| Notes |
t h e r o c k e f e l l e r f o u n d at i o n
centennial series
Balancing Technology and Community in Agriculture
food &
P R O SPERITY
balancing technology and community in agriculture
By Amanda Carroll Waterhouse
Innovation for the Next 100 Years
Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Series
food & prosperity
2 Chapter _: Food & Prosperity 3
4 Chapter _: Food & Prosperity 5
6 Chapter _: Food & Prosperity 7
8 Chapter _: Food & Prosperity 9
Preface from Dr. Judith Rodin 12
Foreword – Kofi Annan 14
Introduction 18
1 Cultivating the Vineyard 32
11 Germinal Ideas 48
111 Rural Reconstruction 60
1v Hard Times, War, and Nutrition 76
v Turning to Mexico 98
v1 Exporting Success 126
v11 Internationalizing Research 146
v111 Taking Stock 172
1x Beyond the Political Debate 184
x A Green Revolution for Africa 206
Conclusion 224
Acknowledgments 232
List of Illustrations 234
Index 240
© 2013 by
The Rockefeller Foundation
Foreword copyright Kofi Annan, 2013
All rights reserved.
Cover: Top: Transplanting rice at the
International Rice Research Institute
(Rockefeller Archive Center.) Bottom:
Photo by Kathrin Ziegler. Getty Images.
Book design by Pentagram.
Food & Prosperity:
Balancing Technology and Community
in Agriculture
Printed in Canada.
Published by
The Rockefeller Foundation
New York
United States of America
In association with Vantage Point
Historical Services, Inc.
South Dakota
United States of America
ISBN-13: 978-0-9796389-4-7
ISBN-10: 0-9796389-4-1
Rockefeller Foundation
Centennial Series
Books published in the Rockefeller
Foundation Centennial Series provide
case studies for people around the
world who are working “to promote the
well-being of humankind.” Three books
highlight lessons learned in the fields
of agriculture, health, and philanthropy.
Three others explore the Foundation’s
work in Africa, Thailand, and the United
States. For more information about
the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial
initiatives, visit http://www.centennial.
rockefellerfoundation.org.
Notes & Permissions
The Foundation has taken all reasonable
steps to ensure the accuracy of the
information provided in the book; any
errors or omissions are inadvertent. This
book is published without footnotes or
endnotes. A manuscript version with
citations and references for all sources
used is available at www.centennial.
rockefellerfoundation.org.
Captions in this book provide
information on the creator and the
repository from which the images in this
book were obtained. The Foundation
has made its best efforts to determine
the creator and copyright holder of all
images used in this publication. Images
held by the Rockefeller Archive Center
have been deemed to be owned by
the Rockefeller Foundation unless we
were able to determine otherwise.
Specific permission has been granted
by the copyright holder to use the
following works:
Jonas Bendiksen: 4-5, 8-9, 17, 57, 74-75,
95, 96-97, 123, 170-171, 203, 204-205,
212, 218, 221, 222-223.
Ken Spain: 89
Mississippi Department of Education: 92
Ted Spiegel: 167
Antony Njuguna: 169
Thomas L. Williams: 180
Marion Kaplan: 182-183
Ashwin Gatha: 189
Wendy Stone: 198-199
Food & Prosperity 11
12 Preface Food & Prosperity 13
of programs and institutions that will make the agricultural sector more resilient, including telephone helplines for farmers who have questions about
everything from plant disease to transport and markets. At the same time,
through our impact investing initiative and our philanthropic partnerships,
we are working to bring new financial capital to farmers and communities
eager to invest in their future.
With Africa’s growing population, it is critical that small subsistence
farmers have the means to make the transition to commercial production,
both to shore up their own livelihoods and to help ensure a food supply
that meets the needs of the continent’s growing urban population. As cities
expand around the world, this need to increase agricultural productivity
through plant-breeding programs, education, and resource management
grows as well. We also need to unlock the range of human potential in these
communities, and this means ensuring that women are able to both fully
contribute to and benefit from the development, management, and marketing of agricultural products.
All of these initiatives encompass a systemic view of the relationship
between food security, resilience, and development. Though the science and
technology we use today represents the aggregation of generations of innovations in the laboratory, the field, and the marketplace, we understand, as our
forbearers did, that community is at the heart of social change.
In his brief autobiography, published in 1913, John D. Rockefeller Sr. suggested that the best philanthropy “that does the most good and the least harm,
that nourishes civilization at its very root…is not what is usually called charity.” Instead, the greatest good comes when innovators take risks and carry
“doubtful enterprises” through to success. This entrepreneurial spirit has infused the efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation—from the fields of Alabama to
the Green Revolutions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—for the last century,
as we have worked to bring food to the tables and prosperity to the homes and
communities of poor and marginalized families worldwide.
By Dr. Judith Rodin
President, The Rockefeller Foundation
J
ohn D. Rockefeller Sr. and his advisors saw agricultural production as
critical to prosperity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they embarked on an unprecedented effort to help poor farmers in the southern
United States increase agricultural productivity. This effort profoundly
influenced innovation in the agricultural sector in the United States and, later,
in countries around the globe.
Today, food and prosperity are still intrinsically linked. Farm production
provides the life-sustaining calories and nutrients that allow poor communities and, indeed, all people to sustain healthy, secure livelihoods. With
increased agricultural yields, crop sales generate cash to allow families, communities, and nations to invest in infrastructure, education, and vital services.
In the early twentieth century, the leaders of the Rockefeller Foundation
were remarkably prescient in their understanding of the systemic relationship between seeds planted in the field and the aspirations of poor residents
of the rural American South, and later of Latin America and Asia. Today, the
Rockefeller Foundation continues this focus on the need to transform human
systems to create food security in the hopes of nourishing the human potential in the world’s most challenging regions, especially sub-Saharan Africa.
In the drought-prone northern region of Tigray in Ethiopia, for example,
we have worked with partners to help improve the livelihoods of poor farmers
by introducing crop insurance, microcredit, and improved resource management strategies to strengthen food and income security. These initiatives build
resilience in communities that face climate, political, and economic challenges
that are often beyond their control and result from forces global in nature. They
also encourage farmers and pastoralists to make the marginal investments
necessary to increase land and labor productivity.
As a founder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, we are investing in science and technology that will allow governments to prepare for
the effects of climate change and enable farmers to raise improved varieties of
maize, cassava, and other food crops. We are also supporting the development
preface
14 Foreword Food & Prosperity 15
The GEB paved the way for the Rockefeller Foundation’s international
agricultural efforts in Europe and Asia in the years prior to World War II.
Then, in the middle of the war, the Foundation launched a remarkable
initiative in Mexico to increase food production substantially through the
development and introduction of more productive and resilient varieties of
wheat, corn, beans, and other staple crops. The increases in agricultural yields
were spectacular. Over the next several decades the Rockefeller Foundation
sought to introduce high-yield seeds and new cultivation strategies in other
developing nations. These efforts became known as the Green Revolution
and are credited with saving more than a billion lives.
Certainly, the Foundation and the world learned lessons along the path
of the Green Revolution. In some regions, greater agricultural productivity
heightened inequality and intensified the marginalization of the poor and vulnerable in society. In other places, intensive use of petrochemical fertilizers
and irrigation led to environmental problems and even the increase of human
parasites like schistosomiasis. These consequences prompted serious reflection and great debate both within and outside the Foundation.
As Food & Prosperity points out, the Rockefeller Foundation learned from
success and disappointment. Deepening its commitment to fighting hunger
and malnutrition after the 1970s, it continued to invest in both science and
human capacity. A second phase of the Green Revolution focused on continued increases in agricultural yields, while striving to protect the environment
and strengthen communities along the way.
Without a doubt, the first green revolution provided the launch pad
for Asia’s astonishing progress over the last generation, but it did not touch
Africa in the ways that some had hoped for. In recent decades, however,
Africa has become a primary focus for the Rockefeller Foundation’s agricultural
work, and drawing on the lessons learned from Asia, they have embarked with
By Kofi Annan
Former Secretary General of the United Nations
Chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
When the Rockefeller Foundation helped launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006,
it brought more to the Alliance than simply money and
know-how. It also provided the wisdom that came from
a century of working to conquer hunger and promote prosperity through
increasing agricultural production around the world.
Much has changed over the last century. Colonial empires have crumbled.
New nations have asserted themselves on the global stage. The world’s
population has grown tremendously, and for many in the developed world,
affluence has never been greater. But many of humanity’s afflictions persist,
including war, disease and, most pervasive of all, hunger and malnutrition.
These problems are especially apparent in Africa, where nearly 350 million
people go hungry every day.
The global community must find the will and resources to feed those who
are starving now. As I have said on many occasions, the world needs better
coordination of emergency food and nutrition programs. We need improved
early warning systems that will alert us to potential food shortages. We
also need to be able to respond to these crises more quickly by moving food
reserves and cash to the countries and communities where they are needed.
Above all, however, we must follow the advice of John D. Rockefeller and commit ourselves to addressing the root causes of hunger and malnutrition.
More than a hundred years ago, Rockefeller financed and founded the
General Education Board (GEB), a precursor to the Rockefeller Foundation.
The GEB began working with small-holder farmers in some of the poorest
counties in the Southern United States in the hope that increasing agricultural production would increase food security and raise incomes in these
communities. With increased prosperity, these communities would invest
in the education of their children, thus ensuring greater opportunities for
future generations.
foreword
16 Foreword Food & Prosperity 17
us on a uniquely African Green Revolution. I hope and believe that AGRA
will provide a similar impetus to the future of our continent while ensuring
economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
Today, as we work with our partners at the Rockefeller Foundation, I have
every reason to be optimistic. Since launching AGRA, we have introduced
over 400 new crop varieties developed with the help of local farmers. We
have helped to train and fund 14,000 agro-dealers who are providing these
new varieties and fertilizers to small farmers across the continent. With our
partners, we have worked to regenerate 380,000 hectares of depleted soils in
Sahelian countries through the precise application of small doses of fertilizer.
Meanwhile, we have focused on training individuals involved in agricultural
and food production and distribution processes, supporting more than 450
graduate students to take MSc and Ph.D. degrees in plant breeding and soil
science at African universities.
These efforts to strengthen agriculture in Africa are painted against a
background of other factors that strengthen my hope and resolve. Economic
growth across the continent is strong. Foreign investment and private sector
funders are increasingly seeing opportunities in Africa. Governance in many
countries has improved, and education and health are more accessible, espe
-
cially to women and girls. Meanwhile, the institutions that comprise our civil
society are growing and becoming more active.
The Rockefeller Foundation has played no small part in these changes.
As readers of Food & Prosperity will discover, the Foundation’s commitment to
improving the well-being of humanity is deeply rooted. Agriculture has been
an important part of the Foundation’s program for decades, and the lessons
learned from its experience should inspire and humble those of us who strive
today to conquer hunger and promote prosperity in our own era.
foreword
F
ire-engine red. Professor Richard Bradfield, a soil
agronomist at Cornell University’s renowned college
of agriculture, was on his way to New York City
to pick up the Rockefeller Foundation’s new “car
-
ryall” station wagon, and its color was not at all appropriate.
There was no way such an attention-grabbing vehicle could be
discreetly driven over the back roads of rural Mexico with
-
out becoming a spectacle. Bradfield and his fellow scientists,
members of the Foundation’s Agricultural Survey Commission
to Mexico, had a mission: observe, draw conclusions, and report
back to the Rockefeller Foundation. Though they would never
be invisible, they should be discreet—quiet, discerning, and,
above all, scientific in their appraisal. This meant limiting the
effect their presence had on that which they observed. A bright
red station wagon just wouldn’t do. Foundation officials had the
vehicle repainted a “pleasing green,” and sent Bradfield on his
way. It was the summer of 1941.
Green. It fit the tone of Bradfield’s pursuit, but he had no
way of knowing that he was a forward scout of what would
become the Green Revolution, one of the most influential
accomplishments of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 20th
century. Bradfield and his three colleagues were simply a
scientific survey team with a mandate from the Foundation
to explore ways to help Mexico solve its pressing agricultural
crisis. Truth be told, they were not exactly sure what could
be done. There was no precedent, no template for what they
were about to do. They intended to drive into Mexico and
take it one mile at a time.
introduction
18 Introduction Food & Prosperity 19
To understand the state of Mexican
agriculture, the Survey Commission
drove nearly 5,000 miles in their green
"carryall" station wagon: (from l to r)
Elvin Charles Stakman (Univ. Minnesota),
Paul Mangelsdorf (Harvard), Richard
Bradfield (Cornell), Richard Schultes
(Harvard). (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Foundation could help Mexico, three of the most prestigious
agricultural scientists in the nation answered the call and gave
up their summers to chase the opportunity.
Heading south toward the Laredo border crossing, the station wagon rumbled through cotton farms in east Texas where
the General Education Board (GEB), another Rockefeller philanthropy, had first experimented with agriculture programs 30
years earlier. The GEB had been a primary sponsor of the farm
demonstration movement that agricultural scientist Seaman
Knapp led at the turn of the century. Knapp had taken a holistic
approach to agriculture, combining science with popular,
demonstration-based education for farmers. His work had long
since been popularized and taken over by extension programs
at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the nation’s
land-grant colleges. It was just the way the Foundation liked
to work. Invest early in an innovative idea, bring a program to
maturity, and then pass it to government or other entities for
permanent support.
Knapp had worked among farmers close to home, but
working in a foreign country, where language and culture and
traditions were bound to get in the way, promised to be exponentially more difficult. At the border, Dr. George Payne, a Rockefeller
Foundation medical officer, met the team. Agriculture work in
foreign countries might be newer and less tested, but the medical
division of the Foundation, especially hookworm, yellow fever,
and malaria specialists, had worked in Mexico and around the
world for decades. Payne would escort the team to Mexico City
to help them get started.
In Syracuse, Bradfield picked up Paul Mangelsdorf, a botanist
from Harvard University who was one of the world’s leading
authorities on corn. Mangelsdorf brought with him a young
Harvard graduate student, Richard Schultes, who was an adventurous scientist—part botanist and part anthropologist, with
fieldwork research experience. Schultes had just returned from
a trip to the Amazon Basin in search of wild, disease-resistant
rubber plants that could be used in the war effort. In 20 years
he would be widely acknowledged as the father of modern
ethnobotany—the study of how humans have used, managed,
and perceived plants. But in the summer of 1941, as the team approached the Mexican border, his greatest contribution was his
ability to speak Spanish.
Dr. Elvin Charles Stakman, a plant pathologist from the
University of Minnesota, completed the team. Stakman was
the most prestigious scientist on the trip: older, and first among
equals. (Among his graduate students at Minnesota was a young
plant pathologist by the name of Norman Borlaug, whose interest
in wheat stem rust would later make him a hero of the Green
Revolution.) On the Mexico trip, Stakman’s colleagues gave him
the nickname “jefe,” only partly in jest. Stakman was absorbed in
work at the University of Minnesota, and could not take time for
the tedious drive to the border. Let the younger scientists break
in the station wagon. He would meet the team in Mexico City.
These were not junior researchers. They were the foremost
scientists in their fields. It was testament to the authority of the
Rockefeller Foundation that when President Raymond Fosdick
asked who might serve on a commission to study how the
introduction
20 Introduction Food & Prosperity 21
study commission to collect data. What was the situation in
Mexico? How could the Rockefeller Foundation help? A few
months later, Bradfield and his colleagues crossed the border
in their green carry-all station wagon.
Overview
F
or a century, the agricultural work of the Rockefeller Foundation has been shaped by the delicate negotiations and
personal relationships that arise out of first encounters
between strangers. In each place the Foundation worked, whether
in the United States or abroad, its activities have been characterized by a creative tension between science and technology on one
hand and local knowledge, culture, and politics on the other. At
times, the push and pull in this encounter has yielded innovative
breakthroughs, while at other times the clash has produced effects
that fall far short of the Foundation’s intentions.
Mexico became a pivot point in the history of the Foundation’s work on agriculture. It was large-scale and global in its
ambition. Mexico became a laboratory in which the Foundation
asked fundamental questions about the nature of agricultural
development. Could the Foundation contribute to lifting farmers
out of poverty into a nascent
middle class? Would the Mexico
program discover new technological innovations that might
improve productivity and feed
Stakman had also worked in Mexico. As early as 1917 he
had been part of a USDA research team studying stem rust in
wheat. He spoke Spanish and knew his way around the Mexican agricultural landscape. Once, during the 1917 trip, he had
absentmindedly walked into a wheat field unannounced, only to
be confronted by a farmer demanding to know what he was doing. “Is this your wheat field?” Stakman had called out. “What in
the hell are you doing in it?” came the answer. Responding that
he was a plant pathologist from the United States would hardly
satisfy any farmer. As the Commission learned, most agricultural scientists worked in laboratories and behind desks, and rarely
met with farmers or ventured out onto farms.
History may record that Stakman, Bradfield, Mangelsdorf,
and Schultes were groundbreaking pioneers, but as they drove
through Mexico, they traveled in the footsteps of others. For
almost a decade prior to their trip, Dr. John Ferrell, associate
director of the International Health Division of the Foundation,
and Josephus Daniels, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, had tried
to convince the Rockefeller Foundation to pursue agriculture
work in Mexico. They saw it as an opportunity to work on a
pilot project to determine if elevating the farm economy could
improve nutrition for the rural poor. Their early attempts to
convince the Foundation failed. It would take a shift in the
Mexican political landscape, the spread of war, and the addition
of U.S. government voices to the chorus of advocates for Mexican
agriculture work to convince the Foundation to explore it as a
possibility. With all of these elements aligned, in early 1941,
Foundation President Raymond Fosdick agreed to convene a
introduction
22 Introduction Food & Prosperity 23
a creative tension between
science and technology
on one hand and local
knowledge, culture, and
politics on the other.
parents. Later, the GEB extended its work from the American
South to the rural Northeast.
After the United States Congress shifted full support for this
work to the government, another subsidiary Rockefeller philanthropy, the International Education Board (IEB), pursued similar
educational programs abroad in the years after World War I.
Chapter Two describes how the IEB funded farm demonstration
projects and agriculture clubs in Northern and Eastern Europe. Like
their counterparts at the GEB in the American South, officers of the
IEB reasoned that farmers with more income would be more likely
to support education. In Europe, the IEB encountered the same
differences in social class and rural culture that the GEB had in the
United States, with the added struggle of working through foreign
languages and cultures on the geographic margins of Europe.
In China, as described in Chapter Three, the Foundation built
on the relationship between agriculture and prosperity. It supported a new, more integrated program for rural reconstruction
and development. The China work became entangled in political tensions that the Foundation struggled to understand, but it
learned valuable lessons along the way.
During the Great Depression, as detailed in Chapter Four, the
Foundation turned back to the United States in an effort to help
address rural poverty and urban food shortages. As in China,
the need to raise the quality of life in rural America encouraged the philanthropists to develop a strategy that combined
improvements in the food supply with increased wealth for
farmers. For the first time in its history of agriculture programming, the Foundation focused its funding across various
the world? Could scientists unlock the nutritional secrets of ancient food crops and make them more nutritious? After Mexico,
agriculture moved to the center of the Foundation’s theory of
global development and helped reshape the world.
This book traces the century-long process of scientific discovery and technological application that the Rockefeller Foundation
implemented in different farmlands and cultures around the
world. This is also the story of evolving definitions of agricultural
prosperity. At times the Foundation focused its efforts on strategies
to increase the wealth of farmers. At other times the Foundation
focused on research that would improve the nutritional content
of food. During the Green Revolution, when the world’s population was increasing exponentially, scientists went into the fields
and focused their creative talents on increasing the yields of staple
food crops. The Foundation’s changing notions of agricultural
prosperity informed its aims and methods as it negotiated the tension between technology and culture.
The first important agriculture work funded by Rockefeller
philanthropy was in the Southern United States. Chapter One
explores the work of the General Education Board (GEB), an
early subsidiary philanthropy created by John D. Rockefeller
Sr., as it aimed to improve farm practices in order to lift poor
American farmers out of poverty. In the decade leading up to
the Rockefeller Foundation’s official establishment in 1913,
the GEB funded popular education programs for farmers. On
experimental farms, GEB agriculturalists proved the value of
new methods. The GEB also created clubs for farm children
to demonstrate new production techniques to their skeptical
introduction
24 Introduction Food & Prosperity 25
it had created in Mexico. It opened regional research, training,
and extension institutions, first in Colombia and Chile, and then
in India. Like the Mexico program, these pioneering initiatives
focused on scientific agricultural techniques and technology as
the path to prosperity.
In the 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation further expanded
its approach by supporting a network of international agricultural research institutes that transcended national governments
and regional agricultural concerns. Chapter Seven explores
the development of these global institutes, which were funded
in collaboration with other philanthropic institutions and
concentrated their work on unlocking the secrets of individual
staple crops. Key centers included the International Rice
Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, the International
Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico,
and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)
in Colombia. Over time the institutes would develop international staffs and serve international educational needs, but in
the beginning they were similar to the in-country Rockefeller
programs, complete with Rockefeller Foundation officers living
and conducting their research in foreign countries where they
were forced to engage both scientific and cultural challenges.
It was in this period that a U.S. government official coined
the now-famous term “Green Revolution” to describe the
proliferation of agricultural science and technology that had
raised agricultural productivity so quickly across the world.
While the Green Revolution is credited with saving more than
a billion lives from famine, by the 1970s the Green Revolution
disciplines, including health. It supported social science research
in an attempt to understand the underlying social forces at work
in agriculture, and to chart a course forward. It also recognized nutrition studies as an important and emerging borderland between
agriculture and public health. The insights it gained into the science of nutrition and yield, agricultural policy, and the forces
of the market in these years would inform its work for decades.
As the U.S. economy recovered and the United States
mobilized for World War II, the Foundation turned its attention to Mexico. Chapter Five chronicles the encounter between
Rockefeller Foundation scientists, including the members of
the Survey Commission in 1941, and their partners in Mexico.
This experience transformed the way that Foundation officers
worked internationally. Up to the 1940s, the agents of cultural
exchange, those who actively implemented technology in local
contexts, were outside advisors to the Foundation—people like
Booker T. Washington in the American rural South or Jimmy
Yen in the Chinese countryside. They acted as a bridge between
strangers, between the philanthropists and scientists of the
Foundation and the people whose lives they sought to improve.
It was in Mexico that Foundation officers aimed to bridge
the cultural gap themselves, by working and living full time
in remote Mexican villages. They sought to transform food
production there by building an operational infrastructure
that promoted scientific techniques and technology to produce
high-yielding food crops.
In the 1950s, as developed in Chapter Six, the Foundation
geographically expanded the new model for agriculture work
introduction
26 Introduction Food & Prosperity 27
A Bigger Job
When members of the Foundation’s Agricultural
Survey Commission returned to the United States
from Mexico in August 1941, they were inspired
by what they had seen. The report they produced deeply impressed Foundation leaders. Even U.S. Vice President Henry
Wallace, who had played a part in encouraging the Foundation
to pursue its Mexican agriculture work, exclaimed upon reading it, “Perfectly swell!”
As Elvin Stakman later reported, the scientists knew that their
job was not just surveying the landscape, but rather studying it
with an eye toward the future, toward the policies that would
change it. “When you undertake, not only to make discoveries,
but also to determine their potential values, and then to capitalize
on those values, it’s a bigger job than merely making the discoveries,” he said many years later. The agricultural scientists took on
this bigger job with gusto, knitting together their knowledge of
science with a vision of progress and the greater good that would
inform the Foundation’s role and identity for generations to come.
Unlike Stakman, earlier Rockefeller philanthropists had no
idea how important and far-reaching their agriculture work
would become. Yet they started out in much the same way. Just
as Richard Bradfield drove his green station wagon south toward
the unknown, Wallace Buttrick, another agent of Rockefeller
philanthropy, boarded a train in 1905 and headed for a field-based
fact-finding mission in the heart of the American West.
became the focus of widespread criticism. As Chapter Eight
details, the Foundation reoriented its agriculture programs
to respond to these concerns. Out of this review grew a new
operating structure and set of goals. The Foundation focused on
addressing “second-generation” problems of the Green Revolution, which centered more on social and environmental issues
and less on high crop yield. The Foundation also reduced the
role of its own staff in the field and began to rely on a growing
cadre of local experts to introduce new technologies.
This new sensitivity to culture and local control continued
to define Foundation work for decades. Chapter Nine describes
how the Foundation streamlined funding in the 1980s to target
neglected regions of the world as well as areas with the greatest
scientific promise. This translated to a new focus on sub-Saharan
Africa and on the emerging science of biotechnology. The latter
has redefined the scope and content of agricultural technology,
allowing farmers to combine higher yields with farm sustainability and higher nutritional quality. The Foundation chose
local actors to implement these new technological advances.
In the 1990s and beyond, the Foundation has continued to
prioritize sub-Saharan Africa and biotechnology in its agriculture
programs. Chapter Ten looks at how the Rockefeller Foundation
partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006
to launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA),
which remains a central focus of the Foundation’s agricultural
programming today.
introduction
28 Introduction Food & Prosperity 29
introduction
Introduction Food & Prosperity
The General Education Board, a
precursor to the Rockefeller Foundation,
included many of John D. Rockefeller
Sr.’s most trusted philanthropic advisors
(l to r, from bottom row): Edwin
Alderman, Frederick Gates, Charles Eliot,
Harry Pratt Judson, Wallace Buttrick,
Wickliffe Rose, Hollis Frissell, John D.
Rockefeller Jr., E.C. Sage, Albert Shaw,
Abraham Flexner, George Vincent, Anson
Phelps Stokes, Starr Murphy, Jerome
Greene. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
30 31
32 Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity 33
Rockefeller’s key philanthropic advisor, called for a “practical way” to spread
the “facts and art of agriculture to farmers.” He suggested that there should
“be no limit to the value of the crops they might raise.” Yet what would this
program look like? What would be its lessons and teaching technique?
Buttrick, then Secretary of the GEB, spent the better part of 1905 trying
to answer this question. Before heading to Texas, he had traveled extensively in North America, researching agricultural education. However, he
was unsatisfied with what he found. No successful model existed to teach
the principles of scientific agriculture techniques to farmers. It was not
until he visited the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas that he
found both the zeal and technical ability that he sought. David Houston,
the president of the college (who would later become U.S. Secretary of
Agriculture), quipped during a meeting, “Buttrick, you came at the right
time. We have two universities in Texas. One is at Austin and the other is
Dr. Seaman Knapp. He is here now.”
Buttrick agreed to meet with Knapp. He soon realized that Knapp’s
farm demonstration concept, which was already gaining attention in Texas,
was just what he was looking for. Knapp’s approach offered an efficient
way to increase productivity through the eradication of simple problems,
which, in the case of agriculture, meant crop blights and poor soil. Farm
demonstrations could disseminate simple and effective lessons for blight
prevention and soil fertilization, and became a model for Rockefeller’s
famed hookworm eradication program in the same region.
Farm Demonstr ation & the USDA
Though Seaman Knapp was not on the GEB radar before 1905, he had
already enjoyed a long and honored career in popular agricultural
education. Born in 1833 in upstate New York, he was schooled and
married in the Northeast, working as a teacher until he moved his family
to Iowa in 1863. He spent 20 years there, alternately working as a farmer,
preacher, and educator. In the late 1870s, he became a professor of agriculture at Iowa Agricultural College. He edited the Western Stock Journal and
Farmer, participated in the Iowa Improved Stock Breeders’ Association, and
suggested that Congress should establish a system of agricultural experiment stations—which finally happened in 1887.
In 1885, Knapp moved his family to Louisiana to work on the North
American Land and Timber Company development project. Though business-oriented, this work gave the former university professor and farmer
the opportunity to combine his scientific and experiential knowledge with
Dr. Wallace Buttrick’s train trip to the western United States
in 1905 was not the first journey he made in the service of the
General Education Board (GEB). He was, in fact, a key figure in
the Board’s creation and in the development of its approach to
problem solving, including its use of field surveys to assess local conditions
and needs. Survey commissions were the eyes on the ground and acted as
advisors on policy.
The GEB had opened its doors in 1902, a full decade before the Rockefeller
Foundation received its charter. It took on the task of promoting education
in the Southern United States “without distinction of sex, race, or creed.” It
provided support for public schools and worked to promote public health.
Its aim of using education as a means and an end in itself motivated the GEB
to become involved in agricultural work in the Southern United States.
Buttrick’s survey trips inspired him to advocate for this new arena of
GEB work. His extensive travels through the South in the first decade of the
century convinced him that the “main obstacle to progress was not apathy
or provincialism but poverty.” In rural communities, low agricultural productivity kept incomes low, and poor communities were unable to support
public education.
Other Rockefeller advisors agreed that in order for their school programs
to succeed, they needed a new educational program that would teach farmers
in the field and increase productivity and crop yield. Frederick T. Gates,
cultivating the vineyard
food & prosperity
Chapter I
34 Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity 35
larvae hatched and to burn cotton stalks in autumn to deprive the boll
weevil of a breeding environment.
Knapp’s first demonstration in Texas took place on Walter C. Porter’s
land. Farmers from the surrounding area were invited to observe. The
U.S. Congress later deemed the demonstration such a success that it
approved $40,000 in funding for Knapp to expand the program to other
counties. By 1905, the so-called “Farmers’ Cooperative Demonstration
Work” had expanded throughout Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma,
and Mississippi. Knapp’s methods greatly reduced the spread of the
boll weevil and diminished the damage it caused to cotton crops in the
Southern United States. Success on this scale fit the GEB’s vision for
agriculture work perfectly.
The GEB Extends Farm Demonstration
Wallace Buttrick’s first meeting with Seaman Knapp turned into
a two-day conference. They discussed the aims and methods
of the farm demonstration model as well as the limitations
imposed by the existing scope of the USDA program. Knapp argued that if
his demonstration model “paid” in dealing with pest-ridden farms, there was
“every reason to suppose that it would pay still more handsomely where no
handicap at all existed.” In other words, even farmers who were not suffering
from boll weevils would benefit from learning the techniques of scientific
agriculture, and the result would be an overall increase in agricultural
productivity. Knapp was frustrated that federal policymakers had only been
focused on interstate problems like the boll weevil. He wanted them to
authorize a general farm demonstration program that could be expanded
to all states in the American South.
These talks with Knapp gave Buttrick a compelling model for popular
farm education. He also realized that the GEB could support education for
farmers in states unaffected by the boll weevil, where the USDA was doing
little to increase agricultural productivity. In January 1906, Buttrick asked
Frederick T. Gates—John D. Rockefeller’s primary philanthropic advisor—
to travel to Washington, D.C., to meet with Knapp. Gates, like Buttrick, was
excited by the concept. At a later meeting with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture
James Wilson, Buttrick proposed that the GEB help expand the farm
demonstration program to states unaffected by the boll weevil. Under the
terms of a formal agreement signed in April 1906, they agreed that federal
funds would go to infested states, and GEB funds to non-infested ones. The
agreement stipulated, however, that the USDA would supervise the work
practical farming. The work inspired him to create
a model for popular agricultural education based on
demonstration. Knapp’s work began with figuring out
what crops could grow on land that had previously
been considered unfit for agriculture in the area around
Lake Charles, Louisiana. He chose rice, and attracted
farmers by the trainload. The major challenge became
convincing the newcomers, who were unimpressed
with the soil, to grow crops both of the variety and in
the method that Knapp advocated. He persuaded some
to relocate to “strategic tracts,” where he demonstrated
cutting-edge rice growing and harvesting techniques.
This tactic was an immediate and clear success. The
farmers stayed, and their neighbors emulated their
growing techniques. Within half a decade, farmers
grew rice in this manner all over the Gulf Coast, and
Louisiana became a major rice producer. Knapp saw
the act of teaching-by-doing as absolutely key to his
success. He later said of this work, which he performed
from 1885 to 1903, that “we then learned the philosophy and the power of demonstration.”
The Louisiana work also led to Knapp’s official
collaboration with the United States Department of Agriculture. He had
a previous relationship with James Wilson, who became Secretary of
Agriculture in 1897. Both had been professors at Iowa Agricultural College,
and when Wilson served in the U.S. Congress, Knapp sent him and others
draft legislation designed to obtain more federal funding for agricultural
experiment stations, thus contributing to passage of the Hatch Act of
1887. In 1898, Knapp was appointed a USDA special advisor for the South
and given the title “Agricultural Explorer.” As part of his rice research,
he traveled to rice-growing regions of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean
in search of improved rice varieties, returning with strains of rice that
enhanced America’s rice production. The USDA also recruited Knapp to
help fight the boll weevils that plagued Southern agriculture. Boll weevils,
insects that attack cotton, had spread from Mexico to Texas in 1892. From
Texas, they were moving northward and eastward, blighting cotton crops.
Knapp started his campaign against boll weevils in Terrell, Texas, in
1903. Using the same teaching-by-emulation technique that he developed
for rice farmers in Louisiana, he preached better practices and diversified
farming. He also coached farmers to harvest cotton before boll weevil
Seaman Asahel Knapp pioneered a farm
demonstration method to disseminate
agricultural science to farmers all over
the United States, earning the support
of the USDA and the General Education
Board. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
36 Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity 37
planting, cultivating, harvesting, rotating crops, and fertilizing, as well as
the use of waste products, machinery, and account books. In lectures and
in writing, Knapp had emphasized the scientific and business aspects of
agriculture. He told audiences that “agriculture may be divided into eight
parts: one-eighth is science; three-eighths is art; four-eighths is business
management.” He had gained access to rural communities by convincing
the best farmer to grow a test plot using his methods. This plot served as a
demonstration field for other farmers.
Knapp’s agents also started agricultural clubs to reach more members of
rural communities. The clubs cultivated a culture of scientific agriculture.
Agents used boys and girls clubs to educate children in good farming practice.
Through the children, agents reached the parents, who often imitated the
children’s practice out of praise for—or embarrassment over—their greater
success. Boys clubs focused on actual crop growing. Boys asked their fathers
for a small plot of land to tend cotton or corn using Knapp’s method. Girls
clubs encouraged vegetable gardening, home economics, and household
management practices tailored to the rural lifestyle. Knapp also created clubs
for women, to teach them how to grow and can vegetables for future use.
By 1912, Knapp’s approach was widespread and successful. That year, over
100,000 farmers volunteered to participate in demonstrations performed
by nearly 1,000 agents and special appointees on 663 demonstration farms,
as well as through new boys and girls clubs. Farm productivity increased.
Corn yields on demonstration farms in Virginia averaged 41 bushels an
acre, compared to 23 bushels on other farms. Seed cotton on demonstration
farms in Georgia averaged 1,303 pounds per acre, compared to 732 pounds on
nearby farms that relied on old methods. During this period, when corn and
cotton prices remained fairly stable, the increased yields created additional
revenue for farmers who employed farm demonstration methods. This work
infused American farming with a culture of agricultural science and even
changed the very appearance of the landscape as people followed Knapp’s
“gospel of clean farming.”
“A l abama Must Feed Herself”
The transformation of agriculture inspired by Knapp involved many
people. Agents walked into the fields to encounter farmers and teach
them where they lived, town by town, county by county. But there
was a difference between teacher and pupil, played out across the divide
of agricultural science. Farm demonstration agents came from the world
of agricultural colleges and extension services. They believed that their
and appoint local extension agents to work with farmers, while the GEB
would simply pay salaries and costs in the areas it funded.
Though this arrangement limited GEB control, it did not restrict its level
of commitment. The GEB quickly expanded its efforts from Mississippi to
other states, such as Alabama. After 1909, it contributed over $100,000 every
year, reaching nearly $200,000 for 1913. These increases partly reflected the
success of the program as a whole. Meanwhile, USDA funding expanded as
the boll weevil spread to new areas. By 1913, the government’s support reached
$300,000 a year. Though the GEB originally targeted southern states in the U.S.,
it also took on work in New Hampshire and Maine. In all, the GEB invested
$925,750 in farm demonstration work in the Southern
United States between the spring of 1906 and the summer
of 1914 (equivalent to about $22 million in 2012 dollars),
as well as $50,876.45 in the northern states.
Unfortunately, as the farm demonstration movement
was expanding, its champion, Seaman Knapp, died in
1911. Farm agents carried his legacy forward. As part
of their training, they read Knapp’s Ten Commandments
of Agriculture, which included lessons in plowing,
By 1913-14, the boll weevil had spread
through the southernmost United States,
from Texas to Florida. The division of
funding between the GEB and USDA
shifted as the boll weevil spread, with
the GEB working only in areas where the
pest had not invaded. (General Education
Board, The General Education Board
1902-1914. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
38 Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity 39
professional education could be translated into popular
understanding and extended to new territory. Farmers
understood their craft in terms of local knowledge,
defined success by what had produced the best yields
in the past, and replicated those techniques. Knapp
knew that there was no culture of science among these
farmers, and so kept communication simple, remarking, rather shrewdly,
that the “average man, like the crow, cannot count more than three.” Yet
he also believed in the capabilities of these farmers once they received the
lessons of agricultural science filtered down through farm demonstrations.
“More could be gained through intelligence,” he concluded, “than was lost
through the weevil.”
Knapp’s farm demonstration model appealed to the USDA and the GEB
not just because it disseminated information, but also because it did so
with multiple mechanisms to overcome farmer skepticism. Farm agents
commanded attention with their own strangeness, using it to demonstrate
new techniques and display clearly superior results. This worked across an
agricultural-science divide that was often compounded by differences of
class and race. Agents and farmers negotiated an understanding across this divide. The GEB characterized farm demonstration as “essentially a cooperative
undertaking, the financial contributors, the agent, the farmer, the community,
all participating.” Because Knapp’s work straddled two funding sources, the
GEB also had to negotiate what role it could play monetarily.
GEB funding of farm work at the Tuskegee Institute showed these
negotiations in action. The Board’s funding changed substantially from
1906 to 1914 as its role in Alabama, and among southern schools for blacks,
evolved. Booker T. Washington had been hired to run the Institute after
it was established in 1881. Its aims and methods had much to do with his
personal and educational upbringing. Born into slavery on a Virginia
plantation in 1856, Washington moved to West Virginia to work after
emancipation. He attended the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute
in Virginia and Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., before returning
to Hampton to teach. The “Hampton model” was based on an industrial
education philosophy of manual labor, normal school and trade training,
economic development, and self-help for its black students. Washington
brought much of this philosophy to Tuskegee, including an emphasis on
agriculture. He appointed George Washington Carver—who by 1896 had
a master’s degree in agricultural science from Iowa Agricultural College—
to a post at Tuskegee. Carver became known for his practical approach,
including advocating diversification of the southern agricultural economy
through crop rotation and creating hundreds of products from simple
plants such as peanuts and sweet potatoes.
Tuskegee gained support on the national stage as Booker T. Washington
appealed to different groups. He worked to convince white elites in the South
that blacks would be better workers if educated; northern donors that they
would gain a Protestant work ethic; and southern blacks themselves that education offered a way to self-employment and landownership. Implementing
this educational model made Washington an African-American leader
for conciliatory racial politics. In 1895 he delivered a speech, the “Atlanta
Compromise Address,” in which he suggested that African Americans would
acquiesce in disfranchisement and social segregation if American whites
would encourage black progress in economic and educational opportunity.
For northern philanthropic institutions, Washington became a chief exemplar
of and spokesman for industrial education. By 1900 Tuskegee was the bestsupported center for African-American education in the country.
Seaman Knapp included African-American farmers and tenants in his
educational scheme from the beginning. After all, they produced the “bulk of
the cotton crop.” In some states, white agents worked with black farmers; in
Seaman Knapp encouraged the creation
of boys and girls clubs, hoping that
parents would adopt the agricultural
techniques their children learned.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
40 Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity 41
Prizes offered to Boys Corn Club
members encouraged them to
use Knapp's high-yield methods
on their demonstration plots.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
others, the USDA appointed black agents, whose numbers increased as the program expanded. Schools like Tuskegee and Hampton played a key role in this
system. Their training produced black teachers and agents, and they furnished
facilities and tools for focusing on black farmers. After visiting Tuskegee in
1906, Knapp wrote a letter to Wallace Buttrick, suggesting that black schools
offered a promising vehicle to reach black farmers and tenants, who would
benefit from a program that combined agricultural science and “good practical
knowledge” related to farming. “Now in building up the country,” he wrote,
“let us go ahead, and build systematically and upon a true foundation of success in agriculture, proper instructions in farm management.”
In 1906, the USDA appointed Thomas Monroe Campbell as
the first Negro farm demonstration agent and assigned him to
Macon County, Alabama, where the Tuskegee Institute was located. Campbell had attended Tuskegee. Promoted to state agent
in Alabama, and then later to field agent
for seven southern states, including Texas
and Oklahoma, Campbell advocated for an
extension building on the Tuskegee campus,
which became headquarters for black farm
extension work in Alabama. He was a key
figure in transmitting the lessons of farm
demonstration to African-American farmers
all over the South. The GEB complemented
Campbell’s work by funding auxiliary actors
and programs for agricultural improvement
in Alabama, including “state supervisors of
Negro rural schools,” who were white. In
addition to these measures that indirectly
affected Tuskegee, the GEB also funded
the Institute directly. By 1915 the Board’s
contributions totaled $135,483.48 (over
$3 million in 2012 dollars).
The GEB never intended its funding to be permanent.
John D. Rockefeller and his advisors believed that philanthropy should help move individuals and communities
along the path to self-sufficiency and self-determination.
They embraced the idea, reflected in a report from an
Alabama State Agent for Negro Schools, for example, that
“Alabama Must Feed Herself.” In the minds of men like
Buttrick and Frederick Gates, the farm demonstration program was a clear
success; it was time for others to formalize a more permanent institutional
structure to carry the work forward.
“A Higher Mission”
The U.S. Congress designed the Smith-Lever Act, which it passed
in 1914, to create a permanent institutional framework for farm
demonstration, building on a long tradition of federal government
support for agricultural development. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
had been established in 1862. Passage of the Morrill Act that same year created
land-grant colleges and gave states public land to support higher education.
The Hatch Act of 1887 extended this federal support for agriculture by
funding experiment stations established in connection with the land-grant
institutions. Later legislation increased funding and expanded the scope of
Canning was taught through
women’s clubs as a way to preserve
the harvest. These women proudly
displayed their work during an exhibit
in Macon County, Alabama, in 1915.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
42 Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity 43
federal support for agricultural research. But as Congressman Asbury F. Lever,
a Democrat from South Carolina, asserted in 1914, the knowledge generated
by all of this research had been “accumulating for more than half a century
and reservoiring in our colleges and other institutions” without reaching the
people it was designed to help—farmers in the field.
Sponsors of the Smith-Lever Act believed farm demonstration and agricultural extension would “naturally and logically [complete] the chain of agencies
fostered by the Federal Government for the betterment of agriculture.” Senator
Hoke Smith, a Democrat from Georgia, saw it as a way to bring results from
the laboratories and field experiments to the local farm communities, to “carry
the school to the farmer and make his own fields a laboratory in which we can
demonstrate the value of science when applied to agriculture.”
As the bill came before the U.S. Congress, however, two events fueled
public antipathy for the Rockefellers and galvanized support for the measure.
The first stemmed from a conflict in the spring of 1914 between armed coal
miners and the Colorado National Guard in Ludlow, Colorado. Thousands
of miners had been striking for months, protesting the Rockefeller-owned
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company’s refusal to negotiate with the United Mine
Workers labor union. On April 20, violence erupted. The company’s guards
sprayed the striking miners’ tent colony with rifle shots
and machine gun fire, and then ignited a fire that spread
through the camp. Between 19 and 25 people died,
including 13 women and children who suffocated in a
dirt bunker underneath one of the tents. The “Ludlow
Massacre” received much attention in the media, serving
as a symbol to many of industrial ruthlessness and
immorality. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who would come to
play a leading role in his father’s philanthropy, sat on
the Colorado Fuel and Iron board of directors. He was
blamed for the tragedy, and some members of Congress
hesitated to support a program associated with the
Rockefeller name.
Public criticism of the Rockefellers was compounded
later in 1914 when U.S. Senator William Kenyon of Iowa
learned of the original 1906 memorandum between
James Wilson (of the USDA) and Wallace Buttrick
(of the GEB), delineating funding roles for the farm
demonstration program. Though this agreement was not
secret, its contents had not been common knowledge;
only a few top officials at either organization knew what
it said. Kenyon, who served on the Senate Agriculture
Committee, publicly condemned the agreement because
it allowed the GEB to pay hundreds of government
salaries (those of demonstration agents, whose payment
the USDA issued). According to Kenyon, the agreement
made the Rockefellers sponsors of a “silent empire.” He
feared they were attempting to establish an “invisible
government” through these gifts.
