past, there had been too much emphasis on technical solutions, and too little thought concerning the social and economic factors constraining and conditioning the successful use of technology.”Footnote ⁶¹ The details of colonial and postcolonial territorial realignments, expropriation of land, fragmentations of landholdings and trade networks, nationalization of resources, and general evolution of land tenure went unremarked in the mission’s report and the TAC’s review.

By the time an official proposal was framed for the center, the priority areas for research were crop improvement, soil and water management, and animal production systems. ICARDA, in its mandate, sought “to develop appropriate technologies which, when integrated into improved farming systems, will increase the production of staple food commodities, especially cereals, food legumes, and sheep.” Its research program consisted of four programs: Farming Systems, Cereal Improvement, Food Legumes Improvement, and Pasture and Forage Improvement. The broadest objective of research and training was to “increase and stabilize food production in the region.” Specifically, ICARDA would “serve as an international center for research into and the improvement of barley, lentils and broad beans (Vicia faba),” as well as any other crops designated by CGIAR, and would serve a relay role for other international centers for research in other important crops in the region, such as bread wheat and chickpeas. In addition to crop improvement, ICARDA would “conduct research into and develop, promote and demonstrate improved systems of cropping, farming and livestock husbandry,” facilitating connections between national, regional, and international researchers.Footnote ⁶²

The mandate was notable for its emphasis on farming systems over crop improvement. The Farming Systems Program (FSP) was a multidisciplinary, systems-oriented approach to agriculture, consisting of crop agronomy, agricultural economics, and livestock and soil science. Such an approach required attention to “the physical, biological and socio-economic problems which impose constraints on the widespread adoption of improved systems of cropping, farming and livestock husbandry.” Rather than isolate plant or animal material, a farming systems approach considered the entire process of production, including attention to pre- and post-harvest factors and a robust program of research and training with a broad range of stakeholders. Broadly, the center’s programs concerned both farming systems and genetic improvement, but planners viewed all “as components of improved farming systems, which should be the ultimate aim of the new Centre.”Footnote ⁶³

Even as its mandate obscured colonial and postcolonial disruptions in rural lands, the insistence of ICARDA’s architects on attending to socioeconomic realities and farming systems, as opposed to single crops, distinguished the center from its predecessors. In priority and methodology, ICARDA took a new approach to the CGIAR mandate to reduce rural poverty, insisting on persistent and dynamic interaction between researchers and farmers. TAC members noted the extent to which a center in the MENA region would depart from “the narrowly defined commodity approaches of the earlier centers.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Five years into operation, the FSP was the largest and most complex of the research programs, often also taking the largest share of the budget.

The commodity focus, and genetic improvement within it, nevertheless remained a principal aspect of the new center’s mission. The interaction between the commodity programs of different CGIAR centers required careful management. Both barley and durum wheat were the province of CIMMYT, headquartered in El Batán, Mexico. The details of ICARDA’s potential relationship to CIMMYT troubled early plans for the center. CIMMYT opposed removing barley as one of its mandate crops, even as the working group charged with establishing the dryland agricultural center concluded that CIMMYT could not meet the needs of the MENA region. For similar reasons, it recommended the possible transfer of the durum wheat program once the center was at full operating capacity.Footnote ⁶⁵ A decade later, the quinquennial review reiterated the arguments for both transfers: 11 million hectares of barley were grown within the ICARDA region, as opposed to 700,000 in Latin America. Forty-four percent of the world’s total durum area was within the ICARDA region, as opposed to 1.6 percent in Latin America, mostly in Argentina, where the crop was declining. Moreover, 97 percent of the durum wheat sown within the ICARDA region was rainfed, as opposed to irrigated.Footnote ⁶⁶ This protracted negotiation indicates the extent to which a commodity focus remained central to CGIAR’s overall program of research, troubling attempts to remake international agricultural development to serve the needs of local economies.

The Skilbeck Committee had recommended agro-climatological studies, a focus on rainfed agriculture, irrigated agricultural systems, and special problems of gypsiferous and saline soils. When pressed to reduce the mandate, members countered that each was a fundamental aspect of farming systems in the region. Rainfed and irrigated agricultural systems, for example, were closely intertwined. The final proposal nevertheless restricted the mandate to rainfed agriculture, noting that the distinguishing agro-ecological characteristic of the region was winter rainfall distribution. Rainfed agriculture was the practice that held the otherwise unwieldy mandate region together. Additionally, as of the quinquennial review in 1984, ICARDA had no lines of research in water management, which had been a component of the Skilbeck recommendation. The review panel found it “odd” that the mandate of ICARDA contained “so little reference to the study of soil-water relationship,” citing the case made so strongly in the Skilbeck report for its centrality to dryland agricultural systems.Footnote ⁶⁷ Even so, the panel acknowledged that “the heterogeneity of the mandated area,” between rainfed and irrigated agriculture and high and low elevation, for example, “posed a number of problems in interpretation of the mandate and program development.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The limited scope of ICARDA’s approach suggested the unwieldiness of a mandate region that was framed first in geopolitical terms and secondarily in agro-ecological ones. While ICARDA’s commitment to farming systems did partial justice to the aspirations of its planners to address the roots of rural poverty, the winnowing of its mandate to exclude irrigated agriculture and soil and water management signaled its limited capacity to address some of the principal problems of agriculture in the region as a whole, and in Syria itself.

Economic liberalization failed to save Syria, even as it led to geopolitical realignment in Western Asia and the world. Hafez al-Assad had pursued liberalization to invest oil money flowing from the Gulf States in the form of aid and remittances from Syrian laborers in the Gulf. These windfalls proved short-lived. In the 1980s, oil prices plummeted. Aid and remittances declined accordingly. A global recession further hampered foreign investment, while Soviet withdrawal from the region deprived the country of substantial military and financial aid. Driven by economic necessity, Assad moderated the country’s stance to the United States. This shift culminated in Syria’s 1991 decision to join the coalition against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and to participate in the Madrid Conference in pursuit of Palestinian–Israeli peace. To Assad’s frustration, the process failed to return the Golan Heights to Syria. It nevertheless indicated his willingness to participate in international negotiations that could further territorial and economic interests.Footnote ⁶⁹

None of this geopolitical maneuvering was sufficient to address the underlying conditions of inequality and sectarianism within Syrian society. The Syrian civil war, begun in 2011, fulfilled the warnings of those who had alerted CGIAR planners to the political and socioeconomic roots of crisis in the region, even as they fell short of a full critique of imperial de-development of greater Syria. While decades of drought provoked significant public investment in irrigation in the early twenty-first century, it was not enough to reverse the impact on farmers in the country’s rural center, who had long resented the political and economic supremacy of the western cities. As drought and increasing fuel prices plunged Syria’s agriculture into crisis, Syrian farmers became some of the fiercest opponents of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who had become president after his father’s death in 2000. The son followed the example of his father, Hafez, in crushing dissent. The outcome was civil war.

Throughout these turbulent transitions, ICARDA was less important for its work in the field than as an institution that symbolized a Western vision for international agriculture. In the inaugural meeting of the TAC, the CGIAR chairman defined international research as “research which, while located in a specific country, was of wider concern regionally and globally, independent of national interest or control, and free from political dictates of anyone government whilst retaining appropriate links with national research systems to ensure necessary testing of results and feedback both of results and needs.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This vision of progressive, scientific agriculture, which provided the context for the proliferation of CGIAR centers across the globe, belied the fundamental commitments of donors to international commodity cultures and the formation of a coalition of states amenable to Western technical assistance. In establishing ICARDA, donor countries staked a claim to West Asia and North Africa as regions of influence, and a base and proxy for arid and semi-arid regions of strategic interest across the globe. ICARDA was part of a globalized vision for agricultural development that made poverty alleviation into a single project and poverty itself into a uniform condition. While international research organizations have made escalating claims to operate at a global scale, and on behalf of universal interests, the landscapes they traverse are more complex in agro-ecological and historical terms.

The post–Cold War history of ICARDA provides an instructive coda to this history. In the 1990s, ICARDA inaugurated plant genetic resources collecting expeditions and collaborations in the countries of the former Soviet Union, focusing on biodiverse regions of the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia. Thus the end of the Cold War provided new geographies for the complex of international research and development within the geography of Central and West Asia and North Africa that had first characterized Eisenhower’s southern rim strategy of containment. Ostensibly, these missions brought new regions into the fold of the CGIAR system, offering farmers membership in a network of international technical assistance. But it is also intentional that these missions were situated on the periphery of the Soviet Union, which had long structured the geography of the CGIAR network. Rural lands were not simply grounds of poverty: they were the fields of empire, recast in the aftermath of World War II as buffers against communism. In the collapse of the Soviet Union, they became the grist for a globalized vision of market-led development, a dream imagined rather than realized in the winds of change.

Since the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011, ICARDA’s operations have decentralized across the Middle East and North Africa, with headquarters back in Beirut. Decentralization realized the initial orientation of planners towards a broad range of territories and enabled renewed claims that international agricultural research can address the needs of small farmers across the globe. Orientation towards the world’s farmers nevertheless requires us to be lucid about the ways in which the imperial prehistory of international scientific research continues to structure neocolonial power relationships, often concealing or abetting conflict.

In July 1971, agronomist Ralph Cummings wrote to the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s agricultural program in India and mentioned his upcoming preliminary visit to India “regarding the feasibility of the suggested Upland Crops Research Institute.” On his docket were meetings with such key people as the agriculture minister, C. Subramaniam, the agriculture secretary, B. Sivaraman, and Planning Commission member Tarlok Singh. Cummings was also scheduled to meet agricultural scientists M. S. Swaminathan and B. P. Pal at such premier Indian institutions as the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, respectively. In all these encounters, Cummings hoped to “discuss the extent to which they wish[ed] serious consideration be given to India as [the] location for the Upland Crops Research Institute.” This institute was to be a world resource center for research on crops in areas of low rainfall.Footnote ¹ By the following July an institute with this mission was in place on the outskirts of Hyderabad. It was christened the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, or ICRISAT, and funded through the recently established Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Although historical accounts commonly put US foundations and agronomists like Ralph Cummings at the forefront in explanations of the history of global institutions such as ICRISAT in the 1970s, American political and scientific ambitions offer at best a partial understanding. As I show, the outreach, interest, and facilitation involved in the establishment of ICRISAT in India were enmeshed in the momentum of past agricultural programs and the contingencies related to choices made by key Indian political leaders in a changing political climate. The establishment of ICRISAT seemingly showcases departures from the high-yield agricultural agenda of the 1960s that India embraced under American inspiration. The latter, commonly captured by the descriptor Green Revolution, was focused on wheat, foisted on fertile, irrigated lands in three key states in India’s northwest, and promulgated by the government through economic incentives.Footnote ² The inauguration of ICRISAT happened after a rupture in Indo-US diplomatic relations and a consequent end to the ongoing collaborations on agrarian programs between the two nations. The upcoming institution would focus on a different set of crops that thrived in a different agro-climatic context and also seemed hitched to a different agrarian program. That said, this chapter argues that ICRISAT – despite the pronouncements of important political actors in India to the contrary – represented an institutional continuation of a Green Revolution vision that had become consolidated in the preceding decade.

The lightning speed with which an institution as large as ICRISAT went from a plan on paper to bricks and mortar demands a history that considers the context of prior agrarian projects in India, including their American lineage, as well as scientific and political developments in India in the 1970s that made an “international” institute palatable to many of the country’s leaders. I begin my analysis by sketching the agendas that brought American agricultural scientists to India in the 1950s and 1960s, before turning to events more immediately surrounding the creation of ICRISAT in association with CGIAR. Lastly, I discuss the Indian context in which proposals for ICRISAT were received, showing how the successful launch of the institute in 1972 depended on reconciling the claims of two key political leaders in India with the rhetoric of international research on dryland crops.

Deepening US–India Entanglements in the 1950s and 1960s

The 1950s and 1960s saw a growing entanglement of American and Indian interests in projects of rural uplift and agricultural yield enhancement that were undertaken in India. President Harry Truman’s project of exporting technical aid to developing nations through his Point Four program opened the gate for the arrival of American technical experts to India.Footnote ³ These experts made an entry in multiple sectors, with the majority working on agricultural and rural development projects.

The footprints of American experts were first noticeable with the launch of India’s ambitious community development projects on October 1, 1952. Earlier that year, India and the United States had signed an agreement to allow for the arrival of American experts. Among these were sociologists, agricultural experts, and “communitarians” who provided key advice to Indian officials and helped set up training centers for the staff of community projects. They made a major contribution specifically in the training of village-level workers, the cadre of the community development project, who bore the primary responsibility for educating farmers in myriad tasks, ranging from seed selection to well-digging to rural education and welfare. Aside from the US State Department, the Ford Foundation was also involved in the training of village-level workers. While the American expertise was crucial, the Indian government showed extraordinary commitment to the idea of bottom-up development that was implicit in the communitarian idea. Within a few years, the government had created a vast, nationwide infrastructure of community centers and blocks. Financial and bureaucratic support for this work was made readily available under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership, not least due to his extraordinary interest in the project.Footnote ⁴

A parallel American interest in augmenting India’s agricultural production also progressed in India in the 1950s and 1960s. Historians of American foreign relations have argued that US-led efforts to mitigate hunger in India and across Asia in the 1950s and 1960s were motivated by the Cold War objective of countering communism. They were sustained by the notion that agricultural atrophy and low productivity in overpopulated nations like India generated breeding grounds for radical ideologies and communist takeovers. The Rockefeller Foundation in particular was at the forefront of this global drive to fight hunger, most famously by contributing to the expanded cultivation of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice.Footnote ⁵

The Rockefeller Foundation’s initial outreach in India started at IARI, with the agronomist Ralph Cummings as the foundation’s director of field staff in the country. Based in India from 1956, Cummings oversaw a project to start a postgraduate teaching program in agricultural sciences at IARI and another to jump-start research on three principal crops of maize, sorghum, and millet.Footnote ⁶ The Rockefeller Foundation dispatched Kenneth O. Rachie, an expert from its Mexican program – the site of its earliest efforts to develop high-yielding varieties – to “assist primarily in the development and execution of the research on improvement of sorghums.”

