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Societal Impact StatementMultiple cropping, the cultivation of several crops on the same land in a year, occupied an important part of Taiwan's agricultural research from 1950 to 1970. This research originated in the context of Taiwan's land reform and diversification programs and their connections to the government's political ambition to maximize food production. The study of how multiple cropping was politicized and depoliticized by different actors helps to expand the narratives of the Green Revolution in Asia, analyze their legacies, and highlight Taiwan's role in the international exchange of visions of agricultural development during the Cold War.Summary Scholars have recently expanded the history of the Green Revolution to move beyond the narrative of North–South technological diffusion. This article enriches the scholarship with the case of multiple cropping in Taiwan and its connection to Cold War geopolitics. Rice productivity in postwar Taiwan was boosted through a land reform launched by the Sino‐American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) in the 1950s. Backed by American aid and staffed by scientists from the Republic of China (ROC) government, the JCRR envisioned to turn tenant farmers into landowners so as to encourage labor input and adoption of seeds and fertilizers. By 1960, the JCRR presented its reform as a “bloodless social revolution” and extended its focus to multiple cropping through a diversification program. The JCRR further created the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) in 1971 to spread Taiwan's breeding and cropping techniques. The ROC's diplomatic isolation in the 1970s, however, prompted the center to reinterpret Taiwan's success in multiple cropping from a political achievement to a technological triumph, thus reinforcing the technology‐driven narrative used by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Through Taiwan's influences on IRRI's rice breeding and multiple cropping research, this paper illustrates that the history of the Green Revolution requires more complex narratives. In addition, with Taiwan's political and economic transition since the 1980s, farmers began to reclaim their voice and influence agricultural policies. The case thus highlights the need of democratic participation in agricultural research, a concern that remains relevant today.
Societal Impact StatementMultiple cropping, the cultivation of several crops on the same land in a year, occupied an important part of Taiwan's agricultural research from 1950 to 1970. This research originated in the context of Taiwan's land reform and diversification programs and their connections to the government's political ambition to maximize food production. The study of how multiple cropping was politicized and depoliticized by different actors helps to expand the narratives of the Green Revolution in Asia, analyze their legacies, and highlight Taiwan's role in the international exchange of visions of agricultural development during the Cold War.Summary Scholars have recently expanded the history of the Green Revolution to move beyond the narrative of North–South technological diffusion. This article enriches the scholarship with the case of multiple cropping in Taiwan and its connection to Cold War geopolitics. Rice productivity in postwar Taiwan was boosted through a land reform launched by the Sino‐American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) in the 1950s. Backed by American aid and staffed by scientists from the Republic of China (ROC) government, the JCRR envisioned to turn tenant farmers into landowners so as to encourage labor input and adoption of seeds and fertilizers. By 1960, the JCRR presented its reform as a “bloodless social revolution” and extended its focus to multiple cropping through a diversification program. The JCRR further created the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) in 1971 to spread Taiwan's breeding and cropping techniques. The ROC's diplomatic isolation in the 1970s, however, prompted the center to reinterpret Taiwan's success in multiple cropping from a political achievement to a technological triumph, thus reinforcing the technology‐driven narrative used by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Through Taiwan's influences on IRRI's rice breeding and multiple cropping research, this paper illustrates that the history of the Green Revolution requires more complex narratives. In addition, with Taiwan's political and economic transition since the 1980s, farmers began to reclaim their voice and influence agricultural policies. The case thus highlights the need of democratic participation in agricultural research, a concern that remains relevant today.
Historical memory is often short, and perhaps nowhere more so than in scientific research. As scientists chase new insights and novel tools, they are rarely rewarded for possessing deep knowledge of their disciplines' past trajectories. Textbook sidebars spotlight singular individuals or celebrated experiments, and institutional accounts highlight founders and funders. Such highlights introduce a tiny-and unrepresentative-fraction of scientific work. Yet, the possibilities and pitfalls of today's research are conditioned by the past.Our contention in bringing together this special issue is that examining the history of plant science and technology is essential to the goals of Plants, People, Planet-that is, to the development of cross-disciplinary approaches in the plant sciences that will foster the insights and energy necessary to tackle the global social and environmental challenges of the present (Hiscock et al., 2023). As the contributions highlight, attention to history can serve many agendas: guiding breeding programs, shaping conservation strategy, tempering expectations for extension work, informing public policy, highlighting the continued legacies of colonialism, and more. It can also serve as the glue that brings researchers from different disciplines into conversation. In this issue, readers will encounter historical accounts (co-) developed by agroecologists, anthropologists, biologists, breeders, development experts, historians, sociologists, and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Though the contributions traverse many decades and continents, their shared terrain is the archive of past plant science and technology, whether inscribed in books and written records, genes and landscapes, or memories and oral traditions.Our cross-disciplinary histories center on another crossdisciplinary domain: crop science. The study of plants we use as food and fodder (and fuel and fiber, too, though they do not come in for scrutiny in this collection) has played an outsized role in exploring and promoting solutions to the challenges of feeding the world. Over many decades, researchers with expertise in fields such as agronomy, genetics, plant physiology, crop ecology, and biotechnology have reconfigured genes, fields, and ecosystems to extend the biophysical limits of food and fodder production. The outcomes of this work are
The organization of sweet potato research across global regions began in earnest in the 1980s. Leading international institutions, notably the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, recognized the potential for science-driven development of a “neglected” crop. Sweet potato was second only to potato in root crop cultivation worldwide and the top tuber in Asia yet had not been subject to the internationally coordinated research that its importance merited. This article explores how scientists involved in sweet potato research attempted to respond to the call for new international research and development efforts while avoiding the limitations of predecessor programs associated with the Green Revolution. It highlights the challenges inherent in this work by focusing on ambitions for—and challenges to—providing standardized information about samples of varieties used in research and entered into gene bank collections. As scientists and institutions grappled with critiques of the top-down model of development, many sought to address these through more inclusive research practices. As the article shows, accommodating diversity in crops and among cultivators and cultures entailed costs that ultimately limited the longevity and effectiveness of some enterprises that sought to maximize inclusivity.
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