Coming to terms with tropical ecology: technology transfer during the early Green Revolution

Abstract

That plants native to one region of the world often fare poorly when transferred to another region has long been known. It seems odd, therefore, that the Green Revolution (GR) programmes of the 1950s and into the ‘60s sought to transfer temperate zone technology to the tropics. Proponents of the GR, however, justified this mistake by arguing that they had had little choice. For knowledge of tropical agriculture was at that time largely confined to export crops while GR programmes focused upon food staples. An understanding of how to transfer technology to the tropics, they maintained, was only achieved in the 1960s at the new international agricultural research centres.Both of these claims, however, are highly misleading. By the 1950s the field of tropical agriculture had much to say about staples which would have been relevant to early GR programmes. Moreover, it was not until the late ‘60s that the new IARCs began to address fully the problem of transfer, and by the early ‘70s these efforts had lost momentum. It would appear, therefore, that those planning the early GR programmes were either unaware of existing knowledge about tropical agriculture or knew but chose to ignore it.

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