After the middle years of the 1960s, as the high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice spread in India, the Rockefeller Foundation pursued a parallel interest in the development of sorghum and millet in India. Thus, late in 1968, Sterling Wortman of the Rockefeller Foundation, the hero of its Mexican Agricultural Program, wrote to India’s agriculture minister suggesting that he meet with Wortman’s emissary, Ralph Cummings, to discuss intensifying research efforts on sorghum and millet. The foundation had been pursuing work on those crops for more than a decade, but Wortman felt that the existing programs still did not meet all the world’s needs “at this point in history.” Wortman thought that India would be “the logical location for an [additional] intensified effort.” He knew that the Indian government was actively considering the launch of all-India coordinated research schemes on sorghum and millet and that its preeminent scientists, such as M. S. Swaminathan, B. P. Pal, and A. B. Joshi, were positively inclined towards pursuing development of these crops. He thus invited the minister to meet with Ralph Cummings to discuss future projects in India in which the Rockefeller Foundation could participate. Wortman referred to Subramaniam’s prior visit to Mexico, where he had seen him, and it seemed the two knew each other well. Clearly Wortman was using his prior acquaintance with the minister in pushing for the expansion in India of the Rockefeller Foundation’s work on sorghum and millet.Footnote ⁷ In short, then, the foundation’s interest in India was hardly limited to wheat and paddy (rice) – the showpieces of the Green Revolution – but, rather, from the 1950s extended to crops like sorghum and millet. These nascent interests anticipated the later interest of CGIAR and Indian stakeholders that concretized around the effort to start ICRISAT.

The New Multilateralism and a Concrete Interest in “Upland Crops”

By 1970, US philanthropies led by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations had been active in India for almost two decades, as had the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and its prior incarnations. The staff of these organizations worked with and through the very large infrastructure of Indian agricultural institutions and engaged with many Indian scientists. The momentum of the work carried out by this binational community of agronomists, crop specialists, and other scientists foretold the collaborative spirit that later helped to launch ICRISAT.

The concrete idea of an institute that would embrace crops grown in areas of low rainfall took shape amidst deliberations at the Rockefeller Foundation in 1970. Its scientists had spent some time identifying and discussing distinct crop geographies of the world. An internal report compiled by Clarence Gray, a specialist in the foundation’s agricultural sciences division, focused on rainfed, or unirrigated, areas in tropical Asia and Africa and justified the need for setting up a new organization to focus on the crops of these regions. Its beginning premise was that advances made in crop yields in Asia in the preceding decade had bypassed areas with low rainfall. “While there have been impressive gains in wheat and rice, a large production problem still exists in Asia,” Gray argued. His report called the “contemporary yield-increasing technologies” of the 1960s vintage inadequate measures which “had little applicability and relevance in the unirrigated, rainfed uplands.” With this logic, the report funneled attention towards a category denoted as “upland crops.”Footnote ⁸ This categorization picked up a salience and reflected a broader pattern wherein the Rockefeller Foundation contributed to the founding of new, geography-specific institutes, such as the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia (CIAT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria, both in 1967.

Gray’s consequential report borrowed ideas from geographers and was influenced by contemporary perspectives that established linkages among climate, rainfall distribution patterns, and agro-ecology. Gray relied on those connections to shape an imagined geography that made available a specific global space for action. The descriptor “upland” was commonly used by geographers to designate landscapes of higher altitudes that were located above the floodplains. These were mostly areas of low rainfall.Footnote ⁹ Gray took an imaginative leap from here to address “upland crops” globally, describing them, and then specifying them as lands of uncertain productivity. Gray’s account took a particular lead from the climatologist Carl Troll’s study of global seasonal rainfalls to identify and group rain-deficient regions in the tropics. While admitting that Troll’s broad categorizations of global rainfall patterns could not hold true year after year, Gray nonetheless presented “agro-climatic situations” for which he believed specific food production and crops research policies could be devised. He identified lands with definitive deficiencies: ones that went without rains for more than seven months every year. The wetter or irrigated areas where high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat had spread thus far due to the Green Revolution measures of the 1960s had been the privileged ones, cornering the bounties of scientific innovation. The drier regions now needed attention.

Clarence Gray’s new geography of low-rainfall areas implied that these areas that were populated by agrarian masses had not yet reached their potential to be the most productive. The world could leave them behind at its own peril. The Rockefeller Foundation’s perception of the need for a new institution of agricultural research was pinned on turning attention to these subaltern lands, crops, and people. Gray considered a wide range of crops in these regions, but highlighted four to make his point: sorghum, millet, chickpeas, and pigeon peas. Pointing to “the inadequate state of tropical crop production technology” for such crops in Asia and Africa broadly, he made the case for establishing a new center that would serve as a world resource for research on these crops. This center would “develop and demonstrate improved cropping patterns and systems of farming which optimize the use of human and natural resources in low-rainfall, unirrigated, upland tropics.”Footnote ¹⁰

Gray’s advocacy seemingly had an effect, as both the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations began to support the cause of upland crops. Their support crystallized at two preparatory meetings called by Ford and Rockefeller Foundation officials in the summer and fall of 1970 to which important scientists from many countries were invited. Among the agricultural specialist invitees from Asian nations to this meeting was B. P. Pal, the director general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. Others arrived from the Philippines, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; these were the nations where the foundations had shown prior interest.

The foundations’ effort to form an upland crops institute transpired almost in parallel with their effort to jump-start the global consortium CGIAR (as discussed by Lucas M. Mueller, Chapter 5, this volume), which emerged in May 1971 under the aegis of the World Bank and United Nations. The 1970s saw an opening for wider collaboration among existing multilateral institutions. The World Bank was looking to channel its funds towards an organization that would dispense with the need for US bilateral aid to individual countries. The World Bank’s president, Robert McNamara, found particularly willing partners in this task in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.

A foundations-wide counterpart to multilateralism was building its own momentum with a different logic. In the 1960s, a preference for decentering aid for agriculture and rural welfare began to find favor among foundation leaders. In the summer of 1966, John D. Rockefeller III spoke with trepidation to the Far East American Council in New York, warning about an apparent “American overpresence” in Asia that might turn out to be counterproductive. The talk, copies of which were pre-circulated, was titled “Our Dilemma in Asia” and stressed that “our presence supports … [Asia’s] self-preservation but it bothers their self-respect.” Rockefeller emphasized the need to restore balance, whereby greater Asian initiatives in security, finance, and development could be achieved.Footnote ¹¹ As a corollary to building Asian solidarity and initiative, John D. Rockefeller III also suggested moving away from policies of American bilateral aid and towards multilateral aid that would reduce the American footprint in Asia while securing the same set of goals.

The coming together of the World Bank, United Nations, and the foundations led to the formation of CGIAR. This partnership had a specific outcome for the “upland crops” project that had germinated within the foundations. The foundations brought into CGIAR their existing research centers and programs, including their plans for an upland crops institute. This initiative got subsumed within CGIAR’s emerging projects in India, where it was sold, thanks to the CGIAR umbrella, as a United Nations initiative. The Rockefeller Foundation’s upland crops institute thus had its reincarnation in India as ICRISAT, an international research center sustained by multilateral funding that would target areas now designated as the “semi-arid tropics.”

The formal plan for ICRISAT concretized rapidly as CGIAR and its core decision-making body, the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), were formed. At its very first meeting, the TAC formed a team to explore the feasibility of such an institution that comprised Louis Sauger (Senegal), Hugh Doggett (United Kingdom), John Comeau (Canada), and Ralph Cummings (United States). The team settled on Hyderabad in southern India as the future site for the new institution. The Ford Foundation was designated by CGIAR as the executing agency to negotiate details with the government of India. It was Ford Foundation officials who signed an agreement with India on March 28, 1972 on behalf of CGIAR. The institution was set up as an international entity under the United Nations Privileges and Immunities Act.Footnote ¹² The governing board held its first meeting in Hyderabad on July 5, 1972.Footnote ¹³

The Political and Diplomatic Context in India

Just as outreach on ICRISAT in India was an admixture of foundation and CGIAR efforts out of which different strands of influence can be teased, the local history of ICRISAT’s establishment was threaded with continuities and disjunctures that require purposeful unravelling. In particular, the launch of ICRISAT coincided with a rupture in long-running USAID-assisted agricultural programs in India. To those loose ends was tied the umbilical cord of the new institution. The birth of ICRISAT as a wellspring of Indian agrarian visions in the 1970s was rooted in this moment of transition.

The decade of the 1970s was one of tremendous flux in US–India relations with respect to aid and in terms of overall diplomatic relations that suddenly turned sour. The historian Srinath Raghavan connects these changes to the new “Nixon Doctrine” that prima facie aimed to deal with the changing dynamics of the Cold War, the rise of a multipolar world, and the acceleration of globalization. On aid relationships, the Nixon Doctrine clearly preferred “a trimming of the American foreign aid program by turning away from bilateral, project-based aid and technical assistance and toward … multilateral financial flows to developing countries.” On the diplomatic front, the Nixon administration actively sought the intercession of Pakistan in establishing a better relationship with China. These two tendencies seemed to come to a point of explicit realization around the time that India entered the Bangladesh War, the 1971 armed conflict between Bengali nationalists and the Pakistani military that ultimately resulted in the birth of Bangladesh. Taking India’s declaration of war against Pakistan on December 3, 1971 as an act that crossed the line, Nixon announced the halt of economic aid to India, including $87 million in USAID support already in the pipeline. The curtailing of USAID presence in India aligned with a prevailing mood among US and Indian officials about “reorienting economic ties” that aimed to reduce USAID’s “footprint in India.”Footnote ¹⁴

In 1971, when Nixon’s decision to cut off aid was announced, the hammer fell most notably on the initiative by five US land-grant universities that had been active in India on a charge from USAID on a myriad of agricultural programs.Footnote ¹⁵ Late in the summer of 1972, G. V. K. Rao, development commissioner in the state of Mysore, informed the University of Tennessee team working for the southern Indian states that all of its programs would be terminated on September 30, 1972. Rao gratefully acknowledged the role the Americans had played in institution- and program-building for Mysore’s department of agriculture and in setting up the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore.Footnote ¹⁶

The top executives of the agricultural universities that were being set up with expertise from American land grants expressed regret at the snapping of ties with their American counterparts. A letter from G. Rangaswami, the vice chancellor of the newly established Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, regretted “the decision taken at Delhi to terminate the USAID operations” and expressed remorse that his “hopes of receiving assistance to develop the University have been completely thwarted.” He had been in contact with the USAID team since 1958 and was “very unhappy” over the recent turn of events.Footnote ¹⁷ The University of Agricultural Sciences vice chancellor, K. C. Naik, called this breakdown in collaborative engagements with USAID an “unfortunate development” and was “sad that a most profitable relationship developed over many years between the US universities and Indian agricultural universities has come to an abrupt end.”Footnote ¹⁸ Naik spoke very approvingly of the results that he thought the USAID programs had wrought. Without them “the progress of Indian agriculture, including that of agriculture in Mysore state would have been trivial.” Naik was referring broadly to the long-running American aid programs in rural India as he alluded to the “seeds sown by the TCM [the US Technical Cooperation Mission to India] and USAID and the help received from a few selected US universities” since the 1950s, and to American participants “who have worked with us intimately, as members of a family, for reorienting our educational system in agricultural sciences, to render effective service to our farmers.”Footnote ¹⁹

In the 1950s and 1960s, USAID-assisted agricultural projects in India had served as a magnet around which US and Indian collaborators coalesced. They formed an epistemic community in India within which common visions of agrarian progress developed and prospered. These forces ensured not only that the formal break in American aid would not spell the end of certain agricultural programs, but also that an initiative such as ICRISAT, which promised to continue prior visions of agricultural progress, would rise and be consolidated. Naik mused about the first joint Indo-American team of 1955 that had initially studied the prospect of the land-grant model for establishing agricultural universities in India. The team’s recommendations had led to the first postgraduate teaching program in agricultural sciences at IARI in Delhi. This program was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and Ralph Cummings, who was appointed director of postgraduate teaching, was assigned the responsibility for defining and developing the program.Footnote ²⁰ A second joint Indo-American team was constituted in 1959 – Naik was a member of this team – and its recommendations solidified the project to launch agricultural universities in India with the aid of US land-grant institutions.Footnote ²¹ Cummings was on this occasion appointed by the government of India to lead a committee in drafting the basic framework for agricultural universities in India. The Cummings Report of 1960, as it came to be later called, provided the blueprint for different states to draft legislation for their respective agricultural universities. Cummings was involved with these separate university projects in a supervisory role.

Speaking in 1972, Naik was being prophetic in hoping that the cessation of collaborative programs with the US universities was “temporary.” He “look[ed] forward to the day when we may be able to pick up the threads and once again proceed on a path of cooperation and collaboration for the good of Indian agriculture.”Footnote ²² The thick matrix of collaborative programs of the past and the relationships to which Naik alluded boded well for the future. The momentum of these programs was such that a cast of characters on the Indian and the American side was standing by and provided a propitious context for the birth of ICRISAT in Hyderabad. In a move that was telling of how old connections paved the way for the new institution, Cummings returned to India as the first director general of ICRISAT, steadying the institution in its initial years between 1972 and 1977. He was representative of those who straddled the worlds of the US State Department and private foundations, as well as CGIAR. Together, individuals like Cummings and Naik ensured that their agrarian visions survived in the face of blips or breakdowns in political and diplomatic relations.

The return of Ralph Cummings to the helm of ICRISAT testified to the resilience of these actors in mobilizing externally funded agrarian programs in India. Yet Cummings and others could not have achieved such outcomes without institutional and political mobilization within India as well, and it is to these mobilizations that I now turn.

Priming the Pump

In February 1979, Ralph Cummings delivered the prestigious Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial lecture – named after the country’s second prime minister and icon of Indian farmers’ prowess – in which he celebrated twenty-five years of scientific contributions to agricultural progress in India. The tone of the talk was slightly autobiographical, with Cummings drawing a straight line from his arrival in India in 1956 and his contribution to the launch of the country’s first postgraduate teaching program at IARI to the 1970s, when the country had turned its focus to “semi-arid” crops.Footnote ²³ Two years earlier, he had ended his tenure at ICRISAT and assumed the chairmanship of the CGIAR TAC. He was convinced of the need for constant attention to the application of science in bolstering agricultural yields. “You have to run as fast as you can to stay where you are. To get someplace else, you have to run even faster,” he explained to colleagues in Indonesia, paraphrasing from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.Footnote ²⁴ In his new role of global ambassador of crop research, Cummings ensured that his message of acceleration and intensification – and his celebration of external aid as the means of bringing about change – could not be missed. However, what Cummings ignored in his account of the recent history of agricultural science in India was the synergy between ICRISAT’s global objectives and India’s national project in the 1970s. A study of Indian administrative records, political documents, and domestic context shows that Indian scientists and politicians, too, had come to embrace the idea of expanding the Green Revolution to the crops of “dryland” areas.