These two scandals prompted “extraordinarily hostile outbursts” in
Congress. New Jersey Senator James E. Martine proclaimed, “I hope the
United States may be spared from living on the contribution of a Rockefeller
or a Carnegie. It would be equivalent to a family living on the wages of
sin.” Thomas Gore of Oklahoma declared that any money coming from
the Rockefellers was “red with human blood and dripping with human
tears.” He advocated a “divorcement of the Government from the General
Education Board.”
The Rockefellers had their supporters. Congressman William West of
Georgia (where farm demonstration had already taken place) argued that
Booker T. Washington was an advocate
of black advancement through education.
Appointed head of the Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881,
he promoted agricultural science.
(Library of Congress.)
District Demonstration Agent T.M.
Campbell used the Jesup wagon to carry
agricultural tools, stock, and poultry from
community to community as he taught
African-American farmers in Alabama
how to increase their agricultural yields.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
44 Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity 45
government could condemn business practices while still
allowing philanthropy to benefit the American people.
“I am not defending these rich men,” West said during a
debate. “Their great donations to these objects may appear
to many, and they appear to me, as a philanthropic paradox;
but they give it, and why not receive it for these objects?”
Hoke Smith, sponsor of the bill and also of Georgia, declared
that the “fund as heretofore contributed has done a great
service,” and that “I am not moved to appropriate the
money from the National Treasury by any adverse feeling
toward the past use of this fund.”
Ironically, Congressional hostility towards the Rockefellers in 1914
served the long-term strategic goals of Rockefeller philanthropy. The farm
demonstration program had been an outstanding success. The GEB hoped
the federal government would adopt the program. Congressmen incensed
at the idea that the salaries of some federal employees had been paid by
Rockefeller philanthropy voted to appropriate funds to ensure the farm
demonstration program’s future independence—exactly the outcome the
GEB wanted in the first place. Notably, congressmen on both sides of this
debate argued that the federal government could afford to pay for this program, and so should take on the responsibility. The House approved the bill
on April 27, 1914, and the Senate passed it on May 2, after which President
Woodrow Wilson signed it into law.
The GEB officially terminated its agreement with the USDA in 1914
and returned to more direct work with educational institutions in the
Southern United States. It funded groups that still affected farming life,
such as rural youth clubs and rural public schools, as well as vocational
agriculture in community programs, agricultural high schools, and state
agricultural colleges. Though congressional condemnation had damaged
the GEB’s reputation, as well as its working relationship with the federal
government, passage of Smith-Lever represented an enormous success for
the GEB’s agriculture program.
In addition to results it achieved during its period of involvement with the
USDA from 1906 to 1914, the GEB’s larger educational aims continued to benefit from agricultural improvement even after its role ended. Federal funding
meant that farmers gained more access to the lessons that agricultural science
had to offer them. In turn, increased crop yields made higher socioeconomic
levels more attainable.
To Seaman Knapp, agricultural productivity had been a means to an end.
“There is a higher mission,” he stated in 1910. “We begin with the increase of
the crop because that is the basis for all possible future prosperity. The farmer
must be made independent.” Frederick Gates, John D. Rockefeller’s advisor and
confidante, took it one step further. With more farm income, he argued, farmers in the Southern United States would increasingly support schools. Greater
educational attainment would promote even greater prosperity.
Unlike later agriculture work, in which productivity and food security
would be central, the earliest Rockefeller agricultural philanthropy was
intimately bound up with educational aims. These early Rockefeller officers
were more interested in planting the figurative germ of education than any
actual seed. Indeed, Raymond Fosdick, who would become the Rockefeller
Foundation’s president, later characterized GEB efforts as “[cultivating] the
vineyard of American education.”
Though this early work in agriculture was different from later efforts in
many ways, it was also influential. The GEB planted seeds because it saw them
as necessary to its aim of doing the same for ideas. In the process, it solidified
a set of techniques to approach problems of farming on a large scale. The cultivation of new scientific farming principles and their promulgation through
farm demonstration programs in cooperation with government extension
agents proved a powerful formula. The process of figuring out this new model
yielded institutional memory within Rockefeller philanthropies for negotiating working projects in the field as well as partnerships with government
agencies. It also set the standard for defining the success of agricultural policy
as continuation by an outside agency—in this case its institutionalization in
the United States through the passage of federal law.
Just as Wallace Buttrick had sought and found in Seaman Knapp a bridge
between his world and that of the farmer that fulfilled his deepest charitable
educational ambitions, Rockefeller philanthropists of the International
Education Board (IEB) would travel to Europe in the 1920s on much the same
quest. They ventured forth by boat, across that wide ocean, already armed
with the farm demonstration model as they pushed agriculture into the new
frontier of international work.
“We begin with the
increase of the crop
because that is the
basis for all possible
future prosperity.”
Seaman Knapp
Chapter One: Cultivating the Vineyard Food & Prosperity
In 1908, by following Seaman Knapp’s
advice, farmer Daw Jacks grew an
abundance of cotton, sweet potatoes,
and corn on his demonstration plot near
Marianna, Arkansas, even though the
land had been cultivated for 75 years
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
46 47
48 Chapter Two: Germinal Ideas Food & Prosperity 49
Both entities sought to improve education, but the GEB worked in the
U.S. with the ultimate goal of correcting social inequalities while the IEB
aimed to prevent future conflict between nations. To achieve this goal, the
IEB focused on correcting the “impoverishment of educational and other
intellectual resources” caused by World War I, especially in the arenas of
natural science, the humanities, and agriculture.
Given the GEB’s success with farm demonstration programs, agriculture
offered a promising starting point for the IEB’s work in Europe. Soren
Sorenson’s request for help had opened lines of communication, and the
philanthropists at the IEB liked the context it offered. Denmark was predominantly agricultural, farming techniques could be improved, and
the country could also serve as a center of operations in Europe.
In 1923, the Board sent Frants P. Lund to Denmark as an advisor. Lund,
like Seaman Knapp before him, offered a bridge across the divide between
agricultural science and culture. He had been born and educated in
Denmark, but had lived and worked in the United States for a considerable
time. He had been a farm demonstration agent for the USDA, running an
important section of girls club work. This experience helped him learn
how to teach agricultural science to farm families. In Denmark, on Lund’s
advice, the IEB set up a wide range of projects, including farm and home
economics clubs, gardening classes, and home instruction.
The success of the project in Denmark led to requests from other
countries. Within a year, Sweden sought IEB aid for farm demonstration
work, as did Finland the following year. In total, the IEB contributed about
$295,500 to education in these three Scandinavian countries (nearly $4
million today). Popular support preceded this work, and contributions from
national governments usually followed. Further requests and contributions
in Northern Europe made it easy for the IEB to spread its farm demonstration work. The model also fit, because Northern Europe in the 1920s, like
the American South, was both rural and marginal to the regional centers
of urban commerce and culture.
As in the American South, farm demonstration agents in Europe
sought to teach agricultural science to farmers across a divide that was
geographical as well as intellectual and cultural. Farmers were skeptical
of the demonstrators’ techniques. The advisors understood that skepticism and built on it. Lund created a sort of traveling show, modeled on
the Tuskegee Jesup wagon, an agricultural school on wheels designed by
Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, to promote science
in rural areas. Lund used educational films to showcase his favorite farm
demonstration program: boys and girls clubs. Recognizing that USDA films
S
oren Sorensen was impressed. The Danish Agricultural Attaché to
Washington stood in a cotton field, surveying the landscape. Changes
wrought by the GEB’s agricultural demonstration program in the
American South had given him big ideas about what could be done
at home in Denmark. Inspired, he had approached the GEB in the 1920s to see
if they would help.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. wanted to work with Sorenson, but the GEB’s charter,
enacted by Congress, limited the institution’s activities to the United States.
Junior, as he was known, talked to Wickliffe Rose, the head of the GEB, as well
as other advisors. Together they created the International Education Board (IEB)
in January 1923 for the “promotion and advancement of education throughout
the world.” (Six years later, as part of a major reorganization of the Rockefeller
philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation would absorb most of the programs
of the IEB.)
Although the IEB extended the mission of the GEB into the international
arena and there was a close relationship between the two boards in purpose and
personnel, the IEB was also a product of the havoc of World War I. Wickliffe
Rose was pivotal in its establishment, serving as director of the new entity while
continuing to head the GEB. He felt compelled by the “disillusion of the world
tragedy of 1914-1918” and the “desperate need” it disclosed to find “some ingredient
which would heal the dissension of nations.” Rose concluded that “knowledge is
that ingredient, or at least it is an essential item in the prescription.”
food & prosperity
Chapter II
germinal ideas
50 Chapter Two: Germinal Ideas Food & Prosperity 51
were “not at all adequate” in the Danish context, he
secured IEB funds in 1923 to commission several films,
to be made in rural New York State.
Showing movies and developing curriculum that
communicated across cultural differences wasn’t easy,
as Lund’s telegrams to the IEB reveal. On one occasion,
Lund struggled with how to incorporate a home
economics demonstration into an American-made
film because the "pimientos" he hoped to use were not
a familiar food item in Scandinavia. Another home
economics program had to be rejected because dress
forms were “not ordinarily [a] girls project.” Lund also
had to struggle with technical issues. A film he received
in 1925 was damaged in transit due to poor packing. Fortunately, Lund
was able to repair the movie and show it. But while an urban audience in
Copenhagen was “very much interested in seeing it,” an epidemic of foot
and mouth disease among local cattle prevented farmers in some rural
communities from leaving their animals to watch a movie. As all of these
incidents reveal, the IEB’s agent in Scandinavia had to adjust his strategies
to respond to local social and cultural circumstances; new technologies
likewise often posed challenges as the IEB sought to transfer ideas and
information about scientific agriculture.
The IEB pursued very limited popular education outside of the farm
demonstration model. The Board gave about $18,000 over a five-year period
to the Hungarian Village Association, which taught traditional village crafts
and supported village educational and community centers. In Norway, the
IEB gave $8,452 to an institute in Oslo to instruct farmers in agricultural sub
-
jects such as soil cultivation, forest management, and livestock production.
In these countries, IEB work went beyond the tactics of farm demonstration
and clubs that it had inherited from the GEB, expanding the range of subjects
it could teach-by-doing in order to promote a broader concept of rural com
-
munity development.
From Popular to Professional Agricultural Education
The professional arm of IEB agriculture education also began with a
trip abroad. This time it was American officers who would seek out
established European institutions to serve as their cultural bridge to
the foreign student. In 1924, following what was becoming a central feature
of Rockefeller philanthropy, Albert R. Mann from Cornell University and
An embroidered flour sack was given
to the Rockefeller Foundation to
commemorate its Belgian war relief
efforts in 1919. The Foundation not only
sent food ships to Belgium but also
supported food aid in Poland, Serbia,
Montenegro, and Albania. These efforts
did not provide long-term food security,
however. After World War I, Rockefeller
philanthropists focused instead on
humanity’s problems by addressing the
root causes in agriculture and other
arenas. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
52 Chapter Two: Germinal Ideas Food & Prosperity 53
the flow of ideas and knowledge within the field.
During his visit to Austria, Hutchison had remarked
that it seemed like researchers “needed about ten
tons of coal more than anything else.”Yet what they
bemoaned was the lack of scientific journals.
The American scientists heard similar stories
all over Europe after the war, but especially in
Central Europe, where professors felt they were
isolated from the rest of the scientific world. In
response, the IEB provided $50,000 to agricultural institutions in Poland, Hungary, Austria,
and Bulgaria for periodicals and laboratory
equipment. These grants helped stimulate the
exchange of ideas and information within the
field. The IEB also explored more fundamental
innovative efforts to transform the knowledge
system within which agricultural development
took place.
In Rome, the International Institute of
Agriculture had embarked on an ambitious
effort to centralize the collection of agricultural
information. When Wickliffe Rose, the president of the IEB, visited this institute during a
tour of Europe in the early 1920s, he was impressed. The IEB later granted almost $80,000 to
the Institute for its agricultural census project
and library reorganization. (The IEB also located
its European headquarters in the Institute for the first year of its work, before
moving to Paris in 1925.) The census, published in 1932, provided a uniform
survey of 62 nations throughout the world producing crops and livestock. It
represented a significant milestone in the generation of reliable, thorough,
and timely statistical information for the international agricultural scientific
community. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
continues this work today.
IEB efforts to strengthen the exchange of information about
agricultural science played a particularly important part in countries
that were less industrialized. In Bulgaria, for example, three-fourths of
the population was estimated to be agricultural. The country’s ability to
pay World War I reparations depended upon its selling wheat and tobacco
abroad. Impoverished by the war, the government could not provide
Two girls, Tuovi and Salme Halkilahti,
inspect their crops in Finland in 1927.
Girls clubs in Northern Europe taught
vegetable gardening and canning.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Claude B. Hutchison from the University of California embarked on a trip
to survey European agricultural universities. They intended to gather data
on the state of research and teaching in agricultural science to form a plan
for strategic giving in this arena and to build the network of contacts that
would prove critical to the program’s success.
Mann and Hutchison had previously worked together at Cornell. An
“alert, competent, and gracious American” with a “conservative attitude
and sound judgment,” Mann was described as a “godsend” to agricultural
officers and educators handicapped by postwar impoverishment. The IEB
had appointed him director of its professional educational efforts in July
1924, but he could only stay away from his college duties for a period of two
years. Hutchison, a “tall, solidly-built man,” who “spoke easily” and with
“self-assurance,” was appointed to assist and then succeed Mann as director.
He would provide the continuity of vision and management to strengthen
the scientific basis for agriculture abroad.Mann left his imprint by leading
the Board’s efforts in this arena first. After Mann’s departure from Europe
in 1926, Hutchison would become the “lone wolf.”
The two scientists traveled extensively to complete their survey work.
They visited every country in Western Europe, including the British Isles.
They traveled through much of Northern Europe and met officials in many
Baltic and Eastern European states. They went as far south as Greece. In
each country, they surveyed “every educational and research institution
dealing with agriculture, veterinary medicine and forestry.”The data
they collected and the contacts they made shaped the IEB’s professional
agricultural education program, which would support both people and
institutions over a wide geographical range.
Basing their decisions on the information gathered by Mann and
Hutchison, the IEB’s Board established a fellowship and traveling professorship program. Fellowships targeted younger workers who showed promise
in a range of agricultural sciences, including plant physiology, plant pathology, soil chemistry, soil bacteriology, cytology, mycology, genetics, and
entomology. The Board provided grants to 223 fellows to travel to 31 other
countries to work with experts in their field. The IEB also awarded traveling professorships on a more limited basis to scientists who had already
established themselves in their field. Twenty-six senior professors traveled
abroad to teach and advise on research at foreign institutions, six of whom
also acted in an advisory capacity for the IEB, reporting on scholars and
universities they encountered.
The IEB focused on developing human capital in the field of agricultural
science through these two streamlined programs. It also sought to stimulate
54 Chapter Two: Germinal Ideas Food & Prosperity 55
for construction and equipping of laboratories for agriculture, botany,
physiology, and zoology, while over $900,000 went toward a new Cambridge
University Library. Upon the inauguration of this new building, one
university leader said that Rockefeller funding “opened up vistas and new
lines of advance in fields which are no longer cultivated by one branch
of science alone, but are common ground where biologists, physicists,
and chemists co-operate with a single purpose.” In short, Rockefeller
philanthropy played a key role in promoting a more interdisciplinary
approach to agricultural science in the United Kingdom.
A Limited Perspective
The International Education Board’s work in both popular and professional agricultural education in the 1920s sought to develop human
capital and institutions. Like the GEB before it, the IEB sponsored
demonstration programs that popularized scientific ideas. From the boys
and girls clubs of Denmark to the Cambridge Library, from Hungarian
village craft to soil bacteriology fellowships, agents of the IEB promoted science as a way to enhance agricultural productivity and improve rural life.
Along the way, the Board struggled to communicate these ideas in ways that
would engage farm families.
At the same time, the IEB focused on the creation of
scientific knowledge. Grants for surveys, libraries, lab
equipment, fellows, and experiment stations constituted
a multifaceted, concerted effort to enhance the infrastructure for research and strengthen the networks for sharing
new discoveries. Much of this work followed the pattern
laid down by Wickliffe Rose, who
believed in planting “germinal
ideas.” As described by Hutchison,
Rose tended to “find some professor,
let’s say, working on something
new, and he would like to make that
man a grant, to give him more assistance, or to help him buy some new
equipment, or to strengthen his
library facilities, or do something
to help him develop that idea in
science with the hope that it would
thrive and grow.”
adequate support to the University of Sofia College
of Agriculture. In 1925, the University applied to
the IEB for a grant to help construct a new building
for agricultural research and instruction. Claude
Hutchison had visited the institution during the survey
trip and understood the need. With his encouragement,
the IEB appropriated $115,000 in 1926 to enable the
University of Sofia to proceed. The grant was so
important to the government that it stopped construction on every other
major building in the country until it completed the agriculture building.
The new facility contributed to a remarkable turnaround in agriculture
in Bulgaria. By 1939, historian George Gray states, Bulgaria was “without
question, the most competent and active outpost of scientific agriculture
in the Balkan states.” In that same year, the University of Sofia awarded
Hutchison an honorary doctorate.
The IEB gave its largest grant, $2,859,788 (roughly $40 million in 2013
dollars), to Cambridge University to create a full agricultural program
integrated with other scientific disciplines. “The total spread over into
agriculture on the one hand, and into the basic physical sciences, on the
other,” Hutchison explained. Nearly $2 million of the grant helped pay
Swedish boys club agents inspect a
club member's plot in 1930. Following
the farm demonstration model, boys
clubs in Northern Europe focused on
growing crops in demonstration plots
with guidance and instruction from
demonstration agents.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
The International Education Board
funded the Hungarian Village Association
as a way to expand European rural
education beyond farm demonstrations
and agricultural clubs. The association
taught women village crafts.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
56 Chapter Two: Germinal Ideas Food & Prosperity 57
Despite all of these efforts, the IEB’s work in
agriculture remained marginal to the larger program
of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s. Most of
the resources of the Foundation and its sister philan
-
thropies were devoted to medicine, public health, and
basic scientific research. In 1928, it seemed briefly
that the Foundation would place a greater emphasis
on agriculture. After a fundamental reorganization
of various Rockefeller philanthropies, however, the
IEB was eliminated as a separate entity, and its earlier
efforts were absorbed into new programmatic divisions
of the Rockefeller Foundation. Under a new guiding
principle, “the advancement of knowledge,” a program
area in the natural sciences was devoted to agriculture
and forestry. But the Foundation did not appoint an
officer to lead this effort. Instead, in 1930, as the world
-
wide Great Depression took hold, it officially described
the program as “suspended.” Convinced that the
development of agriculture had become a priority for
governments, Rockefeller Foundation leaders felt that
they could exert greater leverage in other disciplines
and arenas.
In part, the decision to give a low priority to
agriculture reflected a traditional perspective on its
role in community and economic development. Within this perspective,
food production aimed first to sustain the local population and second to
serve as a source of cash to grow the local economy. As a result, the founders
of the GEB had seen agriculture as a means to an end, a way to increase
prosperity in order to support the larger goal of increasing educational
attainment. It would take a later generation of leaders, informed by the
development of nutrition science, to appreciate the systemic relationship
between food, health, and prosperity. But in the 1930s the Foundation
launched an innovative experiment in China that would help guide this
later generation.
Albert R. Mann graduated from Cornell
University in 1904, and was dean of the
New York State College of Agriculture
from 1917 to 1931. He took a leave from
1924 to 1926 to direct the beginning
of the International Education Board’s
agricultural science and education
efforts in Europe. Officers and educators
there called him a "godsend." (Kaiden—
Keystone. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Targeting Youth for
Agricultural Development
As the GEB learned in supporting the farm
demonstration model, programs aimed at
young people influence parents and build a
basis for future support. Targeting youth has
been an important part of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s agriculture work in sub-Saharan
Africa in recent years.
In Abuja, Ajima Farms and General
Enterprises Nigeria Limited received
$100,000 to develop a youth agricultural
entrepreneurship training center. In Kenya,
the Foundation has funded a pilot project to
develop a business model to expand youth
participation in agricultural systems, giving
$175,000 to Farm Concern International
in Nairobi between 2010 and 2013. This
project aims to address youth unemploy
-
ment and increase agricultural productivity
in Kenya.
Radio has proved a useful tool for
reaching youth in sub-Saharan Africa. With
support from the Rockefeller Foundation,
Farm Radio International began broad
-
casting “FarmQuest,” a program that
encourages youth in Mali and other African
countries to view farming as a rewarding
profession. A similar grant to Agriculture
Climate Change Education Community
Programmes in Nairobi helped launch a
participatory radio show to encourage
youth to enter farming in Kikuyu-speaking
districts of Kenya.
These efforts recognize that youth
interest and financial realities are closely
intertwined. They stimulate youth involve
-
ment in the farming sector in ways that will
lead to real positive economic impact.
Food & Prosperity
The International Education Board
funded plant physiological research
in Europe, including work by the
Laboratory for Plant Pathological
Research at Holland Agricultural
University in Wageningen, Holland.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
58 59
60 Chapter Three: Rural Reconstruction Food & Prosperity 61
rural reconstruction
food & prosperity
Chapter III
J
ames “Jimmy” Yen (Yan Yangchu) was the kind of man that American
philanthropists in the 1920s could believe in. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was
so taken with the young social reformer that he invited Yen and his family to spend a week at the Rockefeller’s summer home in Maine in 1928.
Along with many American leaders in the 1920s, Rockefeller hoped that Yen
would be able to lead a movement that would transform rural life in China.
Like Seaman Knapp or Frants Lund before him, Jimmy Yen offered a
cultural bridge between the Foundation and the nation it was trying to help.
Born in the hinterland of China in 1893, in the same year as Mao Zedong and
during the waning years of the Manchu Dynasty, Yen learned the classics
in a traditional Chinese school in Szechuan Province. He moved on to a
western education in missionary schools. Barred from attending Hong Kong
University because he was not a British subject, he traveled to the United
States for college. He graduated from Yale in 1918 and earned a Master’s degree
in History and Politics from Princeton University in 1920.
During World War I, Yen volunteered with the YMCA as a literacy instructor for thousands of Chinese laborers who had been brought to France to work
behind the Allied lines. In this position he developed a method for improving
literacy by teaching a thousand commonly used Chinese characters. The
experience in popular education gave him great respect for China’s illiterate
peasants and taught him the “ignorance not of the coolies but of the intellectuals like myself.”
After Yen returned to China, he collaborated with
the YMCA on a national literacy program based on his
simple curriculum. Successful in his efforts to expand
literacy in rural China, Yen discovered, like GEB
reformers in the rural American South, that education
alone could not transform a community without a corresponding change in economic circumstances. As one
man remarked: “Mr. Yen, I thank you for bringing this
literacy school to our village, but my stomach is still
just as empty as my illiterate neighbor’s.”
This critique went to the heart of the challenge
facing Yen and others working to shape China’s future
in the 1920s. With the end of imperial rule, various
factions were struggling to hold political power—feudal landlords, liberal
democrats, and emerging communists. Meanwhile, American leaders,
including John D. Rockefeller Jr., believed a singular moment had come to
modernize China and, in the process, build a close relationship between
China and the United States. All of these actors seemed to recognize that
the key to the future was in developing rural life and agriculture in China.
After working to promote Chinese
literacy for years, Dr. James “Jimmy”
Yen (Yan Yangchu) (front center)
sought new ways to fit his teaching
into an integrated program for rural
development. The Mass Education
Movement he founded in 1923 included
instruction in agriculture as well as in
reading and writing. Other MEM officials
included Dr. Chen Zhiqian (Health
Division, rear center) and Dr. Qu Shiying
(Education Division, front right). (Selskar
Gunn. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
62 Chapter Three: Rural Reconstruction Food & Prosperity 63
No outside organization or foreign government would invest more in
China during what some historians call the “Republican era” than the
Rockefeller Foundation and subsidiary Rockefeller philanthropies. Working
with Jimmy Yen and other Chinese partners, the Foundation would pioneer
new approaches to public health and agriculture that proved to be enormously influential in the field of development. Against the backdrop of civil
and global war in the 1930s and 1940s, these successes were sometimes hard
to recognize, but their legacies have become increasingly apparent to those
who work in community health and agriculture today.
Rockefeller Philanthropy in China in the 1920s
The special relationship between the Rockefeller family and China
began with Standard Oil. As historian Mary Brown Bullock points out,
John D. Rockefeller sold kerosene to China for the first time in 1863,
the same year he made his first contribution to Baptist missions in the Middle
Kingdom. By the 1880s, as Standard Oil grew to become the largest petroleum
refiner in the world, China had become an important market. Rockefeller’s
philanthropy likewise expanded in this era, including his support for the
work of American Baptist missions and the YMCA.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. deepened the family’s interest in China. With
Frederick Gates, he helped persuade his father to fund several surveys of
conditions in China prior to the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation. Soon
after the Foundation was founded in 1913, the work of the China survey
committees led to the creation of the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC)
under the management of the China Medical Board (CMB). For years, the
CMB operated as a branch of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1928 it would
become an independent institution with its own endowment, but during
its early years it remained closely tied to the Rockefeller Foundation. The
Rockefellers and the Rockefeller Foundation invested tens of millions of dollars in the PUMC in an effort to promote western medical science.
With the PUMC the Rockefeller Foundation hoped to create an elite
institution with high standards that would become a benchmark for China’s
further development in medicine. But Rockefeller philanthropic initiatives
in China did not stop with medical education. In the 1920s the Foundation
worked to promote higher education in other arenas as well—including the
social sciences and agriculture.
In particular, the International Education Board funded a major initiative
at the University of Nanking, which American missionaries had established in
1888. This private university offered a bridge between American institutions
and Chinese government and culture. In the early 1920s John H. Reisner, dean
of the College of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Nanking, visited
his alma mater, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. An agriculturalist
and missionary, Reisner had been on the faculty at the University of Nanking
since 1914. At Cornell, he described Nanking’s need for strains of crop plants
improved by American scientists, and appealed for help. Cornell agreed to
provide support on a shared basis with the IEB.
Under this arrangement, professors from the Department of Plant
Breeding at Cornell traveled to China to teach and supervise research on
a rotating basis. The IEB paid a portion of their salaries while they were in
China, and the University of Nanking paid their travel expenses and managed the finances of their plant breeding work. These efforts helped establish
a department of plant breeding at the University of
Nanking, which remained under the supervision
of resident directors from Cornell for the duration
of the program, from 1924 to 1931.
Though IEB funding was modest, it formed part
of a concerted effort that laid the groundwork for
future agricultural science in China as
well as Rockefeller Foundation work in
agriculture. Influenced and guided by
these visiting professors, the University
of Nanking started a plant breeding
station at the Tai Ping Men Farm.
Researchers experimented with crops
such as corn, rice, barley, cotton, soy,
and wheat. According to the IEB, by 1931
“some 30,000 articles had been published
in 350 Chinese journals.” The IEB and
the Rockefeller Foundation also helped
promote the creation of other cooperative
research stations modeled after Tai Ping
Men. By 1931, eleven such stations had
been established in the region.These
facilities provided a venue for the professional education of younger Chinese
agriculturalists. Meanwhile, the China
Medical Board contributed $25,000 toward
the completion of a new science building
to house the College of Agriculture and
John D. Rockefeller Sr. (left) and his
son John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded
large-scale philanthropic efforts in
China, including Jimmy Yen's work
toward integrated rural development.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
64 Chapter Three: Rural Reconstruction Food & Prosperity 65
the Department of Biology. This left the original building, which
at one time had housed all scientific disciplines, for the exclusive
use of the physics and chemistry departments. Though Nanking
did not perform any kind of demonstrations for farmers at this
time, a more widespread program would develop in the 1930s
that would depend on these early pioneering efforts, growing out
of the conversation between John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Jimmy Yen.
The Mass Education Movement
Aiming to expand the impact of his rural literacy program and to
do more to promote rural development in China, Jimmy Yen had
founded the National Association of Mass Education Movements
(MEM) in 1923. This initiative gradually expanded its work from basic literacy
into scientific agriculture, cooperative marketing, public health, and local
government instruction, as part of an integrated program of rural social uplift.
Yen’s approach to agricultural development included many of the
strategies and values of the GEB and IEB, but they were also unique to the
Chinese situation. Like the Rockefeller organizations, Yen believed that
science could be used to improve rural agrarian life. Unlike the GEB and the
IEB, however, he did not rely exclusively on farm demonstration programs.
Instead, he believed that agricultural education could work in tandem with
other popular efforts and take a more holistic approach to rural prosperity.
Yen’s work was particularly attractive to John D. Rockefeller Jr. The two
men had met through YMCA contacts in the United States. During the 1920s,
Junior had spearheaded an effort among different philanthropies to fund
“new directions in social work, foreign missions, and historic preservation”
in China. He pledged $400,000 of his personal money to the YMCA, to be
matched by other donors. The funds went partially to a model village initiative
to improve working and living conditions in a suburb of Shanghai.
Junior’s personal support for these efforts reflected an interest in China
that went well beyond medical education, influencing the work of the IEB
and the Rockefeller Foundation. According to Mary Brown Bullock, it contributed to the Foundation’s decision to “look beyond PUMC and its medical
ivory tower toward a more culturally sensitive and populist approach to
China’s social and economic challenges.”
In 1928, after listening to Yen’s appeal for help, Junior gave $100,000 to
support the Mass Education Movement. Rockefeller’s gift led to contributions
by other American philanthropists.
Junior’s interest in Jimmy Yen and the Mass Education Movement paralleled efforts by two key Rockefeller Foundation program officers: John Grant
and Selskar Gunn. Grant had been born and grew up in China as the son of
Canadian medical missionaries. He attended Acadia College in Nova Scotia,
Canada, and earned his medical degree at the University of Michigan before
joining the Foundation’s International Health Board (IHB). For two years he
worked on hookworm campaigns in the American South and then in China.
These experiences cultivated a passionate commitment to an integrated
approach to community health. Returning to the United States in 1920, he
enrolled in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which had recently
been established with Rockefeller Foundation support. After graduation, he
returned to China as the newly appointed professor of public health at PUMC.
Throughout the 1920s, Grant worked to integrate Western ideas of public
health with the values and traditions of Chinese culture. He created the
Beijing First Health Demonstration in 1925 as a “social laboratory” for training public health professionals and medical students from PUMC in curative
and preventive medicine. Grant saw this approach to public health as an
integral part of socioeconomic progress.
Grant and his PUMC colleagues began working closely with Jimmy Yen
and the Mass Education Movement in 1929. In Ting Hsien, a region of some
half a million people in the countryside west of Beijing, known today as Ding
County, they established a health station that folded integrated health work
The China Medical Board funded
the completion of a new building
for the College of Agriculture
at Nanking University in 1924.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
66 Chapter Three: Rural Reconstruction Food & Prosperity 67
into the more comprehensive rural education and reform movement that
MEM already had underway. As Grant explained to Selskar Gunn—who
was then vice president for the Rockefeller Foundation in Europe, prior
to his transfer to China—medical success in China was “dependent upon
progress in other fields of community activity, such as industry, agriculture,
education, and transportation,” making medicine only “one aspect of a
larger plan of social reconstruction.”
Working with Yen and the Mass Education Movement in Ting Hsien
exposed the Rockefeller Foundation to other aspects of MEM’s approach to
rural development. MEM aimed to create an “integrated rural reconstruction
attack on the four weaknesses of village life—poverty, disease, ignorance,
and misgovernment. According to historian Charles
Hayford, by the 1930s the rural reconstruction movement
consisted of “some seven hundred rural projects, schools,
institutes, stations, and agencies which took part in the
nation-wide change of consciousness,” but were “organized
loosely if organized at all.” By 1935 the government was
giving Yen the “run of [this] county (hsien) of 400,000
population as a field for his experiments.”
The Foundation’s initial partnership with the
Mass Education Movement fed a dialogue within
the Foundation that focused specifically on projects
in health and agriculture, but also more generally on
the Foundation’s overall approach to philanthropy.
As the Foundation entered the 1930s, top officers were
increasingly frustrated with the narrow approach
they were taking in many arenas. They recognized
that problems related to public health, economics, and
agriculture were interrelated. They discussed the idea of
creating an experimental, multifaceted social program
that would, as Mary Brown Bullock writes, “bring various
foundation divisions together into a single project that
addressed community development.”
China seemed to offer the perfect venue for such
an initiative. Many of the leaders of the Foundation
subscribed to an idea that Chinese society in the 1920s
and 30s was tremendously malleable, as China’s leaders
embraced efforts designed “to reconstruct a medieval
society in terms of modern knowledge.” Thus, larger
forces would aid efforts to catalyze social change.
Specifically, the Mass Education Movement in China
seemed to offer the perfect partner for an integrated
effort to address the needs of rural Chinese peasants. As
Gunn noted in 1935, Yen’s work constituted one of the
Foundation’s “major interests in China.” And given the
Foundation’s interest in selecting high-quality preexisting
programs to support, a technique that Gunn described as
“qualitative pump priming,” the time seemed right for a
major new initiative.
Rural Reconstruction
I
n 1934 the Rockefeller Foundation trustees approved a program of rural
reconstruction in China. Integrating the conversations and work that
had led to its development, the rural reconstruction program sought to
provide a multifaceted set of social services, which would work in concert
to improve the quality of life in rural China. In addition to agriculture, it
Dr. John B. Grant began work for the
Rockefeller Foundation’s International
Health Division in 1918. He later became
a professor of public health at Peking
Union Medical College and an early
advocate of its integrated approach to
the field. He worked closely with the
Mass Education Movement and later
helped lead the Rockefeller Foundation’s
rural reconstruction program. He left for
India after the Japanese invaded China.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Following John Grant’s initiative,
public health students at Peking Union
Medical College in 1930 focused on the
relationship between public health and
community development. Practicing
curative and preventive medicine, they
used health demonstrations to teach
home health care to factory workers.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
68 Chapter Three: Rural Reconstruction Food & Prosperity 69
embraced “sanitation, preventive medicine, marketing, rural economy, rural
administration, and community work.” Training fellowships, indebted to
the legacy of IEB fellowship support in the preceding decade, were essential
to the program, as they could “add competent technicians to China’s human
resources.” The Foundation inaugurated the program in 1935 as a separate,
autonomous entity, to which they allocated $1 million (roughly $17 million
in 2013 dollars) during the first year of operation.
The rural reconstruction program, however, differed from Yen’s Mass
Education Movement by giving greater emphasis to the role of scientific
research. The Foundation wanted to accelerate the
transmission of new learning from the laboratory to
the field. In 1936 John Grant formed the North China
Council on Rural Reconstruction (NCCRR). This
organization represented leading Chinese universities,
as well as Yen’s organization. The Foundation saw it
as a “more logical and permanent social training and
investigative organization.”
The NCCRR created departments to handle varied social aid and
research goals in the areas of economics, public works, social administration, and civil administration. It also offered programs in composting,
farm implements, the control of gastrointestinal diseases, and plant and
animal breeding, as well as elementary school funding and birth control.
The NCCRR sought to bring Chinese intellectuals and academics working
in these different disciplines into “direct contact with rural China,” training them for “rural leadership and to coordinate the many existing rural
reconstruction efforts.”
The Foundation and Jimmy Yen continued to work together. Indeed,
Yen supported the NCCRR and its mission. He argued that education went
both ways, with reconstruction referring not just to improvement of rural
life, but to the improvement of the universities and professors as well. The
aim of the NCCRR, he once stated, was to “take these intellectuals from
their ivory towers to the dirty villages” in order to get them to “give up their
usual habit of burying themselves in the laboratories and archives to face
day to day problems.”
To complement rural reconstruction work the Foundation continued
to devote a small amount of funding to university agricultural sciences. Its
annual report for 1935 described the University of Nanking as a “pioneer
in agriculture” and an “outstanding institution in China in this field,”
especially due to its contributions in “agronomy (wheat) and agricultural
economics.” In 1935 the Foundation also appropriated $34,600 to the College
of Agriculture of the National Central University in Nanking, for work in
animal husbandry and veterinary medicine. By continuing to fund the
agricultural sciences at this institution, the Foundation sought to promote
local research and train the next generation of agricultural experts in
China. Consistent with the American model, these programs focused on
both professional (university training, experimentation) and popular (rural
reconstruction) education. In China, however, the program was deeply integrated with the institutions of rural life. Thus it could not help but become
entangled with politics.
“R ed China”: The Rockefeller Foundation Confronts Politics
Rockefeller officers working in agriculture had confronted politically charged situations in the past. As we have seen, the General
Education Board’s farm demonstration work became the subject of
a bitter debate in Congress over the appropriateness of accepting charity
from wealthy capitalists to support public projects. International food aid
Improved agricultural production
represented one pillar of the Mass
Education Movement's integrated
approach to rural development.
Agricultural exhibits and prizes
encouraged farmers to adopt better
cultivation methods. (Selskar Gunn.
Rockefeller Archive Center.)
70 Chapter Three: Rural Reconstruction Food & Prosperity 71
provided by the Rockefeller Foundation had to cross hostile waters into
occupied territory during World War I. Yet no situation in the past had
been politically charged in the way that China was in the middle of the
twentieth century.
For the first time, agricultural work was not peripheral to the political
conflict. It was not a symbol of philanthropy as a larger concept, nor a tool to
relieve the effects of war on civilian populations. In China, agriculture was
central to the political conflict. Questions of land ownership, agricultural
production systems, basic sustenance, and quality of life were at stake. Indeed,
Chinese communists, who were gaining strength in the 1920s, asserted that
these issues were central to the future of their largely rural nation. In the late
1930s, as both the Communists and the Nationalists attempted to co-opt the
work of agricultural reform, the Rockefeller Foundation hoped to steer clear
of these politics.
The dissolution of imperial China had led to the establishment of the
Republic of China in 1912, but political power remained fragmented. In
the late 1920s the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party), under General
Chiang Kai-shek, reunified the country, but rival factions kept the new government unstable. In 1927 the
Communist Party of China (CPC) split the revolutionary
ranks, sparking a civil war that would last until 1950.
Because rural influence was key to this conflict,
both parties allied themselves with agricultural
concerns in multiple incarnations. From the 1920s
onward, the Communist challenge to the Nationalists
was especially fervent in rural areas. By the late 1920s
the CPC had shifted from an “unsuccessful effort to
mobilize urban workers to embrace Mao Zedong’s
peasant revolution.” It retreated to southeastern China
to establish the Jiangxi Soviet, where it carried out
experiments in land reform. Historian Mary Brown
Bullock emphasizes the role of this experiment station
as the “first rural revolutionary base area,” key in that
it gave the CPC the opportunity to “carry out agrarian
and administrative reforms, and to actually govern a
rural region.”
By the early 1930s, however, Chiang Kai-shek’s
military campaign had pushed the Communists
northward on their Long March north from Jiangxi.
Settling in Shaanxi they implemented another
campaign of land reform programs. The CPC never
allied itself directly with the Rockefeller Foundation’s
work, which was centered on Ting Hsien. It did associate
the Foundation’s agriculture work with its political
goals, but the CPC called for reform that went beyond
improvements in agricultural productivity. It wanted
fundamental reform that would redistribute land to the
peasant class.
The KMT never made agricultural concerns the centerpiece of its
campaign. As Mary Brown Bullock notes, Chiang Kai-shek “primarily
sought military annihilation” of the Communists. Nevertheless, the
Nationalists implemented a much slimmer program of rural reform that
was also associated with Rockefeller Foundation work in agriculture. The
Nationalist program aimed to compete with the work of the CPC in this
arena, but it folded agriculture into its New Life Movement, a “social and
The Rockefeller Foundation's rural
reconstruction efforts took inspiration
from the Mass Education Movement's
work in agriculture. MEM had helped
farmers improve their crops, including
cotton. (Selskar Gunn. Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
Selskar M. Gunn had worked for the
Rockefeller Foundation on health
initiatives in Europe for almost 15 years
before he traveled to China in 1931.
Impressed by the integrated strategy
for development that combined health,
literacy, and agriculture, he became
an ardent advocate for this approach.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
72 Chapter Three: Rural Reconstruction Food & Prosperity 73
cultural promotion of traditional Chinese values.” Though the KMT was
not averse to rural reform, it could not champion it. As Bullock notes, the
“leadership remained dependent upon the members of China’s landlord
class, who were unlikely to reduce their own economic and political power.”
Instead, the KMT loosely supported various private reforms, with Madame
Chiang Kai-shek reaching out to “encourage and support many of these
efforts, including those of the [Rockefeller Foundation].” In this way, the
KMT could co-opt rural reform without ceding ground on the issue of
land reform. As Bullock puts it, the KMT hoped to “blunt the radicalism”
associated with Communist efforts.
Although Selskar Gunn, John Grant, and their Chinese colleagues knew
that the concentration of land ownership contributed substantially to widespread rural poverty, they avoided this fundamentally political issue. Given
the history and culture of the Foundation, they were opposed to radical
economic solutions. Instead, they hoped that the Nationalist government
would eventually tackle the problem of land reform.
The Foundation was inclined to cooperate with the KMT. It was, after
all, the government in power and supported by American foreign policies.
Moreover, as the offspring of one of the most successful capitalists of all
time, the Foundation and its leaders were not communist sympathizers.
Nevertheless, the Foundation was increasingly ambivalent about its
relationship with the KMT. In 1933, for example, Gunn wanted to avoid
close contacts with the KMT. Yet in 1935 he wrote positively of meeting T.V.
Soong (Song Ziwen), who, as chairman of the National Economic Council,
had asked to be updated on the Ting Hsien program. Gunn later reportedly
reacted to Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s public praise of rural reconstruction
with skepticism in 1937, as he was increasingly aware of the “potent”
Communist challenge. The Foundation did not have the opportunity to reconcile its relationships in China, however, because in July 1937 the Japanese
bombed and invaded Nanking.
For a brief period in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, it seemed
that rural reconstruction could continue, as the Nationalist government
moved to western and southwestern China and the Mass Education
Movement followed. When Gunn and Grant left China in 1938, Marshall
Balfour of the Foundation’s International Health Division replaced them,
traveling throughout China and continuing to monitor NCCRR work.
But the continuation of the program in any real way turned out to be
what one historian calls “wishful thinking.” The outlook for the program
was, as Gunn wrote to the Foundation’s president, Raymond Fosdick, “pretty
wretched.” Even universities and experimental fields that had been able to
relocate were effectively incapacitated by wartime conditions. By 1939 the
NCCRR was completely inactive, and the Foundation tapered off its grants
to remaining member institutions over the next few years. As World War
II engulfed Asia, Europe, and North Africa, the Foundation’s rural development program in China came to a halt.
As had been the case with GEB farm demonstration work in the
United States, as well as with IEB food aid to Europe during World War
I, the Rockefeller Foundation’s programs in China had a lasting effect
on United States government policy. The U.S. State Department’s newly
created Division of Cultural Relations commenced a China program
in 1942. Historian Frank Ninkovich argues that, despite differences in
political motivations (the U.S. government being concerned more with its
own political interests), the “State Department’s cultural efforts, which
relied heavily on the enthusiastic cooperation of the philanthropic and
educational establishments, closely resembled in conception and execution
those of its philanthropic precursors.”
Mary Brown Bullock, too, emphasizes the legacy of rural reconstruction, despite the interruption of war. Jimmy Yen’s programs are often cited
as the model for the post-World War II Sino-American Joint Commission
on Rural Reconstruction, which did “address land tenancy issues and was
highly successful in Taiwan.” Indeed, Yen had lobbied Congress to fund
this Commission, which operated in mainland China as the largest nonCommunist rural reform before being removed to Taiwan in 1949.
Through this era, the Rockefeller Foundation’s officers were often challenged to navigate a charged political context in China, and it was impossible
to predict the outcome of international tension or civil war. Nevertheless,
partnering with Yen for rural reconstruction advanced a new idea of agricultural prosperity that would remain influential in the 1940s as the Foundation
began the work that would be known as the Green Revolution in the 1960s.
John Grant had successfully advocated for pulling multiple aspects of rural
social progress into the sphere of integrated public health in an international
context. Rather than conceiving of agriculture as the mainstay of economic
prosperity, the Foundation now had a reference point for wedding it to personal and social progress. The Foundation’s work on nutrition in the United
States during the Great Depression further cemented the idea that good
agricultural technique had something very important to do with physical
and social health.
74 75
76 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 77
food
& prosperity
Chapter IV
hard times, war,
and nutrition
I
n October 1929, the Wall Street crash signaled the beginning of the
Great Depression. In the United States, the most iconic image of the
Great Depression in rural areas was the Dust Bowl, where poor farm
practices and prolonged drought led to soil erosion and massive dust
storms that began in the wheat belt of the Great Plains and often blew all the
way to the East Coast. In fact, the rural depression in the United States had
begun well before the crash on Wall Street, and it lasted longer.
