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In this paper, we derive time-varying relative export competitiveness (REC) of India’s top agricultural exports (rice, wheat, cotton and sugar) against India’s share of world agricultural exports (REC_WA) and world exports (REC_WE) from 1961 to 2012. We reveal that India’s exports of all four commodities became relatively competitive over time but these were not as competitive as the top, or selected emerging, exporters of the four commodities. We also examine the determinants of REC in these four commodities focusing on factors including crop-specific and aggregate factor endowments, domestic price, export prices, and GDP per capital, preferential trade agreements, export restrictions and bans, and India’s Green Revolution. The regression analysis was mainly confined to the 1981–2012, due to data constraints. We find that the time series regression results are similar in sign and significance for REC_WE and REC_WA. Our key findings suggest the REC in wheat, rice, and cotton deteriorated as a result of export restrictions. Capital had negative effects on cotton REC. Labor and farm size did not influence the REC in the commodities. The Green Revolution improved the REC in rice and cotton (in Phase 3). The WTO had a positive effect on the REC in rice. The South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) Agreement adversely affected the REC in wheat and rice but strengthened the REC in cotton and sugar. Higher domestic price reduced the REC in cotton. Higher per capita income strengthens the REC in wheat with a lag. We explain these results and suggest policy implications.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has become an influential development actor, spending billions of dollars on international health and agricultural development. While scholars commonly assert that the foundation is part of a new breed of “philanthrocapitalists” who apply business principles to their philanthropic activities, little is known about what this really means or how the Gates Foundation works on the inside. This article seeks to deepen our understanding of this new development actor by examining its organizational culture. I do this through a case study of the Gates Foundation’s Agricultural Development program. Using in-depth interviews, materials from the BMGF’s website, and a variety of other primary data sources, I explore the foundation’s quotidian practices, workplace norms, and interactions with grantees as it tries to improve the lives of smallholder farmers in Africa. I argue that the Gates Foundation’s heavy emphasis on strategic planning has produced an approach to agricultural development that abstracts away from smallholder farmers’ sociocultural worlds and relies on a generalizable set of development solutions. My analysis also reveals another significant consequence of the BMGF’s organizational culture: By immersing bright, high-achieving professionals in the competitive, intense environment that characterizes the foundation, staff have learned to “manage up” (toward Bill) rather than manage down (toward their intended beneficiaries). This insulates and distances foundation staff from the field, making it difficult for them to listen to smallholder farmers, even though many express a genuine desire to do so. As a result, farmers continue to be treated as passive objects of development rather than as complex social actors.

SummaryGreen Revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. However conditions have changed since the well-documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefitted smallholders in southern Asia and beyond. We argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial for pro-poor impacts. To critically analyze Rwanda’s Green Revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective, a mixed methods, multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western Rwanda. Here Malthusian policy framing has been used to justify imposed rather than “induced innovation”. The policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties, inputs, and credit in order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income. Although policies have been deemed successful in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period, such trends were found to be quite incongruous with local experiences. Disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Negative impacts were evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted, poverty exacerbated, local systems of knowledge, trade, and labor were impaired, and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed. In order to mitigate the effects we recommend that inventive pro-poor forms of tenure and cooperation (none of which preclude improvements to input availability, market linkages, and infrastructure) may provide positive outcomes for rural people, and importantly in Rwanda, for those who have become landless in recent years. We conclude that policies promoting a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa should not all be considered to be pro-poor or even to be of a similar type, but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment. Such assessment should be based not only on consistent, objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure, agricultural practices, and the wellbeing of socially differentiated people.

Summary Recent interest in a “new green revolution” in Africa has revived debate about state intervention in agricultural markets and biotechnology. These debates take for granted that the first wave of green revolution interventions in Africa failed to influence small-scale food farmers. This essay uses oral historical and documentary evidence from Ghana’s Northern Region to revisit the evidentiary basis of this assessment. Tracing how the production of aggregate data and changing interpretive frameworks in the 1970s and 1980s allowed policymakers to ignore the experiences of farmers, the essay advocates for the role of micro-historical analysis in assessing Africa’s recent agricultural past.