In India, the Fourth Five-Year Plan (1969–74), adopted under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had accelerated national efforts to promote research on “rainfed crops” – those grown without access to irrigation – a move that anticipated ICRISAT’s focus on “upland” or “semi-arid” crops. In that sense, the Rockefeller Foundation outreach of 1971, which I described above, could not have been more opportune. Indeed, a case can be made that the watchful Rockefeller Foundation officials saw India’s eagerness to move towards a focus on rainfed crops and decided the ground was propitious to bring their effort to India. The building of political will in India towards this agricultural agenda could be seen in parliamentary discussions and in concrete steps that solemnized new research programs. For example, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research initiated all-India coordinated projects for millet (1965), pulses (including chickpeas and pigeon peas) (1966), and sorghum (1969).Footnote ²⁵ Another coordinated program on groundnut came later during the Eighth Plan. It was the Fourth Plan, which started in 1969, that apportioned definitive funds for these coordinated nationwide projects and enabled the setting-up of designated institutions. These were then supplanted by an integrated dryland agriculture development project that was also launched during the Fourth Plan.Footnote ²⁶ The demand for research on these crops often came from constituents of rainfed regions and their representatives in parliament. In 1972, for instance, Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka heckled the agriculture minister, asking repeatedly if the funds allocated to such crops were not “meager,” considering that 70 to 80 percent of agricultural lands in the country were farmed under rainfed conditions, while also demanding to know why only a small portion of the allocated funds had been used.Footnote ²⁷

As these separate schemes developed, programmatic connections were established around specific crops. For instance, IARI’s all-India coordinated project on sorghum had a subsidiary center in Hyderabad. The same city was also the seat of the Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University, which was being built with the help of Kansas State University (through the USAID land-grant program).Footnote ²⁸ At the Andhra Pradesh campus Ralph Cummings and fellow Rockefeller Foundation agronomist Lee House coordinated the Rockefeller-sponsored sorghum program.Footnote ²⁹ If anything, it was the connections and reciprocities between US aid programs, Indian political projects, and scientists that ultimately built a critical mass of support for ICRISAT. Thirty years after its founding, M. S. Swaminathan (who was appointed director general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in 1972) reminisced that the germ of the idea of an international center in India for crops like sorghum came from Lee House, and he had enthusiastically welcomed it, suggesting that if such a center were to come up, it should additionally focus on millet.Footnote ³⁰

As ICRISAT came into being – with a focus on four mandate crops of sorghum, millet, chickpeas, and pigeon peas, to which groundnuts were added in 1976 (see Lucas M. Mueller, Chapter 5, this volume) – these synergies and associations between programs and institutions provided justifications to move forward. The minister of state for agriculture, Annasaheb Shinde, referred to those synergies when he announced the inauguration of the institute in the lower house of the Indian parliament. Shinde thought that ICRISAT would provide a “good opportunity to Indian agricultural scientists,” as established experts would now be able to tap into ICRISAT’s collections of globally accumulated genetic materials for its mandate crops.Footnote ³¹ As it moved forward with its programs, ICRISAT routinely drew on the resources of Indian agricultural institutions and the informal network of Indian scientists that the prior work of foundations in India had fostered. The government of India, for its part, appreciated the global resources of ICRISAT and made use of them to advance its own agendas. In the 1970s, Indian officials specifically asked for help to bridge the gap with developed nations on the quality and yield of its pulses – crops increasingly central to domestic political agendas.Footnote ³²

The Politics of the 1970s

On the morning of January 12, 1975, India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, landed at Begumpet airport in Hyderabad, en route to lay the foundation stone of ICRISAT’s campus (Figure 2.1). She was received at the airport by the state’s governor and chief minister. Her entourage included the central minister for transport, Kamalapati Tripati, and All India Congress Committee Secretary P. V. Narasimha Rao, a future prime minister. The arrival of Indira Gandhi and the company of high-level officials signaled the political salience of the new institution to the ruling party and to her brand of popular politics.

Figure 2.1 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi inaugurating ICRISAT in 1975.

Photo courtesy of ICRISAT and reprinted by permission.

Reaching the ICRISAT site at Patancheru, twenty-five kilometers outside the city, Gandhi addressed the audience gathered there on the relevance of the new institute and its research program, emphasizing India’s core problem of hunger. All other social and developmental issues could wait until the problem of hunger had been solved. She referred explicitly to the Green Revolution policies of the mid 1960s and the criticism her government had faced over how those interventions had aggravated economic disparity. She reminded the audience that, despite fomenting inequality, the Green Revolution had resolved recurrent famines and food shortages of the past. India was now at a new stage in its quest to solve the problem of hunger. The nation needed to extend the “modern methods” of the Green Revolution to areas practicing dryland agriculture. Some 70 percent of India’s agricultural land was owned by smallholder farmers, many of whom were located in semi-arid zones. The new institution with its focus on small farmers and semi-arid crops could potentially address hunger and inequality simultaneously.Footnote ³³ Gandhi’s visit to ICRISAT relayed clearly her support for a strategy of expansion: “we have to follow modern methods in arid land as soon as possible.”Footnote ³⁴ In this, she drew a direct line from the prior Green Revolution to its anticipated dryland sequel. The emphasis on productivity that had been applied in wheat and rice now needed to be extended to crops of low-rainfall areas.

Gandhi’s address to ICRISAT also amplified the “international” character of the new institute. Trying to counter the division of the world into “first-, second-, third-, or fourth-world countries,” she idealized the institution as a global center in which scientists from multiple countries participated. Although she asserted pride in the contributions made by Indian scientists, she would not shy away from assistance offered by other countries. Praising ICRISAT’s composite backing, Gandhi argued, “This international institute which is doing research on crops in semi-arid tropics is a model for conduct of international relations between nations.”Footnote ³⁵ Indian scientists were themselves copartners in the institution after all, she implied.

Out of political necessity, Gandhi overlooked the fact that CGIAR, although reflecting an emerging multipolarity, was still backed primarily by expertise and money from US-based sources. Perhaps the cover of CGIAR as being backed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Bank was sufficient for the Indian political class to accept the declaration of its international character. ICRISAT’s American sheen had been diluted just enough to allow Indian politicians to sell the institution to their constituents as anything but American. Gandhi could instead highlight the “pooling of talents of scientists and technicians, regardless of nationality, race, or color” in ICRISAT. They were all unified, Gandhi stressed, “in [waging] this greatest of all wars, the war against hunger.”Footnote ³⁶ It was partly because Gandhi could bring herself to see the international as opposed to the American face of ICRISAT, and because she could bring her constituents to believe in this international image as well, that ICRISAT was accepted, even as popular anti-American sentiment in India was peaking in the wake of the Nixon administration’s policies in providing support to Pakistan during the Bangladesh War.Footnote ³⁷

ICRISAT’s opening coincided with an era of momentous changes in India’s national electoral politics as the reins of power passed from Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party to a rival political formation that brought to the helm two non-Congress Party prime ministers – Morarji Desai in 1977 and Chaudhury Charan Singh in 1979. Four years after Gandhi laid ICRISAT’s foundation stone, Charan Singh arrived at ICRISAT as prime minister to “dedicate” the campus, signaling ICRISAT’s full-fledged operationality. Gandhi and Singh were two polar opposites in the politically divisive 1970s. Paul Brass speaks of “the life-long struggle between … [Charan Singh] and Indira Gandhi.”Footnote ³⁸ These rivalries came to the boil in the 1970s.Footnote ³⁹ The presence of Gandhi and Singh on the ICRISAT campus four years apart represented a unique and rare convergence in their respective claim-making.

As Prime Minister Charan Singh arrived on the ICRISAT campus in August 1979, the diversity of political support enjoyed by the new institution shone through (Figure 2.2). This time the distinguished gathering included key ministers for agriculture, industry, and defense – individuals who were themselves of diverse political leanings and now part of a coalition government. Also in attendance was the Andhra Pradesh chief minister, Marri Chenna Reddy, who belonged to the Congress Party, a rival of the political conglomeration that had catapulted Singh to power in New Delhi. The joint appearance of these leaders at ICRISAT highlighted the issues on which a range of political parties could agree, despite standing in opposition along party lines at the center. Singh had established his political reputation as a peasant leader from the eastern state of Uttar Pradesh. At the national level, he had continued to speak for farmers. It is from this position that he spoke at ICRISAT. Singh exhorted the new center’s scientists to “give utmost priority to removing inequalities in economic development of our nation.” Clearly Singh was thinking in terms of India’s predominantly agrarian economy, in which small farmers in rainfed areas had to be pulled up economically. He mentioned the dependence of 70 percent of the country’s agriculture on uncertain rains and thus underlined the importance of ICRISAT in addressing this vast geography and “helping the farmers who are dependent solely on rainfall.” Meanwhile the chief minister, Reddy, thanked ICRISAT for choosing his state as its location. An element of regional pride suffused Reddy’s adulation as he emphasized the importance of Andhra Pradesh in Indian agriculture.Footnote ⁴⁰ In short, a tenuous alliance seemed to exist over ICRISAT. This secured its place as an Indian, as well as an international, institution.

Figure 2.2 Prime Minister Charan Singh at the dedication of ICRISAT in 1979.

Photo courtesy of ICRISAT and reprinted by permission.

Conclusion

ICRISAT was welcomed in India in 1972 because its scientific goals looked appropriate to and in line with established state research programs and the nation’s settled agenda for agrarian modernization. ICRISAT’s focus on marginal lands and cultivators offered conjoint space to accommodate the politics of both Indira Gandhi and Charan Singh. Gandhi’s rise from 1967 to 1972 was based on an effort to project herself as “a radical reformer.” Her populist politics in the 1970s highlighted the goal of garibi hatao, the removal of poverty.Footnote ⁴¹ Charan Singh held different political positions, on account of his stature as a peasant leader, but ICRISAT still accommodated his advocacy on behalf of marginal farmers. The nature of programming at ICRISAT allowed both Indira Gandhi and Charan Singh to come to a consensus without compromising their different electoral politics.

Set up as an “international center,” ICRISAT in India mirrored the dynamic world order of the 1970s and India’s realization of its own priorities within new global patterns. The diminishing impact of the rigid bipolar divisions of the Cold War that scholars have identified as a trend in the 1970s is visible in the cast of multilateral organizations and national governments that stood behind the establishment of ICRISAT.Footnote ⁴² ICRISAT was the fifth international agricultural research center of the CGIAR system and – as Ralph Cummings emphasized in his role as ICRISAT’s first director general – the first center to be established after the formal constitution of that system.Footnote ⁴³ Cummings’ emphasis on ICRISAT’s origins within CGIAR was meant to highlight the new institution’s composite backing. But in many ways the vision and work at ICRISAT reflected a continuation of prior trends in agricultural development, including India’s earlier pursuit of the Green Revolution, that were earmarked now by a new stage in institutional evolution. The circumstances of postcolonial India allowed for the emergence of new forms of institutionalized expertise that developed outside the direct realm of the local state. ICRISAT arrived in a generative space where global visions sought the approval of Indian scientists and politicians, if not the Indian state per se.

In a bunker far under the ice on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, 12 degrees latitude north of the Arctic Circle, seeds descended from maize landraces collected in Colombia are catalogued as part of the effort to preserve the world’s agricultural genetic diversity and cultural patrimony. Here in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, reserve seeds are filed in an abandoned coal mine for future breeding projects or in case of catastrophe. Nearly a million samples of seeds in the vault represent duplicates for over one-third of the genetic diversity contained in seed banks around the world.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 under a tripartite agreement between the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the latter a partnership between the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).Footnote ¹ That year, the vault received its first batch of shipments of duplicate seeds from around the world, including Colombia, where CGIAR operates out of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), opened in 1967 outside the city of Palmira on the tropical floodplain of the Cauca River.Footnote ²

Within months in late 2017 and early 2018, both the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and CIAT celebrated anniversaries. Scientists, philanthropists, government officials, and journalists arrived at Svalbard airport in Longyearbyen, Norway on the arctic ice and at Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International airport in Palmira, Colombia in the tropical heat. They celebrated these institutions and their histories and looked forward to their continued roles in tackling some of the twenty-first century’s enduring issues, including food security, climate change, war, and natural disaster.Footnote ³ The stories these sites tell about themselves have changed since CIAT’s founding in 1967; however, one constant remains – their global orientation.

This chapter introduces CIAT in Palmira, Colombia, contextualizing its founding and historical evolution and juxtaposing its research agenda and purported accomplishments against the lived reality of late twentieth-century rural Colombians, particularly those in Valle del Cauca, the political department in which Palmira and CIAT are located. Although CIAT is a key node in a global network that spans from Palmira to Svalbard, the global history perspective presented at anniversary celebrations and in official publications, whatever its other merits, misses or minimizes the Colombian side of the story.Footnote ⁴

CIAT’s founding role in the establishment of CGIAR in 1971, and its continuing significance today, situates the site within the circulation of scientists, seeds, and funding in a global network of agricultural science. But in Colombia, the social, political, and economic landscape in which CIAT operates may be discerned in the speaker list for the celebrations of CIAT’s fiftieth anniversary in 2017: corporate executives, local and national politicians, a peace negotiator with the guerrilla, international aid workers, and land-grant academics. Their convergence in the agrarian history of the Cauca Valley binds the experiences of the Latin American Cold War and the multigenerational Colombian conflict to global processes of agricultural science, development, and capitalism.

In Palmira, CIAT’s history has played out against the backdrop of a landscape indelibly marked by a parallel history of agricultural corporatization and monoculture, particularly via the ascendency of a sugarcane agro-industrial complex that has, since 1959, organized under the auspices of the politically powerful Colombian Sugarcane Growers Association (ASOCAÑA). The refined sugar industry has many by-products – candy, alcohol, and biofuels, but also land concentration and the Colombian government’s commitment to private capital growth over land reform, environmental and public health issues related to nitrate leaching from chemical fertilizers and inputs including glyphosate herbicide, and societal consequences such as diabetes and obesity related to a steady rise in per capita refined sugar consumption. Collectively, these have played an important role in the country’s long-running and multidimensional armed conflict.Footnote ⁵ In fact, one of the first victims of a guerrilla insurgency kidnapping in Colombia occurred in 1965, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) symbolically targeted, kidnapped, and murdered Harold Eder, heir to the largest and oldest sugarcane corporation in the valley.Footnote ⁶ Throughout much of the second half of the twentieth century, parts of the Cauca Valley remained a landscape of conflict. But it was also a landscape of conflicting agricultures, or at least agricultural visions. This valley was and is home both to a sprawling sugarcane monoculture and to a world-renowned international research entity dedicated to the improvement of staple food crops, most notably beans, rice, cassava, and pasture grasses. What does the jarring realization that CIAT exists in a sea of corporate sugarcane suggest about the conflicted landscapes of global food production, scientific research, and CGIAR?Footnote ⁷ (See Figure 3.1.)

Figure 3.1 CIAT land at headquarters in Palmira leased to corporate sugarcane producers surrounds the gates to the research center (seen in the side mirror), July 2022.

