V. W. Ruttan and Yujiro Hayami, “Technology Transfer and Agricultural Development,” Technology and Culture 14, no. 2 (April 1973), 119-151.

---

Notes

• 120 – “Before agricultural research and extension were institutionalized, this diffusion took place as a by-product of travel, exploration, and communication undertaken primarily for other purposes. Over a long gestation period — several decades and even centuries — exotic plants, animals, equipment, and husbandry techniques were gradually introduced and adapted to local conditions. In the 19th century the international diffusion process became more highly institutionalized. National governments established agencies deliberately to seek out and introduce exotic crop varieties and animal breeds. Colonial governments and the great trading companies operating under their protection sought to introduce crops with export potential into new areas of cultivation. Over time, these efforts have had a substantial impact on the location of staple production and on international trading patterns in crop and animal products.”
• 120-1 – “The enormous agricultural productivity differences among countries, combined with the success of earlier diffusion efforts, have often been interpreted to imply that more effective diffusion of known agricultural technology among countries could represent an efficient source of economic growth in agricultural productivity and production in the less developed countries. This perspective imposed a ‘naive diffusion’ or ‘extension bias’ to much of the national and international aid efforts for agricultural development that emerged after World War II.”

 

• 121 – “In reviewing the agricultural development efforts of the 1950s and early 1960s, Albert Moseman emphasized that ‘this ‘extension bias’ met with only limited success because of the paucity of applicable indigenous technology and the general unsuitability of U.S. temperate zone materials and practices to tropical agricultural conditions.”

• “In this paper, from earlier research on the diffusion of culture and technology, we draw insights that can contribute to a more adequate understanding of the processes involved in the international transfer of agricultural technology and the impact of such transfer on the location of agricultural production and international trade in agricultural commodities. This analysis leads us to place major emphasis on the emergence of national experiment-station capacity for adaptive research and development as a critical element in the international transfer or ‘naturalization’ of agricultural technology.”

 

• 122 – “The models [of technological diffusion] have, with a few exceptions, only limited relevance for the international transfer of technology in agriculture. They have typically been designed to describe or analyze diffusion within a particular area over time. The attributes of the technology and the attributes of potential adopters are taken as given. While these models are highly useful for the purposes for which they were designed, the assumption of ready availability and of direct transferability of the technology represents a critical limitation in utilizing them to understand the process of international diffusion in situations where ecological variations and differences in factor endowments among countries inhibit the direct transfer of agricultural technology.”
  • As in the case of Mexico

 

 

• 122-3 – “The study by Griliches of the diffusion of hybrid corn represents a rare attempt to incorporate the mechanism of local adaptation into a diffusion model. The study is of relevance because the diffusion of hybrid corn among geographic areas, through the development of locally adapted varieties, is similar to our view of the process of international technology transfer in agriculture”
• 123 – “The procedure employed by Griliches was to summarize the diffusion path for each hybrid-corn maturity area by fitting an S-shaped logistic trend function to data on the percentage of corn area planted with hybrid seed in each maturity area. The logistic trend function is described by three parameters — an origin, a slope, and a ceiling. Griliches interpreted his results as indicating that differences among regions in the rate (slope) and level (ceiling) of acceptance are both functions of the profitability of a shift from open-pollinated to hybrid corn. Variations in these two parameters among regions are thus explained in terms of farmers’ profit-seeking behavior. In this respect Griliches’s model is similar to other diffusion models employed by economists.”
• 123-4 – “Form this analysis Griliches derived the conclusion that both the efforts of the agricultural experiment stations and the commercial seed companies were guided by the expected return to research, development, and marketing costs. It is one of the great merits of the Griliches model that it incorporates the mechanism of local adaptation in the interregional transfer of agricultural technology.”

 

• 124 – “It seems useful to distinguish three phases of international technology transfer: (a) material transfer, (b) design transfer, and (c) capacity transfer.”

