E. Walter Coward and Wayne A. Schutjer, “The Green Revolution: Initiating and Sustaining Change,” Civilisations 20, no. 4 (1970), 473-484.

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Notes

• 473 – “A continuing question in the strategy of agricultural development is the relative importance of technological and institutional innovations. It is apparent that a given level of agricultural development is dependent on both technology and organization and that changes in the level of development reflect prior changes in one or both of these determinants. An important corollary of this relationship is that a change in either technology or organization will create tension for subsequent adjustment in the other.”
• “This corollary has produced strategies of induced technological change based upon the creation of an institutional environment which enhances the acceptability of new technology. The inverse of this relationship, i.e., induced institutional adjustment through technological change, has been somewhat more suspect because of the view that prevailing institutional patterns act as a barrier even to the introduction of new technology.”
• “The experience of several developing nations with the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ offers an example of the latter strategy. Thus we are able to exam the feasibility and consequences of introducing new technology into an unchanged institutional arrangement. Experience thus far indicates that the adjustment of institutions is occurring with some difficulty and that unless such difficulties are resolved through various intervention policies it may be impossible to sustain the initial technological changes.”
• “It appears that the Green Revolution strategy of agricultural development illustrates the following important principles: (1) significant technological change can be initiated with little prior change in institutional patterns, but (2) this will have important influences on the pattern of participation in the development process and (3) will require subsequent institutional changes if the development process is to be sustained.”
• 474-475 – “The experience of the Green Revolution supports the notion that there is enough flexibility within most social situations to allow for the initiation of change-producing innovations. Thus, within society there is enough diversity that some cultivators will be able to respond to new production opportunities within the existing institutional patterns. Some cultivators will have credit sources, access to information and market outlets, and holdings large enough, and secure enough, that allow their early use of new technology.”
• 477 – “The equation is simple: Institutional patterns that create skewed distribution of wealth, status and power plus new technology produce a productive but inequitable agricultural sector.”
• “The consequences of the bi-modal strategy [like that of Mexico] used to initiate the Green Revolution are, in the terms of Moore (1963), both tension-reducing and tension-producing. The Green Revolution has resulted in tension reduction regarding the ability of the ‘miracle’ countries to be self-supporting producers of food grains. Concomitantly, the green Revolution has been tension-producing because of this contribution to increasing existing inequalities and relative deprivations.”
  • Critics or supporters of the agricultural development program can simply emphasize whatever tension/reduction-thereof suits them
• 478 – “The basic notion is that the spread of the Green Revolution beyond the privileged few will require that traditional institutional patterns adjust, or that new institutional patterns emerge, to assure the access of cultivators with limited resources to the knowledge and physical inputs required for the adoption of the HYV production package.”

 

• “The range of socioeconomic problems that require solution if the Green Revolution is to be sustained can be divided into three general categories: (1) infrastructure problems, needed improvements in markets, transportation systems, storage facilities, etc., (2) technical research and extension problems; the need for continuing research to create new HYV’s suitable to a broader range of agro-climatic conditions and to undertake protective research for existing varieties, (3) equity problems, the need to change the distribution of the benefits of agricultural growth.”

 

• 479 – “It is the unsatisfactory distribution of the benefits of change that make inadequacies in institutional patterns most apparent.”
• 481 – “Institutional reform can be left to follow a ‘natural’ pattern of adjustment, or it too can become subject to planned change and intended innovations. Should the later strategy be the policy choice of the ‘miracle’ countries there is an obvious need for action to design and test institutional innovations.”
  • Design, test, and implement the green revolution; study the economic and sociopolitical “feedback” the revolution causes; determine that the instigated feedbacks require institutional adjustment to sustain the revolution; “design and test institutional innovations.”

 

• An entire process model for influencing the economic, social, and political circumstances and institutions in a society.

 

• “In this case, it is in the phases of the Green Revolution subsequent to initiation that there is a critical need for institutional change. As Critchfield has indicated: ‘Virtually every FAO official I interviewed believes some form of social revolution will follow the agricultural revolution in all to many of the poor countries’. This ‘social revolution’ can be viewed both as a consequence of the initiation of the ‘agricultural revolution’ and as a pre-requisite for its continuance.”
  • Here we have an explicit statement of the co-production of agricultural development and sociopolitical change.