The crisis stemmed, in part, from the fact that Europeans had begun to
grow their own food again after World War I. This new supply, coupled with
continuing production by American farmers, caused market prices to drop
precipitously. In the United States, farm income decreased from $17 billion in
1919 to $5 billion in 1932, at a time when farming still employed 30 percent
of the American workforce and another 20 percent indirectly. As historian
Nick Cullather points out, the “economic slump that deepened into the Great
Depression hit first and hardest in the rural areas of the world, particularly
in the single-crop regions.”
Philanthropists and the government were aware of
this crisis, but President Herbert Hoover’s reluctance
to pursue direct intervention resulted in little action
by the federal government. On the philanthropic side,
the Rockefeller Foundation struggled in the 1920s to
find innovative ways to address the farm depression.
Drought and overfarming in the
middle of the United States created
Dust Bowl conditions in the 1930s.
(Arthur Rothstein. U.S. Farm Security
Administration/Office of War
Administration. Library of Congress.)
78 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 79
Constrained by the Smith-Lever Act—which discouraged the Foundation
from joint participation in farm demonstration projects that land grant
college extension services organized—and resolved not to use its funds for
short-term, direct food relief, the Foundation looked for other innovative
opportunities. One of the most unusual materialized in Montana in 1923.
The idea for a tenancy program called Fairway Farms originated with
Henry C. Taylor, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of
Wisconsin, who was also the first head of the USDA Bureau of Agricultural
Economics. According to historian Deborah Fitzgerald, Taylor believed that
the “agricultural problems of the day stemmed from the fact that tenant farmers had little opportunity to both work on shared land and save up enough
money to buy a farm,” which led to a “tenant class of farmers” unconcerned
with the “future of agriculture.”
Taylor discussed this problem with Beardsley Ruml, the director of
the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM), a sister organization to
the Rockefeller Foundation that would be merged with the Foundation in
1929. In 1923, Ruml had asked Taylor what the LSRM could do for the good
of agriculture. Taylor suggested that the philanthropic organization send
someone to Montana to see the Fairway Farms project in its earliest stages
and to meet M.L. Wilson, the project’s director. Wilson was an extension
agricultural economist at Montana State College, who would take charge
of the USDA Division of Farm Management and Cost Accounting in 1924.
Ruml agreed to send a program officer to learn more about Wilson’s plan
to buy derelict, poorly managed farms that still had good soil, and provide
needed capital to a farmer selected by the project to act as tenant and pupil.
His idea was to help individual farmers, and, at the same time, develop a
model of sustainable agricultural development. He and Taylor also wanted to
address the “possibilities and dangers” of agricultural technology, specifically
“tractors and other machines.” With its sparse population, cheap land, and
ideal conditions for growing wheat, Montana seemed to offer a promising
venue for such an experiment.
Wilson wanted to provide all the capital needed beyond what could be
borrowed under the Federal Farm Loan Act. John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally
provided a line of credit, and Ruml agreed that the LSRM would finance the
project “up to $100,000.” But in an unusual move, the money was provided as
a revolving loan fund, and Ruml expected that the LSRM would eventually
get its money back to be given again in some other context.
Wilson spent 1924 scouting farmers and farms suitable for this experiment. By 1925 the program had developed seven operational farms, each
“meant to explore a specific farming problem.” Unfortunately, as historian
Deborah Fitzgerald has shown, the project was not successful. Fairway
Farms made it “clear that the realities of farm life in Montana challenged
Wilson’s high-minded optimism almost as soon as the contracts were
signed.” The capital that farmers needed did not arrive consistently, and
bad weather interfered with planting. Though Fairway Farms generated
“important findings regarding the correlations among such variables as
farm size, farm finances, mechanization, and crop selection,” Rockefeller
philanthropists saw it as an economic failure. They had expected a small
return on their investment, but as the agricultural slump deepened with
the Great Depression, this became increasingly unlikely.
By 1932, after the Rockefeller Foundation had assumed responsibility
for the LSRM’s investment, the program officers realized they “could not
recoup losses even by selling the farms.” Instead, in 1937 the Foundation
gave the Fairway Farm notes to the Farm Foundation as a “special gift.”
Because Taylor was director of the Farm Foundation, this symbolized an
end to the experiment for the Rockefeller Foundation and seemed to signal
a further withdrawal from direct involvement in efforts to develop new
institutional structures for the agricultural economy. But it did not mean
an end to Foundation efforts to improve agricultural production.
Rather than work with farmers directly, the Foundation increasingly
focused its funding on agricultural science and research in partnership with
large and stable institutions like universities and the federal government.
Funding academic studies ensured that the Foundation remained engaged
with the problems revealed by the Depression on a structural level. In a sense,
these strategies were consistent with John D. Rockefeller’s mandate to address
problems at their roots. Supporting agriculture in this manner also preserved
the possibility of influencing government policy, which would broaden the
impact of limited philanthropic investment.
Through the era of the Great Depression, the Foundation also continued
to invest in human capital in agriculture by providing grants and fellowships
to scholars and outside institutions. It first awarded fellowships in agricultural science in 1923. Most went to Europe and China. In the late 1920s and
early 1930s, however, the Foundation pursued a few extended programs of
agricultural science in the United States. In 1929, for example, it gave grants
to the Georgia State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts as well as the
Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. It also gave a small
grant to the New York State College of Agriculture in 1934 for a “maize stocks
clearing house,” which stored information about and specimens of maize.
And it continued to support the National Research Council, which, during
1930, funded 91 fellows in biology, agriculture, and forestry. Meanwhile, the
80 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 81
Foundation gave an additional grant to the Social Science Research Council
in 1932, for which “social and economic research in agriculture” was one of
the few “areas of intensive . . . effort.”
All of these awards reflected a growing interest in finding ways to
advance knowledge in agriculture and food sciences in a way that would
stimulate basic research and farm productivity. But the Great Depression
also raised issues for consumers as well as producers. In urban areas,
poverty led to widespread hunger. In America’s cities, the Rockefeller
Foundation looked for innovative ways to address the needs of working
and low-income classes.
Gardens in the City
F
ood shortage crises were not new to the Foundation. During World
War I, destructive armies and belligerent governments had decimated food supplies in Europe. Although the Rockefeller Foundation
had chosen to provide relief to prevent mass starvation, the Foundation’s
leaders had concluded that relief efforts in general should be undertaken by
others. The greatest good the Foundation could provide to humanity would
come from its efforts to address the root causes of humanity’s problems.
During the Great Depression, however, the crisis in America’s cities tested
this resolve.
With millions of workers unemployed in the United States, the
Foundation looked for ways to work with government to ease the growing
food crisis. In 1931 the Foundation funded an urban gardens initiative
to encourage underemployed workers to produce food for their families.
The U.S. President’s Emergency Committee for Employment created the
project, known as the Family Food Production Demonstration, and implemented it in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Ohio
State University, Purdue University, and the Universities of West Virginia,
Illinois, and Kentucky.
Initially, the Foundation provided $25,000 from a special fund of $1
million established to address unemployment problems. This money supported a one-year trial period, during which the collaborators investigated
the feasibility of mandating a shortened workweek for employees in
certain industries, so they could use the rest of the week to produce their
family food supply. This food was to be “produced either in individual
gardens or holdings of larger area, or on a tract handled by the industrial
plant on a community basis.” Arthur Woods, chairman of the President’s
Emergency Committee for Unemployment, chose collaborating institutions
to implement the experimental program in
states that were most seriously affected by
surplus labor conditions due to their mining and
manufacturing industries. (Woods had notably
been New York City Police Commissioner, served
on the boards of the GEB and the Rockefeller
Foundation, and would soon chair the board of
Rockefeller Center.)
To support the project, the universities appointed agricultural experts from within their
ranks who could draw on the USDA in an advisory
capacity. These experts came from the extension
services of their universities. Employing the
teaching models pioneered by Seaman Knapp,
these agricultural specialists demonstrated basic
gardening techniques to industrial workers, teaching them subsistence agriculture on different
scales. The federal government considered this project
a “most effective and valuable piece of work.” It continued the pattern of cooperation between the Foundation
and the USDA that would develop further as Congress
and President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration
looked for ways to address the deepening crisis in
America’s agricultural communities.
Public Administration, the New Deal, and Agriculture
The Rockefeller Foundation had been created at the height of
the American Progressive movement, and its leaders embraced the
movement’s efforts to strengthen rational, scientific management
in policymaking and public administration. Rockefeller funding had
supported the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (later known as
the Institute of Public Administration), the Institute for Government
Research (later known as the Brookings Institution), and the National
Bureau for Economic Research, as well as a number of similar initiatives.
After Franklin Roosevelt became president of the United States in 1933, the
Foundation played a key role in helping to develop administrative capacity
for the government’s expanded role in the economy and society that was
intrinsic to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. This work included new efforts
to manage agriculture as well as food distribution and marketing.
Beardsley Ruml directed the Laura
Spelman Rockefeller Memorial from
1922 until its merger with the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1929. Established by
John D. Rockefeller Sr. in memory of
his wife, the LSRM provided critical
funding to the innovative Fairway Farms
project in Montana in the 1920s.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
82 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 83
Passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), for example, marked
a significant turning point in American agricultural policy. The Act has
been described as the New Deal’s answer to farm problems. It sought to
provide farm relief and stabilize agricultural prices at levels experienced
in the years immediately preceding World War I by eliminating surplus
production. The government paid farmers to leave part of their land fallow and to cull excess livestock. It created the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration, under Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, to oversee
the distribution of subsidies.
With critical funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Brookings
Institution undertook extensive studies of the AAA and its “effect upon
agriculture and general economic life.” Launched soon after the law was
implemented, the studies were designed to help policymakers fine-tune
federal rulemaking and administration. The effort resulted in the publication of a series of pamphlets. In 1935 Brookings also published an analysis
of AAA accomplishments, focusing on various commodities (wheat, cotton,
livestock, tobacco, and dairy products), along with a volume on agricultural
marketing agreements. Although these studies were more descriptive than
interpretive and critical, they drew attention to important issues, including
the AAA’s restrictive contracts and sometimes coercive efforts to convince
farmers to participate. Overall, they helped explain the economic characteristics of commodity production and distribution, with an eye to aiding
policymakers in the private and public sectors who “may contemplate
further improvement of the condition of agriculture.”
Although he took issue with some of the Brookings Institution’s findings, Agriculture Secretary Wallace described the research and analysis as
“conscientious.” “In my opinion,” he wrote, the work “will have real value
to those who in the future seek information and advice as to opportunities
for government service to agriculture,” and, he continued, the “pitfalls to be
avoided in attempting to provide such service.”
National Investigation: Studying Government Science and Policy
F
oundation initiatives also aimed to strengthen public administration
in agriculture by supporting new research. In 1933 the Rockefeller
Foundation gave a $50,000 grant to the Science Advisory Board,
which had recently been created by executive order of President Roosevelt.
The grant was for work on specific problems of various government
departments through the National Academy of Sciences and the National
Research Council. In arenas affecting agriculture, the Board appointed
special committees and held conferences to formulate plans for land
classification in connection with the programs of the Tennessee Valley
Authority and the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture.
In the late 1930s the Foundation gave the Social Science Research
Council (SSRC) Committee on Public Administration funds for an administrative study of the United States Department of Agriculture. Though
the Foundation had already funded a study of the AAA, the new grant
dealt with economic policies rather than the administrative machinery for
effecting policy. This management analysis of the USDA’s administrative
organization and procedure offered a case study of what researchers called
the “most pressing general problems in the field of administration today,”
using a particularly “inventive” American governmental agency.
The Rockefeller Foundation also gave a five-year $40,000 grant to the
SSRC to offer special instruction in agricultural economics and rural
sociology at the Brookings Institution. The grant helped provide continuing education to agricultural economists in Washington to deepen their
scientific competence. The SSRC requested the grant in response to an
evaluation by an advisory committee that had recommended the creation
of new facilities in these disciplines comparable to outstanding centers of
graduate instruction in medicine.
These efforts to strengthen and rationalize agricultural and food policies
in response to the challenges of the Depression reflected an emerging role
for philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and new
institutions, “think tanks,” that would increasingly help shape public policy
in the United States. While most of these initiatives focused on agricultural
production, food marketing and distribution, and quality of life in rural
communities, new discoveries were being made in the field of nutrition that
would play an important part in the Rockefeller Foundation’s view of the
relationship between agriculture and the well-being of mankind.
Nutrition: A New Focus
J
ust before Christmas 1941, Wilbur A. Sawyer, director of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s International Health Division (IHD), wrote to Dr. Cecil K.
Drinker, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, with good news.
At their recent meeting, the IHD directors had designated $100,000 to help
Harvard establish a department of nutrition. The object, Sawyer wrote,
was to “bring about the teaching of professional public health students in
nutrition,” giving them a “proper balance between clinical and field investigations and the biochemical features of nutrition.”
84 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 85
Sawyer had big plans for this new department
that went beyond Harvard. His enthusiasm revealed
his dedication to the field as well as his concern over
the lack of institutional support for the study of
nutrition. “We are particularly anxious,” he continued
in his letter, “that there shall soon be in this country
a Department of Nutrition” integral, in practical and
scientific components, to public health study.
Scientific nutrition was still a budding science in 1941, and, as Sawyer
recognized, it had not been integrated into the teaching of public health.
Scientists had begun delving into the chemical composition of carbohydrates,
fats, and proteins in the nineteenth century. Wilbur Atwater famously experimented with the calorie starting in 1896, defining it as a measure of energy.
Meanwhile, scientists made progress in the art of food preservation to preserve
nutritional content. Pioneers such as Nicholas Appert and Louis Pasteur had
improved the art of canning by applying food science and studies of microbial
control. However, it was not until 1912 that the first vitamin was discovered.
Shortly thereafter, British and Polish biochemists Sir Frederick Hopkins and
Casimir Funk proposed the vitamin hypothesis of deficiency, theorizing that
the absence of certain vitamins led to disease. The “vitamin era” followed as
scientists raced to name and classify all vitamins, and consumers in developed
nations embraced new diets that emphasized fresh fruits and vegetables.
Establishing Harvard’s Department of Nutrition was a big step for the
discipline that came on the heels of this horizon-expanding era of discovery.
The Rockefeller Foundation was not simply interested in technical research;
it aimed more broadly to guide nutritional studies toward public health,
making its benefits felt in people’s lives. The professional education of public
health officers was critical to this transformation.
Nutrition straddled the basic science and public health spheres, but was
still poorly established in medical science. Professor Frederick Stare wrote
to the IHD in 1944, for example, asking for advice on how to represent the
new program on the institution’s letterhead. In the Health School it was
called the “Department of Nutrition,” yet in the Medical School it was the
Division of Nutrition of the Department of Biological Chemistry. “As yet,”
he wrote, frustrated, “I have been unable to figure out how we should have
the letterhead on our stationery and what citations we should use for our
published papers.”
This little bureaucratic issue spoke volumes about the identity of nutrition
as an applied science. It also suggested the challenges ahead as the Foundation
sought to support a growing awareness of nutrition’s role in public health and
agriculture in the midst of a national and global economic crisis.
In 1935 the Rockefeller Foundation’s Natural Sciences Division had recognized a special interest in a number of fields related to human life. For the
first time, it named nutrition as an important part of its work. To that end,
it began funding various nutrition projects on a small scale. These included
grants for university research in biochemistry as well as research aimed at
public health. The Foundation provided the grants through both its Natural
Sciences and Medical Sciences Divisions, reflecting its two-part approach to
this emerging field.
From 1935 through the early 1940s, the Foundation was particularly focused on laboratory research and the biochemical processes of nutrition. The
first grant, for example, went to Columbia University for studies in nutrition.
The Foundation then expanded funding in this arena in 1936 by providing
additional grants for nutrition research at Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the
Universities of Pennsylvania and Illinois. At the University of Illinois, a
grant of $75,000 over five years funded studies in nutrition with “particular
reference to the function of the amino acids,” a fundamental building block
of nutrition science.
Henry A. Wallace served as U.S.
Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to
1940, and Vice President from 1941 to
1945. He oversaw the implementation
of the Agricultural Adjustment Act.
(Harris & Ewing. Library of Congress.)
86 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 87
In addition to providing research grants, the Rockefeller
Foundation worked to institutionalize the field of nutrition
science. The grant to create Harvard University’s Nutrition
Department played a leading role in giving new visibility
to the field, just as the Foundation’s grants to Johns
Hopkins University in an earlier generation had helped
establish the academic discipline of public health. To
bolster the new department at Harvard, the Foundation gave 14 “special fellowships” in 1943, forming a “special group studying nutrition at the Harvard
School of Public Health.” This group included four physicians, four public
health nurses, and one “highly trained nutritionist.” Research projects at the
school in these early years dealt with nutrition in relation to such topics as
Atabrine, malaria, protein, calcium, and riboflavin, as well as community
nutrition. By 1945 the Foundation described as a goal of its funding a “proper
balance between clinical and field investigations.”
The Foundation supported the expansion of nutrition research in a third
way—by funding individual fellows. It offered fellowships less frequently
than research and lab grants. One in 1938 from the Natural Sciences Division
supported a fellow working in the “physiology of nutrition.” In that same
year, the Medical Sciences Division funded a fellow to study “nutrition in
relation to alcoholism.”
These efforts to strengthen the institutional foundations for research aimed
to make nutrition an increasingly important component of public health. But
here too the Foundation had to act as a catalyst for change, convincing academics and bureaucrats that this new research and these new professionals could
influence the health and well-being of individuals and communities in North
America and, ultimately, around the world.
Changing Attitudes in Public Health
To increase the attention paid to nutrition in the
field of public health, the Rockefeller Foundation
provided incentives to public health officials and
researchers working with public health agencies. These
efforts began in Canada in 1935, when the Foundation
awarded a grant to the Quebec Provincial Bureau of
Health to establish a division of the hygiene of nutrition.
The three-year project sought to promote the “health of
the population by an adequate diet and the observance
of modern scientific rules of hygiene susceptible of favoring good nutrition in the population generally.” The
success of the project in helping to reshape the
policy environment was evident in 1937, when
the Canadian Council on Nutrition was created
as a federal advisory body.
Success in Canada was followed in 1939 by
the Foundation’s first nutrition-related public
health grant in the United States. Vanderbilt
University in Tennessee proposed, and the
Rockefeller Foundation funded, a “study of
nutrition as a public health measure.” The field
study focused on nutritional deficiencies and
remedies in two rural districts just outside of
Nashville, and provided new information on the
metabolism of thiamin. It also helped further
what the Foundation called the “increased
recognition of the fact that the status of human
efficiency and well-being is directly influenced
by the standards of nutrition.”
With Rockefeller Foundation support,
the Washington-based Brookings
Institution undertook a study of the
Agricultural Adjustment Act that
was published in 1935. Rockefeller
philanthropy helped Robert S. Brookings
create the Institute for Government
Research in 1916, the first private
organization for fact-based study of
national policy issues. It merged with
two other organizations in 1927 to form
the Brookings Institution. (Leet Brothers.
Rockefeller Archive Center.) Dr. Frederick Stare was the founding
chair of the Harvard Department of
Nutrition. With Rockefeller Foundation
funding, the department promoted
a new scientific approach to diet and
nutrition. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
88 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 89
Building on the history of the Rockefellers’ philanthropic work with
hookworm, malaria, and other diseases, the Foundation’s growing interest
in field research in nutrition led to additional grants for projects in the
American South. In 1940, in North Carolina, the Foundation began support
of a nutrition study jointly undertaken by the State Board of Health and the
Duke University School of Medicine. The study pursued exploratory research
to “determine the nature and extent of the nutrition problem among selected
groups from different areas of North Carolina.” It surveyed local populations
regarding personal history and dietetic intake, and performed physical and
laboratory examinations. After discovering that a segment of the rural population had a low blood content of Vitamin C, the project implemented a “three
meals a day” feeding program that targeted both black and white children.
The low-cost diet it employed led to “marked improvement” among children
in the area.
These initiatives in North Carolina came together to begin a process
of systemic change by 1945. During this year the Foundation funded three
parallel initiatives: a cooperative nutrition study, which
conducted another survey of people in the state; the SchoolHealth Coordinating Service, which taught nutrition in
schools; and the Nutrition Division, which disseminated
information to the public. With these three projects, the
Foundation once again sought to integrate efforts to assess
nutritional needs and then redress them, in this case by
disseminating knowledge.
Increasingly, program officers at the Rockefeller
Foundation, academics in the fields of nutrition and public
health, and policymakers
came to recognize that
access to a balanced and
nutritional diet was deeply
dependent on economic
status. In early 1942 the
Foundation gave a grant to
the Mississippi State Board
of Health and the Delta
Council to study the state’s
Delta area. The specific
aim was to ascertain the
“nutritional status of tenant
farmers.” To address the
needs of these tenant farmers and their families, as well
as others in Mississippi, the Foundation’s International
Health Division, working with its General Education
Board, funded a joint project of the State Board of Health
and the State Department of Education in Mississippi.
This grant helped to establish a “coordinated schoolhealth-nutrition service.”
The Foundation ultimately recognized that it
did not have the resources to bring about wholesale
systemic change in nutrition and public health. As with the farm demonstration programs in the early part of the twentieth century, however, the
Foundation hoped that grantee success in Tennessee, North Carolina, and
Mississippi would be emulated by state and federal authorities who had the
ability to affect many more communities. In 1942 the Foundation’s leaders
were hopeful. “Recently,” the annual report noted, “the techniques of
nutrition study have been sufficiently advanced to warrant their adoption by
official health agencies.” In that year the Vanderbilt nutrition activities in
After initial success in the mid-1930s,
the Rockefeller Foundation continued
to support public health efforts in
Canada. In 1942 it funded a nutrition
study in the East York Health District
and supported laboratory work at the
University of Toronto, where this siltlamp eye examination was used to
find evidence of riboflavin deficiency.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Vanderbilt University was an important
partner with the Rockefeller Foundation
in promoting nutritional public health in
Tennessee. Foundation grants supported
fieldwork and laboratory research, such
as this preparation of serum for chemical
estimation of vitamin levels in 1950.
(Ken Spain. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
90 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 91
Tennessee were transferred to the state health department, which organized
a nutrition service under the direction of Dr. J.J. Hanlon.
Whereas the work in Tennessee was developed privately and then
handed over to the state government, projects in both North Carolina and
Mississippi were intentionally developed in collaboration with state officials.
This collaboration ensured that field research results were “promptly placed
at the disposal of State and local agencies,” according to the 1942 annual
report, “including particularly the administrators, for use in the formulation of programs to correct deficiencies.” The Rockefeller Foundation also
promoted the development of institutions to manage
these nutrition projects. In 1943, for example, it started
funding the North Carolina State Board of Health to
establish a Division of Nutrition, which worked with
the state’s Cooperative Extension Service.
In the pre-war years, when the effects of the Great
Depression constrained government budgets in the
United States, the Foundation’s efforts to cultivate
greater attention to nutritional issues proceeded slowly. But as in many
other arenas of American life, World War II would accelerate the pace of
change and offer dramatic opportunities to push new innovations into the
mainstream of American culture and public policy. This was particularly
true in the field of nutrition.
War and Nutrition
F
rom 1935 to the beginning of World War II, the Rockefeller
Foundation valued nutrition as one in a constellation of interests
supported by the Natural Sciences Division that focused on the
science of human life. It chose each of these interest areas in the natural
sciences to “contribute directly to, or form the necessary basis for, an
understanding of behavior.” While Medical Sciences emphasized “studies
of the physical aspects of behavior,” grants in Natural Sciences emphasized
“studies of the somatic aspects.” Other areas of study included embryology,
physiology, genetics, and internal secretions. A key motivation for selecting these focus areas, besides their applicability to human behavior, was
the empirical, scientific nature of their study. “The choice of these fields,”
the annual report stated, “reflects a confidence that findings of lasting
significance will continue to result from the application to biological problems of the quantitative and analytical techniques of chemistry, physics
and mathematics.”
By 1936 the Foundation had elevated nutrition as a topic of great value
in its own right. The annual report stated that the “problems of nutrition
are world wide and are engaging the attention of scientists everywhere.” It
was at this time that the Foundation pursued its initial buildup of laboratory research by funding academic studies, institutional construction,
and fellowships, as discussed above. Yet this emphasis on nutrition by
itself was not enough to inspire widespread funding of the public health
aspect of nutrition work. For that, Foundation policymakers would require
the new dimension that nutrition took on as World War II began and the
prospect of U.S. involvement loomed.
The influence of the war was felt even before the United States entered
the growing global conflict. In the last years of the 1930s and the first
years of the 1940s, laboratory research in nutrition shifted to focus on wartime needs, and public health nutrition work became a major beneficiary
of Foundation funding. An expansion of the Foundation’s bureaucratic
capability to take on nutrition made this shift possible. The annual report
of 1943 stated that, despite Natural Sciences’ long interest in nutrition
The Rockefeller Foundation continued
to fund food programs for children to
correct dietary deficiencies and to help
families understand nutrition. The firstgraders at Bain School in Mecklenburg
County, North Carolina, enjoyed many
"vegetable parties" in 1947. (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
92 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 93
“chemical research,” it was “not until 1938 that
technical knowledge and personnel were considered
sufficient to warrant the support of nutrition studies
in relation to public health.”
The Foundation’s annual report of 1940 articulated
this new dimension of nutrition work. It named “nu
-
tritional deficiencies” as a specific affliction “arising
from the war and constituting major health disasters,”
for which it aimed to render services. The linkage of
nutrition to wartime needs became stronger as the
war continued. By 1941 the Foundation stated that
“among the calamities imposed by war comparable to violent destruction
and to epidemics of infectious disease, is the damage from malnutrition,
ranging from plain starvation to the various manifestations of the lack of
essential food elements.”
Though the scope of its support for laboratory
research did not significantly shift as a result of this
reconceptualization of nutrition, the Foundation
linked its grantmaking to wartime needs. The Natural
Sciences Division, for example, provided a grant to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1941 for the
development of a “scientifically sound concentrated
food.” The Foundation named a practical application
of the resulting food to be its “use in wartime by
parachute troops and forces stationed in remote
areas, and for the emergency feeding at any time of
populations that become the victims of famine, flood,
earthquake, or other destructive forces.” Indeed, the
goal of the Division in funding basic research at this
time was to foster “discoveries of practical value,
which are finding adaptations to war needs.” Even
funding to support institutional development was
often connected to this goal. For example, Harvard
nutrition fellows were funded in 1943 “in view of
the probable usefulness of such a group in postwar
reconstruction.” Likewise, the head of the Nutrition
Department at the Harvard School of Public Health,
Dr. Frederick J. Stare, spent the summer of 1945 in
Europe as a “consultant in nutrition to the Surgeon
General of the United States Army.”
Surveys were a key part of public health
work on nutrition, providing an ongoing
gauge of the general population's
needs. The Rockefeller Foundation
helped fund a study of children
between the ages of nine and eleven at
Greensboro, North Carolina, City School
in 1947 to determine what types of
school programs should follow. Survey
data was collected by a nutritionist.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
The School Health Nutrition Service in
Mississippi, funded by various Rockefeller
philanthropies and state entities,
included nutritional correction efforts
that focused on children. One of the
measures involved weighing students
to assess their nutritional health.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
94 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War, and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 95
Thus, as wartime leaders pushed for nutrition studies that would
help battlefield commanders maintain the fitness of their troops, the
Foundation determined that nutrition studies were essential to fortifying
populations at a time when national governments desperately needed
workers and military personnel. In Europe, for example, the Foundation’s
Health Commission studied “urgent nutrition problems which the war
would undoubtedly create.” One of the leading commission scientists
was Dr. John B. Youmans, who had conducted the Foundation-funded
Vanderbilt nutrition study.
E xpanded Focus, Limited Involvement
Throughout the inter-war period, the Rockefeller Foundation stepped
back from agriculture and took on the science of nutrition. Though
nutrition received more funding, emphasis, and expansion, its
program was similar to the limited agriculture work the Foundation had
supported in the 1910s and 1920s. In both cases the Foundation worked
through large and stable institutions—usually the federal government or
universities—to do research with limited and well-defined goals. The public
health component of nutrition appeared early on, with its attendant focus
on practical results, but did not eclipse the theoretical interests that many
agriculture and nutrition projects had in the early years of the rural depres
-
sion. World War II helped accelerate this process of change, especially in the
arena of public health. To be sure, the links between nutrition and agricul
-
ture were still primarily tied to the quantity and availability of agricultural
production. But in many parts of the world, even those only lightly touched
by the conflagration of war, the issue of nutrition was basically a problem
of food supply. To address this issue, as described earlier, the Rockefeller
Foundation turned to Mexico.
Resilience in Trying Times
Environmental threats catalyzed by human
behavior continue to challenge agricultural
production in the developing world and
threaten food security, just as they did in the
Dust Bowl years in the United States. Recently,
the Rockefeller Foundation has helped support
sophisticated and scientific risk evaluation to
help developing countries anticipate the effects
of climate change.
With a $3 million grant from the Founda
-
tion in 2008, the United Nations World Food
Programme (WFP) has worked to restructure
its international natural disaster assistance tac
-
tics. Between 2010 and 2012, the Foundation
gave another million dollars to the WFP for its
Climate and Disaster Risk Solutions (CDRS)
unit to partner with the African Union Com
-
mission to establish the African Risk Capacity
project, an optimized global risk management
system for providing natural disaster assis
-
tance to African countries.
Foundation grants have supported other
innovative projects to promote resilience and
food security, especially in sub-Saharan Africa,
including a crop and livestock insurance program
in Kenya, and the Oxfam America Horn of Africa
Risk Transfer for Adaptation (HARITA) project.
Meanwhile, with support from the Founda
-
tion, the Rwanda Meteorological Service and
the Walker Institute of the University of Reading
began work on climate risk modeling to create a
national climate change risk map that will allow
researchers to evaluate adaptation strategies.
These efforts aim to build farmers’ resilience to
climate change and variability, thereby minimiz
-
ing the harmful effects on food security.
96 Chapter Four: Hard Times, War and Nutrition Food & Prosperity 97
98 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 99
food & prosperity
Chapter V
turning to mexico
When asked why they had accepted the Rockefeller
Foundation invitation to serve on its Survey Commission
to Mexico in 1941, the three main agricultural scientists
all referred to scientific potential. Soil specialist Richard
Bradfield saw it as an avenue for “broadening my experience with agriculture.” Corn expert Paul Mangelsdorf perceived an opportunity “handed to
me on a silver platter” to study corn in “one of the most important countries
in the hemisphere” with respect to its origins.Plant pathologist Elvin
Stakman cited his “scientific interest” in Mexico.
Yet there was another reason, above and beyond pure science, that
these men joined the Commission. “I literally grabbed at the chance,”
Mangelsdorf said, because over and above scientific potential, it offered
him a way to improve agriculture in a “backward” country, which “appealed to me very deeply.” Stakman called it a “godsend,” the “answer
to a scientist’s prayer,” in its objective of helping the “hungry countries”
alleviate the “tragedy of hunger.” He felt a sentimental and moral obligation
to accept, concluding that “I certainly would have been almost wicked not
to have done what a person could do to help out.”
The idea that Mexico needed help derived from the confluence of two
strains of thought: that it did not adequately employ scientific agriculture
in farming techniques and that its food supply was not nutritious. In both
cases, Rockefeller Foundation scientists drew on their expertise and the
U.S. experience of discovering the science of agricultural production and
nutrition to argue that Mexico could progress along the same lines.
All three Survey Commission scientists were born in the American
Midwest in the late nineteenth century. Stakman, the oldest, recalled
veterans of the Civil War in the United States telling stories around
the fire; he also remembered the forests near his pioneer farming
community in Minnesota being cut down and the prairie ploughed for
farmland. All three were educated and worked at land-grant colleges or
experiment stations, where scientific popular education and government
intervention increasingly promoted large-scale farming. They made an
explicit connection between their own professional development and
their approach in Mexico, to advocate for the technology and technique
of scientific agriculture. “From the ox to the tractor, from back-breaking
peasant farming to the intelligent business of farming, is a long and
happy step,” they wrote in Campaigns Against Hunger, the book they later
co-authored. The Survey Commission, they recalled, “had faith that Mexico
could take the same kind of step in an even shorter time.” They had seen
the scientific revolution in U.S. agriculture, which yielded increasingly
industrialized and commercialized agriculture through the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and enthusiastically used it
as a framework for Mexico, or, as they called it, a guideline for progress.
All of them also understood that breakthrough discoveries by
nutritional scientists had implications for agricultural science. Even in
the 1920s, Stakman said, people did not pay attention to nutritive qualities
of basic crops. When scientists grew high protein corn or sorghum, it was
only for baking strength. To feed people meant to “fill their stomachs,”
to work toward bulk. Yet by the 1940s agricultural scientists had begun
to consider the nutritional properties of food crops, to think in terms of
quality in addition to quantity. Mexico offered a laboratory to study crops
as food on a large scale, or, as Stakman later called it, “plant public health.”
Just as agriculturalists sought to straddle crop science and public
health, nutrition research inspired medical scientists to redefine the scope
of public health to include food and, by extension, agricultural production.
The agricultural scientists of the Survey Commission clearly saw their
counterparts in public health make this shift. The Rockefeller Foundation
medical officers had begun to realize that “better nutrition was essential
if they were going to improve the health of many countries very much,”
Stakman said. He agreed that many diseases in Mexico were “due partly
to the predisposing effects of poor nutrition or of hunger.” It was no
accident that the associate director of the Foundation’s International
100 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 101
Health Division became an early and ardent advocate of starting agriculture
work in Mexico.
Yet just because American scientists and philanthropic policymakers
saw Mexico in this way does not mean their perceptions were accurate.
Indeed, the experience of the Survey Commission in the summer of 1941
demonstrated how foreign the agricultural scientists were to the Mexican
land. They found the farms and people unfamiliar, and Mexican farmers
saw them as strangers. Two years later, the agriculturalists who went to
Mexico in 1943 to start the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) would
have a similar experience of trying to spread scientific knowledge.
The program that the Rockefeller Foundation built in Mexico arose out
of new ideas that agricultural science in the 1940s could be tied to public
health through nutrition, and could also be a leading agent for progress
abroad. The way the program functioned in action, however, resulted from
negotiations between strangers who were serving internationally for the
first time in the history of the Foundation’s agricultural programs as a
technological and cultural bridge between the U.S. and foreign countries.
Public Health & Politics: Early Advocates of Mexico
The earliest proponents of a Rockefeller Foundation Mexican agriculture
program argued in the 1930s that agricultural reform was a public
health issue. Their approach would not catch on until 1941, when the
Foundation’s priorities shifted, both by choice and necessity. In 1933, John
Ferrell, associate director of the Foundation’s International Health Division
(IHD), had embarked on what would be the first of three failed attempts to
convince Foundation leaders that this was a worthy cause. Ferrell was formerly
a teacher, public school administrator, county health superintendent, and state
director of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission’s anti-hookworm campaign
in North Carolina, before helping to lead the IHD for three decades. His
interest in agriculture stemmed from public health concerns about nutrition;
he realized that “in most countries it would be impossible to increase the
food supply without making fundamental improvements in the agricultural
system.” Ferrell went to Mexico in the spring of 1933 for exploratory purposes,
eventually turning in trip notes to his divisional director, but without any
proposal for action. One Foundation officer later characterized this visit as
“little more than an exploratory gesture.”
Ferrell found a supportive partner in Josephus Daniels, who had just
been appointed U.S. Ambassador to Mexico—assuming his post a mere six
days before Ferrell’s departure. President Franklin Roosevelt had recently
outlined his “Good Neighbor Policy,” which aimed to
keep Latin America in the U.S. sphere of influence by
friendly diplomacy and non-intervention. Daniels,
coincidentally, already had ties to the work of the
Foundation in both agriculture and public health. Born
in 1862, he had experienced in childhood the poverty
and despair of the American South following the Civil
War. As a Raleigh newspaper editor and publisher, and
early advocate of the North Carolina State College of
Mechanic Arts, he had witnessed Seaman Knapp’s farm
demonstrations and Ferrell’s anti-hookworm campaign.
Daniels also served as U.S. Secretary of the Navy during
World War I, where he mentored Franklin Roosevelt,
then a young under-secretary. Daniels’ friendship with
and support of Roosevelt eventually led the president
to appoint him Ambassador to Mexico in 1933. Daniels
arrived in an environment of suspicion toward American
interference in Mexican affairs, and was met with violent
demonstrations. He pursued his interest in agriculture,
however, visiting the Mexican National School of
Agriculture shortly after his arrival.
Two years later, in the spring of 1935, Ferrell made his
second failed attempt to convince the Foundation of the
necessity of fundamental agricultural changes in Mexico. This time he
voiced his recommendation more directly, and in concert with Daniels.
The two men had meetings in Mexico that convinced them both of the
need for a more formal effort. They outlined the contours of their proposal,
agreeing, among other details, that it should be modeled on the Knapp
farm demonstration method that the GEB had funded in the U.S. in the
early twentieth century. Ambassador Daniels wrote a letter to Raymond
Fosdick (who would assume the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation
the following year), outlining the need for a Mexican agriculture program
funded by the Foundation. He couched his request in terms of U.S. national
interest, in line with Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which sought
to engage Mexico on friendlier terms. However, by summer’s end, the
Foundation was still not receptive to this proposal.
Ferrell and Daniels again tried to convince Fosdick the following year.
This time Ferrell submitted a memo on his own, once more comparing
the historic farm demonstration program that the GEB had funded in the
southern United States to the proposed Mexico work. Instead of outlining
John Atkinson Ferrell was the
associate director of the Rockefeller
Foundation's International Health
Division from 1914 to 1944. He
played a key role in advocating
for the creation of the Foundation’s
Mexican Agricultural Program.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
102 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 103
the structure of the program, as the 1935 recommendation had, the 1936
request suggested that a few qualified Foundation representatives might be
sent to study Mexico’s agriculture and then “outline broadly a constructive
program.” Though this would be the approach the Foundation eventually
followed, it would take another half decade, and a greatly changed international context, before it was approved.
Shifting Priorities
During this period in which the Foundation rejected multiple requests
to fund a Mexican agriculture program, its interests lay elsewhere,
both topically and geographically. Overall, the Foundation’s priority
was research science, and its geographical focus areas were the United States,
China, and Europe. It was not until World War II foreclosed opportunities in
China and Europe that it began to seriously consider work in Mexico. By
late 1940, Foundation research funding had completely collapsed in Europe
and was greatly diminished in war-torn China.
The Foundation had been forced to pull back from virtually all of its
major commitments in the two regions of the world where it had done
its most important work. War relief was not a substantive option. John
D. Rockefeller had not founded his philanthropies to provide short-term
relief, no matter how desperate the demand. He had been interested
instead in the root causes of mankind’s problems. Rather than having the
Foundation’s resources and creativity marginalized for the duration of
the war, President Raymond Fosdick began searching for new regions and
new problems.
This led first to a more general redirecting of efforts toward Latin
America. “As the Foundation is driven out of Europe, and perhaps out
of Asia,” Fosdick wrote in 1941, “its greatest opportunity is going to be
in Central and South America.” It was at this time that the Division
of Natural Sciences recalled its European representative and reassigned
him to Latin America.
In the midst of this reorientation, the Rockefeller Foundation came to
see Mexico as a natural starting point. The country offered an opportunity
to do good work outside of the theaters of war, and to do so in a manner that
did not conflict with U.S. interests. In fact, it was very much in line with
security concerns. President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy had aimed at
improving relations with Latin America mostly through a non-intervention
policy and economic agreements. During World War II, with the rise
of a small fascist movement in Mexico, the policy took on a more explicit
political dimension. It targeted Mexico in 1940 to secure a stable southern
border, but also because the new president, Manuel Ávila Camacho, was
considered to be more moderate and pro-American.
Ávila Camacho was the first Mexican president receptive to Roosevelt’s
efforts at friendship. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 had triggered a revolving door of revolutionary governments, each more suspicious of the United
States than the one before. Succeeding governments had nationalized the
railroads and oil fields and introduced radical land-reform policies. Unequal
distribution of property remained a chronic problem for modern Mexico.
The country was home to movements of both the revolutionary left and the
reactionary right. The U.S. saw Ávila Camacho’s election as a turning point.
Roosevelt sent Henry Wallace, his vice president-elect, to Ávila Camacho’s
inauguration in December 1940.
As the Rockefeller Foundation’s Survey Commission would do soon
after, Wallace drove the whole way south, crossing the border and then
stopping to look at various farms along the way. Wallace was more than
vice president-elect of the United States; he was also the former Secretary
of Agriculture and one of the world’s leading experts on corn. Ambassador
Daniels hosted him upon his arrival in Mexico City, noting that Mexicans
liked him because he “represented modern scientific agriculture, both
officially as a former Secretary of Agriculture and in his own person as a
man closely identified with the popularization of hybrid corn in the United
States.” Wallace spoke before the Mexican legislature, affirming Roosevelt’s
commitment to the Good Neighbor policy. Enthusiastic as his reception
was from Mexican politicians, however, his reception from farmers was
overwhelming. Many traveled to the U.S. embassy to ask his advice, forming
a kind of impromptu “corn clinic.” Daniels stated that the embassy “looked
more like a county fair than a diplomatic establishment, because many
Indian farmers had brought their corn to show it to Wallace, not as a visiting
vice president, but as a world-recognized authority on the breeding of corn.”
Rather than rushing home to prepare for his inauguration, Wallace
spent a full month in Mexico conducting a personal tour of Mexican
agriculture. “He traipsed up steep hillsides to see the corn grown in
mountainous areas,” wrote Wallace’s biographers, John C. Culver and John
Hyde. “[He] talked about hybrid breeding with Indian farmers and eager
students, visited the leading agricultural college at Chapingo, and studied
the Mexican diet and farm implements and work patterns.” Wallace was
shocked by what he found. The best corn farms he saw, in a lowland area
near Zacupa, about two hundred miles northwest of Mexico City, produced
only twenty bushels to the acre. “A generation earlier it had produced
104 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 105
twice that amount,” Culver and Hyde wrote. “Most Mexican farms yielded
only ten bushels per acre, and the human labor needed to garner even that
amount was heart sickening.” Farmers planted corn with a pointed stick,
then had to weed, harvest, and husk by hand, before hauling their product
to market. The farmers in Zacapu required two hundred hours to produce a
bushel of corn. In contrast, an Iowa farmer produced the same amount with
about ten hours of labor in 1940.
In Wallace, Daniels and John Ferrell had found a powerful voice to
help convince the Rockefeller Foundation to begin a program in Mexico.
This time around, President Fosdick was more receptive. One Foundation
historian characterizes this shift in the reception of the
Daniels-Ferrell proposal in absolute terms, stating that
in 1935 it was greeted with “stony indifference.” By 1941
attitudes had been “transformed into an eager search for
programs in less vulnerable parts of the world to replace
those which war had shattered.” Fosdick requested background information on Mexico and the history of the
Foundation’s work there. He also agreed to accompany
Ferrell to Washington, D.C., to meet with Wallace.
This meeting took place on
February 3, 1941. Wallace later
reported that “I said I thought it
would be a fine thing if they went to
Mexico.” He advocated for agriculture
work that went beyond the health
concern of nutrition and focused
directly on increased agricultural
production. He reportedly stated,
“if the yield per acre in corn and
beans could be increased, it would
have a greater effect on the national
life of Mexico than anything that
could be done.” The means to achieve
this ambitious goal would be the
application of “modern scientific
methods” to Mexican farming, which
these men saw as a natural way to
improve agriculture. Indeed, both
the Rockefeller Foundation and the
U.S. government had played a role in
creating the system of research and education established in the land grant
universities in the nineteenth century, and in further developing scientific
research in the twentieth century. The meeting was pivotal. It was the first
time Fosdick agreed that the tactic of funding agricultural research and
education should be extended to Mexico as a way to “greatly benefit the welfare of the Mexican people,” by increasing production of basic food crops.
From the Survey Commission to the Mexican Agricultural Program
J
ust because Raymond Fosdick had agreed to fund a Mexican agriculture
program did not mean that he, or anyone else at the Rockefeller
Foundation, had a clear idea of how exactly this should be done. Fosdick
began by discussing the proposed work with various programmatic division
directors. Warren Weaver, head of the Natural Sciences Division, was just as
lost as Fosdick when first approached for direction. “I told him,” Weaver later
stated, “that I did not have the faintest idea as to whether there was anything
we could do.” The Foundation developed the idea of a survey commission as
a way to approach policy, given that it had the motivation and opportunity
to work on agriculture in Mexico but no idea how to do so operationally. “We
can not possibly ourselves have exact and dependable information on many
subjects,” Weaver went on to tell Fosdick, “but we have developed the contacts
and the techniques through which we can get such information.”
