Seminar - March 2021
The Green Revolution and Enduring Technology-Driven Approaches to Agricultural Development
Dr Marci Baranski, Independent Scholar, Chicago
For the Food Values Research Group's March 2021 seminar, we are pleased to welcome Dr Marci Baranski.
The Green Revolution was a top-down focus on technology diffusion throughout the developing world. Its enduring narrative has led to a focus on plant breeding and chemical and mechanical inputs over alternative innovation pathways. Much of the Green Revolution model is based on Norman Borlaug’s wheat research in Mexico. My historical research shows that Borlaug relied on a flawed understanding of plant adaptation to different environments. Many decades of social science research have shown that agricultural technologies are not ‘scale neutral’ and that hunger is more multidimensional than agricultural production. Yet the major agricultural developmental organizations today still follow the green revolution recipe of top-down technological development that has largely ignored smallholder farmers (Baranski & Ollenburger, 2020). Today’s agricultural development models aim to ‘scale up’ agricultural technologies. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the ‘scalability’ of technologies and “the enormous heterogeneity of contexts faced by smallholder farmers” (Nelson, Coe, & Haussmann, 2016, p. 2). Though more implicit than during the green revolution, mainstream agricultural development still relies heavily on Borlaug’s research model to claim that technologies can be unproblematically ‘scaled’ across diverse environmental and socioecological conditions.
When: Tuesday 23rd March, 10-11 AM
Where: Online. Please RSVP to foodresearch@adelaide.edu.au
Dr Marci Baranski is an independent scholar from the Chicago area. She is primarily interested in the history of agricultural science.
References
Baranski, M., & Ollenburger, M. (2020). How to Improve the Social Benefits of Agricultural Research. Issues in Science and Technology 36, no. 3: 47–53. https://issues.org/how-to-improve-the-social-benefits-of-agricultural-r…
Nelson, R., Coe, R., & Haussmann, B. I. (2019). Farmer research networks as a strategy for matching diverse options and contexts in smallholder agriculture. Experimental Agriculture, 55(S1), 125-144.