Summary In Uganda, New Rice for Africa (NERICA), a high-yielding upland rice variety suitable for the African environment, was introduced to increase food security and reduce poverty in rural areas in 2002. However, more than 50% of the NERICA adopters in 2004 had abandoned it in 2006. The regression results indicate that the low profitability of NERICA relative to alternative crops in variable rainfall areas explains the massive dropout. It is also found that the profitability of NERICA production was low when farmer-produced seeds were used in 2006, suggesting the weak dissemination of appropriate information on seed production to rice farmers.

Summary Interest in agriculture for growth and poverty reduction reawakened in the early 2000s made all the keener by the sudden rise in cereals prices on world markets in 2007–08. But is it still possible to drive agricultural growth through small farms, as happened in the green revolution? Whether small farms have a future was debated at a workshop held in Wye, United Kingdom, in June 2005. It concluded that small farm development is not just desirable for poverty reduction, but also feasible, even in changing circumstances and particularly those of more concentrated supply chains with more demanding buyers. That said, while much that needs to be done is straightforward, such as provision of public goods, fostering the institutional innovations to allow small farmers to deal with the emerging supply chains will require patient work, tailored to specific circumstances. The future of all smallholders may well not lie in farming, but the measures to stimulate the rural nonfarm economy and provide jobs for those leaving farming—a favorable rural investment climate, provision of public goods, institutional development—are largely the same as those for agricultural development as well.

Summary As the experience of the 20th century has shown, implementing policies that increase agricultural productivity among smallholders is a particularly promising strategy to achieve pro-poor growth. However, history also reveals major political challenges to adopting this strategy. The paper compares the experience of Asian countries that were able to launch a smallholder-based Green Revolution with the experience of African countries that are still struggling with this goal. It then reviews the political economy literature to identify the factors that account for these divergent experiences. Finally, the paper develops a conceptual framework to guide empirical research to close the knowledge gaps identified by the review.

This paper examines the agricultural science needs of small farms. The green revolution successfully negotiated two tightropes: agricultural productivity increases were larger than the fall in prices that resulted from producing more food; and output per hectare rose faster than output per worker, thus increasing the demand for labor. The current challenge is to generate technology that helps poor farmers in low potential areas. Since research capacity is increasingly private, incentives to produce the needed technology are needed, perhaps through contracts to produce varieties with specific characteristics. Development of seeds needs complementary work on water, for which economists, plant scientists, and engineers need to pool their skills.

Summary Widespread rural poverty in Africa and the success of Asia’s Green Revolution suggest that agriculture is a key sector for African development. However, in response to recent skepticism, this paper examines whether the conventional wisdom about agriculture’s contribution to the development process can still be applied to Africa today. We first outline the debate between the proponents of agriculture and its skeptics before presenting a series of case studies reflecting the heterogeneity of initial conditions facing low-income African countries. Drawing on economy-wide modeling, these case studies contrast the effectiveness of alternative growth strategies in reducing poverty. The findings indicate that while Africa does face many new challenges unlike those faced by Asian countries, there is little evidence to suggest that these countries can bypass a broad-based agricultural revolution to successfully launch their economic transformations.

Summary This article explores the changing determinants of schooling investments from 1971 to 2003 in Tamil Nadu, India, using pooled and panel data of farming households. We find that the high correlation between children’s attainment of basic schooling and the household’s assets for farming disappeared during the mid-1980s. However, even after the mid-1980s, the attainment of advanced education is still affected by rainfall and thus by farm income, indicating the lack of insurance markets and the segregation of poor households under agriculturally unfavorable conditions from advanced education. Meanwhile, the segregation based on gender and adult members’ education has been disappearing.

Metadata only record The success of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) with rice in Asia has not been replicated with staple smallholder food crops in sub-Saharan Africa. This is variously blamed on inadequate extension, underinvestment in agricultural research, and unfavorable government policies. This article argues that it reflects the slow progress of Africa's Green Revolution, which has reduced economic incentives for chemical forms of crop protection and thus the potential cost-savings from the adoption of IPM strategies. In this context, IPM must re-think its approach. IPM is more likely to be adopted by resource-poor African farmers if it focuses on host plant resistance and biological control, high-value commodities, and helps meet farmers' wider objectives of increasing household food security and earning cash income. The argument is illustrated from secondary literature and recent project experience in southern Malawi.