Photo by Timothy W. Lorek.

In this chapter, I borrow the concept of deterritorialization from anthropology and political geography to suggest an important framework for writing the history of CGIAR centers from the ground up.Footnote ⁸ In these pages, I’m less interested in evaluating the global impact of CIAT, and even less in celebrating its successes or condemning its failures. Instead, my interests coalesce around the international center’s relationship to the landscape, people, and politics just outside its gates. I advocate for seeing research centers in place and evaluating science and knowledge production as actions that take place. Despite their global orientation and circulation, CGIAR centers still rely on local, place-specific environments for soil and water, on local people to drive shuttles and buses, tend to fields, serve food, and clean the bathrooms, and on local businesses and regional and national politics for coordination, agreements, infrastructure, and even funding, whether applied directly to the center’s operations or indirectly via the financing of roads, airports, and state-funded public university programs, to mention a few. Despite these ties, the beneficiaries of CIAT’s research seem to consistently live beyond the Cauca Valley. Viewed from the Cauca Valley, I argue that CIAT has adopted a placeless research agenda, that is, one not specific to a particular location or attuned to the nuances of local sociopolitical conditions. Instead, CIAT has offered scientific solutions for a placeless conceptualization of the global tropics, a phenomenon described in this volume for CGIAR more broadly, for example in Derek Byerlee and Greg Edmeades’ description (Chapter 9, this volume) of CIMMYT’s mega-environments in maize breeding, Prakash Kumar’s account (Chapter 2, this volume) of the imaginative definition of upland crop zones, and others.Footnote ⁹ Immediately outside CIAT’s gates, imagined solutions to the supposed challenges of the global tropics are minimally applicable amidst the reality of the sugarcane agro-industrial complex.

CIAT’s advocates undoubtedly feel that it is not their institution’s purpose to address local sociopolitical conditions. In this regard, CIAT scientists and their proponents adhere to a familiar myth, or, more generously, ideal, that views science as apolitical. Of course, CIAT, born of the hissing boilers and hot furnaces of the geopolitical Cold War, is nothing if not political.Footnote ¹⁰ As we shall see, CIAT leadership’s historical and internally contested decision not to address local conditions was a political choice in the slippery language of anti-politics.Footnote ¹¹

At the same time, CIAT advocates are right to point out that the center did not create the inequalities of the Cauca Valley. The purpose here is not to blame CGIAR sites for creating or exacerbating rural inequalities. Rather, this chapter seeks to historicize CIAT in Cauca Valley soil and understand its creation and evolution as intertwined with, rather than separate from, the challenges of monoculture, land concentration, violence, and peace that preceded the center’s establishment in 1967 and continue to play out beyond its gates after its fiftieth birthday.

CIAT, like the fourteen other centers of the present CGIAR consortium, exists in a place.Footnote ¹² The places where international research agendas come into contact with specific agricultural economies reveal the contradictions and conflicted landscapes of global agricultural systems. Situating CIAT in place, then, is not an act in defiance or condemnation of the research center, much less its scientific community. Perhaps this chapter may even offer CIAT scientists an introduction to the complicated place where they do their important work. More boldly, it offers an attempt to contribute to the evolving mission of CIAT itself, to “help policymakers, scientists, and farmers respond to some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including food insecurity and malnutrition, climate change, and environmental degradation.”Footnote ¹³ All of these profoundly affect the Cauca Valley in Colombia. If CIAT is to be a part of a sustainable peace in Colombia, then recognizing and reckoning with its history in place is an important start.

Local Precedents and Contexts for CIAT

CIAT is located along a highway that cuts across sugarcane fields for approximately thirty kilometers to connect the regional city of Palmira, Colombia (population approx. 300,000) with the large metropolis of Cali (approx. 2.2 million). Cali’s international airport, which regularly delivers the world’s scientific community to CIAT, is also located along this corridor just north of the research center. Coincidentally, this international airport (originally Palmaseca International airport) was inaugurated in 1971 in order for Cali to host the Pan-American Games, the same year that CIAT and the three other founding centers merged into the global consortium known as CGIAR. Cali’s growth and connection to the world offer important background for the establishment of CIAT.

The Cauca Valley is located in southwestern Colombia, between two divergent ranges of the Andes Mountains (Figure 3.2). In the political department of Valle del Cauca, the Cauca River flows north past the Cali metropolitan area. A fertile alluvial plain stretches east of the river at approximately 1,000 meters elevation. This valley has been the subject of grandiose proclamations of paradise and future agricultural bounty since at least the early nineteenth century. In fact, the rise of an industrial sugarcane zone here in the twentieth century was due substantially to the site’s climate and geography – it is one of the few places on the planet that can support a year-round sugarcane harvest. Climatic advantages similarly contributed to the valley’s long-standing tradition of hosting agricultural research centers. The valley’s unique ability to produce two annual crops of maize attracted both Colombian and Caribbean agricultural scientists from the 1920s through the 1950s, eventually including Rockefeller Foundation scientists from the United States after 1948.

Figure 3.2 Monocultures of sugarcane viewed from the air dominate the fertile alluvial lands of the Cauca River valley around Palmira, Colombia, July 2022.

Photo by Timothy W. Lorek.

Despite the region’s long-advertised potential, industrial-scale agriculture took hold relatively recently. Before the 1930s, the Cauca Valley’s most desirable soils hosted a patchwork of sprawling cattle ranches owned by regional elites, much to the chagrin of would-be agriculturalists. In the nineteenth century, these ranches fed and clothed the gold-mining zones of the Pacific Coast to the west and Antioquia to the north. The abolition of slavery in the mid nineteenth century ushered in a period of social unrest in the valley as newly freed Afro-Colombians from the mining districts migrated to the towns and cities of the valley and joined with other people of color in the region in opposition to the large ranching estates, or latifundia. Racially charged conflict erupted in the 1850s over fencing and landowners’ enclosure of the commons, precipitating a series of national civil wars and an ongoing competition for the political allegiance of the popular classes.Footnote ¹⁴

At around the same time, a new cohort of would-be industrialists with ties to international import-export circles purchased land and began to settle in the valley. One of these newcomers, James “Santiago” Eder, began assembling what would become the valley’s first industrial-scale sugar operation with the opening of a steam roller mill imported from Scotland in 1900. That enterprise, Manuelita SA, remained a critical player in the expansion of the sugarcane industry throughout the twentieth century and is a major multinational player in the Cauca Valley today.

In the 1920s, the rural economy of the Cauca Valley pitted a traditional cattle-ranching elite against a growing industrialist class beginning to (slowly) coalesce its investments around sugar. Apart from both of these groups, a vast array of small- and medium-scale cultivators, some with land titles, others without, grew rice, cacao, plantains, sugarcane (milled in simple trapiches to produce unrefined sucrose, or panela), and coffee (in the foothills at the margins of the northern valley in particular). These rural valley residents included Afro-Colombians, as well as recently arrived colonists from Antioquia to the north, a group mythically associated with the expansion of a middle-class agricultural frontier in Colombia. With many groups and interests at odds in a relatively small but fertile valley, political energies focused around land tenure and space. The ranching elite and their political benefactors became the most common targets of charges of inefficiency and wasted space, particularly as Colombian cities such as Cali and Medellín grew and adopted heightened industrial ambitions and a need for robust food-producing hinterlands.

In this context, the departmental government funded a series of projects in the late 1920s aimed at quelling rural conflict and laying the infrastructure for future industrial growth and economies of scale.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1927, the department of Valle del Cauca and the national government joined forces to fund the Palmira Agricultural Experiment Station, one of three regional agricultural stations created to serve the country’s different geographies and corresponding crop regimes. In the 1930s, following the national electoral triumphs of the Liberal Party, with its populist and reformist agenda, the young Palmira station enhanced its emphases on the scientific improvement of a diverse palette of crops, including hybrid rice, maize, sugar, citrus, and even experimental projects such as Cannabis sativa, pursued to explore hemp as a possible domestic fiber for coffee sacks. The focus on diverse and multiscalar agriculture at Palmira complemented both regional and national moods. A series of agricultural schools and colleges were founded around Valle del Cauca at this time to educate the sons of campesinos, as well as a future generation of expert agronomists. The Palmira station partnered in these education programs and aggressively touted its extension efforts. Similarly, at the national level, the minister of agriculture advocated for protectionist tariffs on imported foodstuffs and offered fireside chats on the radio to speak directly to the country’s farmers. Taking cues from the agricultural bureaucracy of the US Department of Agriculture, as well as more climatically and culturally similar efforts in Mexico, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, actors at different levels within the Colombian state sought to foster a dynamic and self-sufficient agricultural sector.

Sugarcane was just one subject of many for researchers at Palmira in the 1930s. Initially, Colombian agronomists’ efforts to promote disease-resistant hybrid canes received a lukewarm reception from valley cultivators. Only the few industrial-scale firms had the capital to invest in a risk like adopting new varieties, such as the so-called POJ lines circulating from the Dutch-operated Proefstation Oost Java (POJ). However, a severe breakout of the sugarcane mosaic virus in the mid 1930s devastated Colombian growers. Many of the small- and medium-scale panela producers lost land and market share as the large entities, like Manuelita, invested further in disease-resistant hybrids and hired foreign breeders. The Colombian state likewise moved to intervene in the mosaic crisis, wresting full control of the Palmira Agricultural Experiment Station from the Department of Valle del Cauca and amping up experimentation with sugarcane cultivars in a collaborative effort with industrial producers and the US Department of Agriculture Sugarcane Research Center in Canal Point, Florida. A newly strong sugar sector thus grew out of the mosaic crisis with firm collaborative investments from Bogotá and Washington, DC. Manuelita, for its part, built a massive new factory with a refinery that inaugurated production in 1952. By mid century, Valle del Cauca’s agrarian populists and political boosters would have to look elsewhere to realize their dream of a bountiful and dynamic valley, at least one not exclusively reserved for sugarcane.

Violence and Development

As the industrial sugarcane sector grew stronger in the aftermath of the Colombian state’s interventions against the mosaic virus, some of the proponents of the old Palmira Agricultural Experiment Station and its extension mission reached out to foreign experts and funders to keep their programs going.Footnote ¹⁶ As World War II ended and the Cold War dawned, the US government responded, establishing Point Four projects and collaborations with Cauca Valley partners, including a series of exchanges run through Michigan State University. The Rockefeller Foundation also responded, launching the Colombian Agricultural Program (CAP) in 1950, the first international expansion of the pilot Mexican Agricultural Program, considered by many to be the institutional birth of the Green Revolution. CAP partnered with the Palmira station and used that site as a base for some of its critical projects, such as maize breeding. Maize landraces collected by Colombian agronomists based in Palmira and Medellín on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation would contribute genes to new high-yielding varieties in Asia and eventually make their way to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.Footnote ¹⁷ During the 1940s and 1950s, sugar production grew in the Cauca Valley, but so did foreign technical assistance as the Rockefeller Foundation and others took the reins of Colombian projects and centers originally established in the 1920s.

These bifurcating processes – sugarcane intensification and Cold War developmentalism – shared a place and time amidst great social and political turmoil. The period between 1946 and approximately 1958 is remembered in Colombia as La Violencia, or The Violence. This period of horror, especially acute in the Colombian countryside, is often attributed to partisan conflict between regional agents of the Liberal and Conservative political parties. However, as Mary Roldán and others have convincingly argued, the conflict had much deeper, locally situated motivations, not least a long history of unresolved grievances related to the control of land and water.Footnote ¹⁸ In the Cauca Valley, the rise of the Cauca Valley Corporation (CVC), a David Lillienthal-approved irrigation and electricity agency launched in 1954, further regulated and concentrated access to water, benefitting those with private property deeds and political connections. Members of the regional business elite, including the owners of sugar refineries, sat on CVC’s board of trustees.Footnote ¹⁹ CVC emerged in the exact years of La Violencia in the Cauca Valley.

Moments of heightened tension and danger loomed over the irrigated sugarcane fields of the Cauca Valley in the 1950s. One observer in the municipality of Florida, some thirty kilometers south of Palmira, wrote to the national minister of government in Bogotá and described a “chaotic state of ruin and death that is bathing the soul of the country in blood.” In the town of Corinto, just south of Florida in Cauca Department, murder occurred in town and country (“se mata en poblado y en despoblado”), when and how one pleased (“cuando se quiere y como se quiere”).Footnote ²⁰ A subcommander in the Valle del Cauca unit of the Colombian military described the effects on land and property of this “undeclared civil war.” “Landowners abandon their properties, leaving them in the hands of unscrupulous usufructuaries or decide to sell them at a derisory price,” he reported after one Cauca Valley massacre.Footnote ²¹ In this way, violence and the fear of violence affected land value and land tenure by intensifying land concentration throughout the valley. Anthropologist Michael Taussig collected memories of La Violencia as a participant observer in the valley in the 1970s. Residents described to him large landowners who took advantage of the “frightful insecurity of those times” to drive down land prices, accelerating processes of smallholder disadvantage relative to an expanding number of large sugar corporations.Footnote ²² Some of the largest landowners employed pájaros (literally “birds,” slang for mercenaries) to protect landholdings and usurp new territory in the Cauca Valley, and CVC too resorted to armed protection as it expanded its irrigation projects.Footnote ²³ Foreshadowing the rise of paramilitaries in Colombia at the end of the twentieth century, this mid-century militarization of private property and natural resources accelerated the process of industrializing and commercializing the landscape.

Some of the worst violence in the Cauca Valley, including the descriptions above, took place during what is sometimes referred to as the “Late Violence,” the period following the formation of the National Front political alliance in 1958, which theoretically ended the partisan aspect of the conflict. As Robert Karl has described, the bipartisan agreement that produced the National Front in Colombian politics set the stage for martial law and the further suppression of land grievances in the name of national reconciliation. Peasant self-protection units formed during La Violencia evolved in this post–Cuban Revolution period into offensive-minded guerrilla insurgencies.Footnote ²⁴ In the Cauca Valley, the most famous of these, the FARC, kidnapped and murdered Harold Eder of the Manuelita sugar corporation in 1965. Other businessmen in the sugar sector would be targeted by guerrilla groups in the ensuing decades.Footnote ²⁵

Access to land and water, pressure points in the Cauca Valley and largely unresolved since the abolition of slavery in the 1850s, became Cold War issues during the 1950s with the conjunction of CVC and its role in the expansion of the sugarcane industry, the developmentalism of the World Bank and Rockefeller Foundation projects, and La Violencia. CIAT would emerge out of this cauldron and, on the Colombian side, had roots in the land reforms of the high Cold War orchestrated under the National Front government of Liberal President Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958–62). Lleras Camargo had long championed interhemispheric diplomacy, having previously held the post, among others, of general secretary of the Organization of American States (OAS) (1950–54). The moderate agrarian reform of 1961 would keep Colombia close to the United States, positioning the country as a major partner in the anti-communist mission, ready to receive its first batch of Peace Corps Volunteers and Alliance for Progress aid, both Cold War projects of the Kennedy White House.