 

• “The first phase is characterized by the simple transfer or import of new materials such as seed, plants, animals, machines, and techniques associated with these materials. Local adaptation is not conducted in an order and systematic fashion. The naturalization of plants and animals tends to occur primarily as a result of trial and error by farmers.”
• “In the second phase the transfer of technology is made primarily through the transfer of certain designs (blueprints, formula, books, etc.). During this period exotic materials are imported in order to copy their designs rather than for their own use. New plants and animals are subject to orderly tests and are propagated through systematic multiplication. Machines imported in the previous phase start to be produced domestically with only slight modifications in design.”

 

• 124-5 – “In the third phase technology transfer occurs primarily through the transfer of scientific knowledge and capacity. The effect is to create the capacity for the production of locally adapted technology according to the prototype technology existing abroad. Increasingly, plant and animal varieties are bred locally to adapt them to local ecological conditions. The design of imported machinery is modified in order to meet climatic soil requirements and factor endowments of the economy. An important element of the process of capacity transfer is the migration of agricultural scientists. In spite of advances in communications, diffusion of the concepts and craft of agricultural science — and of science and culture generally — depends heavily on extended personal contact and association. The transfer of scientists is often of critical importance in easing the constraints on the supply of scientific and technical manpower in the less developed countries.”

 

• 132 – “As the non-U.S. market expands and the product standardization is completed, the production capacity is built in other advanced countries, and finally the international firms begin to service the third-country markets or even the home market from overseas locations characterized by lower labor costs.”
• “In agriculture, however ,it is not the standardization of the product or the production process which facilitates the transfer of new production capacity form the developed to less developed countries. Rather, it is the establishment of an agricultural experiment station system in the recipient countries with capacity to conduct the research and development necessary to adapt foreign materials and designs for local adoption.”
• 138 – [SECTION V – TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AND THE GREEN REVOLUTION]
• “Of particular significance is the fact that the development of the HYVs represents a process of agricultural technology transfwer from the temperate zone to tropical and subtropical zones through the transfer of scientific knowledge and research capacity. Long before the 1960s the HYVs had been developed in Japan, the United States, and other developed countries in the temperate zone. The direct transfer of these superior varieties had, however, been inhibited by differences in ecological conditions. Technological transfer was delayed by lack of experiment-station capacity to develop HYVs comparable with the prototype varieties which existed in the temperate zone. It is particularly significant that this new capacity was directed to improvement in yield of the staple food crops consumed domestically, rather than to the ‘enclave’ tropical export commodities which had received primary attention under colonial administration.”
• 141 – Establishment of these research training centers can be considered as an institutional innovation facilitating the transfer of an ecology-bound location-specific agricultural technology from temperate-zone developed countries to tropical-zone developing countries.”

 

• “The CIMMYT and IRRI do not, of course, represent completely new concepts of research organization. Commodity-centered research institutes established in the tropics under British, Dutch, and Belgian colonial auspices had been responsible for substantial producitivity gains in the production of tropic export crops. The new international institutes represent an extension and further evolution of an already established institutional pattern.”

 