He recommended that the Foundation send a few competent scientists,
“quietly,” to study the Mexican situation. Other advisors also emphasized the
need for knowledge of this foreign country. Dr. A.R. Mann, a former Dean of
Agriculture at Cornell who had worked on the IEB’s agriculture program in
Europe (1924-1926) and later became vice president of the GEB (1937), suggested that “efforts to improve the agricultural economy must be indigenous
and arise out of native abilities, native plants and animal stocks, and the
cultural characteristics of the people.” Professor Carl Sauer, a noted geographer from the University of California, Berkeley, echoed this sentiment from
outside the Foundation, writing in 1941 that “this thing must be approached
from an appreciation of the native economy as basically sound.”
Fosdick mobilized an internal study. The staff agreed that any Mexican
agriculture help should fall under the Foundation’s Division of Natural
Sciences. They recruited Stakman, Mangelsdorf, and Bradfield, the three first
choices for the Survey Commission.
The trip itself was intended to be comprehensive. Over two months in the
summer of 1941, the Survey Commission traveled 5,000 miles through Mexico
and made over one hundred stops, from the arid north to the tropical south.
Raymond Blaine Fosdick served as
president of the Rockefeller Foundation
from 1936 to 1948. He came to the job
after serving on the boards of various
Rockefeller philanthropies and was a
close confidant of John D. Rockefeller
Jr. Winning Fosdick’s support was
critical to the creation of the Mexican
Agricultural Program. (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
106 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 107
Mangelsdorf marveled at how quickly
the landscape changed after crossing the
border. Mexico was nothing like the border
towns he had experienced. When they
could not navigate remote country roads,
they let the local governor take the wheel
of the station wagon. They swam in the
Pacific Ocean and gawked at the Zapotec
ruins of Mitla. They traveled by airplane, on trains, in the
back of trucks, by horse and mule, and even on foot. Years later,
the scientists remembered Bradfield’s voice from behind the
steering wheel as they pounded over the broken road. He would
point out the window of their green station wagon and yell,
“That soil needs nitrogen!” Then they would hear the bang of
the tires in another pothole.
Like Henry Wallace, the scientists were mystified by Mexican
corn-planting. It was not grown on commercial farms as it was in
the United States. It was grown all over the place, for subsistence,
wherever people had small “backyards.” “Corn is planted every
-
where in Mexico,” they reported. Mangelsdorf, who was in charge
of photographing the expedition, captured stands of corn cultivated
between tall pine trees in the forest, on nearly vertical mountain
terraces, and surrounding churches. Corn was so much more than
a food commodity in Mexico. It was woven into the culture.
Mangelsdorf reported that Mexican farmers patiently answered
the scientists’ questions and revealed a strong knowledge of their
native vegetation. The Survey Commission found itself less im
-
pressed with the agricultural scientists of Mexico, whose research
and lifestyles were remote from the farmers they served, a product
of the more sharply defined class system in Mexico. Staff members
of the National Extension Service did not even have means of
transportation, and so were bound to work mostly behind desks. The
experiment station at Chapingo was institutionally stagnant and
evidenced little quality control, while farming was performed with
ineffective tillage and harvesting methods. In Mexico, the scientists
noted, agronomists wore suits and worked inside. The American
commissioners rolled up their sleeves, held the dirt in their hands,
and shared lunches with locals in broken Spanish. Every day made
it apparent that any program the Foundation established would have
to work out myriad cultural interactions on the ground, bridging the
In its final report the Survey
Commission included a map
detailing its route through Mexico
in the summer of 1941. Altogether,
the Commission visited more
than a hundred communities from
Northern to Southern Mexico.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
108 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 109
gaps between American science and Mexican tradition as strangers learned
to work together.
The report that the three scientists produced in October 1941 advised that
basic research and scientific education must precede popular demonstration
in Mexico. Unlike the GEB farm demonstration work, which “inherited the
fruits of a half-century of agricultural research” from the land-grant college
and extension system in the U.S., Mexico had “no comparable body of reliable
information.” The Commission reported that the “primary need is to acquire
a body of facts and principles relating to Mexican agriculture and to educate
men and women who are willing and able to disseminate it effectively through
teaching and demonstration.” In short, the Commission recommended that
the Foundation first support research and fund the teaching of teachers.
During a Rockefeller Foundation conference on the Mexican report on
November 25, 1941—which included members of the Survey Commission,
Warren Weaver, and a few other officers who had helped with the trip—a
decision was made to propose a Mexican research unit, rather than a grant to
the Mexican government. This meeting also included William I. Myers, who
had become a Foundation trustee that year. Myers was head of the Department
of Agricultural Economics at Cornell and had served with various farm agencies, including the Farm Credit Administration. He was the only trustee with
a background in agricultural science, and for the next 15 years he would be an
important advocate for shifting the Foundation’s policies toward public health,
defined broadly to include food production. Myers once said that despite his
great admiration and affection for Warren Weaver, one of Weaver’s remarks
“makes me crawl—when he said that farming is just applied biology.”
Myers had been invited on the Survey Commission trip to Mexico that summer, and, though he could not attend, he helped shape its recommendations. In
December 1941 he assisted divisional officers, including Weaver, in presenting
the Mexican project to the Foundation for approval. “I had a very small part in
it,” he later said, but “I was the only trustee that was reasonably familiar with agriculture.” The Foundation adopted the Survey Commission recommendations
for starting an agricultural project in Mexico, including what it described as its
“country unit model.” Under this concept, the Foundation would operate the
project directly and intimately, with program officers in Mexico working closely
with the Mexican government and agricultural scientists. This programmatic
infrastructure composed of Foundation representatives was so unprecedented
that it constituted a “new pattern of technical assistance.”
The Survey Commission built several specifics into its proposal. The fourmember team it recommended consisted of an agronomist, a plant breeder, a
plant pathologist/entomologist, and an animal husbandryman. These scientists
were to address poor soil management, low-yielding
grains and legumes, pest and disease control, and
quality breeds of farm animal. Yet the newness of
the endeavor, and the Commission’s own experience
with unexpected encounters, inspired the scientists
to advocate for flexibility as well. “We didn’t try to
blueprint everything that should be done,” Stakman said, characterizing the
proposal as a mere guideline for an action program. The “next problem,” he
continued, “was, of course, to implement it.”
MAP in Action: Negotiating a New Working Model
The All-American forward on the University of Michigan hockey
team burst through the defense and fired the puck at Minnesota’s
goalie. This last line of defense threw his hand up, half-stopping the
shot, but not completely, and Michigan won the game. J. George Harrar, a
young agricultural scientist, was in the stands that night in the winter of
"Even the land of the forests is used
for agriculture in Mexico," the Survey
Commission wrote of this pine tree
and cornfield on the mountaintops
near Hidalgo, Michoacán. (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
110 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 111
1942, riveted. That goalie was also a football player, and in both sports he
was known to be a wonderful competitor who would fight to the last moment, fairly and cleanly, while keeping his head at all times. This was not
just any night for Harrar. He had come to Minneapolis from his teaching
post in Washington to meet Elvin Stakman, his old professor and mentor
who still taught at Minnesota, and Frank Hanson, associate director of
the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of Natural Sciences. Stakman had
recommended Harrar to direct the Foundation’s new Mexican Agricultural
Program. Hanson had come from New York for an interview to assure
himself that the recommendation was sound.
Stakman and Hanson both found themselves impressed by Harrar’s
reaction to the hockey game, attributing it to the young man’s similarity
to the goalie. You could tell by his reaction, Stakman said, that Harrar, too,
was a “wonderful competitor who would fight very intelligently and to the
last ditch, but always fairly.” In the excitement, Harrar lost his new hat.
“Well,” Hanson remarked afterwards, “the young fellow lost his hat, but I
don’t think he’d ever lose his head.”
Hanson set the wheels in motion for Harrar to be appointed, calling
him to New York to meet with Paul Mangelsdorf and Richard Bradfield.
The two scientists were also impressed with him. The Foundation offered
Harrar the position, and waited until he could take leave of his job at
Washington State College to commence the program under his leadership
in February of 1943.
If the Foundation chose Harrar for the personal qualities he displayed
at the Minnesota hockey game (on top of his professional qualifications), it
was a judgment well made. Harrar, like the Survey Commission scientists,
was from the Midwest, born and raised in Ohio. He was a fierce athletic
competitor at Oberlin College, where the track team nicknamed him the
“Flying Dutchman” (or “Dutch”) for the records he set in 1928. It was well
known, however, that Harrar’s success derived more from perseverance
and competitiveness than athletic prowess. One of his classmates said that
he “seemed to give every ounce of energy to it and I always feared whether
his endurance could hold out.” Harrar matched his athletic discipline with
a steely intellect that was readily discernible to others. He was known for
his “steady, low voice” and his “blue and sharp” eyes that “divined instantly
what one might be thinking.”
Harrar’s tenacity, consistency, and good judgment would serve him
well in Mexico, as would his professional abilities. He had studied botany
at Oberlin, then taught and studied plant pathology in graduate school at
Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts and the University
of Minnesota, where Stakman became Harrar’s mentor. He gained more
hands-on experience with farming and administrative management as
head of the Division of Plant Pathology of the Agricultural Experiment
Station at Washington State College in 1941. And Harrar spoke Spanish,
having spent four years teaching biology at the University of Puerto Rico’s
College of Agriculture before completing graduate school training.
When Harrar went to Mexico in 1943 to start the Foundation’s
agriculture project, he was met with the same set of challenges in serving
as a cultural bridge that the Survey Commission had encountered. Yet he
reacted to them with skill and perseverance. The colleagues he selected
often spent much of their career at the Rockefeller Foundation, the most
notable of whom was Norman Borlaug (who had also studied with Stakman
at Minnesota). These scientists trained at MAP, and in turn contributed to
professional development abroad. “An untrained man,” Harrar said, “is the
human counterpart of an unproductive acre.” He created a social life with
frequent house or bowling parties for the expats under his supervision,
which relieved tension, cultivated interdisciplinary cooperation, and
brought scientists’ wives into the loop. His motto promoted his own ethic
of balance: “work hard, play hard, but above all, work hard.”
Harrar also dealt with Mexican officials, controlling his “fiery temperament” and making friends in the right places. One of his first achievements
after arriving in Mexico was to write a memorandum of agreement between
the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government. Because government consent had been verbal until then, he asked Dr. Harry M. Miller Jr.,
of the Foundation office in New York, to travel to Mexico to support him
in working out a more formal arrangement. The memorandum that both
parties signed in March 1943 was simple—not a contract but a “documented
intent.” Mexico, he said, “indicated they wanted assistance,” and the
Rockefeller Foundation “indicated we were willing to try to be helpful.”
However, “neither of us really knew what we were agreeing to,”
Harrar said, because “we didn’t know exactly what we were going to do.”
Indeed, this was the first time in the Foundation’s history that it had “sent
agricultural specialists into a foreign land to work side by side with the
scientists of that country in raising the level of national food production.”
As they began, MAP administrators had to create a smoothly functioning
organizational structure. To be sure, the Foundation’s experience in public
health around the world provided context and insight for this new venture,
but Harrar and his colleagues were not doctors or public health officials,
and they had not been involved in these earlier efforts.
112 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 113
First Encounters
Harrar’s first action in Mexico was to go on survey trips of his own, often
with colleagues as his guide. He traveled in the spring, summer, and
autumn of 1943, through a landscape that yielded moments of disconnect as well as wonder. When visiting a volcano with Mangelsdorf, the car got
stuck in the mud, causing their Mexican driver to get out, open the trunk, and
pull out a small boy to help him push the car, much to the Americans’ shock
and horror. Another evening, Stakman and Harrar walked into their hotel after
a banquet to see a man who was “enormous . . . around the equator,” wearing
a big hat, long coat, and “pegtopped” trousers. They immediately recognized
Diego Rivera, the famed Mexican muralist. They conversed extensively
with him, discussing, among other things, his mural at the National School
of Agriculture at Chapingo. (When Stakman woke his wife at 3 a.m. to tell
her he had met Rivera in the lobby, Mrs. Stakman responded: “Did you have
something to drink at that banquet? . . . You’ve got hallucinations.”)
As the Survey Commission had discovered on its journey, Harrar realized
that he was the real stranger in the new landscape. He often encountered
“attitudes of suspicion” and “obvious difficulties in communication.”
Misunderstandings ranged from linguistic, when farmers spoke colloquially,
to theoretical. Harrar found it impossible to explain to any “villager, who
hasn’t the slightest concept of what a philanthropic organization is, what you
are doing there.” He settled on telling farmers he was studying corn, or that
he was a técnico (a technical person).
Yet Harrar found that farmers eventually warmed up to him. He
engaged them personally, asking how they stored their corn or about other
small details on their farms. He found that “showing an interest in those
things that are part of their life in the village” endeared him to people.
As he visited and revisited areas, many people who had been reluctant or
suspicious became more relaxed, on both big and small farms. “I’m not
sure,” Harrar said, “but what they thought we were a little nutty, but harmless nuts.” Out of this friendliness grew working partnerships, which then
became closer friendships as MAP developed new seeds and distributed
them in rural communities.
The scientists likewise had to build collegial relationships with officials
in the new Mexican government. Politicians were different from farmers.
They had a better understanding of the Foundation’s intentions, but they
also had expectations that didn’t necessarily align with those of MAP
administrators. Harrar recognized that he needed a functional relationship
with the Ministry of Agriculture for MAP to run smoothly, but he first
had to figure out how the Ministry operated internally. He worked with
Minister Marte R. Gómez as well as his subsecretary, Alfonso González
Gallardo, and business manager, Eduardo Morillo Safa, eventually
navigating their different roles. González Gallardo handled the technical
relationships, and Harrar had to go to him for program matters, including
the what, where, and how of future work. Morillo Safa handled business
affairs within the Ministry, so Harrar had to see him constantly in order
to get help from the Mexican side. With the Minister he had to talk policy
matters and overall planning.
Though Harrar found these men “competent,
sympathetic, and friendly,” he realized early on that
they believed the Americans had some “secrets to
success” that could yield immediate and brilliant
results. Perhaps, he later said, they “expected us to
perform at least one miracle daily, and maybe a couple
on weekends.” They did not conceive of breakthroughs
as an evolutionary process, that “you could not do it
by magic.” Though Harrar tried to move quickly, the
landscape was strange and science offered no blueprint.
J. George Harrar (left), a young
agricultural scientist picked by the
Rockefeller Foundation to run the
Mexican Agricultural Program, joined
a survey trip with his mentor Elvin
Charles Stakman (right), an expert
in plant pathology. In April 1943 they
traveled throughout Mexico and also
visited the School for Agriculture in
Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
114 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 115
“Climatic and ecological conditions,” in summary, “were different.” Once
the politics had been negotiated, the scientific task was to figure out ways
to breed crop varieties from different locations in order to adapt them to
the Mexican landscape, creating through hard science that “magic” sought
by the politicians.
A Working Program
Harrar’s team commenced work under the Office of Special
Studies (OSS), established by the Mexican government as a joint
responsibility of the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture and the
Rockefeller Foundation. The OSS was primarily housed in a General Bureau
of Agriculture building in a suburb of Mexico City. Both the government and
the Foundation provided funding, with the Foundation also contributing
trained personnel. The Ministry gave “land, labor, office and laboratory
space, funds for buildings, certain pieces of machinery, fertilizers and other
materials,” as well as their own “technical personnel.”
The OSS was the central headquarters of MAP, where scientists performed some laboratory experiments; it also contained exhibit rooms and
an agricultural library. Complementing the OSS was an experiment-field
system that included formal stations and more informal locations. The
first station and, later, the heart of the research system was at the National
College of Agriculture at Chapingo, about 25 miles east of Mexico City.
This site included field labs, greenhouses, and planting projects, with 260
acres of experimental plots. Other stations were at Guanajuato, north of
Mexico City, and Morelos, which was subtropical, enabling winter growing.
Additional experimental locations took a variety of forms, some connected
to schools of agriculture while others were on the land of “hacienda owners
and small farmers” who “offered facilities for experimental work.” These
were extremely plentiful. In 1948, for example, MAP established over 500
experimental sites.
Though the Survey Commission had given MAP a wide range of
research areas, its work was more limited in practice. Historian Deborah
Fitzgerald argues that subsidiary goals were cast off as the program
developed; the “focus . . . became research and advanced training.” Research
itself initially centered on two issues: wheat stem rust (a common blight
on Mexican wheat) and the improvement of maize varieties (corn was a
staple food crop). MAP gave other areas less attention, though substantial
resources still were devoted to alternative crops such as potato, sorghum,
beans, and vegetables, and to subsidiary topics such as animal husbandry.
Advanced training addressed what Harrar saw as the dearth of U.S.-style
agricultural scientists in Mexico and, moreover, the lack of cultural value
attached to this field.
Wheat
The aim of the wheat efforts was to “find or develop varieties which
would resist fungus diseases.” Because wheat was largely a commercial crop in Mexico, grown on larger farms and consumed less
frequently than corn, MAP conceived of wheat rust in financial terms.
Harrar stated in his six-year assessment report that “wheat rusts have cost
Mexico millions of dollars annually.” He began work on improving wheat
in 1943. His team inoculated 700 varieties of wheat with stem rust, planted
them in autumn, harvested them in spring, and then replanted the 500
survivors. This work led to the conclusion that Mexican varieties ripened
early but were not rust resistant, whereas, they knew, American varieties
of wheat ripened later but were resistant.
Harrar brought Norman Borlaug to MAP in 1944, initially as the
team’s plant pathologist. A native of Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug grew up on his
Norwegian-American family’s farm. Like Harrar, he had earned his Ph.D.
under Elvin Stakman and, also like Harrar, he was a competitive athlete in
his undergraduate days (also at the University of Minnesota). “Wrestling
taught me some valuable lessons,” he later said. “I always figured I could
hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough.” Stakman saw
this perseverance in Borlaug and recommended him to Harrar, writing that
Borlaug had “great depth of courage and determination,” adding that he “will
not be defeated by difficulty and he burns with a missionary zeal.”Borlaug
would draw on this strength to serve him well in the early days of MAP.
Soon after Borlaug’s arrival, Harrar assigned the junior scientist the
task of crossing the Mexican and North American strains of wheat to create
a hybrid that was not only rust-resistant but also ripened early (enabling
multiple cropping). In the meantime, MAP distributed the best seeds from
Harrar’s experiment, which, according to Borlaug, were superior to the
strains that local farmers were using.
To create the desired hybrid, Borlaug pioneered an innovative system
of “shuttle breeding.” It was common practice in agricultural science at
this time to raise experimental crops not only in the location where the
resulting varieties would be grown, but also through the duration and
climactic conditions of an actual growing season. Borlaug realized that the
time it took to develop effective hybrids would be halved if he could create
116 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 117
two growing cycles per year. Because he was
breeding wheat that was usually planted in the
winter (due to summer conditions creating a
fertile climate for stem rust to grow and spread),
he replicated winter conditions during the
summer by working at high altitude. His team
first planted experimental strains on a normal
growing cycle near sea level, sowing wheat seeds
in autumn and harvesting in spring at Ciudad
Obregón in the Yaqui Valley of Northwest
Mexico. He then took the seeds from the most
resistant plants, transported them hundreds of
miles to the highland environment of Toluca
in central Mexico, and sowed a new crossbreed
in spring for an autumn harvest.
Harrar initially protested this more
expensive regional approach. He wanted to
confine wheat work to central Mexico. He and
Borlaug had heated arguments, both drawing
on their competitive spirits in an effort to hold their
own. Borlaug later recalled that Stakman appeared early
in the morning one day, fuming. “Have you ever seen
Stakman at 7 o’clock in the morning?” Borlaug interjects
in his story. “I have never before or since.” Stakman
snarled, “You people act like children!” After Stakman's
intervention, Harrar relented. Borlaug implemented
shuttle breeding and repeated the process for two
harvests annually.
By 1950 MAP’s efforts had created 12 new varieties, whose virtue was
their suitability for the Mexican climate and resistance to disease, with
special attention to stem and leaf rusts. Because of this resistance, they
could even be grown in the summer rainy season. MAP had distributed
these seeds to farmers as it developed them, so that by 1949 improved
varieties were estimated to seed about 110,000 acres, or eight per cent of
the total wheat acreage of Mexico. The Rockefeller scientists believed
that the key to the rapid spread of these wheat varieties was the fact that
although they had employed hybridization (crossing different strains)
to create new varieties, the end products were true-breeding varieties.
Farmers could thus save, use, or sell any portion of the harvested grain
as seed for the next planting.
Corn
A major element of the MAP was a project focused on corn (maize).
This project aimed to increase the supply of Mexico’s most basic
food crop by improving yields. Harrar’s six-year assessment
described maize as the “national food,” reporting that “approximately 58 per
cent of Mexico’s cropland is given over to corn.” Despite this large growing
area, MAP characterized low yield as a major impediment to sufficient food
supply, especially when compared to corn grown in the United States. Corn
grown in Mexico, Harrar reported, was “poor in both quantity and quality.”
Researchers first tested hundreds of native corn samples for “vigor, growing period, climatic adaptability, yield, and other cultural factors.” They
selected superior strains for immediate distribution
and planting, keeping some for experimentation. The
scientists then utilized these seeds to create synthetics
(crossing inbreds or single crosses with superior openpollinated varieties) and hybrids. Corn is not amenable
Wheat hybridization experiments in
July 1958 at Santa Elena, Toluca, Mexico,
were monitored by researchers in
the field. (Neil MacLellan. Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
Rockefeller Foundation scientist
Norman Ernest Borlaug joined the
Mexican Agricultural Program in 1944.
His scientific research on wheat helped
support a dramatic increase in food
production in Mexico and other nations.
Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in
1970 for his efforts to avert widespread
famine. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
118 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 119
to the production of true-breeding varieties due to its
propensity for cross-pollinating in the field rather than
self-pollinating, as occurs with wheat and rice.
Synthetics were reportedly better suited for the
Mexican environment, as they were highly adaptable
to a range of climatic zones and were more genetically
diverse. They could be replanted for several years “without significantly reducing yield and vigor.” By 1948 MAP
had distributed various improved varieties to farmers,
including four open-pollinated, eight synthetic, and 16
hybrid, all of which it considered “superior for yield and
resistance to disease.” MAP reported that for the 1948
crop, 500,000 acres were planted in new varieties and the yield increased
by 125,000 tons. Consequently, for the “first time in thirty-five years, Mexico
did not have to import corn.” The increased harvests could also be used as
feed for livestock to improve the supply of meat and milk.
Other Projects
MAP also worked in subsidiary areas that included different
crops and different problems. The other major crop it focused
on was beans, which the program considered secondary to
wheat and corn but which nonetheless was bred for higher yielding and
more resistant varieties. The program attached a nutritional goal to bean
development—to help provide adequate protein for those in the population
who could not afford the more luxurious items of meat and milk. Nutrition
was one of many different subsidiary areas MAP sought to address, which
included soil and crop studies (fertilizers, herbicides, and crops such as
grasses, sorghum, soybeans, clovers, and peas), plant diseases, insect pests,
and farm machinery.
Advanced Training Program
There were many Mexican agricultural scientists at the time that
MAP commenced work, but Harrar, Borlaug, and the other scientists
running the program faced a difficult problem when they discovered
that agricultural science meant something quite different in Mexico than
in the United States. Historian Deborah Fitzgerald argues that Rockefeller
Foundation officers characterized this as a technical and cultural issue that
stemmed from a lack of fieldwork experience. Harrar was of the opinion
that “Mexicans seemed to feel that agriculture was a science best learned in
the laboratory and classroom rather than the field, and a social stigma was
apparent toward fieldwork generally.” MAP scientists also perceived that
many Mexicans were either mystified or awed by American agricultural
science, which could be both positive and negative for the MAP team.
Fitzgerald argues that some Mexican agriculturalists were offended by
the presence of MAP scientists, perceiving an implication that “Mexican
scientists did not know what they were doing.” On the other hand, some
in the government and the universities “harbored unrealistic expectations
of American science.”
The MAP professional training program worked to create technical
personnel, but also to institutionalize an entire new ideology of working
methods. Harrar characterized this as “perhaps the most significant and
far-reaching feature” of the Mexican Agricultural Program. The Mexican
Department of Agriculture assigned about a dozen young men each year
to work with the OSS. These promising scientists would spend one or more
years with MAP scientists in both the laboratory and the field, gaining
Edwin Wellhausen offered tips to
farmers at the Chapingo field day in 1954.
Wellhausen joined the Mexican Agricultural
Program in 1943 as the geneticist in
charge of corn breeding. He served as
director of the program for most of the
1950s. Wellhausen’s colleagues in the early
days of MAP included John Niederhauser
(potato breeder), William E. Colwell (soil
scientist), John J. McKelvey (economic
entomologist), and Lewis M. Roberts (corn
breeder). (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
120 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 121
valuable technical and practical experience. Many wrote dissertations
and earned degrees from Mexican agricultural colleges for this work. The
Foundation also provided study-abroad opportunities in the United States
for those trainees who had shown an aptitude for research and mastered the
English language. The scholarships were given with the understanding that
recipients would return to Mexico to fill posts as agricultural researchers in
government service. Twenty-six scholarships of this type had been awarded
by 1949. The Foundation saw both components of the training program as
successful, stating in 1950 that “this growing body of eager, young, competent scientists forms the vanguard of future agricultural progress in Mexico.”
E x tension and Popul ar Education
Much of MAP’s measurable success came from the ability to
disseminate its improved seed varieties to farmers. Mexico
did not have an extension system akin to
that of the United States, where agricultural colleges,
experiment stations, and extension agents brought
scientific findings to farmers in their home state.
Harrar attempted to make the Mexican experiment
stations into the “channel through which the results
of research can be brought directly and quickly to the
farmer,” but they did not perform effective extension
work. Thus the Ministry of Agriculture and
the OSS pursued other means, which were
largely successful with regards to wheat. The
OSS initially distributed seeds informally,
but there were issues with bad publicity and a
competing black market of seeds that undercut
the effort. In 1947 the Ministry assumed the
distributor role, creating a Wheat Commission
that enjoyed marked success. Within ten years,
90 per cent of Mexico’s wheat acreage was
growing improved MAP seeds. These farmers
were, in many ways, predisposed to accept
distributed seeds. Wheat farmers were mostly
commercial, with larger plots of land, and had
greater ability and willingness to take risks
and invest in seed, irrigation, and fertilizer.
Historian Deborah Fitzgerald argues that,
within Mexico, they were most similar to American farmers, creating
an “effective ‘fit’ between the wheat farmers and the OSS” that made
dissemination easy and successful.
Corn growers did not receive the fruits of MAP labor to the same extent,
though there was much activity directed toward the crop. Two different
corn commissions sought to, as Harrar bluntly phrased it, “put the new corn
varieties in the hands of farmers.” Richard Acosta, a Chapingo graduate and
commercial farmer, founded the Corn Commission in 1947. This was an independent agency that increased the production and distribution of OSS seeds,
which President Alemán Valdés (1946-1952) supported until Don Nazario of
the Ministry of Agriculture started a rival commission. The OSS eventually
gave an equal share of seeds to his National Commission for the Increase and
Distribution of Improved Seed. These entities also pursued popular education
for corn farmers, instructing them on “approved tillage methods, disease and
pest control and irrigation.” To do so, the two commissions held field meetings and contests, screened educational films, and produced bulletins. In one
instance, they even created and sent an educational ballet on tour, based on
the “legend of the Aztec corn goddess.”
Despite these efforts, corn farmers did not adopt MAP seed varieties at
anywhere near the level that wheat farmers did. By 1963, less than 12 percent
of corn acreage grew hybrids, or 36 percent if selected varieties and synthetics
are included. Corn growers were subsistence farmers, with small farms. In
the same way that wheat growers were predisposed to adopt new seeds and
methods, corn growers were unlikely to do so given their situation. They
could not take on the risk or expense of hybrid seed, irrigation, and fertilizer.
No elaborate extension system existed to promote adoption widely enough,
and the agencies that did attempt to serve this role had much less success
with corn growers than with wheat farmers.
No Miracles, Only People, Patience, and Persistence
Despite the tensions and challenges inherent in Mexico’s agricultural
economy, the overall expansion of agricultural production was
enormous. Even corn production rose, owing to improved seeds and
farming methods. In 1948 Mexico did not import corn for the first time. By
1956 it was a net exporter of corn, wheat, and cereal, while still meeting the
food needs of its own growing population. MAP had trained a new generation of agricultural scientists in the expertise it believed most valuable to
approach the problems of Mexico’s agriculture and food supply. It had created
an infrastructure for scientific research, experimentation, and education.
The Mexican Agricultural Program
focused primarily on corn and wheat,
but also funded research on beans –
another staple of the Mexican diet. In
this experimental garden plot at Ciudad
Obregón Experiment Station, researchers
cultivated new varieties of beans in April
1961. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
122 Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 123
Based on the data showing increased production, the Foundation soon
extended the MAP model to many locations around the world. In Mexico,
new initiatives would continue to be motivated by a theoretical wedding of
agriculture and public health through nutrition, which sought to increase
the quantity and the quality of agricultural harvests. The working model
created in Mexico contained vestiges of its theoretical underpinnings, yet its
operational components arose primarily from adapting to conditions in the
field. The Foundation continued to use its own officers as a bridge between
cultures as well as pioneers of technology and science, because George
Harrar, as program director, had operated effectively by negotiating with
both Mexican farmers and government officials.
Foundation leaders knew that adept navigation of cultural differences
in the interest of science lay at the heart of their success in Mexico. When
asked what they believed was the “x-factor” in MAP success, most officers
named the people with whom they implemented the program—citing their
personal friendliness and professional capabilities. Like Harrar, the scien
-
tists who worked under him encountered their own strangers and navigated
through their own moments of unfamiliar wonder. John J. McKelvey Jr.,
a plant pathologist, said that everyone was “intrigued” and “starry-eyed,”
because Mexico was an “unknown” and the “whole business was completely
new to us.” Yet by the time they were done, they had contributed to creating
a functioning program that enjoyed its own successes.
“There is no miracle involved in it,” Elvin Stakman concluded. “Men make
a program,” and the Rockefeller Foundation had “some remarkable men who
knew how to make a program and knew how to carry it out.” For the officers
in the Foundation’s New York headquarters, the greater test of the Mexican
Agricultural Program would be whether or not it was replicable in other
countries. They would soon find out.
Forming New Partnerships
in an Expanded Third Sector
The Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricul
-
tural Program in the 1940s was a pioneer in the
field of international agricultural assistance.
Since the 1970s, aid organizations focused on
agricultural development have proliferated and
the Foundation has worked with many partners
around the world.
In 2008, for example, the Meridian Institute,
an independent non-profit organization, formed
the Foundation Working Group on Food and
Agricultural Policy. The effort brought together
nine U.S.-based foundations, including the
Rockefeller Foundation, to help shape U.S. poli
-
cies related to food and agriculture. The group’s
work focused on nutrition, rural development,
and environmental quality within the United
States and abroad. The Foundation has funded
various projects that grew out of the Working
Group’s efforts including Meridian’s AGree initia
-
tive, Global Dialogue on Agriculture and Climate
Change, and Initiative on Food and Agriculture
Policy (IFAP), all of which promote food security
through public policy or donor networks.
The Foundation also continued to fund
large-scale agriculture efforts spearheaded by
other international agencies. In 2005, it gave
almost $200,000 to the Food and Agriculture
Organization for policy research to strengthen
market linkages and supply chains in Africa
and Asia. Four years later, $1.5 million went to
the same organization to promote resilience
among vulnerable populations in Ethiopia,
Kenya, and Uganda. Additionally, the Foundation
gave more than $300,000 to the United Nations
Economic Commission for Africa between 2006
and 2010 to develop land policy reform as a
contribution to African food security.
Chapter Five: Turning to Mexico Food & Prosperity 125
Some of the 1,200 farmers, teachers,
and agronomists who attended a field
day at the Bajío regional center in April
1964. The Mexican Agricultural Program
organized field days to teach farmers
about new high-yielding wheat varieties.
Though the percentage of farmers
who attended the events was small,
studies showed that these farmers took
the lead in introducing new seeds and
improved practices in their communities.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
124
126 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 127
food & prosperity
Chapter VI
exporting success
The Rockefeller Foundation had embraced the Mexican
Agricultural Program (MAP) as a way to invest in the future
while the chaos of world war consumed the present. But remote
from publicity and urgent expectations, isolated from the daily
pressures of war, the Mexico program thrived quietly as a scientific search
for fundamental solutions to the intractable problem of hunger. The purpose
of MAP was two-fold and elegant, as Warren Weaver described it in 1948:
“to bring modern scientific methods to bear on the improvement of the
quality, yield and production of the basic food crops of Mexico; and to aid the
Government in developing the scientific personnel, research facilities and
methods essential to the effective utilization of the agricultural resources of
the country for an improved society.”
In five short years, the program had studied 1,500 native varieties of
corn, found 15 superior types, and released six to farmers for planting on
270,000 acres, representing six percent of the total corn belt in Mexico.
Yields were often 20 percent and sometimes even 50 percent higher than
they had been a decade earlier. For the first time in decades, Mexico did not
need to import corn.
Scientists at MAP began to extend their research into the effects of
soil composition and management, fertilization, climate, humidity, and
altitude, as well as into the nutritional qualities of corn. The challenge was
not just to grow more corn, but more nutritional corn. President Raymond
Fosdick had even begun to expand the ideological
rationale for MAP by making a direct link between
increased agricultural productivity and the persistent
growth of human population.
MAP had started with a small operational staff in
1943, embedded in the Mexican countryside with no clear
plan for how they would address Mexico’s agricultural
problems. But by 1948 the focus was razor sharp. The Foundation had assigned
ten American scientists from its staff to Mexico, and the Mexican government
had assigned 47 young scientists to MAP. Six Mexican agronomists were
pursuing post-graduate study in the United States, and seven fellows from
other Latin American countries were studying side by side with American
scientists in Mexico.
In 1955 many Mexican farmers were
able to substantially increase their
yields of corn, wheat, and other crops,
including potatoes, with the assistance
of the Mexican Agricultural Program.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
128 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 129
Since 1945, the Foundation had sponsored two graduate students from
the agriculture school at Medellín University in Colombia to spend a year
in Mexico doing research on soil, plant pathology, plant breeding, and
applied entomology. By 1948 two of the first three fellows had returned
to Medellín to join the faculty. The Foundation expanded the fellowship
program from two to six students, and started a new program at the
University of Cali, also in Colombia. On many levels, from research to
improved harvests to expanding professional expertise, the Mexican
Agricultural Program had been a success. A spirit of cooperation and
partnership pervaded the program. Hundreds of visitors arrived at MAP
test plots to study their progress. In 1949 the Foundation funded the
Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Turrialba, Costa Rica,
and invited agricultural scientists from 11 Latin American countries to
join MAP leaders in Mexico City for an “Inter-American Symposium on
Plant Breeding.” A year later, in 1950, the Foundation sponsored a second
symposium, the “Inter-American Symposium on Plant Pests and Diseases.”
Scientists from established universities attended these conferences, in
stable Latin American countries that shared a common language, cultural
traditions, and dependence on corn. They had also avoided the worst
direct impacts of World War II. For the first time since the Rockefeller
Foundation’s international campaign against yellow fever in the years
between World War I and World War II, scientists worked toward common
purposes across national borders. Agricultural research is based on
universal principles, and scientists shared the same research methods.
They read the same technical literature. A breakthrough in Mexico could
be applied in Colombia. The discovery of native high-altitude varieties
in Bolivia held the potential to unlock secrets that might improve yields
in Guatemala. What had begun as an experiment with a narrow focus
on the food production problems of Mexico was ready to emerge onto an
international stage.
Taking the Model to Colombia
I
n 1948 the president of Colombia officially requested the Foundation’s
assistance in setting up a MAP-like program in his country. Dr. Lewis
M. Roberts, a corn specialist from MAP, and Dr. Joseph A. Rupert, a
wheat expert, were assigned to launch the project. The initial Foundation
investment of $40,000 in 1949 increased to $135,600 by 1951.
The Colombia program followed the blueprint of MAP as precisely as
possible. It put emphasis on improving the yield and quality of corn and
wheat, and on increasing the opportunities for Colombian agronomists to
conduct post-graduate research in the United States and Mexico. “We plan
to use it [MAP] as a hub for training and, as it were, seeding the extension
of the work to other countries,” new president Dean Rusk wrote in the 1951
President’s Review. “The men who are operating the program in Colombia
were trained on the job in Mexico, and the personnel to man the proposed
projects in other Latin American countries will similarly be trained
through a year of experience on the staff in Mexico.”
The Colombian Agricultural Program (CAP) developed its principle
centers of research in Medellín and Bogotá, near existing university
research facilities. By 1954 there were four substations for high-altitude
research, three stations in the intermediate altitudes, and three tropical
stations. In its first years, the Colombia program received seeds from Mexico
and adapted them to Colombia’s climate, but researchers quickly developed
a “corn germplasm bank” to store indigenous Andean varieties that could be
used for experimentation or sent to corn researchers throughout the world.
Seeds were distributed to Colombian farmers through the Caja Agraria,
a government- owned credit bank, which formed part of the extension
system and sold the seed “literally and figuratively by demonstrating to
the farmer the advantages of the improved varieties.” By 1960, 80 percent
of the corn acreage in Colombia’s most advanced agricultural region, the
Cauca Valley, was planted with hybrid seeds sold through the Caja Agraria.
The Colombians also developed an emphasis on potatoes, which scientists
pointed out were a staple of the Colombian diet.
Expansion to Chile
S
uccesses in Colombia were quickly followed by a request from the
government of Chile, and in May 1955 the Foundation established
its third agricultural operation. Upon entering the country, in
collaboration with the federal government, the Foundation helped establish
a cooperative unit, the Office of Special Studies, under the aegis of the
Ministry of Agriculture. The Foundation began work on the premise that
there existed a food supply shortfall in Chile that could be fulfilled by
improving agricultural productivity. The “consumption of agricultural
products . . . was increasing at the rate of 2.3 per cent annually,” Foundation
researchers explained, while “agricultural production was going up at the
rate of 1.6 per cent.”
The Chilean program focused on wheat, the “basic staple of the national
diet,” which had been imported annually in recent years. As the program
130 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 131
developed, it also took on “forages for livestock feed,” which the Rockefeller
Foundation considered the second major focus by 1956. Forage crop work
included alfalfa, subterranean clover, red clover, white clover, crimson clover,
trefoil, ryegrass, Phlaris, and sorghum. Pasture and range comprised over 50
percent of Chilean land, about 14 times the acreage under cultivation.
The Chilean program established its headquarters in Santiago, with
experimental stations in Paine (near Santiago), Temuco (in the “winter wheat
region”), and Los Andes (some distance from Santiago). These locations
intentionally spanned a variety of Chilean climates and the “three chief
agricultural regions of the country.” The program
consolidated research in 1957, when the Rockefeller
Foundation gave the Ministry of Agriculture a grant to
group the stations together at a new site near Santiago,
which included an agriculture library. With Foundation
help, the Ministry later purchased land and erected new
experiment stations near the old ones
outside of Santiago and Temuco.
As in Colombia, the Chilean
program’s first step was research to
adapt already improved seeds. Wheat
varieties were bred for high yield and
disease resistance at specific climatic
regions of the country. Later, as in
Mexico and Colombia, they were also
bred to create “short-stemmed ‘dwarf’
varieties” to utilize nutrients more
effectively, and avoid “lodging.”
Following the model set by Mexico
and solidified by Colombia, the Chilean program provided
for agricultural college students to work with Foundation
staff members on research projects, as well as scholarships
or fellowships for advanced study in other countries,
usually in Latin America or the United States. Popular
education that aimed to teach farmers improved methods
of cultivation—including crop rotation, with an emphasis
on forage crops such as clover, alfalfa, and grasses—also
formed a key part of the program.
Though the Chilean program progressed less rapidly than the program
in Colombia, the Foundation nonetheless considered it a success. In 1963 it
reported that Chilean farmers harvested 1.2 million metric tons of wheat
to “meet the country’s requirements, eliminating the necessity of importing
this basic cereal.” The gains were achieved by better farming techniques
and improved seed varieties adapted to Chile’s agricultural regions. The
Foundation also reported that successfully improved alfalfa, red clover,
ryegrass, and orchard grass were “adding to the carrying capacity of Chilean
pastures,” and that demand for these new seeds was high.
Developing a Multilateral Vision Based on Agriculture
The Chile program sparked a more integrated approach to Latin
America as a whole. The programs in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile—
together with the Central American Corn Improvement Project,
a collaboration among five nations—had, by 1955, “gradually developed,
through extensive intercooperation, into a single Latin American
agricultural operation” or “regional unit.” The Foundation extended the
Wheat formed one pillar of the
Rockefeller Foundation’s crop
program in Chile. At the La Platina
Experiment Station in February
1963, researcher Ernesto Hacke
checked plants for their resistance
to rust. (Neil MacLellan. Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
In addition to corn and potatoes,
the Colombian Agricultural Program
researched wheat. In the mid-1950s,
local boys helped to harvest a variety
known as "Menkemen.” (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
132 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 133
operation more widely, and more officially, by creating the Inter-American
Food Crop Improvement Program in 1959. Some non-participating Latin
American countries, including Ecuador and Peru, had benefited from
advice and guidance provided by scientists in countries participating in
Rockefeller Foundation-funded programs. And all the programs had gained
by exchanging personnel; the director of wheat improvement in Colombia,
for example, had become the director of the Chilean
program in 1955.
The Foundation aimed to reach sustainability
and then turn each project over to an appropriate
government agency. “The parallel development of local
governmental and institutional support of the project,”
it stated in 1958, “and of a corps of qualified professional
agronomists to man them, will make it possible for the
Foundation gradually to withdraw from the enterprise.”
The success of the Mexico program also had organizational consequences
within the Foundation. President Dean Rusk announced a dramatic shift
away from its program in experimental biology in the United States so that
funds could be applied to the agricultural program. The Foundation did
continue its commitment to experimental biology in Europe, where basic
research had been devastated by the war. But in the United States, where
new government agencies now sponsored scientific research at a scale that
dwarfed the Foundation’s capabilities, its experimental biology budget was
cut by over 50 percent. At the same time, the budget for experimental biology
in Latin America, where 70 percent of the research focused on agriculture,
jumped from $400,000 to $700,000. Rusk expected the funds to be used “to
upbuild their departments of agriculture.”
Rusk also attempted to stretch the creative boundaries of MAP by
investing in a highly interdisciplinary experiment in Mexico. MAP
had succeeded because it kept its focus narrow: to improve the yield of
basic food crops including corn, wheat, potatoes, and beans, and to train
professional agricultural scientists. In 1951, however, Salvador Sánchez
Colín, the Governor of the state of Mexico—in the rich agricultural valley
just outside Mexico City—approached the Foundation with a new idea that
reflected themes from Rockefeller work in China and the American South.
Sánchez Colín was himself a trained agronomist. He proposed to set
agricultural programs in the broader context of community development.
Rusk described the project as a “human ecology approach to the intertwined
problems of food, health, education, and social relations, and possibly
other factors in a population that is predominantly rural.” The program
would not be restricted to one interest, Rusk suggested. It would represent a
commitment to deeper social reform and encourage work in public health,
medical science, social science, and education. Rusk described the proposal
as “warmly welcomed” by the trustees, who approved an investment of
$100,000 over six years.
As the focus of the agriculture program expanded beyond the improvement of basic crops to a broader interest in the food problems of mankind,
the Foundation appropriated grants for work in solar energy, the purification of brackish water, the study of cloud physics and rainfall patterns, and
the commercial development of food sources from the oceans. By 1956 the
Foundation had established operating programs and other agriculturerelated grants in ten Latin American countries. Five years later it was also
working in the Philippines and India, with outreach activities in dozens of
other countries including Kenya, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Students visited a garlic plot undergoing
an herbicide test in Santiago in July 1957.
Professional development proved critical
to the agriculture program in Chile. As
in Mexico, the Rockefeller Foundation
encouraged agronomists in Chile to
leave the office and laboratory and go
into the field to perform their research
and extension duties. (Neil MacLellan.
Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity
By the mid-1950s the Rockefeller
Foundation operated its in-country
programs as part of a larger, regional
Latin American unit. Research and
staff were shared across established
programs and different locations. Under
this system, Foundation scientists visited
the Grigo Izafulto Experiment Station in
Quito, Ecuador, in April 1961. (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
134 135
136 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 137
The Geopolitical Context
As Foundation leaders increasingly articulated a more strategic
approach to agriculture on the international stage, Dean Rusk
pushed the Foundation “away from problems of health and disease,
because he believed that governments could now handle these.” Instead,
the Foundation’s president encouraged movement toward agriculture as
a means of conquering hunger. But this shift took place within a highly
charged political context.