The 1961 effort was the second of two controversial land reforms passed by the Colombian government during the middle decades of the twentieth century, both under Liberal presidents and ostensibly designed to help small farmers. Among other things, an earlier 1936 land reform sought to ease tenure disputes and the grievances of squatters on uncultivated portions of latifundia (colonos) and farmers of vacant public lands (baldíos) by creating a series of land judges with jurisdiction to determine claims. This arrangement was quickly criticized by cultivators without titles and their political allies, decrying the bias and dealing between judges and large landowners.Footnote ²⁶ President Lleras Camargo’s 1961 land reform would similarly produce significant backlash, as it came to be seen as co-opted by large landed interests and a growing agribusiness sector.

The 1961 reform created two new national institutes. The first, the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA), was designed by National Front architects to integrate agricultural research with education and extension. Then and now, ICA operated locally out of the old Palmira Agricultural Experiment Station, today just east of the CIAT grounds. From its inception, ICA partnered with the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (INCORA), the land reform agency created out of the 1961 law and designed to modestly distribute title to public lands and colonization zones without redistributing or nationalizing private property. In addition to INCORA, ICA worked with the National University and the Colombian national airline Avianca, which transported soil samples from farmers to research centers such as the one at Palmira. Animal science formed a key component of ICA’s mission during the 1960s, especially dairy, along with crop improvement. Extension services also became a major emphasis of ICA, in particular providing information to “la familia campesina” regarding research and technology in order to raise living standards.Footnote ²⁷ In this early phase, ICA operated six experiment sites (including Palmira) and five more subsidiary research stations across the country.

Recently, geographers and anthropologists have reflected upon the deterritorializing effects, if not outright strategies, of INCORA, the new land reform agency tied to ICA. As Juan Pablo Galvis described it, “land reform, as formulated in Colombia, was a deployment of state power that was instrumental in the historical production of marginal territories.”Footnote ²⁸ By the end of the 1960s, over 96 percent of new titles granted through INCORA were for public lands and areas of recent colonization – “new settlement regions.” Many of these new settlement regions were in locations like Putumayo, an Amazonian department in southern Colombia, reflecting the Colombian state and international agencies’ consensus that food production would increase and social conflict (e.g., communist revolution) decrease by relocating small farmers to peripheral territories, away from sites of friction with expanding large landowners and agribusiness in the fertile valleys.Footnote ²⁹ This arrangement also involved pressure by landowning elites for INCORA to focus on distributing untilled land rather than break up private property.Footnote ³⁰ After 1961, for example, the Cauca Valley’s major landowners’ organizations, including the sugar industry’s ASOCAÑA, proposed the so-called Sugar Plan (Plan Azucarero) to INCORA, lobbying for the expansion of large-scale sugarcane cultivation in order to expand wage labor and the regional economy. INCORA could not agree to the plan outright but, in coordination with the semi-autonomous CVC, declared that land generated from that agency’s reclamation projects would be slated for sugarcane production. CVC also cut deals with large landowners, exempting them from INCORA’s caps on property size if they paid taxes or made investments to benefit CVC’s land reclamation projects. These arrangements stimulated a mutually beneficial cycle of using taxes and investments as an official exemption strategy from state regulations, wherein those taxes and investments were specifically tied to the expansion of sugar.Footnote ³¹

The internal dealings of large landowners, CVC, and INCORA dovetailed with the final phase of the Rockefeller Foundation’s CAP. With the blessing of the Rockefeller Foundation and in partnership with the Alliance for Progress, ICA and INCORA represented an alternative model to Soviet or Chinese collectivization or Cuban land expropriation, providing modest land reform (or, more accurately, resettlement) and the coordinated organization of agricultural development operations towards international and capitalist Cold War objectives.Footnote ³² One representative of the US Department of State justified the United States’ assistance to Colombia under the Alliance for Progress, declaring:

Land reform ushered in the first occasion that the Rockefeller, Ford, and Kellogg Foundations cooperated on a single project in Colombia, which would be repeated and codified with the establishment of CIAT later in the decade. As a package, ICA and INCORA became an early poster child for the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps. They received funding from USAID, the United Nations Special Fund, FAO, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and others, reflecting a new era in cooperative international development logistics and funding channels. The University of Nebraska served as prime contractor for the Mid-American State Universities Association and thereby put twelve staff members in Colombia. Proponents hoped to grow this figure to thirty staff within the ICA–National University system in Colombia to be joined by other individuals from the foundations, USAID, and other partner organizations. ICA offered a central repository in which international agencies and sponsors could deposit funds to Colombian agriculture.

Much of this international funding centrally deposited to ICA and INCORA would be indirectly funneled to aid agribusiness. The Sugar Plan presented to INCORA, for example, identified the expansion of corporate sugar production as a strategy for luring foreign investment in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution and the United States’ resultant loss of one of its major sources of sugar.Footnote ³⁴ On another plain, at the individual and family level, young Colombian agronomists had to choose between government-run research centers or the private sector. Colombian agribusiness consistently outbid the government, luring many newly trained agronomists to their corporate payrolls. A growing cadre of Colombian agronomists and geneticists emerged from the expanded university systems, including the National University’s agricultural campus in Palmira and the Universidad del Valle in Cali, recipients of large sums of international funding. As Colombian agribusiness, including the sugarcane sector in the Cauca Valley, grew through the scientific achievements of this group, the government and its publicly oriented scientific stations struggled to keep up. More positions were filled by foreigners, and, not coincidentally, the research orientation of stations such as Palmira shifted towards an international Cold War agenda using science as a weapon against tropical poverty, population growth, and political volatility. The CAP Director’s Report of 1959 foreshadowed this emerging situation:

Exposing the program’s underlying support for the growth of private industry and commercial agriculture, the report concluded: “However, this is in general a healthy situation and reflects a rapidly developing agricultural economy.”Footnote ³⁵

The work of entrepreneurs like Humberto Tenorio, who opened the first privately owned hybrid seed company in the Cauca Valley, reflected this broader shift towards privatization. In this vein, the Rockefeller Foundation pivoted to sponsoring exchanges between Colombian scientists and private industry. For example, a promising breeder named Eduardo Chavarriaga received a Rockefeller Foundation travel grant to go to the United States and work with the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company in Iowa. A generation after Henry A. Wallace, founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred, visited Palmira, Chavarriaga’s studies in Iowa included developing models of seed distribution that might be applicable to the Cauca Valley.Footnote ³⁶ “It is anticipated that the development and cooperation of private enterprise can substantially increase the effectiveness of corn improvement programs in general,” the Rockefeller Foundation reported in 1962.Footnote ³⁷ Other agronomists in training followed the growing connections forged through the Rockefeller Foundation relationship, including future leaders of the valley sugarcane industry such as Roberto Holguín who, similarly, obtained advanced agronomy degrees from Iowa State University in this era.Footnote ³⁸

During the 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation partnered with ICA and its internationalist agenda for national agricultural research, education, and extension. While working to transfer project leadership to Colombians, the foundation turned its attention to more ambitious projects that would transform the sites of its host-country research programs into a global network of agricultural science. Such a network would detach program research from local contexts and contingencies and, as Norman Borlaug suggested, the “complications” of national politics, which, as we have seen, were considerable in rural Colombia. It would be coordinated and driven by a shared set of values to deliver science like interchangeable parts – specifically designed for broad geographic or climatic zones but otherwise transferable across national boundaries and cultural contexts.

CIAT and the Cold War

A 1966 report outlined the Rockefeller Foundation’s collaborative spirit and global perspective. This report was the work of Lewis Roberts, a veteran of both the Mexican and Colombian Agricultural Programs, and Lowell Hardin, an agricultural economist at Purdue University recently hired as a senior agricultural specialist with the Ford Foundation. Roberts and Hardin described two ways to increase global food production: to obtain higher yields from land already in use, or to bring new land into cultivation. An international tropical agriculture research institute would invest in the first method.Footnote ³⁹ INCORA, through its policy of resettling untitled peasants in marginal territories, pursued the second.

Roberts and Hardin set the parameters for the organization of the international center which would complete the phasing out of the CAP.Footnote ⁴⁰ The hot tropics, they thought, contributed little to global food production and struggled to keep pace with population growth. “Outside of Communist Asia and west Asia, most of the world’s diet-deficit subregions are in the tropical belt between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn,” they wrote.Footnote ⁴¹ Ignoring the long history of domestic agricultural science and inter-Latin American and Caribbean networks, the authors argued that such regions as the Cauca Valley had been largely bypassed by modern agricultural science, with only export crop technologies developed under the auspices of colonialism.Footnote ⁴² Export crops like rubber, sugar, bananas, cacao, tea, cotton, and spices, they thought, had received scientific attention, but not the staple food crops of the region, despite the Palmira Agricultural Experiment Station’s work with rice and maize since 1927.Footnote ⁴³

Why did Roberts and Hardin present Palmira as their choice for this new international research center? They felt they needed to choose a location within the ecological zone of tropical agriculture, but one in which the climate would favor the maintenance of a germplasm collection. The Cauca Valley’s comparatively mild tropical heat and modest rainfall met this condition, and it further offered distinct microclimates nearby to simulate different environments. Colombia was important geopolitically, and Cali and Palmira were geographically central within the country’s transportation network, particularly as nearby Buenaventura continued its post–Panama Canal ascendency as the country’s top port. By the mid 1960s, the Cauca Valley had extensive connections to locations throughout Colombia and beyond via a growing system of railroads and highways, as well as plans to expand the international airport in time to host the 1971 Pan-American Games.

There was, of course, an institutional base already in place there as well, and the new site would be constructed adjacent to the National University’s agronomy school and the now ICA-operated experiment station. The Universidad del Valle was nearby, with its important work in agricultural economics, public health, and nutrition, funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addition, the Cauca Valley offered something important to well-to-do international researchers: “attractive living conditions are available in Cali,” they noted. As in the past, Roberts and Hardin also praised the Colombian national and regional governments for their support in the form of promised land and a generally favorable attitude towards the proposed institute. The pair, biased by Roberts’ experience with the CAP, did not identify any alternative sites that matched Palmira’s advantages in these areas.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Roberts and Hardin, the eyes of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Palmira offered the right set of ingredients for their global development concoction.

The new institute at Palmira would be modeled on its forerunners, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, organized in 1960) in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, established in 1966) in Mexico. IRRI represented the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations’ first collaborative attempt to enhance the world’s tropical food supply through a coordinated scientific institution. As Gabriela Soto Laveaga describes in Chapter 4, this volume, CIMMYT then emerged from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP). The new Palmira site, CIAT, was thus strategically designed to capitalize on the work already being done on staple grains at its partner institutions.Footnote ⁴⁶ Like CIAT in Palmira, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) was formed in 1967 in Nigeria. Together these four sites comprised the original CGIAR network, formalized in 1971 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, FAO, and other international entities. As such, CIAT and its sibling sites in the Philippines, Mexico, and Nigeria represented the original coordinating institutions of the collaborative Green Revolution. The group’s clear Cold War mission could be discerned in the personnel responsible for its formation: Robert McNamara, serving as president of the World Bank, launched the Commission on International Development (the Pearson Commission) in 1968, which recommended the coordinated steps that led to the organization of CGIAR.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s CAP filtered its work, equipment, and personnel (“liquidating itself”) into two distinct creations that represented new directions in agricultural science conducted in the country.Footnote ⁴⁷ One of these became CIAT, oriented towards international tropical agriculture and the intensification of staple crop production. The other was the Colombian government’s ICA and its land reform agency INCORA, pursuing domestic agricultural improvement and the expansion of cultivation into marginal territories.

The Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees appropriated $3 million to CIAT in April 1969 and began reassigning CAP staff. By then, eight foundation staff members from CAP had already pivoted to working in Cali and guiding CIAT even before its official opening in 1967. One of these, Ulysses Jerry Grant, director of the CAP maize-breeding effort before being reassigned to India, returned to the Cauca Valley to become the first director of the new international center. The Rockefeller Foundation also sold its staff residential retreat along the Magdalena River and transferred that sum to help finance CIAT.Footnote ⁴⁸ After the 1970 closing of the foundation’s agriculture-centric Bogotá Field Office, more personnel and capacities were transferred to CIAT or to the remaining Cali Field Office, which coordinated with the new international center, CVC, and the regional universities.Footnote ⁴⁹

CIAT was designed to be a “catalyst” for economic and agricultural development in the global tropics. To these ends, the institute and its scientists collaborated with local and national institutions in Colombia and partner organizations around the world, including IRRI and CIMMYT in particular. In the growing network that would soon become CGIAR, CIAT focused on the humid tropics below 1,000 meters.Footnote ⁵⁰ From the outset, an interdisciplinary team of geneticists, agricultural economists, and engineers cooperated with research stations in key tropical regions of Latin America to enhance those few staple crops “vitally important from the standpoint of nutrition,” including legumes, maize, rice, and animal products, as well as root crops, vegetables, and tropical fruitsFootnote ⁵¹ (Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3 Tony Bellotti, entomologist in the CIAT cassava program (wearing the Twins baseball cap), works with Colombians in Palmira in this undated image. Special thanks to John Lynam for identifying Bellotti. Rockefeller Archive Center, Ford Foundation Photographs, Folder 510, Box 32, Series 1, CIAT 522.

Photograph by James Foote, courtesy of Rockefeller Archive Center.

By 1973, CIAT had settled on tropical agricultural research in six main lines: beef, hogs, cassava, beans, maize, and rice. Each of these were truly international in procedure and scope. The beef line, for example, studied cattle and pasturage on Colombia’s eastern plains and partnered with Texas A&M University in disease control. Its scientists served in consultations with Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and across the Caribbean. The rice line worked closely with IRRI in the Philippines and with producers in Central America and the Andean countries. The hog line, similarly, partnered with universities in Bolivia and Costa Rica. It also looked to integrate horizontally, partnering with the cassava and maize groups, for example, in the study of enhanced agricultural systems on small family farms.Footnote ⁵² The cassava line, for its part, worked closely with cassava researchers at IITA in Nigeria.