• 142 – “In retrospect, the staffing program adopted by the foundation and focused on a project leader for each commodity did have one major limitation. In situations where progress depended on the solution to a complex set of interrelated problems in varietal improvement and crop-production practices, the commodity specialist was rarely able to bring to bear the range of disciplinary knowledge and technical skill needed to achive progress in crop production. This can be illustrated by comparing the relative progress of the wheat and corn programs. The wheat program achieved technical success earlier, and its impact on yield per hectare and on total wheat production has been greater than for the other commodity programs. New wheat varieties were being distributed to farmers by the fall of 1948. By 1956 the production impact was sufficient to make Mexico independent of imported wheat.”
• 143 – “Improvement in corn yields occurred much more slowly. In addition to a more complex set of biological factors, the institutional considerations involved in seed multiplication, distribution, and diffusion were more difficult. In retrospect, it appears that success would have been more rapid if initial efforts had been directed to the development of high-yielding synthetic varieties rather than double-cross hybrids.”
• “In situations where the technical, production, and organizational problems were relatively complex, requiring contributions from a broad spectrum of biological and social scientists, the staffing pattern worked out during the early years of the Mexican program was not entirely consistent with rapid progress in the solution of research and production problems. In these more complex situations a multidisciplinary-team approach emerged as a more appropriate strategy than the simple commodity-specialist approach of the early years.”
• “A major source of strength in the success of the Rockefeller Foundation program in Mexico was its economical use of the scarce professional manpower available in Mexico both at the beginning and throughout the program. The shortage of professional manpower and of indigenous educational resources was conducive to the development of an internship system which intimately linked professional education with investigation.”
• “By 1963 agricultural science had been successfully institutionalized in Mexico. On December 30, 1960, the Office of Special Studies was dissolved and merged into a new National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA) under Mexican direction. The Rockefeller Foundation program staff in Mexico was reorganized into a new CIMMYT. The shift of the national program ot Mexican management involved serious emotional strain. One of the more difficult problems faced by the Rockefeller Foundation staff in making the transition was the recognition that they would occupy a marginal role in a program which they had developed. In technical assistance programs, the disengagement phase is often more difficult that the institutional-building phase.”
• 143-4 – “The significance of the disengagement is that it symbolized Mexican success in agricultural science as a career service in which men could enter with confidence that their contributions would be rewarded both in money and in professional recognition. It is also significant that on May 14, 1963, advanced degrees in the agricultural sciences were conferred for the first time in Mexico. Mexico’s new capacity to produced trained manpower in the agricultural sciences is developing in response to the demand for scientific manpower generated by the success of the initial thrust of the technical revolution in Mexican agriculture.”
  • Notice that the “production of manpower in agricultural sciences” is as much as an exported commodity, and spoken of in such terms, as seeds, fertilizers, -cides, and machinery
• 145 – “The significance of the international institute experience, both in Latin America and Asia, goes well beyond the impact of the new wheat, corn, and rice technology in at least two respects. The most important contribution was the evolution of an institutional pattern for the organization of scientific resources which can be replicated for a wide variety of crops and localities with a reasonable probability of success. It is now possible to organize a multidisciplinary team of biological, physical, and social scientists capable of adapting any new biological and chemical technology for crop production to local growing conditions and to make this technology available to farmers in a form that they are capable of accepting within the relatively short period of five to ten years.”

 

• The “improvement” and standardization of the process of epistemic colonialism was as much the goal of MAP as the improvement and standardization of staple food production

• “A second contribution of the new international centers was the evolution of a technique for establishing a set of linkages with national and local education and research centers. This technique includes activities such as exchanges of staff, professional conferences, support of graduate and postgraduate training, personal consultations, and exchange of genetic materials. An institutional infrastructure that is capable, at least in part, of offsetting the inability to exploit fully the economies of scale, which characterize the larger national research systems, is evolving.”

• Facilitating bioprospecting

• 146 – “It is almost inevitable that the dramatic transfer of technology which generated the green revolution would result in substantial stress on several institutions in the relatively underdeveloped economies of the tropics where these changes are occurring.”

 

• 147 – “Technological change may also contribute to the widening income disparities among farmers. The relative income position of farmers who have no access to new technology due, for example, to the lack of irrigation facilities, will worse as the aggregate supply schedule shifts to the right. Declining prices and widening income disparity among farm producers may contrbute [sic] to significant social tension and disruption in rural areas and major political instability at the national level.”
• 150 – “The internatioanl transfer of agricultural technology involves the domestication of exotic plants and genetic materials to local ecologies and modification in the design and use of machines, chemicals, and cultivation techniques to be consistent with the factor endowments and relative factor prices in recipient countries. Failure of a nation to institutionalize domestic research capacity can result in serious impediments to effective international technology transfer. A major challenge for the developing countries is to develop the scientific and institutional capacity to design and adapt location-specific agricultural technology to the resource endowments and economic environments in which the new agricultural technology is to be employed.”