MAP had been nurtured in a stable, non-controversial setting. Scientists
had not been forced to navigate their way through political minefields,
and the program’s successes were not overtly politicized or controversial.
The scientists shared an idealistic conviction that improving crop yields
was a moral imperative. But as World War II ended and the Cold War began,
Foundation staff found themselves in the middle of conflicts as volatile
and widespread as those they had hoped to avoid.
Everywhere the Foundation turned in the early 1950s, the postwar
world seemed as if it was spiraling into chaos. In China, the nationalist
government had been swept away by communist revolution. The Soviet
Union found its more ardent supporters in the nationalist movements
of former colonies of Africa and Asia, the very leaders Rusk hoped to
influence with his agricultural programs. The Viet Minh had declared
independence in Vietnam and were fighting the French. The Mau
Mau rebelled against the British in Kenya. In the Philippines, the Huk
insurgency threatened the government and U.S. military occupation.
Above all the regional conflagrations, the threat of nuclear holocaust
hung over the future of humanity.
Foundation trustee Chester Bowles grasped the magnitude of the
Cold War and its implications for the Foundation’s program, which he
articulated in a letter to John D. Rockefeller 3rd and Dean Rusk in 1954.
“Our civilization may be blown to smitherines [sic] next week, or next year,
or next decade. Thus, it seems to me that saving our civilization has become
at least as fundamental as improving it.” In this context, it was hard for the
Foundation to keep focused on the development of high-yield seeds.
In addition to worldwide political instability, the global population kept
growing at exponential rates. The population of Mexico had doubled in less
than half a century. In Colombia, the population had tripled from nearly
four million in 1900 to almost 12 million in 1950. In India, with the second
largest population on earth, 345 million at independence in 1947 had grown
to 395 million in 1955, an addition of 50 million new mouths to feed in just
eight years. In the former British colony of Nigeria, the population had
exploded from 16 million in 1900 to 33 million in 1950.
Dean Rusk wanted to invest heavily in the new nations that were
emerging from former colonies, and he wanted to invest in applied
science—science with a practical value that might contribute to economic
development. “The emergence of dozens of newly independent countries
after World War Two was having a major effect on the ‘well-being of
mankind,’” Rusk wrote later in his autobiography. “I believed we should
spend less at home, get involved with the great mass of humanity in the
Third World, and especially concentrate on public health, public education,
and agricultural productivity.”
Rusk’s own life experience influenced his perspective on development.
“My memories of Cherokee County and how rural Georgia was transformed
in a few decades helped convince me that the keys to Third World
development lay in these areas. I also thought
the foundation should focus less on original
research and more on extending knowledge
already gained. The Third World, where twothirds of the world’s population live, was a
time bomb for the entire human race.”
A focus on agriculture met all of Rusk’s
criteria for a successful program. Famine
and food shortages held the potential to be
politically and socially explosive as well as
destabilizing, while agricultural research
was practical and could be applied across
national boundaries. In the context of the
Cold War, using science to increase harvests
supported U.S. foreign policy initiatives by
promoting food security, and it helped to
ward off communist revolution without
forcing nations to confront the more
explosive strategies of land reform and land
re-distribution favored by insurgents.
Colombia had become something of a
cautionary tale about the kind of minefields
that could lie ahead. The Mexican Agricultural
Program had never taken a position on land
reform in Mexico. The focus had stayed on
improving crop yields. But in Colombia, a
Dean Rusk became president of the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1952. He had worked at the State
Department from 1946 to 1952, including service
as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern
Affairs. Rusk led the Rockefeller Foundation for
almost ten years, overseeing a significant increase
in international agriculture work. In 1961 he became
U.S. Secretary of State under President John F.
Kennedy. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
138 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 139
violent civil war that took land reform as its central issue began in 1948,
just as the government invited the Rockefeller Foundation to set up a
new program. During the ten years of La Violencia, 200,000 Colombians
lost their lives in the fighting. Liberal candidates for the presidency were
assassinated. Riots paralyzed the capital city of Bogotá. Conservative
military leaders seized power in a coup d’état. Communist rebels organized
guerrilla armies. Through the course of the civil war, Foundation staff
focused on developing high-yield crops in the hope that improved harvests
and more food at the markets might improve living conditions and forestall
demands for more radical land reform.
Even as he tried to get his arms around the rapidly changing, unstable
landscape of the Cold War, Dean Rusk spent his first months as president of
the Rockefeller Foundation preparing for a congressional investigation into
the work and loyalty of non-profit, philanthropic organizations. Some critics
contended that tainted money from the Rockefeller oil empire had built the
Foundation. Others claimed that it invested in subversive, anti-American
programs. The Foundation had experienced congressional investigations
before, but the Cox Committee investigation of 1952 was specifically
organized “to determine which such foundations and organizations are
using their resources for un-American and subversive activities or for
purposes not in the interest or tradition of the United States.”
Rusk had come to the Foundation from the State Department, and
he would return to the State Department in 1961 as John F. Kennedy’s
Secretary of State. Throughout the 1950s, the Foundation was a revolving
door for government officials passing in and out of government service in
the State Department or Treasury, or at the highest levels of the Executive
Branch. The former chairman of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees
was John Foster Dulles, who left in 1951 to become President Dwight
Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.
In his testimony before Congress, Rusk made it clear that the
Foundation “would never knowingly participate in or support unAmerican or subversive activity.” Likewise, “no grant has ever been made
by the Foundation to a recipient organization whose name appears on
the Attorney General’s list of subversives.” But the boundaries between
government policy and the Foundation’s independence were not always
easy to navigate. Rusk often traveled to Washington to receive private
briefings from Dulles. But when Dulles’s brother Allen, who was Director
of the CIA, suggested that Rusk turn over the confidential field diaries of
Foundation staff officers working around the world, Rusk, with the support
of John D. Rockefeller 3rd, refused.
Over and over throughout the 1950s, trustee discussions related to
program planning in agriculture eventually ended up involving the
sticky politics of the Cold War. American diplomat Chester Bowles joined
the Trustees in 1954, and subsequently attended a meeting with Rusk
concerning the possibility of launching a rice research program in Asia.
Rusk was excited about extending the Foundation’s agricultural work to
Asia, and to rice. Bowles had just completed a three-year assignment as
ambassador to India, and argued forcefully that a new rice research institute
should be placed in India for humanitarian and political reasons. In a letter
written to Rusk on November 4, 1954, Bowles confessed: “Although I hope
and believe that we would be taking such actions as this [establishing a
rice research center] if all the Communists handed in their cards tomorrow,
the fact remains that things we do can have a most positive effect in the
political field.” Bowles praised the work of the Ford Foundation in India for
“maintaining a basis of respect and of understanding for America among
thoughtful Indians, both in and out of government.”
Solid arguments could have been made for locating a new rice research
facility in either Japan or India based on the capacity of the scientific
community in each country, but Bowles believed that political issues should
be considered as well. “If these two nations remain outside of the Communist
orbit over a period of years and develop their own indigenous strength and
confidence, the odds are that the remainder of free Asia which lies between
these two political poles will also remain outside of the bamboo curtain.
On the other hand,” Bowles continued, “if either India or Japan succumbs to
Communism, democracy in Asia will have its back against the wall. I do not
imply that this is a primary function of the Foundation, but I do feel that it
should be considered on every major step that we take.”
Partnerships in India
I
n conversations among trustees and senior staff at the Rockefeller
Foundation, Bowles’ arguments were influential and earned support from
others in the organization. Rusk was an Asia expert. He understood the
Cold War stakes of launching a program in India. But the difference between
working in Mexico, Colombia, or Chile and working in India were enormous.
Until 1947, India had been a British colony. After independence the new
government was built on a complex foundation of ancient monarchies, the
remnants of British administrative boundaries, and religious divisions. Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru studiously navigated his country through the Cold
War, refusing to take sides between the United States and the Soviet Union
140 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 141
while founding the Non-Aligned Movement with leaders of other developing
countries. Nehru was a thorough modernist. He organized a centralized
economy and poured investments into local industry and agriculture
infrastructure. To combat the constant specter of famine, he introduced land
redistribution policies, constructed dams and irrigation canals, and promoted
the increased use of synthetic fertilizers. But even modern India remained
a land of more than a thousand languages and dialects as well as myriad
ecosystems, from the Himalayan Mountains in the north to the tropical forests
of Madras and the rolling plains of the Punjab. Moreover, India’s religions and
castes were alien to American sensibilities.
The Rockefeller Foundation began cautiously. In 1956, after the government of India appealed for support, the Foundation helped to establish a
cooperative program designed to focus on corn, sorghum, millet, and other
cereal crops basic to solving the threat of widespread hunger and famine.
The program was based at India’s premier research center, the Indian
Agricultural Research Institute in the suburbs of New Delhi, where it would
be able to combine crop research projects with ongoing research and training activities at the school.
The first Foundation representatives sent to India were Ralph W.
Cummings, a soil scientist from Cornell who had directed the experimental
station at North Carolina State University, and Ulysses J. Grant, a plant breeder
from Oklahoma who had earned his Ph.D. in agronomy from Cornell. Grant
had also worked for five years as a geneticist in the Colombia program. Unlike
George Harrar and his colleagues, who had entered Mexico with only a wealth
of knowledge and the best of intentions, Cummings and Grant arrived in India
knowing exactly what had been accomplished in Latin America and what they
had to live up to. In India, however, culture shock and the scale of the challenge
quickly tempered their idealism. “It would take ten years to begin from the
beginning,” Grant warned during his first visit in 1956, though he speculated
that it might take only “an estimated three years to test an American hybrid.”
Perhaps feeling the pressure of urgency, or the pressure to live up
to the accomplishments of other programs, Grant and Cummings found
themselves easily discouraged during the early days. The Americans
and their Indian counterparts had to learn to work together. “Several times,”
Cummings wrote, “we have wondered if an operating program is going to be
really practical under local circumstances.” And yet, within a year, they had
reason for “substantial optimism” that the program was moving forward.
The India project developed a new strategy. Instead of beginning with
Indian seeds, the scientists solicited high-yielding seeds from other countries
and adapted them to the Indian environment. They created an All India
Coordinated Maize Improvement Program in 1957, and
focused on corn. They drew heavily on the Mexican
Agricultural Program for their work on wheat. They also
developed an emphasis on rice. Since the end of World
War II, the Foundation had been interested in rice research in Asia. It had supported India’s efforts to establish
the Central Rice Research Institute at Cuttack in 1948.
There was a widespread recognition that food security in
Asia was inextricably tied to improved production of rice.
Despite the slow start and the initial culture shock of Foundation
staff, the India program had become a success by the 1960s. In 1961 the
Foundation announced the “record breaking creation in four years of hybrid
maize varieties adapted to all the major agricultural regions of India.” In the
1964-1965 harvest, India produced 89 million tons of food grains, up from 51
million tons in 1950-1951. By 1971, food grain production reached about 110
million tons as a result of planting about 32 million acres with the new and
improved varieties of wheat developed in Mexico as well as rice developed
at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Foundation
officials and policymakers in India saw these trends as very promising.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s Indian
agriculture program had helped to boost
wheat and rice yields dramatically by
the mid-1960s. Indian Prime Minister Lal
Bahadur Shastri was presented with
a sheaf of grain by a village cultivator at
a Field Day during celebrations at the
Indian Agricultural Research Institute.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
142 Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity 143
Voices of Caution
Despite the astounding successes of the agricultural programs in
Latin America and Asia, cautionary voices emerged. As early as
1953, the trustees called on George Harrar to slow down, consider
ecological consequences, examine alternative approaches, and be mindful of
local culture in the rush to increase production. In 1957 the trustees formed
a special committee to review the Foundation’s program. Henry Allen Moe,
president of the Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a Rockefeller trustee,
chaired the committee. Moe visited the agricultural programs in Mexico,
Guatemala, Colombia, and Chile. He talked to national and local leaders as
well as Foundation field staff. He praised the “productive, smoothly-working
teams of scientists, technicians and students” in each country and the
“superb” leadership provided by Harrar and other program directors. But
Moe also expressed concern that the staff focused too
much on technological fixes related to insecticides,
fungicides, soil management, and plant breeding. He
believed that the emphasis on technology undermined
morale and would eventually diminish the quality of
the Foundation’s field staff. To sustain the program’s
gains and retain good staff, Moe suggested that more
attention be paid to basic research.
The trustee committee also noted that a “slower” approach might reduce
the number of mistakes, and that critics of the Mexican program suggested that
the Foundation and its partners pursued intensive corn production to the point
of exhausting soil fertility. Basic research on tropical soils would take longer
than developing hybrid seeds, but addressing the criticisms made it necessary.
Similarly, the board called for more research regarding the nutritional quality
of the new higher-yielding varieties of corn and beans developed by the
Foundation’s programs.
A humanist by training, Moe included a recommendation in the
1957 report that “RF agronomists should have ecologists, botanists,
ethnobotanists, anthropologists, and the like to work alongside them for
depth of understanding.” Moe expressed concern, for example, that in Vera
Cruz the Mexican Agricultural Program had bulldozed burial mounds rich
with artifacts, to flatten large fields for cultivation. He suggested a program
of visiting scholars to work with field staff in Latin America to promote
“more understanding in depth, some widening of philosophy, some crossfertilization between the practical and the impractical which warms the
heart and inspires the head.”
The trustee committee also called for closer integration of agricultural
developments and public health. For children, especially, the trustees noted
that the advantages of increased food supply could be completely undermined
in places that lacked basic sanitation and public health facilities. “It would not
take much money,” the trustees suggested, “to plan ahead so that food supply
and public health may come out with successes in balance.”
The tone and content of the trustees’ report was similar to the approach
advocated by Governor Salvador Sánchez Colín in the State of Mexico in
1951. The Foundation had supported Sánchez Colín’s “human ecology”
approach for six years, investing $100,000, but the results of his experiment
were never reported by the Foundation. In 1960, the integrated approach to
community development couldn’t gain traction with the scientists who ran
the agriculture program.
It’s not hard to understand. The results of the Rockefeller Foundation’s
focus on applied science and technology were spectacular. The harvests were
large. Millions of lives had been saved. Nations that had suffered the threat of
widespread famine were suddenly able to feed their citizens and trade surplus
production on the international market. In this context, the Foundation
focused instead on reaping even further benefits for humanity by increasing
its investments in agricultural science and technology—especially if the effort
could be expanded to promote international collaboration.
Rockefeller Foundation scientist Ulysses J.
Grant (left) inspecting a farmer's field near
Karimnagar, Andhra Prardesh, with Mr. M.S.
Pawar (right) in 1957. After a rocky start,
Grant and his colleague, Ralph Cummings,
would help lead the Foundation’s Indian
agriculture program to significant success.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Chapter Six: Exporting Success Food & Prosperity
The Colombian Agricultural Program
began in 1949 with Rockefeller Foundation
funding. American scientists were trained
in Mexico before traveling to Colombia to
work with local agronomists and farmers.
(J. Sarmiento. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
144 145
146 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 147
food & prosperity
Chapter VII
I
f any question remained about the long-term role of agriculture in the
Rockefeller Foundation’s portfolio—or its relationship to the other
powerful programs in public health, medical education, and population science—the organization answered it in 1961 with J. George
Harrar’s appointment as president. Harrar had joined the Foundation in
1943 to run the nascent Mexican Agricultural Program, ramrodding it to
stunning scientific breakthroughs and increased corn and wheat yields. His
team proved themselves in both the laboratories and the fields. Harrar returned to New York in 1952 as deputy director of agriculture under Warren
Weaver. He became director in 1955, vice president of the Foundation in
1959, under Dean Rusk, and president in 1961 when Rusk accepted John
Kennedy’s appointment to be Secretary of State. Harrar was the first staff
person to ascend through the ranks of the Foundation to become president.
When Harrar arrived in Mexico in 1943, small farmers still planted
their corn crop with long sticks, one seed at a time. In Asia, rice farmers
were following traditions that had not changed in 4,000 years. Farming, the
world over, was essentially a subsistence activity on a small scale, and many
farmers lived perpetually on the edge of poverty. By the time Harrar retired
in 1972, he had helped engineer a global revolution in agriculture tied to a
network of international research institutes, national extension programs,
and a fraternity of hundreds of well-trained agricultural scientists who
shared the same scientific values and often the same field experiences.
Asian farmers shared seeds and research
innovations with Latin American
farmers half a world away. Scientists
working on tropical agriculture in
Colombia could see the consequences
of their research played out in Africa or
Asia. Agriculture became intensively
capitalized and the markets global.
Production was mechanized and dependent on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides
developed in international laboratories,
and government-sponsored irrigation
systems. In the frantic race between
harvest and famine, Harrar’s program
had kept pace, but it had not been easy
or without controversy.
Harrar had been somewhat reluctant
to move to New York in 1952. But leaving
rural Mexico and his small band of
brothers to take a leadership position
within the Foundation allowed him to explore agriculture in a global context, and to consider the potential
for extending the technical and organizational lessons
of Mexico to other nations. What he discovered was an
uncoordinated, inefficient, ecologically damaging, haphazard approach to local agricultural problems around the world—what he
called “a disordered food supply” and “inadequately developed agricultural
practices” that could not keep pace with the world’s rapidly expanding human population.
His first instinct was to build agricultural innovation on local culture.
“The upgrading of a primitive agricultural system is a complex process
in which social, economic, and political factors play parts as important as
the improvement of technology,” he wrote in his first President’s Review
in 1961. “The problems that impede progress must be solved within the
local environment and improvement must start where the people are. The
challenge in areas where improvement projects are planned is to learn
more about the environment and to fit reforms into it.”
The work in Mexico had taught Harrar that focusing on local problems,
training local scientists and technicians, and recognizing that agriculture
was as much an “art” as a “science” together constituted the most effective
internationalizing
research
J. George Harrar, first director of the
Mexican Agricultural Program, served as
the Rockefeller Foundation's president
from 1961 until 1972. He started the
Conquest of Hunger program in 1963.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
148 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 149
way to improve agriculture. His instincts tapped long
traditions of interdisciplinary thinking within the
Foundation. Yet Harrar soon saw that a nation-by-nation,
region-by-region approach to agriculture development
could not keep pace with population growth.
Successful public health campaigns, higher standards of living, and more food seemed to be speeding
the rate of growth. The world population was 2.2 billion
in 1940. A decade later it had risen by 300 million people
to 2.5 billion. Harrar had spent most of that decade in
Mexico. By 1960, when Harrar was working in New
York, the world’s population had jumped by 500 million
people to 3 billion. Between 1960—when the lessons
of Mexico made it clear that scientific agriculture held the potential to dramatically increase crop yields—and 1970, the global population increased
by another 700 million. Former colonies saw the most rapid growth, as they
grappled with developing the institutions of governance in their first years
of independence.
The link between agricultural development and population had
undergirded the Foundation’s work for decades, but the rapid growth of
the global population (an increase of 68 percent between 1940 and 1970)
inspired a shift in thinking. For decades John D. Rockefeller 3rd had questioned whether the advances in public health supported by the Foundation
had contributed to the rise in population. Now the success of the Mexican
Agricultural Program raised similar concerns. In the mid-1960s no one
believed that the Green Revolution could forestall famine in the poorest
nations of the world. Natural scientists argued that growing populations
would always be held in check by disease, famine, and environmental
degradation. It was a basic law of ecology. In places like China, India,
and Africa, the worst fears seemed to be coming true. Half the world’s
population lived in hunger every day. But, over time, what if civilization
did conquer famine as it was conquering disease? Could the productivity
gains of the Green Revolution keep up with the exploding populations that
were a consequence of increased harvests? George Harrar joined a long list
of philosophers—from Thomas Malthus and Benjamin Franklin to Adam
Smith, Charles Darwin, and modern ecologists like Paul Ehrlich—who
were concerned about the consequences of exponential population growth.
Harrar wrote that the Green Revolution could “buy time” for humanity to
address uncontrolled growth, but eventually, “all efforts to provide food
and other material requirements adequate for man’s life will fail unless the
rate of world population increase can be significantly reduced.”
Over a period of 20 years Harrar had come to realize that the pace of
population growth narrowed the Foundation’s options. The slow, patient,
culturally sensitive approach the Foundation had taken in Mexico could
not be duplicated on a global scale. “The mid-twentieth century finds more
than half of the world’s population living as precariously on the edge of
hunger as did their ancestors,” Harrar concluded in 1964. “Great strides
toward the conquest of hunger cannot be made without parallel efforts to
stabilize runaway populations, a goal which today is only barely foreseeable.” The Foundation’s president did not mean to suggest that developing
and marketing high-yield seeds, following the protocols of industrial agriculture, and training agricultural scientists constituted the only solutions
to the problem of food security. They were simply the best contributions
that the Rockefeller Foundation could bring to the table. Governments
and international agencies would also need to play a part, especially on
John D. Rockefeller 3rd (right) chaired
the Rockefeller Foundation’s board
from 1952 to 1971 and was deeply
concerned about the world’s growing
population. He founded the Population
Council as a separate philanthropic
entity in 1952, working to bring the
issue of overpopulation to the global
stage. During his travels abroad
he frequently visited Rockefeller
Foundation projects, including the
Colombian Agricultural Program in
1964. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
150 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 151
economic, infrastructure, and cultural issues. National laboratories, extension agencies, and experimental farms were also essential. “If substantial
advances are to be made,” Harrar suggested in 1964, “it is necessary for
local governments to systematically plan and encourage the development
of agriculture’s essential substructure within their overall economies.”
Throughout his years of leadership, Harrar tied the Foundation’s
agriculture program to the urgency of the population problem and the
specter of famine. He focused the Foundation’s energies on what it could
do best: expand upon the lessons of Mexico and cultivate international
scientific cooperation. Increasingly, the Foundation built this strategy
on a network of international research centers and affiliated university
training programs. It worked primarily through its Conquest of Hunger
and University Development Programs, which were created with Harrar’s
reorganization in 1963. The Foundation assisted in creating the first of
these new institutions to address improvements in the most important
food crop in the world—rice.
International Rice Research Institute
While the Foundation had previously backed limited agriculture
work in Asia, trustees and staff began to “take the South and
Southeast Asian region more seriously” after communists
came to power in China in 1949. Thus when the Philippines’ Secretary of
Agricultural and Natural Resources, P.L. Mapa, asked John D. Rockefeller
3rd to send Foundation officers to “look into conditions here in our country”
in September 1950, the Foundation asked the advisory committee on agriculture to evaluate the situation. The committee concluded that there was a
“special problem in the Philippines in regard to the relations of hunger and
the appeal of communism.”
The situation called for attention primarily from the U.S. government,
which sponsored a Cornell University program at the University of the
Philippines College of Agriculture in Los Baños. Though Cornell researchers had worked in the Philippines since its independence from Spain in
1898, U.S. government sponsorship began in 1952, when Cornell and Los
Baños signed a contract for agriculture programming.
Initially, the Foundation’s role was limited by the influx of funding and
resources from these other entities, but its work complemented their efforts
in subtle ways. It performed surveys and policy reviews, concluding that
rice should be the major focus of agriculture in the Philippines, as well as
the rest of Asia. Following its own advice, the Foundation pursued a policy
of “strengthening existing rice-research institutions”
in basic research and professional development, which
in the Philippines meant investment in the CornellLos Baños program. The focus remained on funding
the agricultural school and extension service at the
university until the Foundation began to contemplate
the creation of a separate international rice research
center in the late 1950s.
The Philippines was not the only place in which the Foundation pursued
an interest in rice. It sponsored small rice-research projects all over the world
in the 1950s, including in the United States and Latin America. But by 1959
these locally focused projects seemed insufficient. “In discussing the problems of rice production with agricultural leaders throughout the world, and
especially in Asia,” the annual report stated that year, “Foundation officers
found that rice improvement is a question of real concern everywhere rice is
grown.” Officers agreed on the “desirability of an international effort directed
toward increasing the supplies of this vital food.” The Foundation concluded
that an international research institution represented the “best method for
meeting the urgent need for rice improvement.”
The International Rice Research
Institute was established in 1960 with
major support from the Rockefeller and
Ford Foundations. Among other things,
that core funding provided state-ofthe-art buildings and experimental rice
plots. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
152 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 153
Ideally, the center would be “dedicated to the study of the rice plant and
of its improvement, protection, production, and utilization.” It would also
be located in Asia but be “international in scope from the outset,” serving
as a research, training, documentation, and dissemination center. The
Foundation’s trustees were acutely aware of the geopolitical implications
of conducting rice research in Asia, and engaged in broad discussions about
where a rice research institute should be located. Some trustees favored
Japan. Chester Bowles favored India. Yet the Philippines offered notable advantages. The country had a 60-year history with the United States, and its
university system was strong enough to support an international research
initiative. In an insecure world, the Philippines offered political security.
One Foundation officer reported that he had conducted an informal
poll of scientists from several Asian countries. Each scientist said that his
first choice would be for the institute to be located in his own country, but,
when forced to pick a second choice, most said the Philippines. Foundation
decision makers came to agree with this consensus emerging among the
nations of Southeast Asia. The Philippines, the Foundation concluded, offered an “excellent combination of advantageous factors.”
In conducting their exploratory surveys with agricultural experts
around the world, the Foundation’s officers realized that the Ford
Foundation was “similarly preoccupied with this urgent problem.” The
two foundations entered into a joint agreement to establish one large,
central rice institute. As with the in-country operating programs, they
began negotiations with the Philippines government only after the latter
had extended a formal invitation in 1959. The government then furnished
land for buildings and an experimental farm close to the College of
Agriculture at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños. The new
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) established close ties with the
College of Agriculture. Graduate students did their thesis research at IRRI,
and the institute staff members who supervised the research were given
the title of “visiting professor.” The Philippines government also granted
IRRI exemption from taxes and duties in “recognition of its scientific and
humanitarian purpose.”
The Ford Foundation geared its funding toward set-up costs and provided
a large initial grant of nearly $7 million (roughly $55 million in 2012 dollars)
for construction, furnishings, and equipment. The Rockefeller Foundation supported the operation and maintenance of the Institute, including appointing an
officer as director in 1959. In addition to monetary support for IRRI’s operation,
the Foundation was involved in the mechanics of daily work, accepting responsibility for the conduct of research as well as recruiting personnel.
The Institute’s governing body reflected diverse support. The board of
trustees included representatives from the government of the Philippines,
the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the University of the
Philippines, as well as “leading figures in the field of agriculture from a number of the countries of Asia.”
IRRI broke ground in 1960. By 1961 many staff, including several seconded
by the Rockefeller Foundation, had arrived and begun their research. The
center was formally dedicated in early 1962, and construction was completed
in 1963. Its state-of-the-art facilities were spacious, including administration,
laboratory, and service buildings, a library, dormitories for trainees, offices for
visiting scientists, seminar rooms, an auditorium, dining rooms, and a lounge.
Laboratories were in a single-story, air-conditioned building, with separate
areas for such distinct fields of interest as plant breeding, genetics, agronomy,
soil chemistry, plant pathology, and agricultural economics. Experimental
facilities included paddies with an irrigation-drainage system as well as
laboratory plant growth chambers that allowed scientists to “vary the length
of daylight and the temperature of air and ground.” Dormitories, a residential
compound for staff, a nearby elementary school, a swimming pool, and tennis
courts fulfilled the goal of making IRRI a “complete living community for the
scientists who staff it” as well as their families, graduate students, and visiting
scientists. The modern complex was designed to be a symbol of science and
progress, but it was very different from the early days in Mexico when George
Harrar put a premium on interacting with local farmers, placing the children
of staff in local schools and integrating the scientists into local village life.
Rice occupied a place in Asia similar to that of corn in Latin America.
It was the basic food crop. Just as the Mexico program had transferred its
advances to other Latin American countries, the founders of IRRI hoped the
institute could easily transfer rice discoveries to other Asian nations. Harrar
outlined IRRI’s goals in the 1960 President’s Review, echoing the language
he had used to describe the Mexico project in the 1940s. He said the new
institute “is dedicated to basic and applied research on all aspects of rice
improvement, protection, production, and utilization, and to training of
young scientists who can bring their knowledge to bear on the solution
of rice production problems in their own countries.” Archiving and circulating findings were to be equally as broad in scope. IRRI staff, the President’s
Review continued, “will assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s
literature on rice and disseminate research results to interested workers in
all countries where rice is grown.”
Staff, fellows, and even trustees were not just from the Philippines.
They were recruited from many of the other rice-producing countries of
154 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 155
South and Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Taiwan,
Thailand, India, and Japan. The Rockefeller Foundation
hoped that, owing to the international origins of IRRI
staff, professional development could be stimulated by
international scholars “who will carry new thoughts and
new vigor to already existing programs on their return to
their countries.” The institute offered a masters of science
as part of its professional development, in conjunction
with the College of Agriculture at nearby University of
the Philippines, which included one year of full-time work at the institute.
IRRI also assisted cooperative research projects in other countries, including Japan, India, Vietnam, and Thailand, in order to determine whether
results achieved in Los Baños could be replicated in different climates.
These projects turned into sub-centers supported by IRRI, for which the
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations financed the staffing.
In the mid-1960s, IRRI became focused on the development of an “ideal
rice,” which it described as “early ripening, disease- and pest-resistant,
stiff-strawed to take fertilizer without lodging, high in protein, and suited
to local culinary tastes.” Researchers experimented with genetic crosses
from the institute’s extensive germ plasm bank, which by 1965 contained
over 10,000 rice varieties. By 1966 Peter Jennings and Henry Beachell, two
researchers seconded to IRRI by the Rockefeller Foundation, along with Te
Tzu Chang, a geneticist from Taiwan, and S.K. De Datta, a young Indian
agronomist, had collaboratively created and tested IR8, a variety of highyielding, short, stiff-strawed rice. The scientists produced it by crossing a
tall Indonesian tropical rice with a Taiwanese dwarf variety. This strain was
close enough to the ideal rice to distribute seeds to interested governments,
including that of the Philippines but also India, Pakistan, Thailand, and
even Latin America, where farmers planted it widely. IR8 and similar semidwarfs famously produced increased yields, and were consequently dubbed
“miracle rice” in the Philippines. Scientists later discovered that IR8 had
the added benefit of being insensitive to photoperiod, or day length, and so
could be grown in many latitudes, at any time of the year.
Also by the mid-1960s, IRRI entomologists had found an effective
control for a major crop parasite, the devastating rice stem borer, and
pathologists had attacked the deadly rice blast disease by working with
plant breeders to create resistance in the new rice strains. Part of IRRI’s
work in the Philippines was the creation of an informal extension service,
with the aim of bringing fertilizers and new farming techniques to local
rice farmers along with the new seed varieties. IRRI trained scientists and
technicians to teach extension workers on a regional basis, and conducted
intensive training courses for rice researchers and Asian farmers.
The interrelationship of research and training, and their mutually farreaching effect, undergirded IRRI’s mission. “Envision a pool of water into
which a pebble is tossed,” a Foundation employee wrote of IRRI, describing
a “concentration of agricultural scientists in various disciplines, devoting
their efforts to increasing the production of rice.” The pebble created circles
in that figurative pool, he continued, symbolizing, first, the visitors and
students who came to learn; second, the agricultural extension effort to
train farmers in rice production; and third, the “community effect” tangibly affecting farmers, agribusiness, and government. Though IRRI’s work
was necessarily limited, its focus on human infrastructure of different
varieties made its potential influence, like those many circles in the water,
ever-widening.
In the decade after IRRI’s establishment, the Rockefeller and Ford
Foundations continued to devote major funding to its operation. The
Rockefeller Foundation contributed over $8 million to the Institute’s
core budget in the first 12 years of operation, as well as nearly half a
Parasites like the stem borer caused
significant damage to rice crops.
Searching for ways to control these
pests, International Rice Research
Institute scientists artificially infected
a cut rice stem with a freshly hatched
stem borer larva in 1966. (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
156 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 157
million dollars for special projects. Though the Rockefeller Foundation
alone funded IRRI’s core budget for the first five years of operation (after the
Ford Foundation funded the Institute’s substantial start-up costs), the two
foundations agreed to become equal partners after 1964. By the early 1970s,
Ford contributed over $5 million to the core budget and another $3.5 million
to special projects, including training, foreign travel for IRRI staff, symposia,
cooperative research, and rice development programs such as those in
`Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Though there were additional smaller-scale contributors throughout
the late 1960s and early 1970s, IRRI’s funding base became more diversified
in 1972. It received substantial annual contributions from subsidiary
donors, including the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The
institute’s work continued to pursue similar goals even with this shift in
funding. For example, IRRI engineers focused on mechanization and irrigation systems in 1972, while agricultural economists defined the costs and
returns involved in rice production. IRRI economists also assisted in the
formulation of national policies to stimulate production in different Asian
countries. Both the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations continued to support
IRRI, and staff from one or the other of the two foundations chaired IRRI’s
board until 1982.
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)
Unlike IRRI, which started from scratch in 1960, the International
Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) grew out of
the solid foundation of the Mexican Agricultural Program. By
1963, when the center was established, scientists had already been working on the problem of corn and wheat yields for 20 years in Mexico. The
Foundation enjoyed a strong relationship with the Mexican government.
Scientists trained at MAP had dispersed throughout Latin America and
Asia. Secondary programs had been established in Colombia and Chile.
The Foundation had even sponsored international gatherings of scientists.
It saw CIMMYT as the logical extension of work already being done.
The center was established in October 1963 through an agreement
between the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation.
CIMMYT fell under the auspices of the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture
until it became independent in 1966, after which it was operated under the
supervision of an international board of trustees. It accepted funding from
the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and other organizations.
CIMMYT focused primarily on basic research in the two crops. The
Foundation considered it not only a way to perpetuate professional development, but also to disseminate scientific findings. “In essence,” Foundation
officials noted in 1964, “the center is an ‘open door’ through which Mexico
can share its great advances in the improvement of maize and wheat production with other countries whose conditions and problems are similar.” This
included countries in the rest of Latin America as well as Asia and Africa,
all of which requested and received improved seeds in the first years of the
center’s work. By 1969 the high-yielding disease-resistant wheat developed
in Mexico was considered to be responsible for record harvests in India and
Pakistan. Middle Eastern scientists were also well represented among those
being trained at CIMMYT, which the Foundation attributed to “intensifying
local efforts” in that region. As in the Philippines, Mexican efforts included
extension work through the research center. The Puebla Project, for example,
successfully brought techniques developed at CIMMYT to small farmers in
the state of Puebla through demonstration plots.
Part of CIMMYT’s professional development work relied on close cooperation with academic institutions. The graduate program at the National
School of Agriculture in Chapingo became a center for post-graduate study,
as did the Mexican National Institute of Agricultural Research. CIMMYT
work reflected the already advanced nature of maize and wheat science due
to the in-country operating program. However, unlike the original Mexican
Agricultural Program, which focused on the country’s internal needs,
CIMMYT aimed to make new, universal discoveries that could be applied
in or easily adapted to other nations.
By 1966 the center had developed six basic corn complexes from 250
Latin American strains and distributed them internationally. It had also
developed local crosses with high-yielding Mexican wheat varieties from
such disparate countries as Paraguay, Kenya, Afghanistan, and India.
By 1969 the center had created corn that was insensitive to the length of
daylight, making it adaptable to widely different ecological conditions.
CIMMYT also developed new varieties of “triple dwarf” wheat that were
short, high-yielding, and disease-resistant, as well as a species called
triticale, created by crossing wheat and rye, which promised high yields,
nutritional quality, and drought resistance. The Foundation built on its
previous work by investigating the nutritional properties of wheat and
corn, and adding other crops to its roster. A Foundation specialist, for
example, headed the International Potato Improvement Project, based at
CIMMYT, cooperating with Mexican, United States, and Middle Eastern
schools and scientists.
158 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 159
Indeed, CIMMYT picked up where other agencies left off. The Office of
Special Studies (OSS) had been the centerpiece of the in-country Mexico
program started in 1943. As the Rockefeller Foundation decreased funding for OSS, which moved completely under the auspices of the Mexican
government, the Foundation increased funding to the non-governmental
CIMMYT. This represented a successful shift in policy, ensuring that the
Foundation continued to promote research and educational capacity in
Mexico while allowing the government to bear full responsibility for
popular education and extension services. CIMMYT also furthered the
Foundation’s general policy goals by making the research that took place
in Mexico more connected and relevant to the international agricultural
science world. By training scientists from other countries at the maize
and wheat center, and working with local plant varieties from around the
world, the center furthered educational capacity and scientific knowledge
for other developing countries.
The results of international cooperation were dramatic and swift.
“A corn breeder in Nigeria who needs a genetic strain resistant to certain
kinds of pests or diseases, a geneticist in India in need of a drought-resistant
strain, or an Egyptian scientist looking for lines giving high yields under
irrigation, can find these in Latin American germ plasm banks,” the
Foundation reported in 1965. In that year, seed shipments from Mexico
alone went to 39 countries and 19 states in the U.S.
Despite the creation of two important international research institutes—
and despite their record of success with rice, wheat, and corn—scientists
could not outrun the specter of famine. Human populations were growing
too fast. By 1965 India had suffered through several years of severe drought.
Famine seemed imminent. George Harrar reported, “In 1965 the world as
a whole had less to eat than the year before. World food production grew
by one percent while the number of people increased by two percent. It
is already too late for even the most vigorous programs to increase food
production and lower birth rates to offset the food deficits that loom for 1970,
and only far greater efforts than those presently under way in either area can
affect the 1980 gap between numbers and nutrition.”
In 1963, at the request of the Indian government, Harrar had dispatched
Norman Borlaug from Mexico (where he had successfully developed highyielding dwarf wheat) to India, in a desperate attempt to fight back against the
impending famine. Borlaug had been frustrated at every turn by suspicious
farmers and government bureaucracy. But the drought had grown so severe
by 1965 that the Indian government relented and allowed Borlaug’s project
to proceed. In 1966, India imported 18,000 tons of seed wheat from Mexican
farmers, the largest purchase in history at the time, and a half-ton of “miracle
rice” from IRRI. By 1967 Indian farmers had turned that half-ton into enough
seed to plant 250,000 acres of rice; and Borlaug’s dwarf wheat, planted in
irrigation fields, produced double and quadruple the harvest that traditional
strains had produced. India backed away from the precipice. Farmers wanted
more seed, and once the Indian government made the decision to import it,
the dissemination moved rapidly. Farmers already grew the wheat varieties in Mexico and the rice varieties in the Philippines, so large quantities
could be purchased, treated as seed, and shipped to India. The Rockefeller
Foundation had already helped to establish the National Seeds Corporation
in India to facilitate the dissemination of new corn varieties, and it had the
capacity and know-how to do the same for wheat and rice. And because
these were true-breeding varieties, farmers themselves saved and traded seed
varieties for further planting.
In 1967 Turkey purchased 22,000 tons of wheat seed from CIMMYT.
Pakistan imported seed from Mexico. Yields doubled and tripled from previous averages. Kenya’s national corn production program moved from deficit
to surplus with the help of high-yield varieties from CIMMYT. Also in 1967
the Philippines achieved self-sufficiency in rice for the first time in many
decades, and Pakistan followed close behind. “The hoped-for catalytic and
multiplier effects of early Foundation contributions are now occurring in
many nations in many ways,” Harrar reported in 1968.
The turnaround had been so swift and so widespread that Borlaug became
an international scientific celebrity, known as “the man who saved a billion
lives.” In 1970 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution of high-yield
wheat to the war against famine.
Responding to Green Revolution Issues
I
t was hard to second-guess success. The threat of a population explosion
and famine had forced the Foundation to narrow the scope of its agricultural work, to focus intensely on increasing yield and production rather
than sustainability or environmental degradation. There had been winners
and losers, however. Some farmers made more profits and expanded. Some
found themselves excluded from the new agricultural economy. The global
food system became even more dependent on a perilously small number
of commodity crops. Myriad traditional crops that added nutrition and
diversity to the diet had been left behind, or not increased at fast enough
rates to keep pace with growing populations. But the infrastructure of
international research and cooperation that the Rockefeller Foundation
160 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 161
had created was working. Having found success at what it did best, the
Foundation kept doing it.
In 1967 Harrar realized that the innovations of the so-called “green
revolution” were not boundless. They bought time for long-term planning,
but there was a limit to the ability of wealthy nations to create agricultural
surpluses that could be shipped to poor nations. High-yield seeds needed
expensive fertilizers and pesticides. They required irrigation infrastructure. Farms could not be tied to markets without roads and railroads. The
emerging nations of the world would have to develop sustainable systems
to feed themselves.
Harrar offered a three-point program. He took as his first principle that
governments, scientists, and farmers needed to think about agriculture
as an industry, supporting agricultural development in the same way
they supported industrial development. High-yield seeds were important,
but his second principle emphasized the need for scientists to improve
the nutritional quality of crops. His third principle focused on finding
ways to expand agriculture into the tropics and arid lands. Since 1964
the Foundation had supported the Arid-Lands Research Institute at the
University of California, Riverside. The program became a successful
post-graduate training center for international students from arid nations,
but research results came slowly. In 1967 the Foundation made a decision
to establish two new international institutes for the study of tropical
agriculture in Latin America and Africa.
Tropical Agriculture
Work on the International Center for Tropical Agriculture
(CIAT) began in 1967 near Cali, Colombia. Like the other
research institutes, it was established in cooperation with the
government of Colombia, but it functioned autonomously, governed by an
international board of trustees. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation joined the
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in funding the new center. CIAT devoted
its program to research on the improvement of tropical agriculture with
the “hope of developing ways to exploit the vast unused tracts of land in
the lowland tropics of this hemisphere for increased food production,”
including rice, corn, grains legumes, and root crops. A parallel focus was
livestock, with the aim of increasing beef and swine production through
research on grassland and forage improvement, animal health, nutrition,
management, and herd improvement. The center aimed to serve as a
training base for people from other areas of the world interested in tropical
agriculture, with a special focus on cooperative research and information
exchange in Latin America.
The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) also began
development in 1967 as a result of a joint effort by the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations. It was located in Ibadan, Nigeria. IITA leased land from the
Nigerian government, and then, with the government’s cooperation, built
the Institute. More than $14 million (over $80 million in 2012 dollars)
from the Ford Foundation supported construction costs. Then Ford and
Rockefeller shared the cost of paying for annual operating expenses.
Like CIAT, IITA concerned itself with agricultural
research and training in the tropics. This included
a rice research and production program for West
Africa as well as an additional concentration on grain
legumes, root crops, corn, and a germplasm bank
for important tropical food crops. When it was up
and running, the institute housed researchers who
worked in plant breeding, agronomy, soil science,
Norman Borlaug (left) visited Pakistan
in March 1968 with Elvin Stakman (third
from left). Wheat research in Mexico led
to the introduction of new high-yielding
seeds in countries like India, Turkey, and
Pakistan, where rapid population growth
threatened to lead to famine in the
1960s. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
162 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 163
plant pathology, entomology, and nematology. Its
long-term objectives included promoting high-yield
farming systems and new methods of managing soils,
weeds, pests, and diseases. The Rockefeller Foundation
intended the Institute to be a “hub for cooperative
research” for all interested nations in its region.
By the late 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation found
itself tied to four major international research centers
and a revolutionary new ideology of farming. “Much
of the future success of efforts in agricultural improvement will depend
upon the degree to which international centers can continue and expand
cooperation with strengthened national institutions,” Harrar wrote in 1969.
“Throughout the world traditional or subsistence agriculture can and must
be replaced by a highly productive, market-oriented system.”
Over the next several decades, this model would be replicated in 16 other
international centers, and funding would come from a variety of foundations, governments, and quasi-governmental international organizations.
Conferences: Sharing & Institutionalizing
Though the Rockefeller Foundation aimed to form a collaborative
international network through the research institutes, this result
did not spring organically from the institutes’ creation. As it sought
to more actively promote shared and standardized agricultural science in
its quest to raise food crop productivity, the Foundation sponsored three
basic types of conferences: those held in the research centers, topical symposiums, and those promoting the permanent networks that would be created
in the early 1970s.
The first of these conference types was presented by the institute itself,
on its own site. Many of the institutes contained conference facilities to
reinforce the idea that international collaboration formed an essential part
of their mandate. They had a responsibility to promote formal meetings to
bridge institutional divides. IRRI, for example, provided meeting facilities
for this purpose from its inception in 1960. It convened “international symposia to bring working scientists together for a thorough review of research
in a given specialty,” such as rice blast disease or agricultural engineering
problems. The Rockefeller Foundation saw these conferences as a chance
to share findings, but also an opportunity for scientists from all over the
world to network, to “meet face to face and discuss, across the conference
table and informally, their professional activities, concerns, and problems.”