In 1975, CIAT employed approximately 150 scientists and related personnel from 13 countries. In addition to its research lines and regular international partnerships, the institute sent científicos for consultation work across Latin America.Footnote ⁵³ By 1983, CIAT’s roster had swelled to 1,200 employees, including 92 scientists hailing from 24 countries.Footnote ⁵⁴ In addition to consultations, CIAT regularly distributed pamphlets and publications around the world and administered international seminars and outreach programs on select technical topics.Footnote ⁵⁵ The institute focused on “comparative advantage” to apply its research and consultations to the specialization of its partners and other CGIAR institutions.Footnote ⁵⁶

Land tenure offered CIAT scientists and directors considerable conversation fodder from the outset. An ongoing debate within the institute centered on whether or not to embark on a rural development project in addition to crop science. Specifically, the institute considered “a major rural uplift program” in Valle del Cauca beyond the research center’s property. Director Jerry Grant described this concept as working with small farmers to help design improved farming systems for them, as well as improving educational, health, and other services. Proponents hoped to emulate the Puebla Project (Plan Puebla) in Mexico, initiated in 1967 and targeting the intensification of rainfed smallholder (minifundista) agriculture and fertilizer distribution through the formation of cooperatives and other cost-sharing mechanisms. Grant and his allies at CIAT imagined such a project for the Cauca Valley, partly in response to the frequent question hurled at them from every direction: “How are your results going to help the small farmer?” However, other leadership, including David Bell, vice president of the Ford Foundation, viewed this as a “diversion of talent” at such an early stage of research and development. Bell and others suggested attention to land tenure and questions of equity would be more appropriately addressed by ICA, perhaps with technical support from CIAT.Footnote ⁵⁷ ICA and INCORA, in accord with the lobbying interests of large landowners, CVC, and agribusiness, specifically focused on resettling untitled cultivators in marginal or peripheral lands. David Bell and CIAT’s official position to defer to and provide technical support to ICA thus supported the deterritorializing move that helped declutter the Cauca Valley of peasant cultivators and redirect the burden of their long-standing political grievances away from the local expansion of agribusiness.

This debate continued several years into CIAT’s operations. In 1973, leadership again examined the relevance of their work to small farmers. They organized a meeting that October with forty representatives from not only CIAT but the Universidad del Valle, ICA, and several international organizations. They discussed how to integrate scientific research and technology into small-farm agricultural systems, and they evaluated the impact of new technologies on the well-being of independent farming families. CIAT likewise pursued a program targeting “sistemas para pequeño agricultores” – the Small Farm Systems program launched with the Ford Foundation in 1973. This program funded observatory field work by CIAT personnel in the distant Colombian Llanos and Caribbean coastal regions, as well as collaboration with IITA in Nigeria.Footnote ⁵⁸ This approach accepted on principle that committed small farmers would be left to the peripheries, while others would provide ample wage labor for the complex of valley soils and CVC waters allocated to produce sugarcane. As if confirming this unfolding reality, CIAT studies revealed the comparatively high market share of Valle del Cauca’s large commercial farms in relation to those of neighboring departments such as Huila, Antioquia, and Nariño. CIAT’s own studies underscored the inequalities embedded in Valle del Cauca agriculture and the department’s intensifying concentration of credit and capital in large-scale operations. Nevertheless, and despite (or perhaps because of) these realities in its own backyard, its work in rural development and small-farmer systems concentrated on the global peasant and regions of Colombia far removed from Valle del Cauca. Seeing CIAT in the light of INCORA reveals the mirroring aspects of deterritorialization in Colombia. From this vantage, CIAT was never intended to help small farmers in the Cauca Valley. As INCORA facilitated the resettlement of small or untitled farmers in Amazonian Putumayo or the remote eastern plains of Casanare, CIAT offered the technical training and science for expanding cultivation into these hot lowland territories. Meanwhile, in the Cauca Valley, ASOCAÑA members increased their share of land and water.

Conclusions

On November 8–9, 2017, CIAT celebrated fifty years of its footprint in global agriculture.Footnote ⁵⁹ A contingent of distinguished guests commemorated the moment in Palmira. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos spoke, as did Minister of Finance Mauricio Cárdenas Santamaría. Other speakers included Governor of Valle del Cauca Dilian Francisca Toro Torres, Mayor of Palmira Jairo Ortega Samboní, and Juan Camilo Restrepo Salazar, head of the Colombian government’s peace negotiating team with the ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrilla group. The ambassador of France to Colombia joined the politicians assembled, as did leaders of FAO, the World Bank Group, and CGIAR. Officers and representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Global Harvest Initiative assembled with corporate executives from the likes of DuPont Pioneer and professors from the usual assortment of land-grant universities and Ivy League institutions, including Columbia, Cornell, Michigan State, Minnesota, and Rutgers.

The attendees spoke triumphantly of “fifty years, fifty wins.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Speakers and the conference program largely organized their remarks around contemporary investment-generating phrases, including “building a sustainable food future,” “the future of climate change research,” and “aligning public and private interest to scale up and deliver impact.”Footnote ⁶¹ The framing language may have changed with the times, but the institution’s global ambitions have remained. For five decades, scientists, academics, politicians, and corporate executives have converged upon CIAT from afar, pulled by the institution’s centripetal position in an orbit of tropical agricultural science. In turn, the research and technologies undertaken at CIAT have radiated out to the tropical world like a centrifugal force. Apply your buzzwords of choice, CIAT has made the Cauca Valley a critical node in a contemporary global food system.

In sharp contrast to the current rhetoric of small farmers and sustainable cultures presented by CIAT, but in overlapping timelines, the Cauca Valley sugar complex accumulated resources and technical advantage. Through its technical assistance to ICA and partnerships with INCORA in Cold War Colombia, CIAT has accepted, if not embraced, that status quo. As a package, land governance and CIAT crop research in Colombia function to aid in the accumulation of the best land and resources for agribusiness and remove those with land grievances to start anew on the margins and bring new territories under cultivation.

Even amidst the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of 2017, the apolitical ideal of the 1960s remained. The commemorative institutional history published that year, for example, described it this way: “One of the core characteristics of the international centers was that they were apolitical, and the Roberts–Hardin proposal had reaffirmed this by stressing that CIAT would not be involved in the land reform question. Rather CIAT would give particular consideration to improving productivity of small farmers.”Footnote ⁶² The language is key. CIAT was designed to focus on increasing the productivity of small farmers. But the institution’s built-in collaboration with ICA and INCORA determined the geography of where those small farmers sowed. ICA and INCORA were the mechanisms for bringing new land under cultivation, often at the margins of Colombian territory – in the eastern tropical savannah of the Llanos, in the acid soils of the southern rain forests of Amazonia – and often by relocating farmers without title away from the most fertile valleys where land tenure issues had long simmered. These valleys increasingly became the objects of international development projects and aid, including CVC, for example, which regulated water and pursued land reclamation projects in consultation with the ASOCAÑA businessmen on its board. The agro-industrial sugar complex grew in the Cauca Valley; CIAT did not cause the exacerbation of inequality outside its gates, but it was part of the mechanics of shifting territory in Colombia.

The history of rural conflict in Colombia is as ironic as it is tragic: many of these recipients of INCORA grants or CIAT technical assistance have witnessed firsthand the paralyzing war between guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and the Colombian army. CIAT’s stated objective to improve agrarian livelihoods around the tropical world has proven to be largely a mirage in its own Cauca Valley. More specifically, that objective was never intended for those in its own backyard. No wonder the “CIAT 50” pamphlet during the celebrations in Palmira featured a Southeast Asian family rather than a Cauca Valley one on its cover.Footnote ⁶³

To understand the global impact of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, or CIMMYT, we must first delve into the creation of the center. Though born a Mexican institution with an intended international focus, CIMMYT’s roots are in binational cooperation and a longer practice of global germplasm exchange aimed at producing better crops. This chapter first examines the historical background of CIMMYT, and then considers the main shift in the center’s mission over the span of its first forty years (1966–2006). To illustrate this shift, the chapter relies on brief overviews of how CIMMYT worked on the ground – training wheat breeders and working with farmers on specific projects – which serve to illustrate the broad aim and reach of the organization, before turning to its crafting a message for a world stage. The conclusion offers a reflection on the place of CIMMYT in global agriculture research today.

Historical Roots

Launched in the 1960s, CIMMYT is unique among other research centers of CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) in that it traces its roots to an impactful 1940s agricultural development program known as the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP).Footnote ¹ As I discuss here, CIMMYT was designed to be international in scope but remained connected to Mexico and former MAP personnel to harness existing technology, a pool of trained scientists, and research experience.Footnote ²

CIMMYT would eventually become part of CGIAR’s first cohort of geographically diverse agricultural research centers and, arguably, its best known.Footnote ³ As Derek Byerlee and John K. Lynam maintain, centers such as CIMMYT were “the major institutional innovation of the 20th century for foreign assistance to support agricultural development and food security.”Footnote ⁴ Byerlee and Lynam, speaking about CGIAR centers, echo historians who decades earlier used similar language to describe the foundation of MAP as a pivotal moment in the twentieth century when agricultural science scaled up from domestic industrialization to become a “device for power relationships between nations.”Footnote ⁵ Historians of MAP were not the only ones to note its oversized influence. Reminiscing about the origins of MAP before a US Senate Committee in 1979, at which time MAP no longer existed, Norman Borlaug, by then already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, made certain to underline that MAP “preceded all other foreign technical assistance programs in agriculture by at least 7 years” and that its establishment, at the request of the Mexican government, became a model for cooperative crop research.Footnote ⁶

Established in 1943 as an agricultural technical assistance agreement of the Mexican ministry of agriculture and livestock in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, the goals of MAP could be synthesized in a few key objectives: the training of Mexican scientists, increasing food production, and, equally important, stabilizing funding for the experiment stations that already existed in the country.Footnote ⁷ Beginning in 1950, the Rockefeller Foundation expanded beyond Mexico and began country-specific agriculture programs in Colombia (1950) and Chile (1955) in the Americas. These programs, described as “evolutionary extensions” of MAP, consisted of men who were part of that program moving “southward in successive stages, carrying with them materials, concepts, ideas and wisdom that they had acquired in helping to solve problems in agricultural production and human relations in Mexico.”Footnote ⁸ But the influence of MAP was not confined to the Western hemisphere. In 1956 the Rockefeller Foundation signed an agreement with the government of India for a MAP-like program, and in 1960, in partnership with the Ford Foundation, it opened the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.Footnote ⁹ In addition to these MAP-influenced programs, MAP supported cooperative programs for crop-testing far beyond Mexican fields. One of its most successful partnerships was the Central American Corn Improvement program, which focused on testing maize varieties.Footnote ¹⁰

By 1960, with more than 800 Mexican scientists trained, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Office of Special Studies scheduled MAP’s retirement. On January 1, 1961, the Office of Special Studies and the Mexican government’s Institute for Agricultural Research were terminated. These two organizations merged into a newly formed research unit – the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INIA).Footnote ¹¹ The Rockefeller Foundation had long anticipated that the Office of Special Studies, which oversaw MAP, would have an expiration date. As others noted, closing the Office for Special Studies allowed the Rockefeller Foundation to attain its objective of building “a strong wholly Mexican Agricultural Research Institution” while ensuring continuity of MAP’s research agenda under INIA.Footnote ¹² Since the research stations and installations of MAP had been built up from Mexican ones, the main transitional point was that of personnel. The staff of MAP transferred to INIA, while the few remaining foreign personnel would serve in an advisory capacity in the country or be reassigned.Footnote ¹³

At the time of its ending, MAP, though based in Mexico and focused on a handful of agricultural regions within the country, had for nearly two decades served as a blueprint for how to run agricultural research programs across the so-called developing world. The research model – using in-country field plots staffed by an internationally networked group of scientists, as well as training domestic scientists – could be successfully exported beyond the Americas. Yet its becoming a blueprint was not a given. Though there was knowledge-sharing among and between these networked programs, when MAP closed there was no effective institutional authority for global agricultural research as there would later be under CGIAR.

While the origins of MAP are widely and broadly covered by historians of the Green Revolution, less documented is the end of the program and the eventual emergence a few years later of what would become CIMMYT.Footnote ¹⁴ In fact, the timelines of where one program ends and the other begins are often entangled in these historical narratives.Footnote ¹⁵ Given the significant overlap of personnel, experiment stations, and research aims, as well as programming with the former MAP, in particular the Office of Special Studies, this confusion is not surprising.

CIMMYT had predecessor programs. For example, in 1958 the Rockefeller Foundation created the Inter-American Maize Improvement Program and the Wheat Improvement Program, but, as the historian Bruce Jennings describes, “the crop improvement programs in maize and wheat floundered. Part of this difficulty stemmed from the cooperative nature of these programs. They depended … on the degree of cooperation arranged by host governments,” which could be volatile.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1963, the president of Mexico, Adolfo López Mateos, and the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, J. George Harrar, created the International Corn and Wheat Research Institute with the idea “to fuse the two crop improvement programs into a single organization with an international mandate.”Footnote ¹⁷

The idea of this institute was first publicly mentioned in 1960 during a farewell dinner for remaining Rockefeller Foundation staff in Mexico. In addition to former MAP staff and cabinet members, there were several Mexican scientists in attendance who had trained via MAP. Listening to the long list of successes, the evening’s host, President López Mateos, apparently remarked that he was “confused by this departure” because:

It was clear that López Mateos positioned Mexico as both a model and a leader among developing countries.Footnote ¹⁹ The ambition to have Mexico as a key global player was neither farfetched nor unusual. As other accounts demonstrate, Mexican leaders, economists, and diplomats were not passive members of international organizations but for much of the twentieth century helped shape agendas, proposing new economic approaches and other interventions, including ambitious health care models.Footnote ²⁰ Nor did the president’s interest in crop research contradict his better-remembered campaign to accelerate Mexico’s industrial development. Known as the Mexican Miracle, the period beginning in the mid 1950s through the early 1970s is often described as the golden age of the Mexican economy. Focused on industrial production, this was also a period of intense mechanization of the Mexican countryside. However, López Mateos’ particular vision for Mexico as a maize and wheat global leader was not about producing crops but rather about producing research about such crops. Thus, the hopes were for Mexico, an agricultural country, to become a knowledge-production center for agriculture on a global scale. These were two intertwined but certainly distinct goals: food production and research production.

The International Corn and Wheat Research Institute created in 1963 by the government of Mexico and the Rockefeller Foundation quickly encountered difficulties, including disagreements over administration and allocation of resources, and an inability to attract funding. Resolving these issues without abandoning the idea of the institute required significant reconfiguration and resulted in the establishment of CIMMYT in 1966 as an international research institution independent of but in collaboration with Mexican governmental agencies.