We investigate long-term productivity trends in a representative intensive rice cropping system using periodic farm level survey data spanning more than 20 years of the Green Revolution in two rice bowls of the Philippines. Estimation of production functions with year dummy variables shows substantial declines in productivity from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. Examination of secondary data shows, however, that the survey years were unrepresentative of long-term trends and were unduly influenced by exogenous yield shocks. Correction for these effects removes the productivity decline, but shows that productivity has stagnated. A renewed emphasis on increasing crop genetic yield potential may be necessary in order to improve productivity and restore the contribution of this important farming system to poverty alleviation.

Two propositions have become common assumptions in the development literature: 1. (a) the Green Revolution caused genetic erosion, and 2. (b) the Green Revolution increased genetic vulnerability. With regard to the first proposition, no causal relationship between the Green Revolution and genetic erosion can be established for bread wheat given the difficulties in measuring genetic erosion and of demonstrating causality. The pattern of genetic variation in farmers' wheat fields has undoubtedly changed over the past 100–200 years with increasing cultivation of varieties released by plant breeding programs, but the implications of these changes for the scarcity of useful genetic resources are unclear. With regard to the second proposition, evidence suggests that since the early years of the Green Revolution, the concentration of wheat area in leading cultivars has declined. The semidwarf wheats of the Green Revolution were also less vulnerable to rust diseases than the tall varieties previously released by plant breeding programs as well as traditional varieties. Although rust diseases continue to pose a challenge to wheat scientists, their understanding of the genetic basis of resistance has increased over time. The percentage of area planted to leading wheat cultivars remains a cause for concern, however, and social scientists need to understand better how various policies affect the spatial distribution of cultivars.

Zimbabwe epitomizes the contradictions driving the failure of state-directed agricultural development policies. In its second decade of independence, the government takes the credit for the country's agricultural and rural development success. Zimbabwe's “Green Revolution” record in Africa is enviable. Yet, this peasantry-led success story is problematic. It hides serious policy flaws in development strategy, namely, lack of performance and waste characterizing the Model B producer cooperative resettlement projects. Individually and collectively, the cooperatives, the government's preferred mode of production, are a complete failure. Lessons for development programs elsewhere, and in emergent South Africa, in particular are clear. The political economy of government assistance is not sufficient to produce agricultural surpluses and sustainable development. The social economy of cooperation in production organization by Africa's traditional farmers also does not, necessarily, translate into modern cooperatives, as Zimbabwe's policy makers assumed. Producer cooperatives are unproductive because of the prevailing organizational culture which enables leading members to seek individual self-interest and private gain, making it hard for the rank and file to cooperate and work for the common good.

The Green Revolution was launched in 1960 in Zimbabwe, five years before it got underway in India. Since Zimbabwe's Green Revolution was spearheaded by white commercial farmers, however, it was ignored by Africa's new leaders in the 1960s as they experimented with state farms from Moscow, communal farms from China and land settlement schemes from Israel. At Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, the new majority-ruled government introduced a number of programs to help smallholders increase food and cash crop production. Drawing on a backlog of hybrid maize varieties, expanded access to credit, higher guaranteed government maize prices, and marketing subsidies, smallholders doubled maize production during 1980–1986. Zimbabwe's maize-based Green Revolution challenges those who allege that hybrid maize cannot compete with sorghum in low rainfall areas and that it is unsuitable for resource-poor farmers because of the need to purchase new seed each year. Today virtually 100% of Zimbabwe's maize area is under hybrids and short-season hybrids are outcompeting other foodgrains in many low rainfall areas. Zimbabwe's biggest challenge is to develop cost-effective marketing policies and institutions to sustain its maize-based Green Revolution. Countries trying to replicate Zimbabwe's success story should focus on fulfilling four interrelated preconditions: political, technological, economic and institutional.

The pattern of maize seed development in Malawi demonstrates the importance of farmers' capacity to articulate their interests through collective action and institutions. Despite the vital significance of maize as a wage good in Malawi, limited effective demand for maize seed research prolonged the period of technical stagnation. Analysis of the institutional factors shaping the demand for maize seed research complements previous work on Malawi's political economy, the supply of seed technology and adoption, with implications for current political changes in that nation, the importance of farmers' organizations, and state commitment to agricultural research in sub-Saharan Africa.

