Abstract
Virtually all areas of policy are commonly justified by reference to history. This article examines claims in literature which discusses the feasibility of ‘another Green Revolution’ and shows that almost all of the ‘history’ it deploys is poorly constructed. Moreover, since the authors in question arrive at a wide range of conflicting policy recommendations, the literature is of little use to policymakers. It concludes, however, not that history is useless for policy, but that if carefully done, it can indeed provide valuable orientation.
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Notes
Also referred to as a ‘second GR’, ‘new GR’, ‘Gene Revolution’ or ‘GR 2.0’, often with reference to Africa.
I also discuss a few cases below where the authors do not explicitly refer to a new GR (Spielman and Pandya-Lorch 2010; Haggblade and Hazell 2010). I have included them in the analysis, nonetheless, because they (a) seek to extract lessons from the history of agricultural development since the 1970s and (b) their focus, like that of the GR, is on improved cultivation technologies.
The literature on which this study is based consists of about 60 works which were collected rather unsystematically. Some titles were drawn from a Google Ngram search using the terms ‘new GR’, ‘second GR’, ‘another GR’ or ‘GR for Africa’. Others emerged from searching several development journals using the same terms, and yet others were found by accident in the course of my reading. A larger sample size, however, would have been pointless because my aim is not to review this literature comprehensively but rather to develop an analytical framework which can be used to identify a small number of basic stances which recur in the debate.
This reluctance is also evident in the editors’ introductory essay (Haggblade et al. 2010a: 3–12). In their discussion of why African agriculture is in such bad shape, they make no reference to the impact of SAP on sub-Saharan Africa from 1980 [unlike both Eicher (1995) and Djurfeldt et al. (2005)].
In Mexico, too, the Mexican Agricultural Program was established in 1943 before any high-yielding maize or wheat varieties had been developed for Mexican conditions (Jennings 1988).
The same tendency is evident in this book’s analytical framework which identifies two ‘key structural features’ which are said to provide the ‘levers available for initiating change’ (Haggblade et al. 2010b, 22–23, 325ff). These are (a) those factors affecting productive capacity (i.e., providing farmers with a repertoire of technical options) and (b) those affecting incentives (i.e., for the farmer to adopt one or other option). This framework provides a way to analyze the factors affecting growth and productivity, but it says nothing about which ‘structural features’ affect equity or environmental quality.
Selective definitions of ‘success’, of course, are hardly confined to the technologies of the original GR. For a nice analysis of success claims for genetically modified cotton, see Glover (2010).
If one asks why most of the historical accounts in this literature are so weak, it may be due to carelessness in some cases. But as one historian of the GR has persuasively argued (Cullather. 2010: 265–268), it is almost certainly because such accounts are often policy-driven histories which have been cobbled together to arrive at a foreordained conclusion.
Occasionally, radical criticism is also to be found in documents which are not expressly concerned with the new GR. In a report on boosting food security in Africa, for example, the UN Conference on Trade and Development challenges an assumption underlying virtually all calls for a new GR: that new technology is essential. African farmers today are capable of producing far more food than they do, the report argues, but in order to achieve this potential they will require access to credit as well as markets and prices which are fair; improved technology is not so important (UNCTAD 2010, 58).
This situation is hardly peculiar to history as a discipline. As the history and sociology of science have repeatedly demonstrated, complete consensus—as opposed to widespread agreement—is also very rare in the natural sciences.
According to one study of the policy process, policymakers often use research less to guide them to a specific solution than to help them to think about issues, define the problems and anticipate possible outcomes (Garrett and Islam 1998: 9).
Of course, getting the history right is not enough; policymakers have to be willing to listen. There is a large literature on the ways in which politicians and top civil servants often use empirical evidence selectively in order to justify policy which has already been agreed. Once again, this kind of cynicism does not mean that history is useless for policy, but a discussion of how experts can nonetheless ‘speak truth to power’ must be left for another place.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Dominic Glover and Lidia Cabral for helpful feedback on a draft of this article. More generally, I am grateful to Dagmar Schaefer (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin), Johan Schot (Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex University) and Jim Sumberg (Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University) for providing supportive environments for my work over the last 3 years.
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Harwood, J. Another Green Revolution? On the Perils of ‘Extracting Lessons’ from History. Development 61, 43–53 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-018-0174-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-018-0174-5