Byerlee and Lyman trace the idea of a centralized, global research center focused on crop improvement not to that 1960 dinner but much earlier, to 1951.Footnote ²¹ More significantly, they signal the origins of a plan for a collaborative and networked crop-breeding model to ideas about efficiency espoused after World War I. Yet their research reveals that the invention of MAP and later CIMMYT, often attributed to US models, was nonetheless a “merger of the highly integrated international wheat program in partnership with the FAO [the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization], a loose federation of country and regional maize programs, and associated basic research activities in Mexico.”Footnote ²²

The 1960s vision of a Mexican institution modeled on a specific US–Mexico partnership but with a broader international focus morphed into something different when CIMMYT became a founding member of CGIAR in 1971. As part of CGIAR, CIMMYT, though still headquartered in Mexico, came to be perceived by both the public and scientists as part of a global network and not a national institution addressing domestic concerns. It would also, like the other centers, have a series of missions: the centralizing of functions for maximum efficacy (for instance, germplasm banks), close collaboration and sharing across institutes, and finally training “aimed to substitute for weaknesses in many developing national research systems.”Footnote ²³

Put differently, once MAP was dissolved in 1961, scientists continued to travel to Mexico to conduct research and undergo training in agricultural science, only now as part of a different program. This program had similar aims but additional funders: the Mexican government (supervised by INIA), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and FAO.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, at CIMMYT’s founding on April 12, 1966, both the Mexican minister of agriculture, Juan Gil Preciado, and Rockefeller Foundation President J. George Harrar conveyed that the new center was in some ways a continuation of nearly twenty-three years of agricultural research between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government.Footnote ²⁵ The center’s goals were spelled out in that founding document: to conduct basic and applied research, distribute “superior” germplasm, train scientists, foster cooperation among scientists and breeders, and publish and distribute its findings.Footnote ²⁶ Over the following years, these basic aims would be expanded and became, as community needs were considered, both more nuanced and specific (See Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Attendees of a 1968 international meeting held at CIMMYT, seated before a map of the research facilities in Mexico where its research programs initially were based. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation Photographs, CIMMYT Series 105, International Agricultural Meeting.

Courtesy of Rockefeller Archive Center.

A Growing Center Reflects and Shapes the World, One Crop Germplasm at a Time

In 1960 MAP’s International Wheat Program began to distribute “international trials” (“ensayos internacionales”) of experimental lines of wheat.Footnote ²⁷ Years later, in 1971, the same would be done for corn by CIMMYT, as Derek Byerlee and Greg Edmeades discuss in Chapter 9, this volume. What did these trials consist of? An international trial was composed of “identical experimental lines” shipped to research partners across the world, who planted these seeds following specific instructions and conditions and later compared them with local varieties.Footnote ²⁸ But the process did not end there. All results were sent back to CIMMYT, where they were analyzed, discussed, later published, and broadly distributed. These international experimental aims were quite clear, as outlined in a CIMMYT publication of the time. In addition to the obvious ones, such as trying out new lines under vastly different climactic, pest, and disease conditions, was the important issue of standardization of the research. The international trials also served to train networked and partner scientists, as well as to obtain the germplasm needed to continue to make new crosses.Footnote ²⁹

Mere months after CIMMYT’s founding in 1966, El Informador, a newspaper based out of Guadalajara, reported on the center’s research-driven mandate at its first meeting. It noted, clearly echoing the message and language of CIMMYT, that the “urgent need” to ensure an increased production of cereals using “modern technology” was a pressing, global one. The article went on to quote a “Rockefeller Foundation representative” as stating that the newly inaugurated CIMMYT would bring together research, experimentation, and training at the “highest levels” to increase maize and wheat yields.Footnote ³⁰ It is worth pausing to explain that news of CIMMYT’s mission was making it to the pages of a regional paper. Even if this article was a reprint from larger newspapers, as was the practice, its inclusion suggests the broad appeal that this news of such a center had in other Mexican states.

With a vision of further training of young scientists, CIMMYT expanded its training program to include plant pathology, managing research stations, and wheat chemistry. Following the MAP model, foreign researchers travelled to Mexican research stations where both Mexican and international scientists were trained (Figure 4.2). They would return to their home countries with sample seeds and a core training in wheat and corn science.

Figure 4.2 Wheat trainees inoculate plants at the CIMMYT research station in Toluca, Mexico, undated. CIMMYT repository.

© CIMMYT.

Much of the initial focus of agricultural research centers was on the training of future scientists rather than the dissemination of germplasm directly to farmers.Footnote ³¹ Yet reports of famines in South Asia served as a catalyst to push for more extensive plant-breeding programs that could stretch from Mexico to farmers around the world. In hindsight, the inauguration of CIMMYT in spring 1966 seemed an auspicious time to launch an international agriculture research institution, given that at the time the spectre of hunger seemed to loom especially large across the ideologically divided Cold War world.Footnote ³² For example, a focus on famines happening in both India and Pakistan revealed that both countries had the lowest wheat yields since World War II.Footnote ³³ Researchers believed that overpopulation and the depletion of resources would lead to more human hunger, increased violence, and political instability. In an ideologically separated world this meant potential communist insurrections which would, in turn, risk destabilizing Western societies, in particular the United States. Hence by zeroing in on global hunger, political instability could be averted by using science to increase yields that would, in turn, feed populations and create a more stable world. The globe, it seemed to Rockefeller and Ford Foundation personnel, was primed for an international organization rooted in agricultural science that could help improve crop yields – enough to stave off concerns of an overpopulated world.

In the fall of 1966 CIMMYT announced that it was broadening its scope via Noticiero del CIMMYT, or CIMMYT News, a bilingual publication available in seventy countries and devoted to detailing the latest scientific advances in wheat and corn research. Reporting on the fall meeting of CIMMYT’s board, the Noticiero announced the board’s apparent decision to fully concentrate CIMMYT’s efforts on maize and wheat.Footnote ³⁴ For the maize program, the center planned to establish projects “in plant breeding, agronomy, genetics and physiology as well as a broadened action for regional programs, such the Central American Cooperative program.”Footnote ³⁵ As for wheat, research projects would also be expanded to include cytogenetics, vital to understand the plant’s cell biology and growth, and “enlargement of the activities of the milling and baking laboratory.”Footnote ³⁶ The latter was especially important to the work of wheat breeding. It was in these laboratories that wheat quality was tested. If a particular wheat variety did not yield flour that would easily rise when baked or did not pass a taste test, then that variety, regardless of rust resistance or other qualities valued in the field, would not be pursued as a successful strain. This work was considered so useful that the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to the Mexican cereals chemist Evangelina Villegas to visit milling and baking laboratories in the United States and CanadaFootnote ³⁷ (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 The CIMMYT cereal scientist Evangelina Villegas (center) with other researchers and trainees, undated. CIMMYT repository.

© CIMMYT.

The growth of CIMMYT was programmed to be fast. At that same reunion it was proposed that by 1967, a year later, CIMMYT should have 121 technicians, and by 1970 the total would reach at least 189 (by 1973 there were 420 staff positions across the world).Footnote ³⁸ Though headquartered in Mexico, the center’s activities would be “multiplied through cooperative programs in many countries” where CIMMYT personnel would be based. The center would also offer trainees access to graduate education through an agreement with the nearby National School of Agriculture at Chapingo.Footnote ³⁹ Researchers would continue to come, as they had under MAP, to Mexico.

In the early 1970s a key shift occurred when CIMMYT officials realized that it was often difficult for researchers from low-income regions and countries to travel to Mexico. It is uncertain how this realization came about, but to address the concern, the center launched a series of regional training programs. By the end of the decade there were four regionally based maize programs, four wheat ones, and, expanding beyond crop-centered research, four centers focused on regional economies.Footnote ⁴⁰

Regional centers also allowed for deeper understanding of how local farmers adopted new technologies and new seeds. Within Mexico, one such local model was the Puebla Project, which encompassed 47,000 families, mostly small-plot farmers, with whom CIMMYT researchers worked from 1967 to 1973. The aims of the project were, first, to increase technological transfer to smallholding farmers who relied on rainfed crops, especially maize, and, second, to train technicians from other regions. The lands of the Puebla Valley were selected because there was little irrigation infrastructure, as opposed to what could be found in CIMMYT’s experiment station in Sonora. Also, locals reportedly seemed eager to work with CIMMYT technicians.Footnote ⁴¹ With the Puebla Project, CIMMYT provided investment in maize for smallholding subsistence-level farmers. As a scholar noted, a new approach was needed to work with small farmers, especially since “enthusiasm was expressed for any attempt to bring the banking sector into closer contact with groups of producers who had traditionally remained outside their reach.”Footnote ⁴²

The farmers’ socioeconomic environment, which had not been an initial topic of interest for the architects of CIMMYT’s goals, was becoming as important an area of focus as the crops these farmers planted. An additional shift was happening with a more region-centered, bottom-up understanding of agriculture. Yet despite the existence of the Puebla Project, which remained comparatively close to CIMMYT headquarters, CIMMYT was not yet reaching the most remote (often the poorest) farmers within Mexico or abroad. A sharper focus on these farmers would only come later in the century. Meanwhile the germplasm bank and wheat-breeding program, both core to the organization as it exists today, thrived in this era.Footnote ⁴³

At the center’s one-year anniversary, in spring 1967, the president of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, John D. Rockefeller III, and Rockefeller Foundation President J. George Harrar visited CIMMYT to learn about the ongoing “maize and wheat germplasm and cooperative research.”Footnote ⁴⁴ During their visit they discovered that Mexican wheat varieties planted in other countries already surpassed the surface area of wheat farming in Mexico, which demonstrated “the wide adaptability and acceptance of these varieties.”Footnote ⁴⁵ As the historian Marci Baranski shows, along with Harro Maat (Chapter 6, this volume) and others, the push for so-called wide adaptation was vital to the goals of international programs, for it allowed researchers to replicate findings from one location to another.Footnote ⁴⁶ Though maize research was still important, by 1965 Norman Borlaug and Rockefeller Foundation scientists focused increasingly on wheat breeding and its purported adaptability to most soils. Wide adaptation would become a core tenet of CIMMYT’s research agenda. Phrases such as “exchange of ideas,” “fraternity with a common goal,” and “a collective discussion,” forged the sense of single and singular research community reinforced by the rush to try to feed the world’s hungry.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the maize program, this communal sense of purpose was most visible in the speed with which CIMMYT’s maize germplasm bank grew. The germplasm bank represented how agricultural research shifted from country-specific aims to global crop centers. For example, by 1974 the maize germplasm bank was already the largest in the world, with more than 12,000 samples from more than 47 countries.Footnote ⁴⁸ With key breeding resources and connections to long-running training and breeding programs, CIMMYT symbolized Mexico’s long-ascendant centrality to global maize and wheat research. Shortly thereafter CIMMYT expanded its aims once more.

CIMMYT on the Ground

As CIMMYT grew so did the scope of its programs. Here I focus on two examples of CIMMYT’s vast projects, the wheat-breeding program and its training program, to showcase the deep local roots of global technology transfer.

Like the germplasm bank, the wheat-breeding program defined CIMMYT. From its foundation, the international breeding and testing nurseries attracted growing numbers of visiting scientists and trainees. The Bread Wheat Program operated in three Mexican locations: Ciudad Obregón in the arid, irrigated farming region of Sonora; Toluca in the central Mexican highlands; and at the CIMMYT headquarters at El Batán near Mexico City. (Today there are an additional two CIMMYT stations in tropical and subtropical settings: Agua Fría, Puebla, and Tlaltizapán, Morelo.)Footnote ⁴⁹ The original locations – one at sea level near the Sonoran desert, the other two in rainy regions with high elevation – played a crucial role in experimentation and development of wheat lines with disease resistance.Footnote ⁵⁰ But CIMMYT experimentation did not and does not now remain limited to these five locations. Taking advantage of Mexico’s extraordinary diversity of microclimates, wheat pathologists, for example, used nurseries across the country to screen for diseases. Meanwhile, breeders used seed multiplication plots to replicate stressors from across the globe. This research geography was and continues to be the lifeline of CIMMYT. It is in these spaces that researchers test new wheat and maize lines, examine the impact of pests and plant diseases, and host farmer workshops.

Genetic materials that survive these varied trials with natural and amplified stressors, such as heat tolerance or difficult tropical soil, have stronger viability in regions across the globe. In 1972 alone, nearly 5,500 crosses were made in bread wheat. But, from experience, less than 1 percent of these crosses would survive the center’s “rigorous screening.”Footnote ⁵¹ From generation two (F2) onward, experimental material was sent worldwide where plants’ performance was observed for six generations in different conditions and in competition with local wheats. The most crucial aspect of CIMMYT’s broad infrastructure, beyond its germplasm and experimental stations, was and continues to be the training of plant specialists. Between 1966 and 1988, the wheat improvement program served 471 trainees from 80 developing countries.Footnote ⁵² The trainee program, open mainly to researchers and extensionists from developing countries under the age of thirty, allowed participants to remain in Mexico from six to eighteen months. Some were later granted scholarships to pursue master’s degrees, usually in Mexico. The range of trainees was broad, from government workers to postdoctoral fellows to visiting, well-established scholars. The benefits of this intergenerational mixing were significant, as program participants learned from each other. Similarly, the practice of working “shoulder to shoulder” engaged everyone in a hands-on approach.Footnote ⁵³

In addition to crop management, this hands-on practice consisted of “designing and managing field plots, choosing parental materials, making crosses … scoring for tolerance and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and selecting improved progeny.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The numbers of trainees in the first decade are telling. In 1966, there was a total of 22 scholars of all ranks (scholarship recipients, established scientists, temporary residents), but by 1973 there were 739.Footnote ⁵⁵ The majority of these hailed from Latin America. It is important to recall that scholarships were also key for MAP. The significant increase of twenty-two scholars in the first year of operation to a leap in hundreds of recipients mere years later is likely a reflection of the educational networks in place for two decades.

In 1988, CIMMYT conducted follow-up questionnaires of 324 trainees to evaluate the program’s effectiveness. The survey revealed that 74 percent of respondents worked for their government’s research and extension services, and more than 50 percent continued to work with wheat.Footnote ⁵⁶ Those who responded to the questionnaire hailed from forty-five countries across Asia, Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and European countries. In other words, participants represented the global community of crop researchers. The 1988 survey revealed that the vast majority of trainees felt that they had gained something from participating in the program, including improved “plant breeding and plant pathology skills,” and when returning they used “CIMMYT’s methods in their training activity.” The survey did reveal some discontent, and some trainees thought that the courses offered were too elementary, but these tended to be participants with either a doctorate or a master’s degree.