A review of more than 300 studies on the Green Revolution published during 1970–1989 shows that about 80% of those studies which had conclusions on the distributional effects of the new technology found that inequality increased, both interfarm and interregional. This evidence diverges from the position of action agencies which support and participate in this technological strategy toward agricultural and rural development. An evaluation of the studies, using their results as data for a statistical analysis, reveals that the authors' conclusions on the question of whether income concentration increased depended on such structural and methodological characteristics as the regional origin of authors, location of the study area, methodology followed, and the geographic extension of the study area. For example, studies done by Western developed-country authors, those employing an essay approach, and those looking at a multicountry region are most likely to conclude that income inequalities increased. By contrast, work done by Asian-origin authors, with study areas located in India or the Philippines, and using the case method are more likely to conclude that increasing inequality is not associated with the new technology.

Quantitative impacts of the Green Revolution on food production in the Punjab of Pakistan are reviewed and the effects of different technologies on wheat yields over the past two decades decomposed. New quantitative evidence of sustainability problems in irrigated systems is presented. The yield increases expected in the post-Green Revolution period from the further spread of modern wheat varieties, a tripling of fertilizer dosage, and the release of newer higher yielding varieties have been cancelled by problems resulting from increased cropping intensity, use of poor quality groundwater, low fertilizer efficiency, and increased weed and disease losses. New directions in institutional policies and research and extension strategies are outlined to improve efficiency and sustainability in wheat production and prevent Pakistan from becoming a major food grain importer in the coming decades.

A re-examination of Sol Tax's classic research from Guatemala reveals that the data actually portray a real world example of the theory of second-best, early empirical evidence of an inverse relation between farm size and the labor/land and output/land ratios, and case in which concentrated resource ownership in a setting of information and monitoring problems combined with missing or imperfect asset markets generates a Pareto inefficient outcome. The contemporary revelance of this finding is that it contributes to an understanding not only of persistent allocative inefficiency in Guatemalan agriculture but also of the relative failure of the Green Revolution in Latin America as compared with Asia.

This paper examines the impact of the green revolution on selected dimensions of income distribution in India, by reviewing the Indian empirical evidence. (i) The Indian empirical studies suggest a wide diffusion of modern varieties (MVs) among farmers, over time, irrespective of farm size and tenurial status. But the pace of diffusion of MVs of a given crop among farms, across the regions and over the years has certainly revealed a tendency to be interlinked with the nature and level of their (regions) development in physical and institutional infrastructure. (ii) Through prospects of increased demand for labour, the green revolution has undoubtedly exerted a favourable impact on the absolute income status of the landless labourer, notwithstanding the fact that the owners of land and capital have gained relatively more than the labourers in the increased production due to MVs. (iii) The impact of MVs on regional income differences has been one of increasing the gap mainly due to an interplay between differentials in levels of physical and infrastructural development of regions and product- location-specificity characteristics of MVs.

The need for tenurial reform as a prerequisite of agricultural technological change is discussed in the context of experience in Kenya. The circumstances which gave rise to the Kenyan programme of reform are discussed, and a description of its operation, costs and effects given. The relevance of Kenya's experience as a model for other developing countries is also considered.

Observers have argued that, although Bangladesh has not yet experienced the Green Revolution in any real sense, the Comilla co-operative experiment has been fairly successful not only in the adoption but also in the equitable distribution of the benefits of the new agricultural technology, and that the spread of the Comilla-like diffusion programmes can be expected to yield similar results in other parts of Bangladesh. This paper contends that the Comilla experience does not lend support to such optimism.

Technology represents man's competence to use his knowledge of nature and its resources for the welfare of his society. Application of science by him made it possible to convert his tools into machines and simple conservation techniques into modern technology for the processing of agricultural produce. Thus, man has moved from being a victim of nature to one who can control and utilize it effectively. Developments in the eighteenth century made it possible for science and technology to interact and make phenomenal economic development possible in certain parts of Europe. Although it took Western Europe 150 years to convert art technology into science technology, the United States, USSR and Japan achieved this transformation over much shorter periods. There is no reason why the 71 per cent of mankind living in technologically less advanced countries cannot make use of the available knowledge, with modifications to suit their socio-economic needs, for bringing about even faster transformation. The large amount of scientific and technological knowledge available in the world makes it necessary to develop a proper institutional infrastructure for careful identification, selection, modification, further development and use of technology. This would help to avoid error and to optimize resources for development. The economies of developing countries are predominantly agricultural. Therefore, highest priority needs to be given to the transfer of technologies for the processing of agricultural produce. This would stimulate further agricultural development, sustain the green revolution and encourage development of industries for which agriculture is the main resource. This would make a very desirable impact on living standards and nutrition, especially in rural areas. Agro-industries require a number of other industrial raw materials. Thus opportunities would be created for the establishment of chemical industries for the supply of flexible packaging material, metallurgical industries for the supply of containers and engineering industries to supply processing plant and machinery. In selection and transfer of technologies from the donor countries to the users, international agencies have an important role because of their world-wide contacts.