CIMMYT likewise held two international conferences in 1970, with the
goal of bringing together leaders of agricultural and economic development to consider how strategies utilized in small farmer demonstration
projects might be adapted to other areas.
The second of these conference types, topical symposiums, began in
the late 1960s, when there existed enough institutes to form a network
and when international agriculture work had expanded to include other
non-governmental autonomous entities and philanthropic organizations,
as well as governments and even agribusinesses. In the spring of 1968,
the Foundation hosted its first agriculture symposium, “Strategy for the
Conquest of Hunger,” at Rockefeller University. Three hundred United
States educators, government officials, businessmen, and editors attended,
while Rockefeller Foundation officers and a dozen leaders from developing
nations addressed the symposium. The proceedings were published to
further the goal of open collaboration. Harrar observed that “all were
convinced that if governments, national planners, and investors pay proper
attention to the modernization of agriculture in the developing countries,
it will be possible during the next few years to meet growing food needs.”
He summarized that the “consensus of the speakers was one of cautious but
justifiable optimism.”
The third conference type expanded the concept of a topical symposium
to encompass a more permanent and widespread international network.
It began in April 1969 when the Foundation hosted a gathering at its Bellagio
Study and Conference Center in Italy. Fifteen national and international
assistance agencies were represented, including the World Bank, the
Lessons at the International Center
for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) near
Cali, Colombia, included horticulture.
The Center was formally established
in 1967 with support provided by the
W.K. Kellogg, Ford, and Rockefeller
Foundations. (Neil MacLellan.
Rockefeller Archive Center.)
164 Food & Prosperity 165
With funding from the Rockefeller and Ford
Foundations, construction began on the
International Institute of Tropical Agriculture
(IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1967. (Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
Asian Development Bank, the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, the United Nations Development
Program, the Inter-American Develop
-
ment Bank, the Economic Commission
for Africa, the United States Agency for
International Development, the Ford
Foundation, and several bilateral donors.
During the three-day conference, the
representatives discussed the means and
methods required to increase agricultural
productivity to support the growing
world population in the decades to come.
Participants focused on the human as
well as institutional infrastructure neces
-
sary to support a continual increase in
worldwide crop yield.
Over the next few years, representa
-
tives of this so-called Bellagio group met
three times to review their goals and set
policy to achieve them. They focused
primarily on technology, having agreed
that, based on special reports, “with the
exception of rice in the lowland tropics
and spring-type bread wheat, the world’s
agricultural technology is extremely
weak.” They concluded that there was no
institutional infrastructure for compre
-
hensive assistance with many other basic
food crops—including sorghum, millets,
potatoes, yams, beans, peanuts, legumes,
and tropical vegetables or fruits—or any
of several tropical animal species. Thus
the Bellagio group recommended new
international efforts to study these plants,
166 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 167
as well as upland crops suited for dry areas in Asia and Africa. The group
also called for new efforts to evaluate agricultural policies and water management strategies. Additionally, the representatives recommended that the
four Rockefeller Foundation institutes then in existence (IRRI, CIMMYT,
CIAT, and IITA) be provided with “necessary continuing support by the
international community of donors.”
The cornerstone of this final recommendation was not substantive,
but structural. The Bellagio group suggested formation of a more permanent body of donor agencies. The Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was thus established in 1971 under
the co-sponsorship of the World Bank, the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP). It consisted of 28 organizations with a “declared interest
in helping to stimulate the agricultural sectors of the developing world.”
These included the four international research institutes launched with
Rockefeller Foundation funding, as well as new ones in Peru, India, and
Kenya. Governmental and international organizations continued to participate as well, all informally associated as part of the network. They met
twice a year to set the forthcoming agenda and pledge funds for the work of
the international agricultural research centers.
The Rockefeller Foundation greatly valued the creation of CGIAR,
seeing it as a milestone and an achievement in itself. The “coming together
of nations, lending agencies, and foundations toward the support of
international agriculture,” it stated, “is an event of great meaning to the
Rockefeller Foundation.” Whereas in 1943 the Foundation was one of very
few organizations working internationally to improve crop yield, in 1971
the “world’s great development agencies have joined in the recognition
that without a thriving agricultural sector the world cannot meet even the
minimal expectations of hundreds of millions of its people.” Truly worthy
of this initial excitement, the CGIAR continued to thrive. By the late 1990s
it served as the focal point for contributions from 39 international donors
to support the international research centers.
Investing in Human Capital
I
n addition to the financial support they received from the Rockefeller
Foundation and other donors, the agricultural research centers were
also infused with human capital. Agricultural scientists trained in universities supported by the Foundation’s University Development Program,
or who benefited from Conquest of Hunger scholarships and post-doctoral
fellowships, became deeply involved in research and the transmission
of agricultural science from the laboratory to the field. These scientists
were meant to be the recipients of educational aid, but also to form a new
international scientific network, often returning to their home countries
to staff universities or staying on in the institutes to teach and conduct
further research.
The educational component of agriculture work preceded the
international institutes and conferences, with many in-country universities funded as a lead-up to the more hands-on infrastructure that
the institutes embodied. By 1963, when the institute system was just
starting, the Foundation had already assisted in the creation of graduate schools of agriculture in Mexico, Peru, India, and the Philippines,
in order to “help meet the need for greater numbers of well-qualified
agricultural specialists to man programs of accelerated development.”
The Foundation continued funding to these countries through the 1960s,
in tandem with institute development, expanding its support to agricultural colleges in Uganda and Kenya, both attached to
the University of East Africa. By 1970 the Foundation
also supported universities in Colombia and Nigeria
that were attached to CIAT and IITA, respectively.
And the Foundation created scholarships to aid in this
professional development, awarding 544 grants in the
agricultural sciences from 1963 to 1968, all in “fields
Richard Bradfield (left), Paul Mangelsdorf
(center), and Elvin Stakman (right)
attended the Rockefeller Foundation’s
Conquest of Hunger conference in 1968,
nearly 30 years after their original trip to
Mexico to survey agricultural conditions.
(Ted Spiegel. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
168 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 169
important to the conquest of hunger and all to persons who hold essential
positions in key institutions.” Though education aid included some fund
-
ing of facilities, it ultimately focused on people. It “takes ten years for a
recently graduated Ph.D. to become a full-fledged scholar and educator,”
the Foundation acknowledged in 1969, but, still, “men are more important
than dollars.”
Education and agricultural development were connected through
the demand for expanding human infrastructure in emerging nations.
The Foundation stated in 1966 that its “efforts to strengthen educational and
research institutions within the developing countries and scholarship
programs” were both “designed to increase scientific competence.” The
Foundation fundamentally linked this goal to the planned withdrawal of
its own involvement through the cultivation of self-sustaining local capac
-
ity. The “most effective aid,” it stated, “is that which develops leadership
within the nations themselves and enables them to assume responsibility
for their own agricultural and economic development.”
The Benefits of Internationalized Agriculture
The development of international research centers in the 1960s
was intended to complement national research facilities. As the
Rockefeller Foundation pointed out in 1968, the “total technological
needs are so vast, and requirements often so localized, that only through
establishment of strong national production-oriented research programs,
backed up by international centers, can adequate progress be made.”
Indeed, the Foundation’s turn to a more multilateral approach did
not suggest a desire to abandon local efforts, but rather to find new ways
to promote and transfer agricultural science. The institute model also
reduced the need for diplomatic skills, since the institutes were less likely
to be challenged by political forces. Even if nations turned to communism
or fell victim to social unrest, the international human network of trained
agricultural scientists would still exist. The downside to these efforts,
however, was the increased isolation of scientists from the communities
and countries they sought to help. By the late 1960s, concerns first raised
by the Foundation’s own board of trustees were increasingly echoed by
people and organizations preoccupied with the social and environmental
consequences of the Foundation’s agricultural work. In the 1970s, the
Foundation would take fundamental steps to address these misgivings.
Honoring Innovators,
Past and Present
From Seaman Knapp to Norman Borlaug, the
Rockefeller Foundation has a long history of
backing innovators in agriculture. In 2012 the
Foundation teamed up with the World Food
Prize Foundation to offer the Norman Borlaug
Award for Field Research and Application. With
a one million dollar endowment provided by
the Rockefeller Foundation, the annual award
recognizes a young extension worker, research
scientist, development professional, or other
individual who best emulates the dedication,
perseverance, and innovation demonstrated by
Norman Borlaug.
With the creation of this award, the Rock
-
efeller Foundation sought to recognize men
and women under the age of 40 who are work
-
ing closely and directly in the field or at the
production or processing level with farmers,
animal herders, fishers, or others in rural com
-
munities. It also wanted to honor the personal
characteristics evidenced by Borlaug and
other Foundation scientists in the Conquest of
Hunger program including determination, per
-
sistence, and courage in the fight to eliminate
global hunger and poverty.
In 2012 Dr. Aditi Mukherji, who was a senior
researcher with the International Water Man
-
agement Institute in New Delhi, became the first
recipient of this prestigious award. Her work
on groundwater led to changes in policy that
helped thousands of farmers in West Bengal.
170 Chapter Seven: Internationalizing Research Food & Prosperity 171
172 Chapter Eight: Taking Stock Food & Prosperity 173
food & prosperity
Chapter VIII
taking stock
Despite tremendous increases in agricultural production in the
1960s and the prevention of mass starvation in many critical
regions, the world food crisis persisted. Crop failures in 1972
and 1974 caused world cereal and other food prices to skyrocket.
Inflated prices for fertilizer and increasing demands for water and irrigation
systems compounded a growing concern over food security. In 1972 the
Foundation realized that per capita food supply had remained basically
flat because population growth since 1962 had been keeping pace with the
increase in food supply. In fact, in the two decades between 1955 and 1975,
despite the successes of the Green Revolution, a substantial number of nations
actually moved from food surpluses to deficits.
The outlook seemed bleak. Some social scientists predicted that the world
population of four billion in 1975 would increase by 25 percent by 1990,
and could reach eight billion by the turn of the century. Even Mexico, the
birthplace of the Green Revolution, was once again an importer of basic
food commodities by the late 1960s.
The issues in Mexico reflected concerns that would be expressed
elsewhere. By the early 1970s it was clear that the benefits of increased
agricultural production in Mexico were not broadly distributed. Large,
commercial farmers reaped greater rewards than smaller, subsistence
farmers. Domestic politics had factored heavily in the outcome, rather
than any general increase in efficiency and productivity. In some cases,
the Green Revolution had contributed to increased social stratification that
led to widespread activism, unrest, and persistent rural poverty.
George Harrar acknowledged these concerns in 1969. “Large-scale
programs designed to remedy massive national food deficits are necessarily
geared to the farmer who can afford some investment in seed, fertilizer,
and machinery,” he conceded. As a result, “Many of the great advances in
agriculture have bypassed the small farmer.” The Foundation found itself in
a position where it could control technological innovation but could not control local political and social factors that were just as critical in the success
of agricultural development. Harrar encouraged efforts to reach out to and
convert farmers from their “traditional methods,” but he was not as forceful
when it came to addressing the social and environmental consequences of
the technological revolution.
Some critics of the Green Revolution pointed out that most high-yielding
seed varieties need chemical fertilizer and pesticides for increased yield, which
promotes widespread petro-dependent farming. This dependency fed a cycle
of decline, as reliance on chemical fertilizers depleted
natural soil fertility while pesticides generated resistant
insects, creating a need for even more fertilizers and
pesticides. Indeed, the Foundation reported in 1974 that
worldwide consumption of chemical fertilizers had
already tripled since 1960.
Meanwhile, intensive agriculture often depended
on irrigation. As the demand for water increased,
environmentalists raised concerns regarding water
supplies. The extensive conversion of natural areas to
cropland and the repeated planting of similar varieties
of high-yielding food crops in certain areas also undercut the benefits of local biodiversity. “By eliminating
the great number of genetically different types of wheat
and rice,” one critic stated in 1970, “and replacing them
with substantially the same variety, there is a loss of
variability from which to select resistance to new and
still unknown diseases.”
Some experts in agricultural development began
to turn away from the core premises of the Green
Revolution’s narrow focus on increasing agricultural
productivity. As the World Bank would later report,
“rapid increase in food production does not necessarily
result in food security—that is, less hunger.”
Upon assuming the presidency of the
Rockefeller Foundation, John Knowles
(center) restructured the agriculture
program to focus on second-generation
problems of the Green Revolution,
building on the work of past presidents
Dean Rusk (right) and J. George Harrar
(left). (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
174 Chapter Eight: Taking Stock Food & Prosperity 175
Though this was a period of criticism and reconsideration, the Rockefeller
Foundation did not reject the major assumptions supporting its agriculture
initiatives, such as the central role of the agricultural scientist and the role of
technology in improving seeds, fertilizer, pest control, and irrigation. If the
focus on yield had proved too narrow, what else could be brought to the strategy to promote lasting food security? In the 1970s, the Foundation embarked
on a serious study and reorientation of its Conquest of Hunger program.
New Leadership and the Green Revolution
By the end of his tenure, Harrar was well aware of the mounting
criticism. “Professional interest in, and press coverage of, the
Green Revolution,” he stated in 1970, was “keen and world wide.”
Though “some discern a new age of plenty,” he said, to others “the Green
Revolution appears to be fraught with potential dangers.” Harrar suggested
that some of the criticism came from people who simply resisted change.
“Fundamental changes evoke fundamental fears,” he said, and “such change
often leaves behind those whose vested interests lie in the more traditional
approaches and in analyses supporting the status quo.” In 1971, his last
year as president, Harrar conceded that “some observers” worried that the
Green Revolution in many developing countries was “making the rich
richer and the poor poorer, accelerating the migration of the rural poor to
already overcrowded cities, aggravating problems of under-employment and
unemployment, and presenting new threats to the environment.” Still, as
the father of the Green Revolution, it was very hard for him to undertake a
fundamental reassessment.
John Hilton Knowles succeeded Harrar as president of the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1972. A medical doctor by training, Knowles gained his
administrative experience as the youngest-ever director of Massachusetts
General Hospital. Soon after assuming his post at the Foundation, he undertook an intensive effort to evaluate all of the existing programs. In the course
of this analysis, he took criticisms of the Green Revolution seriously.
Despite the upheaval of the late 1960s, Knowles believed that philanthropy could still be relevant and useful if it responded to the changing social
context. His evaluation process aimed to provide the “wit and intellectual
capacity” the Foundation would need to “maintain the richness of pluralism
and heterodoxy which has strengthened our national life” and contributed to
“social melioration.” He started the process in December 1972 by appointing
a program committee of trustees to conduct the first formal review of the
overall program and policies of the Foundation since 1958.
As the review process moved forward, the trustees were forced to
consider the effects of worldwide economic inflation and the declining asset
values of the Foundation’s investment portfolio. Steep drops in stock prices
had contributed to a 52-percent decline in the constant-dollar value of the
Foundation’s endowment between 1964 and 1974. Meanwhile, double-digit
inflation contributed to what Knowles called an “erosion of money power,” so
that even as the Foundation experienced a sharp decrease in its income and
assets, it had to spend more on each individual grant or program to be effective. Knowles also believed that an explosion of specialized knowledge in the
social sciences and development theory had created an “absolute increased
cost of solving complex problems.”
Even as these changes began to affect the Foundation and its work,
changes in the institutional landscape of development suggested the need to
reevaluate the Foundation’s role. In the postwar context, new international
organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International
Monetary Fund, combined with foreign aid offered by the United States and
other nations in the developed world, created an increasingly complex environment for work in global agriculture, health, and development. As Knowles
pointed out, governments, nonprofits, and international organizations offered
“huge sources of money available to work toward solutions of the nation’s and
the world’s problems,” that had not been available only 20 years before.
The combination of these changes in finances and roles suggested to
Knowles that the Rockefeller Foundation needed to fundamentally restructure its approach. Rather than operate field programs with hundreds of
employees in a few select nations or research centers, the Foundation should
become a broker of ideas and a catalyst for change. “We must,” he stated,
“place more emphasis on our ability to influence policy and the allocation
of resources” and “focus increased attention on leadership development.”
This new vision would heavily influence priorities in all of the Foundation’s
programs, especially in the Conquest of Hunger.
A Shift in Focus for the Conquest of Hunger
By 1971 the Conquest of Hunger program accounted for about 20 percent of the Foundation’s grantmaking and programmatic spending.
This included continued funding of in-country operating programs,
international research institutes, conferences, and agricultural education. However, as a result of Knowles’s policy evaluation, the Rockefeller
Foundation shifted its focus to “second-generation” problems of the Green
Revolution, including food distribution, nutrition, rural population
176 Chapter Eight: Taking Stock Food & Prosperity 177
displacement to cities, employment and income distribution, and the “plight
of the small farmer.”
With this shift in focus came a change in strategy that reflected many
of the concerns expressed by the trustees as early as 1957. The Foundation
placed greater emphasis on interdisciplinary teams that included population
experts, economists, and public health officers. One aim of this interdisciplinary strategy was to address multiple concerns through Conquest of Hunger
while avoiding the overextension of commitments that led to unfocused
and ineffective programs—a predicament that Knowles, echoing John D.
Rockefeller’s chief advisor Frederick Gates, called
“scatteration.” By working on well-defined projects
with teams of experts, the Foundation could address
multiple layers of second-generation concerns
without spreading itself too thin. Interdisciplinary
program evaluation would likewise more accurately
reflect the problem itself, doing justice to its complex
nature. “Increasing food production,” Knowles wrote,
“is, of course, a technical and scientific issue, but it is
also an economic, medical, political, ethical (or value),
and behavioral problem.” It thus required teams of
experts, such as “the economist, the humanist,
the political scientist, the demographer, the public health expert, and the cultural anthropologist,
in addition to those of the plant breeder,” all of
whom could be organized into a focused attack
on a big problem.
In one sense, this interdisciplinary approach
was not new. It had been a core value of Conquest
of Hunger since George Harrar created the program in the early 1960s. But the slow, integrated
“human ecology” approach had always been in
conflict with the urgency of the global food crisis
and the rapid growth of populations. In the early
1970s, however, the Foundation moved towards
institutionalizing interdisciplinary values within
its working procedures.
Specifically, Knowles attempted to build
interdisciplinary evaluation into program
review and policy development. As Vice President
Sterling Wortman noted in a memo to Knowles,
the Foundation was moving into an era in which it
hoped to “concentrate on finding those strategies
and systems for major problems by which knowledge
and action can be combined to accelerate human
progress.” Understanding systems was critical to
this effort. “With regard to national agricultural
research or national agricultural development,
health care delivery or education for development,”
Wortman continued, “we are dealing with systems
and it is these systems with which scientists have
not developed much capability of handling.”
Addressing problems from a systems perspective demanded cooperation
and collaboration. Through its efforts to develop international agricultural
institutions, and through much of its history, the Rockefeller Foundation, as
Wortman pointed out, “has learned that one of the unique ways it can be helpful in the world is to facilitate means by which institutions and individuals
of diverse expertise can be enabled to work in concert toward goals which
they all have in common.” In an inflationary era, when the income from the
Foundation’s endowment did not go as far as it had in the past, this kind
of leadership required fewer dollars but could still be powerfully effective.
While the Rockefeller Foundation worked
to develop new varieties of maize in
Guatemala and other Latin American
countries, the Foundation and its partners
also collected seeds for a germplasm bank
of native and pioneer maize material for
research and to prevent genetic erosion
through monocropping. By the early 1970s,
this collection formed the basis for an
international bank of genetic material.
(W. Wickham. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Sterling Wortman played a key role in
many of the Rockefeller Foundation’s
agricultural initiatives. He served
as president of the International
Agricultural Development Service (IADS)
in the 1970s and helped run several of
the agricultural institutes created by the
Foundation. Director of the Agricultural
Sciences Division from 1966 to 1970,
he became vice president in 1970 and
served as acting president in 1979,
following the death of John Knowles.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
178 Chapter Eight: Taking Stock Food & Prosperity 179
Over the next few years, rural development projects that reflected this way of
thinking—such as those planned for Brazil and Thailand in 1973—embodied
this more integrated approach to development.
Innovation, Collaboration, and Sustainability
I
n 1975 the Foundation took the leap toward implementing this approach by funding the establishment of the International Agricultural
Development Service (IADS). The autonomous nonprofit organization
was designed to function as a contracting agency rather than a funding or
granting agency, providing consulting expertise in agriculture and rural
development. The goal was to link low-income, food-deficit nations with
existing technology as well as assistance from international institutes.
IADS also provided assistance with financing projects through major
international banking agencies, including the World Bank, Inter-American
Development Bank, USAID, and various U.N. agencies.
The new organization worked to “improve cooperation between donor
agencies and country needs for more effective contributions to alleviating
the world’s food problems.” IADS specialized in working directly with
developing nations to establish long-range cooperative production programs,
agricultural research, education, or development efforts that were production-oriented. Teams of experts were created to ensure that new knowledge
gained from research flowed to farmers and national agricultural programs.
By 1976 IADS had contracts with the governments of Nepal, Indonesia,
Sudan, Ecuador, Brazil, Bangladesh, Botswana, and several other countries.
The Foundation contributed almost $8 million to IADS’s operational
costs over the next decade, emphasizing long-term self-sufficiency. The
Foundation described its goal in funding the agency as simply to “help
countries design programs they themselves can carry out.”
As the Foundation tackled the “second-generation” problems of the
Green Revolution, it also sought to address concerns related to fragile
environments and marginal lands. In 1978 the Foundation began exploring
opportunities to contribute to “rational utilization” of land areas that were
either mismanaged or underutilized, mostly in the rain forests, semiarid
regions, and deforested hillsides of the tropics. “Millions of hectares of
land,” it stated, “remain totally unused or have been degraded by increasing
intensity of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture or by inappropriate efforts
to introduce mechanized agriculture.”
This was a massive amount of land, especially in proportion to that
being used for agriculture. Though much of it had been considered
nonproductive, the Foundation sought to develop “ecologically stable, energy-efficient systems for small farm
agriculture” that would extend agriculture to these
areas. It saw improved water resource management,
use of both old and new crop species to stabilize soil,
and use of livestock as tools at its disposal to achieve
this goal. The Foundation took small steps in 1978 by
supporting a study of deforestation in the tropics and
sponsoring a national conference on range management in the American West as well as a demonstration
and training program on the utilization of arid lands
for grazing and livestock production.
As part of its effort to strengthen the Conquest of Hunger program,
the Rockefeller Foundation began work on food policy and development.
The Conquest of Hunger staff cooperated with the International Relations
Division to support work on food and agricultural policy having “specific
reference to production, distribution, and nutrition in the developing countries.” These efforts included funding the establishment of the International
Food Policy Research Institute within CGIAR (the Consultative Group on
The Rockefeller Foundation sent Ben
Jackson (left) to Bangkok in 1966 to
advise the staff of the Thai Department
of Agriculture’s rice-breeding
program. Jackson worked with other
agricultural scientists to achieve a major
breakthrough in developing high-yielding
varieties of "floating rice," which could
add six inches of stalk a day during flood
conditions and survive in fifteen feet of
water. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
180 Chapter Eight: Taking Stock Food & Prosperity 181
International Agricultural Research) along with
selected food and agriculture policy studies in regions
where “new technology or organizational innovation
in input delivery and education is aimed specifically at
providing better opportunities for the small farmer.”
In 1979 the Foundation officially established a food
and agricultural policy component of Conquest of
Hunger to address food deficit problems at the policymaking level. The program hoped to address barriers to
agricultural production and improved nutrition that
could only be removed through government policy, such
as poor transportation, weak extension services, and
unfavorable agricultural credit.
Taking on these new issues did not completely eliminate the traditional
Conquest of Hunger approach. The Foundation continued to value international agricultural research, strengthening and expanding the network of
international agricultural research centers that had become its focus under
George Harrar in the 1960s. By 1979 more than 570 scientists and a support
staff of 7,000 worked in 11 centers all over the world, while the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) provided over $100 million to the institutes. One of the new institutes that took on different research
subject matter was the International Laboratory for Research on Animal
Diseases (ILRAD), established in 1973 in Kabete, Kenya, near Nairobi. The lab
was created by an agreement between CGIAR and the Kenyan government.
The Foundation also supported numerous smaller research projects that
aimed to “provide the tools for scientists and farmers to further enhance yields
and to reduce production risks.” The Foundation believed that pioneering
research was essential for food security, and saw innovation as a key quality in
the projects it funded. Research areas of emphasis in the late 1970s included
legumes, hemoparasitic animal diseases, aquatic species, and new dimensions
of plant-breeding, physiology, and disease resistance.
As part of its effort to bring leaders together to solve problems related to
agriculture and food security, the Foundation continued to play a key role as
convener. One such meeting in 1973 in New York focused on “Socio-Economic
Aspects of Food Production and Distribution in Less Developed Countries.”
Conferences like these emphasized interdisciplinary research and the relationship between agricultural science and socioeconomic analysis.
The Foundation also continued to invest in human capital to promote
innovation in agriculture. It spent about $1 million per year on fellowships
related to agricultural sciences in the ten years following 1972. These
fellowships focused primarily on plant science, agronomy, animal science,
entomology, pathology, and genetics. In keeping with its interdisciplinary
approach, the Foundation funded additional awards for work related to social
sciences and human resources in the areas of economics, food policy, rural
development, communications, and sociological/anthropological studies.
“Investment in human capital,” a Conquest of Hunger internal review stated
in 1982, “is vital to the development process and preferable in the long term to
providing foreign experts.”
By the 1980s the lessons of the second generation of the Green Revolution
were already becoming clear, and they would have come as no surprise to
Wickliffe Rose, Raymond Fosdick, or other early leaders of the Rockefeller
Foundation. Innovations in technology that increased agricultural yields were
much easier to achieve than the fundamental changes in society needed to
ensure that the benefits of greater agricultural production reached the poor
and vulnerable in the world’s developing nations. An integrated, systemic
approach to change was required, and the Foundation did not turn away from
what it had always been good at: promoting science-based innovations to
improve the quality of life for millions of people. Building on its profound
influence in the field of molecular biology, the Foundation would place even
greater emphasis on science in the 1980s to lead a new wave of agricultural
innovation based on biotechnology.
The Rockefeller Foundation convened
an Agricultural Sciences Seminar at
Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1979. The
meeting brought together the old guard
and a new generation of agricultural
scientists, including J. George
Harrar (front left), Ralph Richardson
(center), as well as Gary Toenniessen
(front right), who would rise through
the ranks to lead the Foundation’s
agricultural initiatives. (Thomas
Williams. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
182 Chapter Eight: Taking Stock Food & Prosperity
The Rockefeller Foundation continued
to invest in international agricultural
research institutes in the 1970s. Funding
provided to The Consultative Group
on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR) helped launch the International
Laboratory for Research on Animal
Diseases (ILRAD) in Kenya in 1973. Staff
members included Dr. Dick Cook (left)
and Clinical Assistant George Ngekenya
(right). (Marion Kaplan. Rockefeller
Archive Center.)
183
184 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 185
Two dozen scientists sat around a table in New York in the early
1990s to discuss rice. The Rockefeller Foundation had invited them
to talk about Vitamin A. Every day, an average of 6,000 children
around the world died as a result of Vitamin A deficiencies, and
hundreds of thousands went blind every year. Scientists had worked for
years to improve the nutrient content of rice, searching unsuccessfully for
a natural variant that produced beta-carotene, the precursor to Vitamin A.
But these efforts had been unsuccessful. Gary Toenniessen, the Foundation’s
deputy director for Agricultural Sciences, had organized this brainstorming
meeting to see if biotechnology could provide a solution.
Among those at the table was Peter Beyer, a German biochemist who
studied the beta-carotene biosynthetic pathway. Just past his 40th birthday,
he had earned his doctorate in cell biology from the University of Freiburg.
On the flight to New York he met with another German scientist, 60-year-old
Ingo Potrykus, who had earned his doctorate at the Max-Planck Institute.
Potrykus had moved to Basel, Switzerland, in 1976 to establish the plant
genetic engineering group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute. By 1985 he
was a full professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Potrykus had been thinking about ways to use biotechnology to increase
the nutritional qualities of rice for several years. In 1990 the Rockefeller
Foundation had begun to provide funding to his lab at the Institute for Plant
Sciences to help with the effort to develop an Indica rice transformation
protocol. As they talked during the flight, Potrykus
and Beyer quickly realized that, with their combined
skills and expertise, they might be able to offer some
new ways to approach the Vitamin A problem.
During the conversation around the table in
New York, Beyer and Potrykus articulated a strategy
that involved engineering a rice plant to convert the
precursor that already existed in rice to beta-carotene. From a researcher’s
point of view, it was a risky proposition. No one had introduced four genes
into a plant before and gotten them to function in a sequential way that
would produce a biosynthetic process not previously resident in the plant.
food & prosperity
Chapter IX
Neglected by aid agencies in previous
eras, sub-Saharan Africa became a focus
of the Rockefeller Foundation’s work in
the 1980s. The Foundation’s agriculture
initiatives helped small-holder farmers like
this Nigerian woman picking okra leaves.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
beyond the
political debate
186 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 187
It would be an expensive process and require
patient funding. For the scientists, it meant devoting
years to an idea that might not work. But as he left
the meeting, Beyer could not stop thinking about
the children who suffered and died from Vitamin A
deficiencies. “If, as a basic scientist,” he said later,
“you find out that you could make a contribution to
the real world, that you have some tools in hand that
might make a change, you go for it.”
The decision proved equally difficult for the
Rockefeller Foundation. Its board of scientific advisors
understood the challenges that Beyer and Potrykus and their teams would have
to overcome. But, in many ways, this project represented the culmination of
a shift in the Foundation’s program that had been a full decade in the making.
The Rockefeller Foundation Refocuses
As the 1980s dawned, agricultural development policies had remained
caught in the crossfire of an increasingly political debate. Critics
of the Green Revolution’s environmental and social impacts, along
with western conservatives less willing to provide aid to developing nations,
continued to voice their criticisms. Support for agriculture from the industrial
world consequently began to wane. In 1979, funding for agriculture accounted
for roughly 12 percent of the official and private aid resources flowing from
developed to less-developed countries. Over the next two decades, that support would lessen dramatically.
The decrease coincided with a change in leadership of the Rockefeller
Foundation. Following the sudden death of John Knowles in early 1979, after
his battle with pancreatic cancer, Sterling Wortman was appointed as interim
president. A plant geneticist, Wortman had been a Foundation agriculturalist
since the 1950s. He had worked in Mexico and at IRRI in the Philippines, and
helped launch CGIAR. He had also served as director of both the Agricultural
Sciences Division and IADS, as well as vice president of the Foundation. As
interim president, Wortman avoided significant policy shifts, and in 1980 he
was succeeded by Richard Lyman.
A historian by training, Lyman had been the president of Stanford
University and had served as a Rockefeller Foundation trustee since 1976. He
focused on stabilizing the Foundation’s programs in the wake of a decade of
changes, reducing the scope of its work and refocusing divisional programs
to provide effective support and leadership. Like Knowles, Lyman saw the
Rockefeller Foundation as an influential risk-taker, but pragmatically asked,
“How do we intend to make our limited dollars count?” He reviewed the
Foundation’s divisions one by one, streamlining them so that they could
work more effectively given the “sea change in our circumstances.”
The gradual changes that Lyman’s review inspired included doing away
with the idealistic program titles of the 1960s in favor of a return to the more
academic designations that reflected the Foundation’s past. The Conquest
of Hunger program became the Agricultural Sciences Division, for example.
Despite this apparent return to traditional disciplines, the Foundation
continued to promote interdisciplinary and systemic thinking. The
Agricultural Sciences, Health Sciences, and Population Sciences Divisions
all had biotechnology components that involved the establishment of laboratory infrastructure and technology as well as research and professional
training. To promote interdisciplinary thinking, the Foundation created its
International Program to Support Science-Based Development.
Established in 1986, Science-Based Development operated on the
“premise that scientific advance and technical innovation can serve the
cause of international equity by helping to reduce the incidence of poverty,
disease, malnutrition, unwanted pregnancies and illiteracy in developing
countries, and thereby advance the well-being of their peoples.” It sought
to distribute scientific knowledge and technology more equitably across
the world.
Norman Borlaug (right) visited Mexico
in September 1981 with Rockefeller
Foundation trustees. In the 1980s the
Foundation reduced its field operations
and ended direct support for many of the
agricultural institutes it had launched.
Instead, it provided direct funding to
national agricultural research institutions
in Africa to strengthen their capacity and
for rice biotechnology research in Asia.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
188 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 189
The Foundation also refocused much of its international funding on
neglected regions of the world that did not receive significant attention or
support from aid agencies, especially sub-Saharan Africa, which had critical
needs in science and technology. The Reflections on Development program
selected young scholars from sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia to
work on development topics of their own choosing, free from their various
obligations of teaching, government, or international agency service work.
Science-Based Development continued the interdisciplinary approach
that the Rockefeller Foundation explored in the 1970s. Acknowledging that
agricultural science alone could not end world hunger, the Foundation had
made agriculture just one of many tools to promote food security. These
new programs went one step further, making food security one of many
goals in a more holistic paradigm of development that also included health
and population control. The expansion of this approach capitalized on the
resources that became available when in-country programs ended. Acting
through third parties and partnerships, the Foundation promoted scientific
research and technology in the laboratory and disbursed it to those
“neglected” regions that needed it most.
Working on development internationally freed the Foundation from many
of the frustrations of working with national governments. It also allowed
the Foundation to distance itself from the U.S. government, which promoted
development in Third World countries as a tool of foreign policy. Because the
Foundation had already reduced its in-country programs, the end of the Cold
War in the 1980s did not greatly affect the structure or goals of its work.
Peter Goldmark Jr., who replaced Richard Lyman as president of the
Foundation in 1988, oversaw this transition. Creative and energetic,
Goldmark was the son of a remarkably successful inventor. Harvardeducated, he had served as New York Mayor John Lindsay’s chief of staff. He
went on to head the Massachusetts Department of Human Services and then
serve as executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
At the time he was recruited to lead the Rockefeller Foundation, he was a
senior executive with the Times Mirror Company.
Goldmark’s tenure as president of the Rockefeller Foundation coincided
with both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in
1989, as well as the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. It was a time, Goldmark
reported, when the “fields of human affairs were seen to swing from EastWest to North-South.”
Goldmark retained the same organizational structure of Science-Based
Development that encompassed Agricultural, Health, and Population Sciences.
He added a new health initiative and expanded field-based programs in
Africa. He also took into account global environmental
concerns, insisting that environmental issues related to
development had to be “structured as part of our overall
framework.” In 1989 the Foundation launched its Global
Environmental Program as a component of ScienceBased Development.
This increasing focus on environmental issues
within the Foundation and around the world became
important to agricultural science. In addition to
seeking to increase the quantity and quality of food
produced in the developing world, the Foundation
sought to promote “sustainable, environmentally
positive agriculture.”
Fortunately, improvements in the Foundation’s financial situation gave it
the ability to tackle this modest programmatic expansion, as its assets increased
every year from 1984 to 1989, doubling in just five years.
Agricultural Sciences Evaluations & Shifts
With increased resources and an awareness that other institutions’
support for agriculture was declining, the Rockefeller Foundation
reprioritized its agricultural initiatives. The transition had
begun in 1982 with Richard Lyman’s effort to review each of the Foundation’s
major programs, aided by three consultants: Bryant Kearl, vice chancellor for
academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin; Robert McNamara, former
The International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI) continued to focus on
plant breeding in 1980 at Los Baños in
the Philippines, in an effort to create
high-yielding crop varieties. After
1983 the Foundation pumped millions
of dollars into genetic engineering,
including rice biotechnology. This
work led to significant scientific
breakthroughs by the late 1980s.
(Ashwin Gatha/Kay Reese & Associates.
Rockefeller Archive Center.)
190 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 191
U.S. Secretary of Defense and president of the World Bank; and Perry Adkisson,
deputy chancellor for Agriculture at Texas A&M University. The report
produced by this team proposed that the Rockefeller Foundation’s agriculture
program should be restructured around three core areas: 1) strengthening food
and agricultural systems in African nations; 2) supporting biological research
and developing new agricultural technologies; and 3) promoting institutional
cooperation to address critical agricultural issues.
To accomplish these goals, the Foundation underwent a major strategic
and organizational transition beginning in 1983. Since the early years of the
Foundation’s history, field operations, first in health and later in agriculture,
had been a major component of the Foundation’s work. These were expensive
endeavors for which the Foundation hired highly skilled professionals and sent
them around the world to work directly with public officials, research scientists, farmers, and communities in developing nations. Under its new strategy,
the Foundation concluded that dollar-for-dollar it could be far more effective as
a grant-maker and catalyst.
In agriculture, the timing of this transition was propitious. By 1983 many
governments and international agencies had adopted crop-specific work previously initiated by Rockefeller Foundation field staff. By handing off more work
to others, the Foundation could focus its staff in a few areas without having
older projects disintegrate. This streamlining now outweighed the “traditional
philosophy of seizing opportunities wherever they arise.” Having already
ceased its in-country programs, the Foundation also looked to reduce involvement in the international agricultural research institutes it had helped to
start. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
proved an effective vehicle for this transition. By the early 1980s CGIAR was
receiving support from over 30 governments, international agencies, developmental organizations, and foundations.
As the Rockefeller Foundation implemented the new strategy, it provided one last terminal core support grant to each of the five research centers’
operating programs concerned with agricultural technology and policy in
Africa. The Foundation continued to fund CGIAR projects after 1985, but
only as they aligned with the interests of the Agricultural Sciences Division
and at a level that would allow the Foundation to retain its CGIAR membership. At this time the Foundation also made its final appropriations to several
other research centers, including the Chinese Academy of Agricultural
Sciences and the International Agricultural Development Service (IADS),
which had merged with other entities to form the Winrock International
Institute for Agricultural Development. With the decks cleared by the mid1980s, the Foundation had the resources to focus on new undertakings.
Biotechnology
The Foundation had created its biotechnology program in 1983 as a
modest effort to apply genetic engineering to agricultural sciences,
but in many ways the Foundation had already been a pioneer in the
field. Although humans have manipulated biological processes to generate
food, medicines, and other products for centuries, modern biotechnology
is rooted in the field of molecular biology. Emerging from breakthroughs
in physics and chemistry in the early decades of the twentieth century,
molecular biology allowed researchers to begin to explain biological processes at the molecular level. Rockefeller Foundation funding had helped
to support those early breakthroughs. When Warren Weaver became head
of the Natural Sciences Division, he concluded that new discoveries could
potentially revolutionize the field of biology. In 1932, with support from the
Foundation’s trustees, he launched a program in “experimental biology.”
The Foundation’s grants over the next two decades helped give birth to a
new field that Weaver dubbed “molecular biology” and played a pivotal role
in developing new knowledge that paved the way for the discovery of the
double-helix structure of DNA in 1953.
Although the Foundation withdrew from this arena in the 1950s, after
it was well-established and receiving significant research funding from
governments in the developed world, the Agricultural Sciences Division remained interested in the breakthroughs in genetics and cell physiology that
offered promising new paths for developing hardier, more productive, and
more nutritional food crops. Indeed, by the mid-1970s scientists working in
the field of molecular biology had progressed so far that it was increasingly
possible to envision the ability to engineer life forms to meet human needs.
Some people in the general public found this prospect of bioengineering deeply troubling. Haunting images, ranging from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein to the profoundly disturbing eugenics experiments of the 1930s
and 40s, raised strong moral issues. Others feared that new organisms created through biotechnology would disturb existing ecosystems. For every
concern, however, biotechnology offered tremendous benefits to humanity—new foods that would help people live longer and healthier lives; new
medicines that would inhibit disease pathogens at the molecular level; and
new products that were more environmentally sustainable. Nevertheless,
leading scientists came together to try to address the concerns during a
conference at Asilomar, California, in 1975. They set standards for work
with “recombinant DNA” to ensure public safety and to meet high moral
standards. Though this conference could hardly allay public concerns, it set
192 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 193
the stage for professional standards that helped accelerate the development
of the field.
Though the Foundation was not a “stranger to the fields of molecular
genetics and cellular biology,” it had not explored the intersection of biotechnology and agricultural science before 1983. That year, it sent two scientists,
Judith Lyman and Gary Toenniessen, to kick off the Foundation’s explorations
by visiting university and commercial laboratories across the United States
and by attending scientific congresses and international meetings. Seeing
great potential for future work in this arena, the Foundation wanted to
understand its successes and impediments. The survey, according to President
Richard Lyman, was intended “to foreshadow a strategy for future work.”
Toenniessen would play a pivotal role in the development of the Foundation’s biotechnology program. He had joined the Rockefeller Foundation
in 1971 after earning a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. He rose through the ranks, serving as assistant director of Natural and Environmental Sciences; assistant, associate, and deputy
director for Agricultural Sciences; and director of Food Security. Toenniessen
was a steady administrator and innovative scientist. The recommendations
that he and Judith Lyman offered based on their survey helped inspire the
Foundation to act.
In 1984 the Rockefeller Foundation announced a major, long-term
commitment to plant genetic engineering. Over a ten- to fifteen-year period,
the Foundation said, it would invest in targeted research leading from basic
technology development to its application in breeding. It began by funding
research on the application of cellular and molecular biology to food production in the developing world, with an initial emphasis on cereals. It sought
“vertical integration” of conventional breeding with new genetic-engineering
techniques, believing that these “powerful tools” should flow to developing
countries through their international centers and national agencies.
Rice became a high priority for the Foundation’s biotechnology program,
including not only the research in genetic engineering but also the promotion
of new breeding techniques. In many parts of the developing world, rice
accounted for a major percentage of what people ate. Prior to the Foundation’s
involvement, however, scientists were not focused on the ways in which rice
might be bioengineered to better meet the nutritional needs of people in the
developing world.
The biotechnology program targeted sophisticated research projects
as well as the practical application of new findings to national research
programs and small-scale farms in the developing world. Other cereal crops
besides rice, as well as the root crop cassava, became top priorities. Consistent
with past practice, the Foundation promoted interdisciplinary study as well, encouraging social scientists
and other scholars to “anticipate the socioeconomic
and environmental impacts that may be associated
with successful application of genetic engineering in
international agriculture.”
The Foundation invested a substantial amount of
money in this work. The trustees authorized almost
$7 million in grants in the first two years of the cereal
genetic engineering program. By 1987 they had given
over $10 million (about $20 million in 2012 dollars)
to the International Program on Rice Biotechnology
(IPRB) alone. Much of the funding went toward already
advanced laboratories, some in developed countries,
with the intention that their work would be applied in
the developing world. A biotechnology fellowship program aided agricultural scientists from the developing
world interested in exploring biotechnology at home
or in western laboratories, where they could be trained
before returning to their home countries. The program
expanded into China and India in 1987, taking advantage of their research establishments, scientists, and
“mature rice genetic improvement programs.” The Foundation stationed
former IRRI scientist John O’Toole in India first, then in Thailand, to lead
the rice biotechnology program in Asia.
These early investments in biotechnology led to significant scientific
innovations by the late 1980s. Researchers funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation developed new methods for regenerating whole rice plants from
protoplasts, considered a “major breakthrough in genetic engineering of
cereal plants.” They also introduced desirable traits such as insect resistance
and cold tolerance. In 1991, scientists working at Cornell University with
Foundation support developed a detailed molecular genetic map of rice,
which they disseminated to rice breeders around the world to facilitate the
creation of improved rice varieties. In 1995, a Foundation-funded team of
scientists cloned a gene for resistance against bacterial blight, which yielded
high resistance in susceptible varieties.
Meanwhile, consistent with its historic practice, the Foundation continued to promote dialogue and knowledge transfer between global networks of
agricultural scientists. It helped to organize an association of scientists working in biotechnology. A mid-term review of the Foundation’s International
Gary H. Toenniessen joined the
Rockefeller Foundation in 1971. He
worked on environmental problems
associated with the Green Revolution and
was an early advocate for biotechnology
funding by the Rockefeller Foundation.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
194 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 195
Program on Rice Biotechnology highlighted partnerships with more than 350 scientists all over the world
in the early 1990s, concluding that “new varieties
of rice should feed 100 million more people than
believed possible, and 150 million additional people
within 20 years.”
Peter Beyer and Ingo Potrykus, who had
participated in the brainstorming session in New York
regarding rice and Vitamin A, represented the leading
edge of this process of innovation. They announced a major breakthrough
in 1999, after years of work. With funding from the Rockefeller
Foundation, they had introduced two daffodil genes and one bacterial
gene into rice. In combination, these three genes were able to produce the
enzymes—in four steps, in the right order—necessary for converting
the precursors in rice to beta-carotene. This new “golden rice,” dubbed for
its remarkable color, seemed to provide a potential solution to the problem
of Vitamin A deficiency.