CIMMYT 1975 – Thriving and Overextended

By 1974, the CGIAR network of international agricultural research centers focused on training and providing assistance to governments around the world. From the Philippines, to Nigeria, to Colombia and Peru, to India, to Kenya and Ethiopia, CGIAR leadership created a network of centers devoted to specific crops, livestock, and environments. In this larger circle of interconnected expertise, CIMMYT became the center focused on maize, wheat, barley, and triticale (the hybrid of wheat and rye), and, as such, a sort of scientific pilgrimage site for hundreds of researchers who regularly arrived in Mexico to study and exchange ideas. A decade after its founding, CIMMYT had become firmly established in both national and international agricultural research.Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, at this time CIMMYT envisioned itself more as a handmaiden to national projects, an additional research arm supporting domestic research.Footnote ⁵⁸ In a similar vein, the larger CGIAR mission at this stage was to support national research programs and aid in pushing them to a higher level. Despite the global orientation of the CGIAR system, CIMMYT publications continued to highlight the vast reach that the center maintained in Mexico. With maps and descriptions of the experimental stations in the country, CIMMYT materials emphasized the centralized coordination directed from El Batán, CIMMYT’s headquarters. A detailed map of the central buildings – including dormitories for sixty scholars, baseball diamond, pool, basketball courts, and cafeteria – as well as laboratory and experimentation space, depicted this self-contained space as a sort of international scientific enclave.Footnote ⁵⁹

The built environment of CIMMYT was examined in a 1974 New York Times article that described El Batán as a “complex of modern buildings surrounded by 160 acres of experimental fields, three dozen agricultural scientists and scores of technicians, most from poor countries … engaged in a major campaign to feed adequately the two billion people” who depended on wheat, corn, and similar crops to survive.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this and dozens of other articles, it was the promise of science and how it could, if used appropriately, reduce hunger, which imbued CIMMYT with an aura of productive legitimacy. Two months later, after CIMMYT’s participation in the World Food Conference in Rome (November 5–16, 1974), the center received more than twenty-five requests from individual countries seeking to increase food production to meet their populations’ needs.Footnote ⁶¹ Despite these numbers, Haldore Hanson, CIMMYT’s director general, turned down the majority of appeals. As he explained, the center’s forty-five scientists were already overextended with consulting work and travel.Footnote ⁶² This high demand, however, brought about more changes in CIMMYT, especially in how it functioned on a global scale. As Hanson explained to the New York Times, CIMMYT would set up two-member regional teams who would train scientists in their own countries. This effort to reach more farmers had begun earlier when CIMMYT joined CGIAR. This quintupled CIMMY’s research budget from $9 million to more than $48 million in less than four years.Footnote ⁶³ These funds were needed to push the use of high-yielding varieties and extend them to “small farms” across the world.Footnote ⁶⁴ CGIAR funds also pushed for a reorientation of the organization taking place: production research that more accurately reflected farmers’ needs.

A good example of a “typical” program (granted that all of these programs were unique to their locale) was CIMMYT’s Regional Maize Program for Central America, Panama, and the Caribbean. A 1978 report on the program reveals the vast network of scientists, technicians, government workers, diplomats, farmers, and many intermediaries needed to make it function. The Regional Maize Program was sponsored by the Swiss government with the cooperation of fourteen countries. Modeled on the on-farm approach advocated by CIMMYT, it also included the core philosophy of the international organization: research at experiment stations, research and production of new technologies in farmers’ fields, and demonstrations for technology transfer.Footnote ⁶⁵ As part of this project, two maize scientists and an economist spent a total of 126 days consulting with ministers of agriculture and directors of national research institutions from nine governments (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica). Most meetings encouraged the “participation of local maize program leaders and technicians” with the stated aim that “technology generation” happening on farmers’ fields would be more widely accepted.Footnote ⁶⁶ Vital to this research was the establishment of maize nurseries and the running of experiments. In 1978, alone, a total of 164 experiments produced 9 new experimental varieties to be tested the following year. This research had to navigate differences from country to country and, indeed, between intra-country regions. For example, when it came to seed production, some countries had a “well-organized program” (El Salvador and Guatemala), while others were not developed. Pairing regionally specific characteristics (i.e., husk cover, propensity to ear rot, height of plants, leaf breadth) with desired crop yield was a scientific riddle that relied heavily on research conducted on farmers’ fields.

The Regional Maize Program for Central America, Panama, and the Caribbean revealed that “production technology generated at experiment stations in the region often was not accepted by farmers.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This was due mainly to the fact that conditions at experiment stations were simply not replicable, and, crucially, the economic risk was not factored into the analysis of which varieties and technologies to propose to small-plot and medium-plot farmers. For instance, a factor that had not previously been examined was the difference between individuals and cooperative groups. The latter could afford the suggested herbicide while individual farmers found it difficult to even find it in local markets.Footnote ⁶⁸ Working directly on farmers’ plots expanded adoption of technology and led to subsequent yield increases.

Finally, in addition to in-country workshops, the 1978 Regional Maize Program introduced seven production program directors from El Salvador to Mexico’s Poza Rica-Tuxpan, where the maize training program was located. Upon returning to their country these directors held a workshop to showcase what they had learned. This fruitful exchange allowed for knowledge and experience to ripple beyond national borders. This web of interconnected researchers, farmers, and state officials was anchored solely by its connection to CIMMYT. CIMMYT was becoming vital at all levels of regional agriculture development – local leaders, national bureaucrats, regional experts – reaching far beyond the research station.

The focus on “marginal zones,” the buzz word in Mexican politics of the 1970s and 1980s, would trickle down into CIMMYT’s lexicon and influence how the institution approached outreach.Footnote ⁶⁹ Just as CIMMYT affected Mexico’s framing of farmers’ problems, so too did Mexico impact CIMMYT’s framing of global problems. How, the organization asked, could agricultural advances and technology reach the most remote farmers, those who had not yet benefitted from CIMMYT’s contributions? A greater focus on economic impact began to take shape.

A Global Center

In 1986, Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid presided over CIMMYT’s twentieth anniversary. While some of the themes from the celebration echoed earlier research priorities, the international contributions and expansion of CIMMYT as part of the CGIAR network had emerged as the most critical. Of course, the context of the 1980s in Mexico proved quite different from the decade of CIMMYT’s founding. By 1986, Mexico was in the midst of one of the worst economic crises in its history, and across the globe neoliberal reforms were on the rise. Further, widespread enthusiasm for the first generation of wheat seeds, which had promised to end world hunger in the 1950s and 1960s, gave way to growing critiques that pesticides, excessive fertilizer, and irrigation did more harm than good to small-plot farmers.

In this new era, CIMMYT’s global impact was undeniable. More than 4,000 agricultural scientists from 125 countries had been trained at CIMMYT. The scholarship program had expanded to allow trainees to spend more time in Mexico. And by 1985 CIMMYT had the world’s largest collections of wheat and maize germplasm, with more than 2 million seed packets sent on a yearly basis to nearly 120 countries.Footnote ⁷⁰

As a major global player facing economic crisis in Mexico, as well as criticism of its results, CIMMYT sought a more transparent accounting of the real costs to implement technological change. As CIMMYT Director General D. L. Winkelmann explained, “it is necessary to combine financial information with biological” research to assess how this knowledge made it on the ground.Footnote ⁷¹ In short, though still celebrating advances in plant breeding, there was once again a concerted effort to bring the farmer into greater focus, and to do this more successfully than in the past. This shift reflected a trend in international agricultural research, with a strong focus on more farmer-centered approaches to knowledge and technology development such as the frameworks of farming systems research, Farmer First, and Farmer-back-to-Farmer.

CIMMYT issued a series of publications reflecting this new interest. One example, Gorras y Sombreros – or Baseball Caps and Sombreros – focused on “paths of collaboration between technicians and peasants.”Footnote ⁷² Taking the example of local knowledge transmission about farming with velvet beans, usually passed on from one generation to the next, CIMMYT organized a series of workshops that brought together state officials, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), local leaders, and peasants from across southern Mexico and Central America to discuss velvet bean farming techniques as technologies worthy of study by an international organization. The velvet bean was introduced into the United States from Asia at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷³ From there it made its way to Central America via the United Fruit Company in the 1920s. The velvet bean had a specific appeal for plantation owners. Interspersed between corn stalks, mature beans could be used as forage for livestock, served as natural fertilizer for cotton or corn, and, if planted with oranges, worked as a natural weed deterrent. Indigenous farmers from southern Mexican states and Guatemala had been using velvet beans for decades. Despite its evident success in the fields, it was displaced by inorganic fertilizers and its use labeled “backward.” By the early 1990s once-disdained practices were revisited, but there was little research on the bean’s characteristics, what little knowledge existed was dispersed, and few, if any, controlled studies had been conducted, certainly not in experimental fields.

The push to bring farmers into conversation with scientists and extensionists became part of a growing trend that elevated local “practices” to the study of science. In the case of recuperating knowledge about the velvet bean, for instance, funds from several organizations were brought together to sustain a frank exchange of knowledge between professional researchers and farmers. Under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, twenty-four representatives from universities, NGOs, and both national and international agricultural programs from eight countries met with farmers. The group was not limited to the region but also included representatives from South America, West Africa, and the Philippines. While a significant focus of the workshop, which was held in Catemaco, Mexico, was research and new extension work on green fertilizers, the event kicked off with visits to two Indigenous communities experimenting with velvet beans in Soteapan and Mecayapan, Veracruz. These community visits served as the framing for the multiday event. Though just an example of a shift in CIMMYT’s practices, the velvet bean meeting represented a growing determination to focus on farmers and the vigorous “exchange of technical knowledge.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Questionnaires used to query farmers in this period reveal the level of local detail sought by CIMMYT experts. For instance, questions ranged from soil choice to tools used: How do you prepare your soil? In this cornfield, what was planted in the previous season? Why did you choose to use this lot and not another for experimental crops? Although completed questionnaires, if they have survived, remain hidden in the archival record, what is certain is that there was a concerted effort to tally the participation of local, small-plot farmers. Local farmers, for instance, “took control of experiments using simple and easy to understand practices.” This ease could be translated as making the farmer feel comfortable with experimentation by designing trials from previous farming experience. Furthermore, the design of the experiments was done collectively, with all participating farmers agreeing on what it was they sought to understand.Footnote ⁷⁵ The push for openness and collective spirit was vital to give farmers a sense of control and equal footing with CIMMYT experts – although, as subsequent investigations into farmer participatory research illustrate, critically measuring “participation” is difficult, as is quantifying communication and other human-to-human interactions.Footnote ⁷⁶

By 1994 CIMMYT had only grown in its dominance as a producer of scientific agricultural knowledge. In that single year CIMMYT staff produced 410 publications on topics ranging from seed quality, to triticale improvement strategies, to disease resistance in Mexican landraces of maize, to networking for sustainable maize farming in Central America, to a traveling workshop on wheat-based sustainability in East Africa.Footnote ⁷⁷ The institution’s prominence was also evidenced in CIMMYT’s global footprint. As reported by wheat scientist Sanjaya Rajaram, by 1994, 58 percent of the total bread wheat area in developing countries was planted by varieties directly or indirectly derived from CIMMYT germplasm.Footnote ⁷⁸ In less than three decades, seeds developed in CIMMYT’s experimental stations in Mexico had conquered the wheat fields of the world.

Tying together the themes of germplasm and focus on farmers, CIMMYT and the Mexican government launched a ten-year program known as Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture (MasAgro) in 2010 with the goal of reaching small-plot farmers, whose rainfed lands had previously been dismissed by agricultural research. In many ways, MasAgro, at least in writing, recalls how agricultural research that directly benefitted farmers was described in the early years of technical assistance – “to augment the productive capacity of small wheat and corn farmers” and guarantee “food security for the world’s growing population.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Echoes of the original aims more than fifty years later reveal how decades of inputs and focused research projects have not always managed to transform agricultural fields. It is more difficult to change social context (poverty, or unequal land and water distribution, for example) than it is to create experimental plots.

Ten years prior, in 2003, the Mexican government had signed an agreement enabling CIMMYT to continue to function in the country as an international organization with a series of fiscal and judicial benefits reserved for international institutions in good standing and in acknowledgments of the important role that CIMMYT continued to play in the development of agricultural technology in the country. Crucially for its research mission, the agreement declared that seeds destined for CIMMYT research stations would continue to be exempt from Mexican law that prohibited the import of seeds. This latter point may seem obvious, given the nature of CIMMYT’s research, but it also signaled the continued value placed on the ongoing work at the center and by its researchers. Fully 99 percent of CIMMYT’s funding comes from external sources, but the Mexican government continues to provide about $300,000 yearly in addition to the lands and access to the nation’s research stations.Footnote ⁸⁰

Conclusion

To understand the importance of CIMMYT today – and how we should best tell its history – we should first ask, was CIMMYT a technical assistance program? This depends on whom you ask. For example, in a 1979 hearing before the Subcommittee on International Trade of the Committee on Finance, John Pino, director of agricultural sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, insisted that this was “no usual technical assistance program. We never, in fact, used that terminology.”Footnote ⁸¹ Instead, those involved with CIMMYT preferred to focus on cooperative research and training programs as the goals. This is a vital distinction, because mid-twentieth-century technical assistance in practice, often associated with development aid, frequently disregarded local practices and knowledge. In its initial years, so did CIMMYT. As CIMMYT goals grew to incorporate socioeconomic impacts, its programs also sought to include more farmer participation. Farmers would not simply be passive recipients of information; rather, they became active participants and, as in the case of the velvet beans, vital designers of experiments. It was local farmers who understood the land at a deeper level, and it was farmers who, enmeshed in social networks and unspoken rules, could – and did – affect how science was conducted on the ground. Crucial, then, to the distinction of technical assistance versus an international research program was the role assumed by the Mexican government and Mexican research institutions. CIMMYT was conceived as initially a Mexican program, and in 1966 it embraced and reflected a Mexican nation which, like its president, was seeking to influence the globe, to become a leader in the so-called developing world.

When CIMMYT was incorporated into CGIAR a few years later in 1971, it joined the network of research institutions not as a recent creation but rather as an organization with a history that traces its origins decades earlier to the inauguration of MAP in 1943. These origins matter, for its aims and thus its research agenda reflect a divided world, a product of a post–World War II era, and the role that agricultural science can play in ending world hunger. Since that time, the organization’s breadth and goals have modified to reflect the changing understanding that different actors – scientists, donors, NGOs – hold on food security, agricultural development, and agricultural research.

In 2020, CIMMYT’s website and publications boasted that for more than fifty years it had used science to “make a difference,” defining this as helping “tens of millions of farmers grow more nutritious, resilient and productive maize and wheat cropping systems, using methods that nourish the environment and combat climate change.”Footnote ⁸² But at its origins, farmers themselves were not the focus of CIMMYT, and instead the driving engine for the organization was crop research, specifically for increased food production, yield, and ensuring a global food supply. In the new context of climate change and renewed calls to again increase crop yields, CIMMYT’s historical adaptability will be put to the test.