It is by now a commonly accepted proposition that economic development must involve both growth and equity. That in many countries the subsidization of the owners of large farms is inequitable is also acknowledged. However, the debate on the ‘efficiency’ of large versus small farms continues. If the owners of large farms are not using the crop acreage with greater efficiency than are the small farmers and if there are no economies of scale, then the imposition of ceilings on farm size and land redistribution are clearly the right options to consider. The object of this study is to test two hypotheses. First, there is an inverse relationship between land productivity and farm size. Second, there are no economies of scale in agricultural production. The tests are performed by regression analysis on the farm-level data collected from Pakistan by the author in 1974. The merit of this study is that it deals with a country which, with a few other underdeveloped countries, has been a beneficiary of the ‘Green Revolution’. The available studies on Pakistan agriculture are limited to the aggregate analyses. Interregional micro-level studies are almost non-existent.

Where the ‘green revolution’ has not led to multiple cropping it is often assumed that farmers do not face important new labour bottlenecks. However, a recent survey in Ethiopia shows that such farmers do face these problems especially in harvesting and, rather less, in weeding. Past attempts in the area to introduce intermediate farm technology have not been directed at these specific bottlenecks and cannot claim too much success, while the recent land reform is both challenging and potentially dangerous insofar as it affects the scope for improving farm equipment. Finally, two implements which deserve further research are briefly examined.

Very low incomes and relatively low mobility in LDCs limit the scope for “lessons” for DCs. Three areas remain, however: analogues, interactions, and above all conceptual transfers. Development studies have moved away from adding up individual responses to change, towards examining interactions that produce systemic outcomes. Examples are analyzed from the evolving debates about (a) peasant response, as related to tenure and risk; (b) farm systems vs . village systems analysis; (c) impact of the “green revolution” on the poor; (d) unemployment. Development studies show analysts of developed countries—especially in case (d) above—that adding-up approaches, ignoring interactions and total systems, produce very misleading results.

Development programs and policies can influence smallholder producers’ abilities to adapt to climate change. However, gaps remain in understanding how households’ adaptive capacities can become uneven. This paper investigates how development transitions—such as the recent adoption of ‘green revolution’ agricultural policies throughout sub-Saharan Africa—intersect with cross-scale social-environmental processes to unevenly shape smallholders’ adaptive capacities and adaptation pathways. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative material from a multi-season study in Rwanda, we investigate smallholder adaptation processes amid a suite of rural development interventions. Our study finds that adaptive capacities arise differentially across livelihood groups in the context of evolving environmental, social, and political economic processes. We show how social institutions play key roles in shaping differential adaptation pathways by enabling and/or constraining opportunities for smallholders to adapt livelihood and land use strategies. Specifically, Rwanda’s Crop Intensification Program enables some wealthier households to adapt livelihoods by generating income through commercial agriculture. At the same time, deactivation of local risk management institutions has diminished climate risk management options for most households. To build and employ alternate livelihood practices such as commercial agriculture and planting woodlots for charcoal production, smallholders must negotiate new institutions, a prerequisite for which is access to capitals (land, labor, and nonfarm income). Those without entitlements to these are pulled deeper into poverty with each successive climatic shock. This illustrates that adaptive capacity is not a static, quantifiable entity that exists in households. We argue that reconceptualizing adaptive capacity as a dynamic, social-environmental process that emerges in places can help clarify complex linkages among development policies, livelihoods, and adaptation pathways. To ensure more equitable and climate-resilient agricultural development, we stress the need to reformulate policies with careful attention to how power structures and entrenched social inequalities can lead to smallholders’ uneven capacities to adapt to climate change.