Gary Toenniessen and others at the Rockefeller Foundation were
delighted. The work was pioneering in several ways. In biotechnology,
genes were usually introduced to synthesize particular proteins. But this
new approach represented the first case of what scientists called “pathway
engineering,” designed to alter the kinetics and product of a metabolic
process. Toenniessen also noted that the innovation was aimed directly at
the consumer of rice—not the farmer—by improving the nutritional value
of the food crop.
Unfortunately, continuing concerns about the development, regulation,
and safety of genetically modified products raised significant barriers to the
production of golden rice. To resolve these issues, the researchers, with
the Foundation’s consent and encouragement, entered into a partnership
with Zeneca, a large pharmaceutical and agribusiness. The agreement
allowed for the creation of public-sector breeding programs to make golden
rice seeds available to resource-poor farmers in developing countries at no
additional cost. Zeneca (today Syngenta) also agreed to provide resources
to the Humanitarian Project, founded by the inventors, to continue their
research. As of 2012, however, regulators, concerned about the safety of
genetically modified organisms, were still considering whether to approve
golden rice for production, frustrating many people who hoped to see this
remarkable innovation enable millions of the world’s poorest children to
enjoy better health and a higher quality of life.
Neglected Regions: Sub-Saharan Africa & Beyond
I
ncreasing the consumption of Vitamin A and other vital nutrients was
a particular priority in sub-Saharan Africa as part of a much larger
effort to increase the quantity and quality of food available there. Africa
became a high priority for the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1980s, because
it was the region facing the most acute food shortages.
Prior to the mid-1980s, the Foundation provided limited support for
strengthening food and agricultural systems in Africa by developing research
and professional infrastructure through a number of disparate programs. The
Foundation provided money to CGIAR for international research institutes
located in or relevant to Africa. The West Africa Rice Development Association
(WARDA) received grants for research and development activities, and a senior
Rockefeller Foundation staff member served as interim director when WARDA
experienced management difficulties in 1985.
The Foundation also worked on a limited basis in Africa by cultivating
professional development helpful to the region, with a focus on science.
New agriculture initiatives in Africa
built on programs launched in the
1960s. In Njoro, Kenya, for example, the
Foundation supported Egerton College,
where the school's principal, Professor
M.A. Barrett, used a prize-winning
Guernsey cow to illustrate a point
for students in 1963. (Marc & Evelyne
Bernheim. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
196 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 197
These programs included agriculture as well as demography and human
health. One such project, related to food security, placed African social
scientists in postdoctoral fellowship programs with international research
centers. The goal of supporting these ten annual fellowships was to help
produce a “future generation of African social scientists versed in multidisciplinary research and sensitive to the human and social complexities
inherent in the agricultural transformation process.” In addition, the
Foundation explored the possibility of expanding its assistance for scientific
training to the pre-doctoral level for young Africans, enhancing its effectiveness and relevance in a region with relatively few scholars trained to
the doctorate level.
When the Foundation restructured its Agricultural Sciences Division
in the mid-1980s, the new plan retained the professional development
component, but with a new focus. The postdoctoral fellowship program
now targeted scholars studying “critical issues affecting international
agriculture.” These issues included, for example, the “application of
technology” by “strengthening the often fragile linkages between research
centers and country efforts.” While the Foundation was reducing its field
staff, it expanded the fellowship program in 1985, incorporating regional
conferences and seminars into its funding to “allow the fellows to share
their experiences.” The Foundation also developed a program component
called Enhancing International Agricultural Research Collaboration in
the mid-1980s, which focused on “facilitating better communication
and cooperation between the various international agricultural centers
and national agricultural research systems.” It sought to refine the centers’
ability to respond to national systems, and to train the latter to better
convey their priorities and choose the best form of assistance.
By the late 1980s the Agricultural Sciences Division began to develop
a more cohesive strategy toward Africa. The new initiative, Improving
Family Food Production Systems in Africa, took shape in 1985 under the
leadership of Robert Herdt. Herdt had come into the orbit of the Rockefeller
Foundation while he was still a graduate student at the University of
Minnesota in the 1960s, working on a project at the Indian Agricultural
Research Institute. For ten years he served as an economist at IRRI and then
moved to the World Bank, where he was a scientific advisor to CGIAR. In
1987 he joined the staff of the Rockefeller Foundation as program director
in charge of agriculture.
The program developed by Herdt and his staff adopted as its major
strategic focus the strengthening of selected national agricultural research
systems in order to improve the food-production strategies of farming
families in sub-Saharan Africa. To this
end, it supported both individuals and
institutions with an emphasis on biological and socioeconomic research on such
crops as roots and tubers, which, it said,
were the “nutritional mainstay of much of
the population.”
One major project funded by the new
initiative was a cooperative effort by two
CGIAR laboratories to focus on cassava,
a shrubby plant grown for its edible root
and widely cultivated by the “very poor
in sub-Saharan Africa.” The Rockefeller Foundation
appropriated over $2 million in 1987 for researchers in
nine African countries spread across the continent to
examine a wide range of issues, including the growing,
processing, consumption, and marketing of cassava. It
also supported African agricultural graduate students
to work on the cassava project as part of their doctoral
research, and funded a social science research unit at the
International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in
Nairobi, Kenya. This unit aimed to evaluate “farmers’ needs, wants,
and the appropriateness of new technology for pest control.”
In the last years of the 1980s, the new president of the Foundation,
Peter Goldmark, built on this work in Africa, creating more developed
infrastructure for its operation. The Foundation added new personnel,
hiring economist John Lynam to run its East Africa programs, including the
cassava research project. It recruited Malcolm Blackie, former dean of agriculture at the University of Zimbabwe, to lead the Foundation’s southern
Africa programs. It also supported local professional development. In 1989,
for example, the Foundation cooperatively funded Zimbabwe’s Agriculture
Faculty to develop a graduate program to train the country’s future research
and extension staff, and to form ties with the small farm community.
Expanded funding was also directed toward diversifying crop work. In
1988 the Foundation supported a program at Washington University in St.
Louis, Missouri, to apply biotechnology techniques for tomato and tobacco
plants to improving cassava. This project became the starting point for supporting a modest international research network for biotechnology research
on cassava, which eventually became a cornerstone of the Foundation’s
Africa work.
Nigeria was among many countries
that benefited from Rockefeller
Foundation agriculture funding.
Animal scientist Dr. A.N.A. Modebe
(left) helped a member of his
dairy microbiology class examine
milk samples for bacteria at the
University College of Ibadan in
1963. (Marc & Evelyne Bernheim.
Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity
Maize research in 1989 at the
Mbabawa Research Station in Malawi
was supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation. The country's most
important food crop, maize was
planted on three-quarters of the land
owned by small farmers. (Wendy
Stone. Rockefeller Archive Center.)
198 199
200 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 201
In addition to backing research on cassava, the
Foundation provided grants for work with other crops.
A cooperative project in Uganda, for example, sought to
increase banana productivity with funding to Makerere
University and the Ministry of Agriculture for experi
-
ments and on-farm trials. Another project supported
maize research to adapt high-yielding varieties of the crop
to the needs of small farmers in Malawi. Yet another ven
-
ture involved Texas A&M’s genetic mapping of sorghum
as well as training of scientists to work with sorghum in semi-arid Africa.
Additional Africa funding went to addressing soil fertility, water manage
-
ment, and livestock. After 1989 the Foundation’s new Global Environmental
Program encouraged these resource studies. It gave one such grant to a
study of African continuous cropping systems. Another grant funded the
evaluation of the use of ecological systems—including worms, insects, and
microorganisms—to enhance soil productivity and sustainability.
During Peter Goldmark’s tenure as president, the Foundation increased
funding for agriculture work in other parts of the world as well, although
on a limited basis and usually aimed at other neglected regions. In 1988
the Foundation supported scientists at the Mexican Polytechnic Institute’s
Center for Research and Advanced Studies in their efforts to improve maize
using molecular genetic maps. The Foundation backed a similar program for
using advanced biotechnology techniques to create better rice plant varieties
in a range of Asian countries, including China, India, Malaysia, Thailand,
Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Efforts outside of Africa focused on expanding the topical scope of agricul
-
ture work as well. In the late 1980s the Foundation helped the World Wildlife
Fund establish a program of small grants to specialists in developing countries
for studies aimed at tropical forest preservation. The Foundation also searched
for alternative, and more comprehensive, ways of measuring the impact of
technological change. To this end, it provided grants for detailed assessments
of new agriculture technologies in terms of their impact on various factors—
including labor, nutrition, income, prices, and the environment—through
evaluating rice in China, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh,
and Thailand. The Foundation intended these findings to inform an evalua
-
tion of the effectiveness of their agricultural science work the world over.
Finally, the Foundation invested in education in the industrial world to
support a better understanding of issues affecting international develop
-
ment. It supported the University of London’s Wye College, for example, in
creating a distance-learning masters degree program “stressing economics
Dr. Keith Gough (front), a visiting
researcher from Australia's national
science agency, participated in the
cassava improvement program with
Professor Roger N. Beachy (rear) at
Washington University in St. Louis,
Missouri, in 1988. (Andrew Lipman.
Rockefeller Archive Center.)
202 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 203
and management for professionals working throughout the Third World on
agricultural development projects.” The projects included small farms and as
-
sociated households; agricultural processing and marketing; and government
planning and policy. Likewise, the Foundation provided a grant to a Cornell
University project for identifying essential books and journals valuable for
developing-country researchers and policymakers in the agricultural sciences.
The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (TEEAL) that resulted was made
available in poor countries at no or minimal cost, first in a CD format and later
online. Yet another Foundation-supported project involved agricultural scien
-
tists from both industrial and developing countries, who produced methods
by which developing countries could determine aid priorities for agricultural
biotechnology. Like the rest of the Foundation’s expanded work in the late
1980s, this project retained its applicability to agricultural development in
neglected regions of the world.
Innovation Consistent With Tradition
Biotechnology represented an important innovation in the Rockefeller
Foundation’s historic efforts to apply science to the goal of increasing
food security. It also represented an important new tool for address
-
ing a matrix of development concerns, including health, population, and
environmental sciences. Although this work aimed to be universally useful,
the Foundation by the late 1980s and 1990s increasingly believed that its
mission—“to promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world”—
should be focused on poor and marginalized people. While investors in
the private sector funded the development of biotechnology to provide
products and services for affluent communities in industrialized nations,
the Rockefeller Foundation intended to ensure that biotechnology would
deliver benefits to developing nations as well.
One region, above all others, seemed to demand the attention of the
Foundation and of other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well
as private foundations in what some called “the third sector.” By the late
1990s it was clear that sub-Saharan Africa had not benefited from the Green
Revolution or the technological innovations of biotechnology as much as
other parts of the world. As the Foundation contemplated its future, Africa
loomed large on the horizon.
Exploring the Ramifications
of Biotechnology
As a pioneer in plant biotechnology research, the
Rockefeller Foundation recognizes that biosafety
regulations, intellectual property rights, and public
acceptance of genetically modified organisms have
emerged as major impediments to the adoption of
new crop varieties that have the potential to improve
agricultural production and human nutrition. With
grant funding, the Foundation launched a series
of initiatives designed to better understand these
constraints and to foster constructive dialogues
seeking to find common ground among those with
varying viewpoints concerning these issues.
From 2000 to 2002 the Foundation funded a
study by the Meridian Institute, which “issue mapped”
current questions related to biotechnology across
the globe. The Foundation then sponsored a series
of conversations and training programs that helped
developing countries strengthen their capacity to
implement more effective programs dealing with
biosafety, intellectual property management, and
public awareness.
Through Meridian the Foundation helped launch
a Food Security and AgBiotech news service that
provides free updates and information from a broad
spectrum of sources to all concerned parties. The
Foundation helped create and funded the operations
of the Public Intellectual Property Resource for
Agriculture to facilitate collaborative intellectual
property management among public-sector
agricultural research institutions. The Foundation
also gave grants to the International Rice Research
Institute to enable it to help selected Asian countries,
with large populations vulnerable to Vitamin A
deficiency, to conduct the field test and biosafety
assessments required for regulatory approval of
Golden Rice.
204 Chapter Nine: Beyond the Political Debate Food & Prosperity 205
206 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 207
The “selective exclusion from the benefits of agricultural science
has been especially pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa,” the
Rockefeller Foundation said in its 2004 annual report. It was a
frank admission. “For decades,” the report continued, “funders of
international development programs have been frustrated by the difficulty
of bringing the benefits of higher crop yields to many of the worlds poorest
communities and farmers.”
The Foundation cited a “tangle of reasons” for the continued exclusion,
including “complex weather conditions, limited government capacity, scant
infrastructure, and markets for both inputs and crops that remain concentrated in cities and coastal areas.” Finding a solution would be a long story
that is still unfolding today.
The Rockefeller Foundation had worked in different capacities and
various locations in Africa throughout the second half of the twentieth
century, with initiatives focused largely on areas such as public health and
university development. In the 1980s it began to imbue its Africa work with
more emphasis on agriculture. Despite the increased attention, farming and
food supply problems in the region persisted. Many within the Foundation
began to believe that the Green Revolution, which sparked such dramatic
changes in key areas in Latin America and Asia, had bypassed Africa. As the
work of the 1990s developed, the Foundation increasingly looked for ways to
cultivate a Green Revolution for Africa.
Agricultural Sciences: Concerns of the 1990s
“An America that has been complacent and satisfied in the eighties,”
Rockefeller Foundation President Peter Goldmark wrote in 1991,
“now becomes uneasy and troubled.” Like many others, Goldmark
was disturbed by the new global tensions that emerged after the Cold War.
“When the freeze of the Cold War lifted,” he wrote,
“there emerged a much more violent and uncertain
world than we had hoped to find.”
At the same time, the Foundation enjoyed increasing financial prosperity. Its endowment doubled from
about one billion to two billion dollars in the 1980s,
and reached three billion dollars in the mid-1990s.
Goldmark used the additional endowment to expand
the Foundation’s programming, arguing that the new
food & prosperity
Chapter X
a green revolution
for africa
The International Rice Research Institute
formed part of the rice biotechnology
network supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation in the late 1980s and early
1990s. The Foundation’s funding in 1987
helped Dr. Lesley Sitch, the institute’s
associate cytogeneticist, transfer useful
genes from wild rice into domesticated
varieties. (Rockefeller Archive Center.)
208 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 209
decade required something “quite different” from what he called “the romantic interventionism of the 1960s” or the “minimalist doctrine of the 1980s.”
It was in this context of both prosperity and tectonic shifts after the Cold
War that Goldmark served the majority of his tenure as president. He continued to build on the established operating structure of the Foundation to
expand its abilities without scattering the focus of its work. The Foundation
increased its funding for the International Program to Support Science-Based
Development, which encompassed Agricultural, Health, and Population
Sciences, as well as Global Environment. It also added an African Initiatives
program to address the needs of the continent more directly.
Biotechnology continued to be a pillar of the Foundation’s work, with
a focus on supporting research in the rice biotechnology network that
included Cornell and Purdue Universities, CIAT in Colombia, and IRRI in the
Philippines. In the eight years leading up to 1992, the Foundation appropriated more than $40 million for rice research. The Foundation thus stimulated
a major achievement early in the decade with the development of rice varieties demonstrating durable, long-term resistance to blast fungus, a widespread
and damaging disease-producing organism. Complementing the focus on
rice, the Foundation also continued its historic funding of maize research for
higher yields.
By 1993 the Foundation defined its core strategy for Agricultural
Sciences in terms of improving the yield of a handful of staple crops. It
aimed to “increase food production in selected developing countries” with
a “20% increase in rice productivity and 50% increase in maize productivity by 2005.” In Africa, the Foundation concentrated on Kenya, Malawi,
Uganda, and Zimbabwe as the agricultural regions from which improved
productivity could be spread to the rest of the sub-Saharan continent.
The Foundation also funded research and networking on a smaller scale
for other food crops important to the developing world, including sorghum
and millet, both staple crops in parts of Asia and Africa. A genetic map of a
legume genus created by a Foundation-funded scientist helped researchers
working with cowpeas and mung beans, major tropical legumes. And the
Foundation continued to champion cassava, which was “once regarded as a
backstop crop to tide the rural poor over in ‘hungry season,’” but had recently
“emerged as a nutritional and commercial mainstay in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Like the work with maize, cassava research aimed to help both Africa and the
rest of the developing world.
Rockefeller Foundation-funded researchers reached a watershed moment
in 1996 with the discovery that all eight types of cereals, providing 70 percent
of the food consumed by humans, share many nearly identical chromosome
segments with rice. This discovery allowed much of the knowledge developed
by the International Program on Rice Biotechnology to be utilized for genetic
research and engineering on all cereals.
In addition to crop research, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a
number of subsidiary areas relevant to agriculture. It supported an ongoing
cooperative project to help developing countries obtain genetic-engineering
technologies and products, with attention to ethical, social, cultural, and
scientific concerns. It articulated one goal of funding biotechnology research
networks to accelerate the transfer of knowledge between scientists working
in the developed and developing countries. The Foundation also funded
various studies of the impact of the Green Revolution in different regions,
including a report on the history of Indonesian rice that covered the period
between 1970 and 1990.
Many of the subsidiary projects concentrated on Africa. The Foundation
placed a priority on research and technology that addressed problems of
soil-nutrient depletion and declining yield caused by pests and diseases. The
Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Programme (TSBF) in Kenya, for example,
included field research at sites in Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe that addressed
the biological processes in tropical soil to improve crop yields. The Foundation
also supported the Forum on Agricultural Resource Husbandry, which worked
to strengthen graduate education in Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
The forum awarded competitive grants for master’s degree students to study
soil- and crop-management field research with an eye on policy and farmers,
and functioned as a research network linking more than a dozen institutions
in eastern and southern Africa. In Malawi, a program started in the late 1980s
sought to increase maize production among small farmers by looking at soil,
agro-forestry practices, weeding, and pest and disease damage measurement.
The Foundation supported similar ongoing work in Kenya, Uganda, and
Zimbabwe. It also funded efforts to apply the advances in rice research that
had been made in Asia to the work being done in Africa, by crossing Asian and
African strains to create new high-yield varieties well-suited to African conditions in their resistance to drought, weeds, and pathogens.
As the nutritional and crop yield crisis in Africa deepened in the 1990s,
the Foundation became aware that it needed a more focused approach.
Many African nations neared a crisis point. Food, health, and basic needs
were out of reach for many people. This was especially striking in the field
of agriculture. Despite substantial policy reforms, most of sub-Saharan
Africa had seen only limited improvement in agricultural productivity,
and few of the indirect growth effects that had accompanied agricultural
improvement in other developing regions.
210 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 211
These shortcomings shook the faith of some in the development
community that agriculture could be a vehicle for progress in Africa. The
predicament fueled a “resurgence of ‘agro-pessimism,’” and led some scholars, such as Luc Christiaensen and Lionel Demery, to describe this era as one
that “led many to question agriculture’s potential to reduce poverty.” Most
sub-Saharan African countries were different than Asia in key ways, including the condition and under-development of their infrastructure, irrigation,
human capital, and access to credit. The global economic context was also
different. Compared to the experience of the 1960s, African nations in the
1990s faced a much more competitive external trading environment. At the
close of the 1990s, under the leadership of a new president, the Foundation
began to grapple with addressing these issues in the context of its work in
African agriculture.
New Century, New Horizons
Gordon Conway succeeded Peter Goldmark as president of the
Rockefeller Foundation in 1998. An agricultural ecologist by
training, Conway had focused his academic work extensively on
sustainable agricultural development. Before coming to the Foundation
he had conducted research in Malaysia, at Imperial College of London,
and in various locations in Asia and the Middle East on behalf of the
Ford Foundation, World Bank, and USAID. He was known for pioneering
Integrated Pest Management in the 1960s and for articulating the concept
of sustainable agriculture in the 1970s. At the time he was selected to
become president of the Rockefeller Foundation, he was serving as vicechancellor at the University of Sussex.
In many ways, the trustees’ decision to recruit Conway reflected a
profound exercise in institutional humility. Conway had co-written an
account of agricultural development that was critical of many of the
working methods the Foundation had employed for more than four
decades. His book, Unwelcome Harvest: Agriculture & Pollution, published
in 1991, took industrialized farming to task for the waste and pollution
created by synthetic pesticides and fertilizers as well as silage, livestock
slurry, and other farm processes. These pollutants, Conway argued, not
only negatively affected the global environment and human health, they
were also unsustainable and were impeding the goal of higher agricultural
productivity in the long run. Almost a decade before his presidency, Conway
had concluded that agricultural development should cultivate a system of
global farming that both polluted less and was more efficient and productive.
Conway was a vocal proponent of these ideas
from within the agricultural aid community. In 1995
he presented a report to CGIAR titled “Sustainable
Agriculture for a Food Secure World,” which advocated
a new Green Revolution—one in which natural resources management and knowledge of local farming
communities were just as important as productivity.
A few years later he published an elaborated version
of this argument in The Doubly Green Revolution: Food
For All in the 21st Century. This book continued to stress
sustainability and the effects of agriculture on human
health and the global environment. It also branched
out to address farmers’ economic concerns and the
unequal distribution of the benefits of agricultural
science to the rural poor. Whereas the first Green
Revolution started with the science and technology
of creating high-yielding food crops and then tried to
reach farmers, Conway argued that the new, “doubly”
Green Revolution “has to reverse the chain of logic”
by seeking research priorities based on rural demands.
“Its goal,” Conway wrote, “is the creation of food
security and sustainable livelihoods for the poor.”
It was fitting that publication of this book in
the U.S. coincided with Conway assuming the
Foundation’s presidency. The book aimed to be prescriptive, neither losing
its accessibility nor oversimplifying complex matters to be dealt with
through public policy and private-sector investment. It took a pragmatic
view of the international context in which agricultural development
operated, but remained hopeful, ending with a rallying cry to address the
world’s need for food. “Now is not the time to sit back and congratulate
ourselves on what has been achieved over the past thirty years,” Conway
concluded. “It is the next thirty years that will be the true test of whether
we can harness the power of science and technology . . . for those millions of
poor and hungry who deserve and have a right to enough to eat.”
Like Goldmark before him, Conway acknowledged that the geopolitical
shifts of the 1990s were a two-sided coin. He argued that the end of the Cold
War had not brought about an increase in global stability. While “conflict
between East and West has declined,” he wrote, there existed a “fastgrowing divide between the world of the peoples, countries and regions
who ‘belong’ and those who are excluded.” This new reality made food
Sir Gordon Conway was president
of the Rockefeller Foundation from
1998 to 2004. Conway advocated for a
"doubly green revolution" that took into
account the needs of small farmers as
well as global environmental concerns.
(The Rockefeller Foundation.)
212 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 213
security all the more important. Addressing hunger
worked to offset the polarized state of affairs and calm
global unrest.
Upon assuming his post, Conway emphasized the
legacy of the Foundation’s attention to local needs
and local responsibility in its international work. He
affirmed his commitment to the early Rockefeller Foundation framework
of ensuring that a community receiving grants from the Foundation would
have “its own will and its own resources to meet the need.”He also called the
Foundation’s attention to issues of globalization, arguing that the distinction
between international and national grantmaking should be dropped to “seek
a more integrated global approach.” That approach would include partnerships with key social actors drawn from governments, the private sector, and
non-governmental organizations.
As the Rockefeller Foundation’s policies evolved during Conway’s tenure,
they reflected a continuing commitment to agricultural science, but with new
concerns for the unintended consequences of technology. During Conway’s
first year as president, the Foundation adjusted its course and defined a new
organizational structure. It began making grants under four core program
themes: Food Security, Creativity and Culture, Working Communities, and
Health Equity. “Cross themes” were meant to institutionalize an interdisciplinary and integrated approach. These themes and cross themes aimed to
help the world’s poor in an integrated and interdisciplinary fashion, grounded
in focused regional activities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the West
Coast of the United States.
The Foundation defined the goal of its new Food Security work: to
“help achieve food security for all through the generation of agricultural
policies, institutions and innovations that can provide sustainable
livelihoods for the rural poor in regions of developing countries bypassed
by the Green Revolution.” This reorientation was significant in that it
explicitly subsumed agricultural science under food production, and
acknowledged the shortcomings of past work.
The Foundation gave grants under the auspices of Food Security in a few
well-defined categories. The first was “Enabling Farmer Participation,” which
was based on the premise that farmers must be engaged to not only articulate
their own needs, but to design and implement innovations. Grantmaking
focused on involving farmers in “setting priorities for and conducting plant
breeding, developing seed production and distribution systems, and improving agronomic practices.” The second category was “Applying Science and
Technology,” based on the idea that cooperation between local scientists and
farmers with scientists in the fields of biotechnology, plant breeding, agroecology, and policy could overcome barriers to food security. Grantmaking targeted
projects that would accelerate the “discovery, development and application of
new genetic and agroecological strategies” to promote yield stability, resilient
crops, and human nutrition, and to prevent environmental degradation.
The third grant category within Food Security was “Strengthening
Policies and Institutions.” This program emphasized professional development and institution building that could strengthen local organizations to
influence key policy, institutional, and technological levers in the interest
of food security. Grantmaking aimed to foster national support for smallholder agriculture and to strengthen institutions that integrated scientific
and participatory approaches to innovation. In all three categories, grants
were global in scope, but focused especially on sub-Saharan Africa and
Southeast Asia. The Rockefeller Foundation gave grants to institutions, but
scientists from these regions who were nominated by grantee institutions
also received research grants and postdoctoral fellowships.
Other initiatives besides Food Security focused on agricultural issues.
Under Global Inclusion, for example, the Foundation gave grants to promote
“Global Dialogue on Plant Biotechnology.” These grants aimed to help
Created in 1998, the Food Security team
of the Rockefeller Foundation worked
with farmers, scientists, and governments
to increase food availability. (Jonas
Bendiksen. The Rockefeller Foundation.)
214 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 215
communities and nations address concerns about plant biotechnology and
shape policies to cultivate a more stable policy environment for research.
They were offered particularly to “developing-country stakeholders.” The
Foundation also developed an Africa Regional Program in 2000, which
focused much of its support on Makerere University in Uganda. It supported
building human and institutional capacity in agriculture, health, finance,
education, planning, and public administration.
The Foundation worked with other philanthropies at this time to support
higher education across sub-Saharan Africa. Its “Partnerships for Africa’s
Renewal” component began exploratory work in 2000, based on the premise that
efforts in food, health, culture, and work required “broader contextual and developmental issues that shape the contribution of the capacity that is being built.”
In the effort to deepen its engagement in Africa, two of the regional offices
opened by the Rockefeller Foundation during this period were located there.
The Nairobi office, led by Cheikh Mbacke, and the Harare office, led by Akin
Adesina (who was appointed Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture in 2010), employed seven full-time program officers in 2000. Other agricultural initiatives
in Africa in the first years of the twenty-first century included the Agricultural
Productivity and Food Security Task Force in Zimbabwe, the Maize Productivity
Task Force in Malawi, and the Sustainable Community Oriented Development
Programme in Kenya. The Foundation also funded the National Agricultural
Research Organization of Uganda to release new maize varieties with improved
disease resistance and more efficient nitrogen utilization. The organization
developed these new varieties specifically so that farmers could save seed from
their harvest for the next planting.
The Foundation contributed some funding to projects in Asia and Latin
America, recognizing that, despite successes in these regions, the Green
Revolution had bypassed certain sectors of society. “Large numbers of rural poor
people,” it stated in 2000, “remain in poverty,” and many are “chronically undernourished.” In Africa, however, the Foundation worked to create a more holistic,
systemic development initiative, aiming to “build the capacity of African
institutions and strengthen their commitment to serving smallholder farmers.”
It also began to make good on Conway’s intention to promote local input and
responsibility, and to cultivate agricultural prosperity by working with the
natural environment rather than just petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.
All of these initiatives helped to revitalize the Rockefeller Foundation’s
global perspective at a time when the world’s leaders struggled to cope with
new tensions. The September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center
ignited war in the Middle East and raised new concerns regarding global terrorism. Growing economic instability raised further concerns regarding increases
in income inequality. All of these issues would confront the Foundation and
a new president after Gordon Conway stepped down in 2004.
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
J
udith Rodin, a prominent research psychologist and academic, came to
the Rockefeller Foundation from the University of Pennsylvania, where
she was the first woman to head an Ivy League institution. Rodin had
served on the faculty at Yale, was dean of the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences, and served as provost before she left to lead Penn in 1994. Over
the course of her career, she had been involved in various science and
development issues, participated in influential global forums, and written or
co-written many articles and books, including Public
Discourse in America (2003).
Like Rockefeller Foundation presidents before
her, Rodin began her tenure with an organizational
review of the Foundation and its programs. She
emphasized the importance of globalization and its
effects on the poor and vulnerable. Near the end of
her first year as president she declared that “today
more than ever, exclusion is poverty, and vice versa.”
A pioneer in her field, Dr. Judith Rodin,
the first woman to lead an Ivy League
institution, became president of the
Rockefeller Foundation in 2005. The
founding of the Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa was one of the earliest
initiatives of her presidency, carried
out together with the Gates Foundation
(The Rockefeller Foundation).
216 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 217
Rodin called on the Foundation, along with its partners and grantees,
to find new ways for “poor people and communities to better participate in
the global web of information, creativity, care and commerce.” Under her
leadership, the Foundation began to focus on “Smart Globalization” that
supports a “world in which globalization’s benefits are more widely shared
and social, economic, health, and environmental challenges are more
easily weathered.”
Organizational changes that followed the review process in 2006
reflected this new focus. The Foundation noted that, throughout its history,
“what is remembered is how we have been able to improve lives.” To this
end, in 2007 Rodin reorganized the Foundation’s work into new “issue
areas” focusing on: “Basic Survival Safeguards,” “Global Health,” “Climate
& Environment,” “Urbanization,” and “Social & Economic Security.”
Agriculture was included under the first of these programs as part of an
effort to secure “food, water, housing, and infrastructure” the world over.
These new initiatives retained a close focus on Africa, where agriculture
continued to experience a crisis lasting into the twenty-first century. A 2007
World Bank study focusing on Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, and Tanzania
concluded that “enhancing agricultural productivity is a critical starting
point in designing effective poverty reduction strategy, especially in lowincome countries.” Though it placed little faith in the ability of agriculture
alone to lift African countries out of poverty, empirical evidence seemed
to indicate that indirect growth effects would make funding agriculture
worthwhile. And the Rockefeller Foundation continued to believe that
agriculture and food security were critical to Africa’s future.
In the first years of the 21st century, the Foundation both funded and
invested in a network of small businesses to develop, package, and distribute seeds, fertilizers and other materials for small farmers in Africa and
to create outlets for larger harvests, hoping that market forces would help
develop distribution networks for seeds and soil nutrients. Likewise, the
Foundation supported cereal banks to help farmers in a given community
work together to store and sell their produce to get a better return. In keeping with the value it placed on local input and sustainable development,
the Foundation funded an expansion of “resident expertise” in agricultural
sciences, on both the individual and institutional levels. “Only Africans,”
it stated, “can ultimately solve Africa’s problems.” In 2005 the Foundation
also gave a grant to the new African Centre for Crop Improvement at
South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal, which granted doctorates and
conducted original research relevant to African environments across the
continent. That grant also supported various international research studies
on soil productivity, improved crop varieties, and public goods and markets
for poor farmers.
Although many of these initiatives helped build institutional capacity
within African agricultural economies, the Foundation increasingly saw
the need for a bolder and more integrated approach. In 2006 it opened a new
era when it joined with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to launch
the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). “It is time,” the
Rockefeller Foundation asserted in its annual report, “for a second Green
Revolution, aimed squarely at Africa. It is Africa’s turn.”
AGRA built on the lessons learned during almost a century of working
on agricultural development and rural poverty. The new initiative aimed to
tackle the African agriculture problem by implementing more widespread
use of high-yielding crop varieties. “If better seeds could reach the farmer,”
the Foundation stated, “along with techniques for using them effectively,
the inefficiency and risk of food shortages could be reduced or eliminated.”
Additional work would focus on productive seed combinations, added
soil nutrients from improved fertilizers, and involvement of farmers in
breeding, testing, and selecting seeds suitable to Africa’s various regions.
The Rockefeller Foundation articulated the goal for this work in terms of
increased yield and its effect on human prosperity and health, stating in
2006 that the aim was to “develop 400 new crop varieties and to eliminate
hunger and poverty for tens of millions of people within ten years.”
AGRA also built on the Rockefeller Foundation’s more recent initiatives.
Its six-year-old effort to improve crop varieties had established a “credible,
promising beachhead” in parts of the continent, from which it was “breaking out,” with Gates Foundation collaboration, in 2006. This previous work
took on the more modest aim of reducing the hardships of subsistence farming and addressing the increasing chronic risks of shortages and starvation.
AGRA, however, required a “more expansive vision.” The Foundation stated
that a “successful revolution in African agriculture would depend on the
growth of stronger market systems, better infrastructure, and the technology to make the various transactions efficient.”
As the Rockefeller Foundation committed to this more ambitious goal,
new partners came to the table. In the seven years leading up to 2006, the
Foundation had spent nearly $150 million on Green Revolution work in
Africa. AGRA received that much in its first grant appropriation, with $100
million coming from the Gates Foundation and the remaining $50 million
from the Rockefeller Foundation, to be distributed over five years. Key
elements of this first grant supported the Program for Africa’s Seed Systems
(PASS), which funded research to develop improved crop varieties; training
218 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 219
of a new generation of African crop scientists; distribution
of improved seeds to farmers; development of a network of
African agro-dealers; and the monitoring, evaluating, and
managing of these PASS projects. In its first years, AGRA
funded nearly 30 organizations in eight African countries
for training African crop scientists at African universities
to work within their communities. In addition to providing
funds, the Rockefeller Foundation seconded two experienced program officers to AGRA—Joe DeVries to lead the
work on seeds and Akin Adesina to lead the work on building markets.
AGRA also worked to improve access for small farmers to affordable
fertilizers and irrigation. It focused in 2007, for example, on soil health
and fertility, which included both petrochemical and organic fertilizer
distribution and education. “Africa’s soils,” AGRA states, “are significantly
depleted,” and thus warrant “application of fertilizers combined with soil
fertility management” to replenish soils and promote food security at a
lower chemical level than many developed countries.
The Alliance acknowledged that conditions in Africa were different
from those in Asia and Latin America, requiring a different approach for
the new Green Revolution. AGRA valued the lessons learned from the
earlier Green Revolution, but recognized that new models needed to be
developed for Africa. As the Alliance pointed out, given the poor soil quality
in Africa, a key objective was “to make sure that the African experience is
more environmentally sensitive.” AGRA likewise aimed to “conserve and
promote the diversity of African crops, cropping systems and livestock for
future generations.” It also took into account that “most of the smallholder
farmers are women and therefore their access to land, appropriate technologies, and affordable finance is critical.”
As the Alliance developed, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundation
partnership provided critical funding that allowed AGRA to expand
its work. In 2007, former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan
became the first chair of the Alliance. By 2010, AGRA worked in 13
countries, pursuing a “system-wide approach” to stimulate gains in the
quantity and quality of food crops in sub-Saharan Africa. Its Market
Access Program resulted in greatly increased income and decreased food
insecurity for farming families.
Strategically, the Alliance concentrated investment in the “breadbasket
region” of four main countries: Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, and Tanzania.
It also supported work in South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya,
Ethiopia, Rwanda, Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Reflecting the historic
pattern of the most successful Rockefeller Foundation initiatives, AGRA’s
core funding expanded to include resources provided by governments
as well as other agencies and international institutions. AGRA was an
independent organization by 2012, with its own board and governance
structure whose “approach and leadership are uniquely African.” By 2020
AGRA aims to cut food insecurity in half in 20 African countries, while
doubling the incomes of 20 million small farmers and putting 15 countries
on track to attain and sustain a Green Revolution.
Looking Forward
The worldwide economic crisis that began in 2008 had a profound
impact on development efforts. As Judith Rodin said in her “president’s
letter” for the 2008 annual report, “people around the world found
their communities in crisis” as “financial distress became financial disaster.”
Among other effects, “food security eroded and riots erupted.” Yet, as Rodin
observed, “this time of turbulence and tumult was also infused with reason
The Alliance for a Green Revolution
in Africa focuses on agricultural problems and solutions that are uniquely
African. An emphasis on biodiversity
includes the promotion of root crops,
such as those grown on this farm in
Malawi in 2006. (Jonas Bendiksen.
The Rockefeller Foundation.)
220 Chapter Ten: A Green Revolution for Africa Food & Prosperity 221
for optimism and hope,” as philanthropists responded to efforts to promote
the “well-being” of people across the globe in a time of crisis. The Foundation
itself was founded during an economic recession, she pointed out, and has survived and done good works through 18 subsequent economic contractions.
Climate change has presented new challenges to agricultural science in
recent years. “Food security,” the Foundation stated in 2008, “slips further
from reach as climate-sensitive agricultural ecosystems deteriorate.”
Climate change affects soil fertility in rural villages, traditional habitats for
hunting and grazing, and access to clean water for drinking, fishing, and
irrigation. The Foundation has taken very seriously the scientific predictions
about the outcomes of these effects. According to its 2008 annual report, a
Stanford University researcher supported by the Foundation suggests that
climate change could depress maize production in southern Africa up to 30
percent in the next two decades. A scientist from Yale estimates that African
smallholders relying on rain-fed land could suffer a financial loss of $28 per
hectare each year.
Yet, as with the economic downturn, the Foundation sees in this new
set of dangers new challenges. It seeks to help smallholder farmers at an
ever-larger scale, primarily in Africa, by equipping them with its standard
tool belt of agricultural technologies and practices, allowing them to sow
resilient seeds, gain access to affordable fertilizers, better irrigate land,
move product to market, and earn fair prices. Additionally, the Foundation
aims to “achieve food security and spur economic growth over the long run”
by “concurrently preparing for the effects of changing local and regional
climates.” While it remains committed to AGRA, the Foundation also
searches for the “next generation of agricultural innovations,” particularly
“those that can strengthen smallholders’ resilience to climate change.”
Expanding its scope, the Rockefeller Foundation has funded efforts
to “bridge disciplines of climate and agricultural science in African
universities and think tanks,” helping farmers prepare for and cope
with imminent environmental changes. It has also invested in a way
to safeguard the accomplishments of the Green Revolution through
innovative weather insurance products designed to be affordable for
African farmers. Technology in other areas has likewise been a key tool,
with the Foundation supporting the World Food Programme’s Climate
and Disaster Risk Solutions team as it developed Africa RiskView, a
software tool that allows scientists to “predict and assess the impact of
severe droughts on food security throughout the continent.” Ideally, Africa
RiskView will allow preemptive response to climate-related food crises,
including famine. Likewise, African Risk Capacity, a sovereign insurance
program, provides African countries with immediate
relief funding when a RiskView-documented drought
threatens or causes famine.
All of these new avenues of funding highlight the
Foundation’s vision for the future. Throughout the
1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century,
it has sought to understand agricultural needs across
the world and recalibrate its work accordingly. It has gone from concentrating on other regions to focusing immense funding on Africa, and from a
highly specialized focus on biotechnology to a broader strategy that sees
biotechnology as part of a range of helpful initiatives. More than ever, the
Foundation is focused on innovation. As technology rapidly advances, and
new threats of economic distress and climate change loom, this expansive
and cutting-edge outlook serves the Foundation as a compass in its efforts
at agricultural development and food security for all.
New strategies for agricultural
development include marketing
strategies that ensure fair prices
for small-holder farmers in subSaharan Africa. (Jonas Bendiksen.
The Rockefeller Foundation.)
222 Food & Prosperity 223
An Epochal Contribution, A New Century Ahead
Near the end of his life, famed plant pathologist Elvin
Stakman, who had been part of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s original survey team in Mexico, recalled
a journey he took with Mexican agricultural scientist Benjamín
Ortega Cantero. Ortega had studied with Stakman at the
University of Minnesota during World War II, with the help
of fellowships provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and the
Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. After returning to Mexico
he went to work for the Office of Special Studies. In 1952 he
was appointed director of the Ministry’s Northern Agricultural
Zone, with an office in Torreón in the state of Coahuila.
On this particular day, Stakman and Ortega were in a
pickup truck racing over dirt roads to inspect wheat fields. As
they bounced along, the two men were “trying to develop a
philosophy of the operations [of the Rockefeller Foundation] in
Mexico.” Suddenly, Ortega slammed on the brakes and, according to Stakman, glared at two farmworkers who were resting in
the shade of some trees. Through the open window, he chastised
the workers for not sticking to their fieldwork. But the men
were unabashed. One explained that indeed they were working, and they would work harder after a little rest, but they had
retreated to the shade for a moment to “philosophize” on the
future of agriculture in Mexico.
As he told this story in 1967, Stakman was well aware of
the irony. “That’s just exactly what Benjamín Ortega and I had
food & prosperity conclusion
224 Conclusion 225
Elvin Stakman (center, with pipe) helped
shape the Rockefeller Foundation’s
agricultural policy for several decades.
He was a mentor to many agricultural
scientists, and he helped convince
policymakers that a revolution in
agricultural production was possible.
(Rockefeller Archive Center.)
Food & Prosperity
Since the Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913,
its leaders have looked to science and technology to increase
agricultural yields. This science had, according to Stakman,
“made an epochal contribution” to human welfare. Engineering
these contributions required massive investment in research
and in people. With his competitive intellect and inner drive,
Stakman had been part of the first generation of agriculturalists
who linked farming to public health through the new discoveries of nutrition. His talented students at Minnesota—including
George Harrar, Norman Borlaug, and men like Benjamín Ortega
Cantero (who would become undersecretary of agriculture in
Mexico in the 1970s)—were his “gold nuggets.” He had trained
and mentored them as scientists under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation, later drawing on them for his philanthropic
pursuits and building a network of innovators in the process.
His work, in combination with the work of others in the Rockefeller Foundation, had laid the groundwork for a revolution in
food production.
Over the course of a century, the Foundation has worked
across divides of race, socioeconomics, language, and nationality. The tension between technology and culture permeated all
of the Foundation’s agricultural initiatives, from the American
South to sub-Saharan Africa. Over the course of those years, the
Foundation learned that the effort to implement new agricultural technologies required as much sensitivity to the farmers
in the field as it did knowledge of hybrid seeds or biotechnology.
The Foundation worked with a variety of actors to
bridge the divide, starting with outside agents like Booker T.
been doing,” he said. Indeed, as the truck pulled away, Ortega
had turned to him and confessed, “Maybe we set them a
bad example.”
Stakman’s interviewer asked about critics of the Rockefeller
Foundation who suggested that American technology and
resources had been wasted in Latin America because the efforts
ran counter to the culture of the people. Stakman’s answer
focused on an abiding tension in academia between ideas that
are theoretical, or embedded in the high culture of learning, and
knowledge that is utilitarian or technological—in other words,
applicable to immediate human problems. He acknowledged that
the tension between these two ways of thinking lay at the heart
of the work to which he had devoted his life.
“In all of the agricultural sciences,” he said, “when you’re
trying to do something practical, very often you’re utilizing
standardized methods and you’re not necessarily inventive, and
you’re not necessarily using the imagination—that is, scientific
imagination. You’re not projecting into the future. You’re not
determining policies—not determining truths. You’re not really aiming to discover new truths. What you’re doing is to use
knowledge and develop skills to apply it.”
But as Stakman had discovered over the course of a long
career, the process of shaping any regional, national, or global
philosophy of agriculture required other ways of thinking and
engaging. From farmers to consumers, scientists to bureaucrats,
philanthropists to entrepreneurs, the process of systemic innovation was far more complex than the search for technological
solutions to narrow practical problems.
conclusion
226 Conclusion 227
food & prosperity
Food & Prosperity
of farmers by raising their yields through enhancing cultivation and fighting pests. Farmers who could increase their
incomes would be more capable of supporting public services
like education and public health. In funding an integrated set
of social programs in rural China, however, the Rockefeller
Foundation first acknowledged that farm productivity had
to be connected to nutrition and public health—that the
quantity and quality of production were both important. In
the 1960s and 1970s, the Foundation’s priorities shifted again
as scientists focused on improving production, growing food,
and expanding harvests to keep pace with the rapid rise of
human populations in the emerging nations of the world, in
what must have felt like a never-ending race against famine.
Today, the Foundation’s agricultural initiatives embrace two
additional and interrelated values. Grants and programs seek
to increase the quantity and quality of food while protecting
and sustaining the environment and the community within
which it is produced. In addition, these initiatives work to promote resilience so that the environment and the community
are better able to respond to challenges and crises.
