Robert Evenson, “The ‘Green Revolution’ in Recent Development Experience,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 56, no. 2 (May 1974), 387-394.

Notes

• 387 – associate professor of economics at yale university
• “As a consequence, the disoveries, particularly the wheat varieties from the Rockefeller Foundation program in Mexico, were diffused over very wide geographic areas. Such widespread diffusion would have been very unlikely in the temperate and steppe climate zones where dozens of first-rate discovery institutions have been in place for a number of years. The existence of a reasonably and efficiently organized system of discovery institutions, in which each major research center is oriented toward the discovery of technology suited to the soil, climate, and economic characteristics facing its clientele, effectively prevents widespread direct diffusion of technology. Green revolutions, in the popular sense of the term, would not occur in a modern system of scientific and technology discovery institutions.”
• 390 – “The dominant role of the green revolution in recent agricultural development literature provides a very misleading picture of growth in agricultural productivity and of its determinants. This stems largely from a more general lack of understanding of the factors determining real economic growth. Many development projects have been designed on the premise that the LDC farmer was ignorant and unresponsive to economic incentives, that relevant technology was actually in existence, and that the ‘missionary’ extension agent was the key to changing farmer values and attitudes and leading him to adopt modern methods. The consistent failure of these programs to produce the results expected of them created a setting in which the unexpected gains of the improved wheat and rice varieties were treated as a godsend.”
• “The publicity generated in the process masked a number of important facts. These include the fact that considerable and important agricultural productivity gains had been achieved in many less developed countries in the 1950’s and 1960’s.”
  • Meaning before the implementation of Green Revolution programs (he’s dealing with Asia and North Africa)
• “The research measures are based on the number of publications which have been screened for commodity relevance and for scientific significance by two international abstracting journals, Plant Breeding Abstracts and Biological Abstracts.”
• 391 – “Table 3 reports regression results based on the more complex specification. The wheat and rice regressions indicate that indigenous research activity has influenced productivity gains. The high yielding variety variables included in the regressions indicate that the green revolution also contributed independently to productivity growth.”
• 392 – “The regressions to reflect a significant degree of international transfer of research findings in both wheat and rice production. In fact, the dominant research variable in regressions for both wheat and rice is the interaction variable of regional agronomic research and zonal supporting science research.”
• “It indicates that for all cereal grains: 1. National agronomic and plant breeding research has contributed significantly to realized productivity growth. In addition to a direct contribution to the economy in which the research is conducted, and indirect contribution to other economies in similar geo-climate regions has been realized.//2. Indigenous research programs are complementary to regional research contributions at low levels and substitute for regional or transferred research at high levels.//3. In the case of both indigenous and transferred research contributions by agronomic and plant breeding research, the indirect contribution of supporting scientific research in plant physiology, phytopathology, and soil science has been very significant. In fact, the apparent marginal contribution to production of a dollar expended on supporting scientific research exceeds that of the applied agronomic and plant breeding research.// 4. It would appear that most technology transfer takes an indirect rather than a direct form. The region yield variables do not dominate the regional research variables. The negative interaction term between regional yield levels and indigenous agronomic research indicates that indigenous research is indeed producing substitute or competing technology. Much of the transfer apparently takes the form of ‘knowledge’ as opposed to tangible technology.”