Though the targets of agriculture work have changed
vastly over time, the Foundation has consistently reached out
to the poor and marginalized rural communities around the
world. Within the United States it has worked with the rural
poor. In Europe it focused efforts on Northern and Eastern
areas devastated by World War I. In China, Mexico, Colombia,
Chile, and India, the Foundation worked with poor farmers
and promoted agricultural science as a profession. Since the
Washington and Seaman Knapp. After World War II the
Foundation built its strategy around highly trained staff, assigned to the far corners of the world to live and work among
farmers of different cultures who lacked formal training in
science, but who knew their farms better than any professional.
Finally, beginning in the 1970s, the Foundation came to rely on
a new kind of agent who acted through the third-sector network
of multilateral agencies, non-governmental organizations, and
private foundations investing in international development.
This tension between technology and culture continues
to characterize the Foundation’s work in agriculture and food
security. Those who served as cultural bridges in the past
played a dynamic and important role in this story, because they
were forced to confront the reality, again and again, that while
science and technology offer enormous benefits to humanity,
their effectiveness is bounded by the institutions and communities within which they are applied. The history of agricultural
development has thus been a story of cross-cultural encounters
framed by efforts to apply new solutions to old problems.
To its credit, when a gap developed between good intentions
with bold expectations and failure in the field or limited success
in the laboratory, the Rockefeller Foundation has adapted by
modifying its approaches, listening to criticism, and submitting
itself to vigorous self-evaluation. The most dynamic adaptation
the Foundation made over the century was the willingness to
revise its definition of agricultural prosperity. In the early years
of its work, in the United States and Europe, the purpose of farm
improvement programs was to better the socioeconomic status
conclusion
228 Conclusion 229
food & prosperity
Food & Prosperity
initiatives difficult at times, but also dynamic and responsive
within the Foundation’s history.
Since that first carryall ride down to Mexico so many years
ago, agriculture has assumed a celebrated place of importance
within the Rockefeller Foundation, informing its identity
around the world. Today, as in 1913, the struggle to balance
technology and culture to promote the well-being of humanity
lies at the heart of the process of putting food on the table in
households around the world. As the Rockefeller Foundation
enters its second century, the lessons learned from these efforts
to incorporate ways of life into scientific methods of cultivation
and husbandry continue to inform the work of new generations
of farmers, scientists, philanthropists, and policymakers in
fields, laboratories, conference rooms, and legislative chambers
throughout the world.
1990s more emphasis has been placed on sub-Saharan Africa
precisely because it has remained marginalized in an expanding
global economy.
Exploitation and exclusion formed part of the story of agriculture and poverty in the postcolonial world of the twentieth
century. It took many years for the Rockefeller Foundation to
learn how to work in politically charged environments. The
Foundation was often a victim of powerful historical forces
beyond its control. Foundation officers in China were only partially aware of the ways in which social improvement programs
were incorporated into the struggle between Communists and
Nationalists. And yet the willingness to take risks and embrace
new initiatives also led to stunning successes like Mexico.
The Foundation tried to remain neutral during the most political and violent century in history. It was almost impossible. It was
a problem inherent in philanthropy. The Foundation constantly
searched for a way to work outside the constraints of U.S. foreign
policy and separate from national self-interest, but without challenging those interests. As a result, the Foundation has learned to
work closely with a wide variety of partners, ranging from governments and NGOs to the private sector.
From the beginning, agriculture programs have been integral
to the Foundation’s efforts to improve quality of life for millions
of people. Over the long run, the Foundation has worked to
increase food security, improve health systems, and expand access
to quality education and training as ways to develop individuals,
communities, and nations. Attention to the local and the desire
to build cross-cultural relationships have made agriculture
conclusion
230 Conclusion 231
food & prosperity
Food & Prosperity
232 Food & Prosperity 233
acknowledgments food & prosperity
Acknowledgments
Food & Prosperity has been a group endeavor from start to finish,
and many people deserve great thanks for their contributions.
The book is part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial
initiative. At the Rockefeller Foundation, President Judith
Rodin inspired the project concept. Gary Toenniessen’s support
and willingness to review multiple drafts was invaluable. His
expertise in microbiology and agricultural science, combined
with four decades of work and leadership at the Rockefeller
Foundation, helped develop and frame many of the ideas in this
book. Bob Bykofsky and Elizabeth Pena in Records Management
facilitated research of recent materials. The Foundation’s
Centennial team, including Michael Myers, Carolyn Bancroft,
and Charlanne Burke, provided support and input, including
reviewing drafts and providing essential feedback. Kathy
Gomez collected photographs highlighting the Foundation’s
recent work. In the General Counsel’s office, Shari Patrick
and Erica Guyer provided legal guidance. Many people at the
Foundation read manuscript drafts, including Heather Grady
and Neill Coleman. Their work is greatly appreciated. Teneo
Strategy kept us on track for the duration of the project. Many
thanks to Michael Coakley, Andy Maas, and Max Dworin for
their tireless work.
None of this would be possible without the staff at the
Rockefeller Archive Center. Jack Meyers, RAC president, and
James Allen Smith, its vice president, welcomed our team
and provided continuous institutional support. Barb Shubinski
and Teresa Iacobelli, the RAC’s Rockefeller Foundation
Centennial Research Fellows, generously coordinated with us,
sharing ideas and research. The reference team applied their
considerable skill to our efforts. Thanks to all the archivists,
and especially Michele Hiltzik, assistant director and head
of reference, and Tom Rosenbaum, as well as to Nancy Adgent,
Mary Ann Quinn, and Monica Blank who provided valuable
support at critical junctures.
Many worked to turn the manuscript into a beautiful
book. The Pentagram team, including Michael Gericke, Matt
McInerney, and Olya Domoradova, skillfully designed the series,
according each individual book its own identity. Ernie Grafe
provided diligent content and copyediting. Mindy Johnston and
Leigh Armstrong handled photo rights management.
The Vantage Point team contributed immeasurably. Lois
Facer managed photographs, helped with research, and provided
administrative support. Claire Wilkens also helped select
photographs. Sam Hurst facilitated writing and content development, helping to add punch and verve to key passages. Eric
Abrahamson masterfully edited the manuscript, contributing
historical integrity and journalistic clarity. He also served as
sounding board and project manager, cultivating thematic elements and keeping everything coordinated and on track. Thanks
also to my family and friends for their irreplaceable support.
All of the hands that helped sculpt this book shaped and
improved it for the better. Any errors or omissions that remain
are entirely my own.
Amanda Carroll Waterhouse
List of Illustrations Food & Prosperity 235
list of illustrations
234
food & prosperity
2-3 American and Filipino students
at IRRI (1980).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
4-5 Vietnamese boy in field (2006). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
6-7 Warren Weaver, Raymond Fosdick, and
Wilbur G. Downs in Mexico (c. 1945).
Photo by J.G. Harrar.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
8-9 Woman and grain (2005). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
17 Ugandan woman in field (2007). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
18 Survey Commission to Mexico (1941). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
30-31 General Education Board officers (1915). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
34 Seaman Asahel Knapp (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
36 Map of GEB and USDA work (1914). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
38 Boys Club with agents (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
40 Boys Corn Club county prizewinners
(no date).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
41 Women’s canning club, Alabama (1915). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
42 Booker T. Washington (no date). Source: Library of Congress.
43 District Demonstration Agent T.M.
Campbell and Jesup wagon, Alabama
(no date).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
46-47 Daw Jacks’ farm, Arkansas (1908). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
50 Embroidered flour sack (1919). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
53 Finland Girls Club (1927). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
54 Sweden Boys Club (1930). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
55 Hungarian Village Association (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
56 Albert R. Mann (no date). Photo by Kaiden—Keystone. Source:
Rockefeller Archive Center.
57 Girl in Malawi (2006). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
58-59 Holland Agricultural University (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
61 Mass Education Movement officials
(c. 1935)
Photo by Selskar Gunn.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
63 John D. Rockefeller Sr. &
John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1921).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
64 Nanking University College
of Agriculture building (1924).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
66 John B. Grant (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
67 Peking Union Medical College
public health students (1930).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
68 Mass Education Movement winners
at agricultural exhibit (c. 1935).
Photo by Selskar Gunn.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center
70 Selskar M. Gunn (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
71 Mass Education Movement selecting
cotton for plant improvement (c. 1935).
Photo by Selskar Gunn.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
74-75 Rice paddy in Vietnam (2006). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
77 Farmer and sons walking in the face
of a dust storm. Cimarron County,
Oklahoma (1936).
Photo by Arthur Rothstein.
Source: Library of Congress.
81 Beardsley Ruml (1940). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
84 Henry A. Wallace (1938). Photo by Harris & Ewing.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
86 Harvard Department of Nutrition
(c. 1945).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
87 Brookings Institution (1939). Photo by Leet Brothers.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
88 University of Toronto silt lamp
eye examination (1942).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
89 Vanderbilt University Nutrition
Study (1950).
Photo by Ken Spain.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
90 North Carolina “carrot party” (1947). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
List of Illustrations Food & Prosperity 237
list of illustrations
236
food & prosperity
92 Mississippi School Health Nutrition
Service (no date).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
93 Greensboro, North Carolina, Nutrition
Survey (1947).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
95 Livestock herd and dust (2005). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
96-97 Corn field in Kenya (2007). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
101 John Atkinson Ferrell (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
104 Raymond Blaine Fosdick (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
107 Map: Itinerary of the Agricultural
Survey Commission to Mexico (1941).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
109 Corn in the forest, Mexico (1941). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
113 J. George Harrar and Elvin C. Stakman
in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (1943).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
116 Norman Ernest Borlaug (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
117 Experimental wheat field in Mexico
(1958).
Photo by Neil MacLellan.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
118 Edwin Wellhausen at Chapingo,
Mexico (1954).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
120 Experimental bean plot in Mexico (1961). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
123 Boy in front of cereal bank (2006). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
124-125 Mexican Agricultural Program
field day (1964).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
127 Mexican farmer with potatoes (1955). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
130 Colombian boys with wheat (c. 1954) Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
131 Experiment Station in Chile (1963). Photo by Neil MacLellan.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
132 Students at garlic plot in Santiago,
Chile (1957).
Photo by Neil MacLellan.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
134-135 Scientists at Experiment Station in
Quito, Ecuador (1961).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
137 Dean Rusk (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
141 Field Day at Indian Agricultural
Research Institute (c. 1965).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
142 Field inspection near Karimnagar,
Andhra Prardesh, India (1957).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
144-145 Colombian Agricultural Program
(no date).
Photo by J. Sarmiento.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
147 J. George Harrar (no date). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
148 John D. Rockefeller 3rd at Colombian
Agricultural Program (1964).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
151 International Rice Research Institute
(no date).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
154 IRRI scientists perform rice stem borer
experiment (1966).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
161 Norman Borlaug and Elvin Stakman
in Pakistan (1968).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
162 Horticulture lesson at International
Center for Tropical Agriculture (1974).
Photo by Neil MacLellan.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
164-165 International Institute of Tropical
Agriculture (c. 1967).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
167 Bradfield, Mangelsdorf, and Stakman
at Conquest of Hunger Conference (1968).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
169 Farmer in Kakamega, Kenya (2009). Photo by Antony Njuguna.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
170-171 Ahero Rice Scheme, outside Kisumu,
Kenya (2006).
Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
173 J. George Harrar, John Kowles,
and Dean Rusk (1973).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
176 Corn field in Guatemala (1976). Photo by W. Wickham.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
177 Sterling Wortman (1966). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
179 Ben Jackson and Thai floating rice (c. 1974) Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
List of Illustrations Food & Prosperity 239
list of illustrations
238
food & prosperity
180 Agricultural Sciences Seminar
at Williamsburg, Virginia (1979).
Photo by Thomas Williams.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
182-183 International Laboratory for Research
on Animal Diseases (no date).
Photo by Marion Kaplan.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
185 Nigerian woman picking okra leaves
(no date).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
186 Norman Borlaug and RF Trustees
in Mexico (1981).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
189 International Rice Research Institute
laboratory (1980).
Photo by Ashwin Gatha/Kay Reese &
Associates. Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
193 Gary H. Toenniessen (1989). Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
194 Lesson at Egerton College in Njoro,
Kenya (1963).
Photo by Marc & Evelyne Bernheim.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
197 Examining milk at University College
of Ibadan, Nigeria (1963).
Photo by Marc & Evelyne Bernheim.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
198-199 Mbabawa Research Station in
Malawi (1989).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
201 Cassava improvement program
at Washington University (1988).
Photo by Andrew Lipman.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
203 Laboratory in Uganda (2007). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
204-205 Hands holding rice (2005). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
207 Dr. Lesley Sitch, International Rice
Research Institute biotechnology (1987).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
211 Sir Gordon Conway (no date). Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
212 Woman with grain (2005). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
215 Judith Rodin (2012). Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
218 Farmer with root crops in Malawi (2006). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
221 “Good Price Celebrations” drawing (2005). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
222-223 Man in corn field in Malawi (2006). Photo by Jonas Bendiksen.
Source: The Rockefeller Foundation.
224 Rockefeller Foundation Board of
Consultants for Agricultural Sciences
(1963).
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
Index Food & Prosperity 241
Acadia College, 65.
Acosta, Richard, 121.
Adesina, Akin, 214, 218.
Adkisson, Perry, 190.
Afghanistan, 157.
Africa, 13-16, 123, 136, 147, 149, 157, 160, 166, 186, 189-
190, 194-197, 200, 202, 206, 208-210, 213-214, 216-217,
219-221.
African Risk Capacity, 95, 220.
Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 82-84, 87.
Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 82.
Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, 33.
(See also Texas A & M University)
Alabama, 13, 36-37, 39, 40-41, 43: State Agent for Negro
Schools, 40-41; Macon County, 40-41.
Alemán Valdés, Miguel, 121.
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), 12,
14, 16, 28, 215, 217-220: “breadbasket region,” 219;
Market Access Program, 219; Program for Africa’s
Seed Systems (PASS), 217-218.
Amazon Basin, 20.
Annan, Kofi, 14, 219.
Appert, Nicholas, 84.
Arkansas, 36, 46.
Asia, 12-13, 15, 73, 102, 123, 136, 139, 141-142, 146-147,
150-153, 156-157, 166, 186, 193, 206, 208-210, 213-214,
219: Southeast Asia, 34, 150, 152, 154, 188, 213.
Asian Development Bank, 164.
Atwater, Wilbur, 84.
Austria, 53.
Balfour, Marshall, 72.
Baltic States, 52.
Bangladesh, 156, 178, 200.
Beachell, Henry, 155.
Bellagio Study and Conference Center, 163.
Berlin Wall, 188.
Beyer, Peter, 184-186, 194.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 28, 217, 219.
Biotechnology, 28, 181, 184, 186-187, 189, 191-195, 197,
200, 202-203, 207-209, 213-214, 221, 227: Asilomar,
California conference, 191.
Blackie, Malcolm, 197.
Bolivia, 128.
Boll weevil, 34-36. (See also General Education Board;
Knapp, Seaman; United States Department of
Agriculture)
Borlaug, Norman, 20, 111, 115-116, 119, 158-159, 161,
169, 186, 227.
Botswana, 178.
Bowles, Chester, 136, 139, 152.
Boys clubs/girls clubs, 37-38, 49, 53-55. (See General
Education Board; International Education Board)
Bradfield, Richard, 18-20, 22-23, 29, 98, 105-106, 110, 167.
Brazil, 178.
British Isles, 52.
Brookings Institution, 81-83, 87. (See also Institute
for Government Research)
Bulgaria, 53-54.
Bullock, Mary Brown, 62, 65-66, 70-73.
Burkina Faso, 219.
Buttrick, Wallace, 29-30, 32-33, 35, 40-42, 45.
Camacho, Manuel Ávila, 103.
Cambridge University, 54: Library, 55.
Campbell, Thomas Monroe, 40-41, 43.
Canada, 87-88: Canadian International Development
Agency (CIDA), 156; Canadian Council on Nutrition,
87; Nova Scotia, 65.
Caribbean, 34.
Carnegie, Andrew, 43.
Carver, George Washington, 39, 49.
index
Chen Zhiqian, 61
Chiang Kai-shek, 70-72.
Chile, 27, 129, 131-132, 139, 142, 156, 229: Ministry
of Agriculture, 129-130; Los Andes, 130; Paine, 130;
Santiago, 130-132; Temuco, 130-131.
Chilean Agricultural Program, 129-132: Office of Special
Studies, 129.
China, 25, 56, 60-70, 72-73, 79, 102, 133, 136, 149-150,
193, 200, 229-230 : Baptist missions, 62; Communist
Party of China (CPC), 61, 70-72, 136, 150, 230; Jiangxi
Soviet, 70; Kuomintang (KMT) (Nationalists),
70-72; Long March, 70; Manchu Dynasty, 60; Mass
Education Movement, 61, 64-68, 71-72; “Middle
Kingdom,” 62; National Economic Council, 72; New
Life Movement, 71; Nanking, 72; Republic of China,
70; Republican era, 62; Rural Reconstruction, 25, 60,
66-69, 71-73; Shaanxi, 70; Shanghai, 65; southeastern,
70; Szechuan Province, 60; Tiananmen Square, 188;
Ting Hsien, 65-66, 71-72; western, 72. (See also Mass
Education Movement)
Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 190.
Christiaensen, Luc, 210.
Cold War, 136-139, 188, 207-208, 211.
Colombia, 27, 128-129, 131-132, 136-137, 139, 142, 144,
147, 156, 160, 162, 167, 208, 229: Bogotá, 129, 138;
Cali, 160, 162; Cauca Valley, 129; La Violencia, 138;
President, 128.
Colombian Agricultural Program (CAP), 129: Caja
Agraria, 129; corn germplasm bank, 129, 161, 176.
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 42.
Colorado National Guard, 42.
Columbia University, 85.
Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR), 166, 179-182, 187, 190,
195-197, 211. (See also International Food Policy
Research Institute)
Conway, Gordon, 210-212, 214-215.
Cornell University, 19, 51-52, 56, 63, 85, 105, 108, 140,
150, 193, 202, 208: Department of Agricultural
Economics, 108; Department of Plant Breeding,
63; The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library
(TEEAL), 202.
Cornell-Los Baños program, 150-151.
Costa Rica, 128: Turrialba, 128.
Cullather, Nick, 76.
Culver, John C., 103-104.
Cummings, Ralph W., 140, 142.
Daniels, Josephus, 22, 100-101, 103-104.
Darwin, Charles, 149.
Datta, S.K. De, 155.
Demery, Lionel, 210.
Denmark, 48-49, 55: Copenhagen, 51.
DeVries, Joe, 218.
Drinker, Cecil K., 83.
Duke University School of Medicine, 88.
Dulles, Allen, 138.
Dulles, John Foster, 138.
Economic Commission for Africa, 123, 164.
Ecuador, 132, 134, 178.
Ehrlich, Paul, 149.
Eisenhower, Dwight, 138.
Ethiopia, 12, 123, 216, 219.
Europe, 15, 25, 45, 49, 52-53, 56, 59, 66, 70, 73, 79-80, 92,
94, 102, 105, 133, 228-229: Central, 53; Eastern, 25, 52;
Northern, 25, 49, 52-54; Western, 52.
Fairway Farms, 78-79, 81.
Family Food Production Demonstration, 80.
Farm demonstration/Farmers’ Cooperative Demonstration Work, 21, 25, 33-45, 49, 51, 54-55, 57, 64, 69, 73,
78, 89, 101, 108. (See General Education Board; Knapp,
Seaman; United States Department of Agriculture)
240
food & prosperity
Index Food & Prosperity 243
Farm Foundation, 79.
Ferrell, John, 22, 100-101, 104.
Finland, 49, 53.
Fitzgerald, Deborah, 78-79, 114, 119-120.
Ford Foundation, 139, 151-156, 160-162, 164, 210.
Forum on Agricultural Resource Husbandry, 209.
Fosdick, Raymond, 20, 22, 45, 72, 101-102, 104-105,
127, 181.
France, 60.
Franklin, Benjamin, 149.
Friedrich Miescher Institute, 184.
Gates, Frederick T., 30, 32, 35, 41, 45, 62, 176.
General Education Board, 14, 21, 24, 30, 32, 34, 36,
43, 69, 89: boys and girls clubs, 37-38, 49, 51; farm
demonstration, 21, 33-36, 38-39, 41-43, 51, 55, 101;
memorandum with USDA, 35-36, 42; mission, 32.
Georgia, 37, 42-44, 137: Cherokee County, 137.
Georgia State College of Agriculture and Mechanic
Arts, 79.
Ghana, 219.
Golden rice, 194-195, 203.
Goldmark, Peter Jr., 188, 197, 200, 207-208, 210-211.
Gómez, Marte R.
González Gallardo, Alfonso, 113.
Gore, Thomas, 43.
Grant, John, 65-68, 72-73.
Grant, Ulysses J., 140, 142.
Gray, George, 54.
Greece, 52.
Green Revolution, 13, 15-16, 19-20, 24, 27-28, 73, 140, 159-
160, 172-175, 178, 181, 186, 193, 202, 206, 209, 211,
213-214, 217, 219-220.
Guatemala, 128, 142, 176.
Gunn, Selskar, 61, 65-68, 70-72.
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 39-40:
“Hampton model,” 39.
Hanlon, J.J., 90.
Hanson, Frank, 110.
Harrar, Jacob George, 109-113, 115-117, 119-122, 140,
142, 146-149, 150, 153, 158-160, 162-163, 173-174,
177, 180, 227.
Harvard University, 20, 84, 92: Medical School—Division
of Nutrition of the Department of Biological Chemistry, 85; School of Public Health—Department of
Nutrition, 83, 85-86, 92.
Hayford, Charles, 66.
Herdt, Robert, 196.
Hong Kong University, 60.
Hookworm, 21, 33, 65, 88, 100-101. (See Rockefeller
Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of
Hookworm Disease)
Hoover, Herbert, 76.
Hopkins, Frederick, 84.
Houston, David, 33.
Hungarian Village Association, 51, 55.
Hungary, 53.
Hutchison, Claude B., 52-55.
Hyde, John, 103-104.
Imperial College of London, 210.
India, 133, 136, 139-141, 149, 152, 154-155, 157-159,
166-167, 193, 200, 229: All India Coordinated Maize
Improvement Program, 141; Central Rice Research
Institute at Cuttack, 141; Himalayan Mountains, 140;
Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), 140-
141, 196; Madras, 140; National Seeds Corporation,
159; New Delhi, 140, 169; Punjab, 140.
Indonesia, 133, 154, 178, 200.
index
Institute for Government Research, 81, 87. (See also
Brookings Institution)
Institute of Public Administration, 81. (See also New York
Bureau of Municipal Research)
Integrated Pest Management (IPM), 210.
Inter-American Development Bank, 164, 178.
Inter-American Food Crop Improvement Program, 132.
Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences, 128.
Inter-American Symposium on Plant Breeding, 128.
Inter-American Symposium on Plant Pests and
Diseases, 128.
International Agricultural Development Service (IADS),
177-178, 187, 190.
International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT),
27, 160-162, 166-167, 208.
International Centre of Insect Physiology and
Ecology, 197.
International Education Board (IEB), 25, 45, 48-49, 51-56,
59, 62-65, 68, 73, 105: boys and girls clubs, 55; gardening classes, 49; home economics clubs, 49; home
instruction, 49.
International Food Policy Research Institute, 179.
(See also Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research)
International Institute of Agriculture, 53,
International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA),
161, 164, 166-167.
International Laboratory for Research on Animal
Diseases (ILRAD), 181-182.
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center
(CIMMYT), 27, 156-159, 163, 166: Puebla Project, 157.
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 175.
International Potato Improvement Project, 157.
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), 27, 141, 150-
156, 159, 163, 166, 187, 189, 193, 196, 203, 207-208:
IR8/”miracle rice,” 155, 159.
Iowa, 33: Cresco, 115.
Iowa Agricultural College, 33-34, 39. (See also Iowa State
College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts)
Iowa Improved Stock Breeders’ Association, 33.
Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts, 79,
110. (See also Iowa Agricultural College)
Italy, 163: Rome, 53.
Japan, 139, 152, 154.
Jennings, Peter, 155.
Johns Hopkins University, 85-86,: School of Public
Health, 65.
Kabete, Kenya, 181.
Kearl, Bryant, 189.
Kennedy, John F., 137-138, 146.
Kenya, 57, 95, 123, 133, 136, 157, 159, 166-167, 181-182,
194, 208-209, 214, 216, 219: Mau Mau rebellion, 136;
Nairobi, 57, 181, 197, 214.
Kenyon, William, 42-43.
Knapp, Seaman, 21, 33-40, 44-46, 49, 60, 81, 101, 169,
228: farm demonstration, 21, 33-35, 38, 101.
Knowles, John Hilton, 173-177, 187.
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM), 78-79, 81.
Lever, Asbury F., 42.
Lindsay, John, 188.
Louisiana, 33-35: Lake Charles, 34.
Ludlow Massacre, 42.
Lund, Frants P., 40, 51, 60.
Lyman, Judith, 192.
Lyman, Richard, 187-189, 192.
Lynam, John, 197.
242
food & prosperity
Index Food & Prosperity 245
Madagascar, 216.
Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 72.
Maine, 36, 60.
Makerere University, 200, 214.
Malawi, 199-200, 208-209, 214, 218-219.
Malaysia, 200, 210.
Mali, 57, 219.
Malthus, Thomas, 149.
Mangelsdorf, Paul, 18, 20, 22, 98, 105-106, 110, 112, 167.
Mann, Albert R., 51-52, 56, 105.
Mao Zedong, 60, 70.
Mapa, P.L., 150.
Martine, James, 43.
Mass Education Movement (MEM), 61, 64-68, 71-72:
National Association of Mass Education Movements,
64; Ting Hsien, 65-66, 71-72.
Massachusetts: Department of Human Services, 188.
Massachusetts General Hospital, 174.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 92.
Max Planck Institute, 184.
Mbacke, Cheikh, 214.
McKelvey, John J. Jr., 118, 122.
McNamara, Robert, 189.
Medellín University, 128-129.
Mexico: Chapingo, 103, 106, 112, 114, 118, 121, 157
(See also Mexican National School of Agriculture at
Chapingo); central region, 116; Ciudad Obregón, 116,
120; government, 103, 108, 111-112, 114, 119-120, 122,
126-127; Guanajuato, 114; legislature, 103; Mexican Revolution, 103; Mexico City, 20-21, 103, 114,
128, 133; Minister of Agriculture, 113; Ministry of
Agriculture, 112, 114, 120-121, 156, 225; Morelos, 114;
Subsecretary of Agriculture, 113; National Extension
Service, 106; northwest region, 103, 116; Toluca, 116-
117; Torreón, 225; U.S. embassy, 103; Vera Cruz, 143;
Yaqui Valley, 116; Zacapu, 104.
Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP), 100, 101, 104-105,
110, 113, 116, 118-120, 122-123, 125-128, 137, 141, 147,
156-157: “x-factor,” 122; Corn Commission, 121; memorandum of agreement, 111; National Commission
for the Increase and Distribution of Improved Seeds,
121; Office of Special Studies (OSS), 114, 119-121, 129,
158, 225; Wheat Commission, 120.
Mexican National Institute of Agricultural Research, 157.
Mexican National School of Agriculture at Chapingo, 101.
Mexican Polytechnic Institute (Center for Research
and Advanced Studies), 200.
Middle East, 210, 214.
Miller, Harry M., 111.
Minnesota, 99: Minneapolis, 110.
Mississippi, 35-36, 89-90, 92: Delta Council, 88; State
Board of Health, 88-89; State Department of
Education, 89.
Missouri, 197, 200: St. Louis, 197, 200.
Moe, Henry Allen, 142-143.
Montana, 78-79, 81.
Montana State College, 78.
Morillo Safa, Eduardo, 113.
Mozambique, 219.
Myers, William I., 108.
National Academy of Sciences, 82.
National Bureau for Economic Research, 81.
National Research Council, 79, 82.
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 139, 141.
Nepal, 178, 200.
New Hampshire, 36.
New York, 19, 51, 63, 110-111, 122, 146-148, 181, 184-185,
194, 215: Ithaca, 63; Syracuse, 20; upstate region, 33.
New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 81. (See also
Institute of Public Administration)
New York City Police Commissioner, 81.
index
New York State College of Agriculture, 56, 79.
Niger, 219.
Nigeria, 137, 158, 167, 197, 219: Ibadan, 161, 164.
Ninkovich, Frank, 73.
Nobel Peace Prize, 116, 159.
Non-Aligned Movement, 140.
North America, 33, 87.
North American Land and Timber Company, 33.
North Carolina, 88-90, 92, 100: Cooperative Extension
Service, 90; Nutrition Division, 88; Raleigh, 101;
School-Health Coordinating Service, 88; State Board
of Health, 88, 90.
North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, 101. (See also North Carolina State University)
North Carolina State University, 140. (See also
North Carolina State College of Agriculture and
Mechanic Arts)
North China Council on Rural Reconstruction
(NCCRR), 68.
Norway, 51: Oslo, 51.
O’Toole, John, 193.
Oberlin College, 110.
Ohio, 110.
Ohio State University, 80.
Oklahoma, 35, 41, 43, 140.
Ortega Cantero, Benjamín, 225, 227.
Pakistan, 155-157, 159, 161.
Paraguay, 157.
Pasteur, Louis, 84.
Payne, George, 21.
Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), 62, 66-67: Beijing
First Health Demonstration, 65.
Peru, 132, 166-167.
Philippines, 27, 133, 136, 141, 150-153, 155, 157, 159,
167, 187, 189, 200, 208: Los Baños, 150-152, 154, 189;
government, 152-153, 155; Secretary of Agricultural
and Natural Resources, 150.
Poland, 51, 53.
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 188.
Porter, Walter C., 35.
Potrykus, Ingo, 184-186.
Princeton University, 60.
Purdue University, 80, 208.
Quebec Provincial Bureau of Health, 87.
Qu Shiying, 61.
Reisner, John H., 63.
Rivera, Diego, 112.
Roberts, Lewis M., 118, 128.
Rockefeller Center, 81.
Rockefeller Foundation, 12-16, 19-30, 32, 45, 48, 51, 56-57,
62-63, 65-67, 69-73, 76, 78-83, 85-92, 94-95, 98-105, 108,
110-111, 113-114, 116, 119, 122-123, 126, 128, 130-132,
135, 137-144, 146-149, 152-156, 158-163, 166-169,
172, 174-177, 179-182, 184-197, 199, 202-203, 206-
221, 224-232: African Initiatives section, 208; Africa
Regional Program, 214; Agricultural Productivity and
Food Security Task Force, 214; Agricultural Sciences
Division, 177, 187, 190-191, 196; Applying Science
and Technology, 213; Basic Survival Safeguards, 216;
biotechnology, 28, 181, 184, 186-187, 189, 191-195,
197, 200, 202-203, 207-209, 213, 221, 227; Central
American Corn Improvement Project, 131; charter,
32; China Medical Board, 62-64; Environment, 216;
Conquest of Hunger, 147, 150, 166-167, 169, 174-177,
179-181, 187; Creativity and Culture, 213; Enabling
Farmer Participation, 213; endowment, 62, 175, 177,
207; Enhancing International Agricultural Research
244
food & prosperity
Index Food & Prosperity 247
index
Spanish (language), 20, 22, 106, 111.
Stakman, Elvin Charles, 18, 20, 22, 29, 98-99, 105, 109-
113, 115-116, 122, 161, 167, 224-227.
Standard Oil, 62.
Stanford University, 187, 220.
Stare, Frederick, 85-86, 92.
Sub-Saharan Africa, 12, 28, 57, 95, 185, 188, 195, 197, 200,
202, 206, 208-210, 213-214, 219, 221, 227, 230.
Sudan, 178.
Sweden, 49.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 184: Institute for
Plant Sciences, 184.
Switzerland, 184: Basel, 184; Zurich, 184.
Syngenta (Syngenta AG), 195.
Taiwan, 73, 154-155.
Tanzania, 216, 219.
Taylor, Henry C., 78-79.
Te Tzu Chang, 155.
Tennessee, 87, 89-90: Nashville, 87.
Tennessee Valley Authority, 83.
Texas, 21, 33-36, 41: Austin, 33; Laredo, 21; Terrell, 34.
Texas A & M University, 190, 200. (See also Agricultural
and Mechanical College of Texas)
Thailand, 193, 200.
Third World, 137, 188, 202.
Times Mirror Company, 188.
Toenniessen, Gary, 180, 184, 192-193, 195, 232.
Turkey, 159, 161.
Tuskegee Institute, 39-42, 49: Jesup Wagon, 43, 49.
U.S.S.R., 188. (See also Soviet Union)
Uganda, 122, 167, 200, 208-209, 214: Ministry of
Agriculture, 200; National Agricultural Research
Organization, 214.
United Mine Workers labor union, 42.
United Nations, 53, 120, 123, 164, 175, 219: Development
Program (UNDP), 166; Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 53, 123, 153, 164, 166.
United States, 12, 23, 25-26, 29, 34, 43, 45, 48-49, 60-61, 65,
73, 76, 79-80, 82-83, 87, 90-91, 95, 99, 102-103, 106, 117,
119-120, 123, 127, 129, 131, 133, 138-139, 151-152, 175,
192, 213, 228-229: Agency for International Development (USAID), 156, 164, 178, 210; agricultural extension service, 37, 78, 81; agricultural extension agents,
36, 45, 120; Army, 92: Surgeon General, 92; Attorney
General, 138; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 138;
Civil War, 99, 101; Congress, 25, 33-35, 41-43, 48, 69,
73, 81, 138; Congress Senate Agriculture Committee,
43; Cox Committee investigation, 138; Department
of Agriculture, 83; Bureau of Agricultural Economics,
78; Division of Farm Management and Cost Accounting, 78; farm demonstration, 33; Negro farm demonstration agent, 40; Department of the Interior, 83;
Executive Branch, 138; Dust Bowl, 76, 95; economy,
26, 81; Farm Credit Administration, 108; Federal
Farm Loan Act, 78; foreign policy, 137, 188, 230; Good
Neighbor Policy, 101-103; Great Plains, 76; Gulf Coast,
34; Hatch Act, 34, 41; Midwest, 99, 110; Morrill Act,
41; Negro rural schools, 41; New Deal, 81-82; President’s Emergency Committee for Employment, 80;
rural Northeast, 25; Secretary of Agriculture, 33-35,
82, 84, 103; Secretary of the Navy, 101; South, 12,
25-26, 32, 34-35, 39, 41, 48-49, 61, 65, 88, 101, 106, 133,
227; State Department – Division of Cultural Relations, 73; Treasury, 138; Wall Street crash, 76.
University of Cali, 128.
University of California, Riverside, 160: Arid-Lands
Research Institute, 160.
University of East Africa, 167.
University of Freiburg, 184.
University of Illinois, 80, 85.
246
food & prosperity
Collaboration component, 196; Food and Agricultural Policy program, 123, 179-180; Food Security, 192,
203, 212-214; Global Dialogue on Plant Biotechnology, 213; Global Environmental initiative, 208; Global
Environmental Program, 189, 200; Global Health,
216; Global Inclusion, 213; Harare office, 214; Health
Commission, 94; Health Division, 22, 61, 66, 72, 83,
89, 100-101; Health Equity, 213; Improving Family
Food Production Systems in Africa initiative, 196;
International Health Board (IHB), 65; International
Health Division (IHD), 22, 66, 72, 83, 85, 89, 100-101;
International Program on Rice Biotechnology (IPRB),
193-194, 209; International Program to Support
Science-Based Development, 187, 208; International
Relations Division, 179; Maize Productivity Task
Force, 214; Medical Sciences Division, 85, 87, 91; molecular biology, 181, 192; Nairobi office, 214; Natural
and Environmental Sciences, 192; Natural Sciences
Division, 85-86, 91-92, 102, 105, 110, 191; neglected
regions, 28, 188, 195, 200, 202; New York headquarters, 122; Partnerships for Africa’s Renewal component, 214; Population Sciences Division, 187-188, 208;
Reflections on Development program, 188; Social &
Economic Security, 216; Strategy for the Conquest of
Hunger Symposium, 163; Strengthening Policies and
Institutions, 213; Survey Commission to Mexico, 18-
19, 26, 29, 98-100, 103, 105-106, 108-112, 114; Sustainable Community Oriented Development Program,
214; Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Programme
(TSBF), 209; trustees, 67, 133, 138-139, 142-143, 150,
152-153, 168, 174-176, 186, 191, 193, 210; University
Development Program (UDP), 166; Urbanization, 216;
Working Communities, 213.
Rockefeller Hookworm Eradication Campaign, 33.
Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of
Hookworm Disease, 100.
Rockefeller University, 163.
Rockefeller, John D. (Senior or Sr.), 13-14, 24, 35, 41, 45,
62-63, 79, 81, 102, 176.
Rockefeller, John D. 3rd, 136, 138, 148-150.
Rockefeller, John D. Jr. (or Junior), 29, 42, 48, 60-65, 78,
104.
Rodin, Judith, 12, 215-216, 219, 232.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 81-82, 100-103.
Rose, Wickliffe, 30, 48, 53, 55, 181.
Ruml, Beardsley, 78, 81.
Rupert, Joseph A., 128.
Rusk, Dean, 129, 133, 136-139, 146, 173.
Rwanda, 95, 219.
Sánchez Colín, Salvador, 133.
Sauer, Carl, 105.
Sawyer, Wilbur A., 83-84.
Scandinavia, 51.
Schultes, Richard, 18, 20, 22.
Science Advisory Board, 82.
September 11, 2001 (World Trade Center attack), 214.
Shelly, Mary, 191.
Simon Guggenheim Foundation, 142.
Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, 73.
Smith-Lever Act, 41-42, 44, 78.
Smith, Adam, 149.
Smith, M. Hoke, 42, 44.
Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 80, 83: Committee on Public Administration, 83.
Soong, T.V. (or Song Ziwen), 72.
Sorensen, Soren, 48.
South Africa, 216, 219.
South America, 102.
Soviet Union, 136, 139. (See also U.S.S.R.)
Spain, 150.
Index Food & Prosperity 249
index
248
University of Kentucky, 80.
University of KwaZulu-Natal, African Centre
for Crop Improvement, 216.
University of London, 200: Wye College, 200.
University of Michigan, 65, 101.
University of Minnesota, 20, 114, 196, 225.
University of Nanking, 62-64, 69: College of Agriculture,
64; College of Agriculture and Forestry, 63; cooperative research stations, 63; Department of Biology,
64; Department of Plant Breeding, 63; Tai Ping Men
Farm, 63.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 192.
University of Pennsylvania, 215.
University of Puerto Rico, 111, 115: College of
Agriculture, 111, 115.
University of Sofia College of Agriculture, 54.
University of Sussex, 210.
University of the Philippines, 150, 152-154: College
of Agriculture, 150, 152, 154.
University of West Virginia, 80.
University of Wisconsin, 78, 189.
University of Zimbabwe, 197: Agriculture Faculty, 197.
Vanderbilt University, 87, 89.
Vietnam, 136, 154: Viet Minh, 136.
Virginia, 37, 39, 180.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 160, 162.
Wallace, Henry, 29, 82, 84, 103-104, 106.
Washington (state), 83, 104, 110-111.
Washington State College, 110: Agricultural Experiment
Station, 111; Division of Plant Pathology, 111.
Washington University, 197, 200.
Washington, Booker T., 26, 39, 42, 49, 228: Atlanta
Compromise Address, 39.
Washington, D.C., 35, 39, 83, 87, 104, 138.
Wayland Seminary, 39.
Weaver, Warren, 105, 108, 128, 146, 191.
West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA),
195.
West, William, 43-44.
Wilson, James, 34-35, 42.
Wilson, M.L., 78-79.
Wilson, Woodrow, 44.
Winrock International Institute for Agricultural
Development, 190.
Woods, Arthur, 80-81.
World Bank, 163, 166, 173, 175, 178, 190, 196, 210, 216.
World Food Programme, 95, 220: Climate and Disaster
Risk Solutions, 220 – Africa RiskView, 220-221.
World War I, 25, 48-49, 51, 53, 60, 70, 73, 76, 80, 82, 101,
128, 229: Allies, 60.
World War II, 15, 26, 73, 91, 94, 102, 128, 136-137, 141,
225, 228.
World Wildlife Fund, 200.
Wortman, Sterling, 177, 187.
Yale University, 60, 62, 215, 220: Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences, 215.
Yen, James (also Jimmy Yen or Yan Yangchu), 26, 60, 62,
64-69, 73.
Youmans, John B., 94.
Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 60-62, 65.
Zambia, 209, 219.
Zeneca (Zeneca Group PLC), 195.
Zimbabwe, 208-209, 214.
BEYOND CHARITY: A CENTURY OF
PHILANTHROPIC INNOVATION
The creation of the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1913 was in itself a
marked innovation in the development
of modern philanthropy. Foundation
staff, trustees, and grantees had to
learn by doing. The topical chapters
in Beyond Charity explore the evolution of the Foundation’s
practice from the board room to the field office. For
professionals or volunteers entering the field of philanthropy,
each chapter offers an opening essay that highlights abiding
issues in the field. The vivid stories and fascinating characters
that illuminate these themes make the history come to life.
HEALTH & WELL-BEING:
SCIENCE, MEDICAL EDUCATION
AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Philanthropists who seek to improve
health often find themselves torn
between efforts to identify cures for
disease and projects that strive to
improve the social conditions that
lead to better health. As this remarkable book shows, over a
hundred years, the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to balance
these sometime competing objectives have fundamentally
shaped the fields of public health and medicine.
INNOVATIVE PARTNERS:
THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
AND THAILAND
For nearly a century, the Rockefeller
Foundation and its Thai partners
have been engaged in an innovative
partnership to promote the wellbeing of the people of Thailand.
From the battle against hookworm and other diseases to the
development of rice biotechnology and agriculture, the lessons learned from this work offer powerful insights into the
process of development. On the occasion of its centennial in
2013, the Rockefeller Foundation has commissioned a history
of this innovative partnership.
DEMOCRACY & PHILANTHROPY:
THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT
Many argued in 1913 that Rockefeller
wealth seemed poised to undermine
the democratic character of American
institutions. Under the shadow of
public concern, the trustees of the
Rockefeller Foundation launched programs to strengthen
American political institutions, promote equal opportunity in
a plural society, and reinforce a shared sense of national identity. The relationship between democracy and philanthropy
has been constantly tested over the last century. Democracy
& Philanthropy offers insights and anecdotes to guide the
next generation of American philanthropists.
THE VOICES OF AFRICA: HUMAN
CAPITAL AND DEVELOPMENT
In every society, development
depends on investment in
institutions and individuals.
Wickliffe Rose, an early leader in the
Rockefeller Foundation, called this
“backing brains.” But developing
human capital is a risky proposition. This intriguing history
explores the challenges and triumphs in the Rockefeller
Foundation’s efforts to invest in the people of Africa over
the course of a century.
To find out more about how to receive a copy
of any of these Centennial books, please visit
www.centennial.rockefellerfoundation.org.
O T H E R B O O K S I N
the R ockefeller F oundation C entennial S eries
the R ockefeller F oundation C entennial S eries
About This Book
John D. Rockefeller recognized that agricultural productivity is key to increasing overall
wealth and health in the poorest of rural communities. Embracing the promise of science,
the Rockefeller Foundation focused on the discovery of new technologies to enhance
food production. But technology was never enough. New techniques and tools had to be
adapted to local cultures and communities. This engaging book explores lessons learned
from the Foundation’s efforts to improve this most basic arena of human endeavor.
The Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Series
Published in sequence throughout the Rockefeller Foundation’s centennial year in 2013,
the six books in this series provide important case studies for people around the world
who are working “to promote the well-being of humankind.” Three books highlight
lessons learned in the fields of agriculture, health and philanthropy. Three others
explore the Foundation’s work in Africa, Thailand and the United States. As a package,
the books offer readers unique insights into the evolution of modern philanthropy.
About the Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is committed to achieving more equitable growth by
expanding opportunity for more people in more places worldwide, and building
resilience by helping them prepare for, withstand, and emerge stronger from acute
shocks and chronic stresses. Throughout its history, the Foundation has supported
the ingenuity of innovative thinkers and actors by providing the resources, networks,
convening power, and technologies to move innovation from idea to impact. From
funding an unknown scholar named Albert Einstein to accelerating the impact
investing industry, the Foundation has a long tradition of enhancing the impact of
individuals, institutions and organizations working to change the world. In today’s
dynamic and interconnected world the Rockefeller Foundation has a unique ability
to address the challenges facing humankind through a 100-year legacy of innovation,
intervention, and the influence to shape agendas and inform decision making. |