Harvesting Diversity: Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Transformation of the Green Revolution, 1950–2000

Doctoral Project: Leo Chu

Harvesting Diversity: Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Transformation of the Green Revolution, 1950–2000

Abstract: The Green Revolution, coined in 1968 by aid agencies to promote high-yielding cereals for economic development, has been scrutinized for its connection to American Cold War geopolitical strategies and its uneven socio-ecological outcomes. The thesis explores how scientists in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, in particular the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, transformed the Green Revolution through what I call the expanded and reformist visions. The thesis follows the history of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC). Created in Taiwan in 1971, the center traced its root to the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), funded by American aid and managed by Republic of China (ROC) officials. Following the ROC’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the JCRR transformed the island’s tenant farmers into landowners and organized them into associations for the distribution of agrochemicals, seeds, and irrigation water. The AVRDC, initiated by JCRR officials, inherited this experience and attempted to expand the improved yield in the Green Revolution from cereals to vegetables and achieve the diversification and intensification of commodity production. The expanded vision was nevertheless contested by Southeast Asian ecologists and anthropologists in the 1980s who argued the pursuit of productivity had to be balanced with sustainability, and believed that the Green Revolution could be reformed from within to conserve the socio-ecological diversity in rural societies. This thesis examines the achievements, interaction, and limitations of the expanded and reformist visions in bringing the focus of the Green Revolution beyond cereals, and studies how Cold War agricultural development influenced the contemporary discourses of sustainability and agroecology. By showing scientists’ ambition and negotiation with national governments, international donors, and local farmers, this thesis contributes to the historiography of Green Revolution, the scholarship on Cold War Taiwan and Southeast Asia, and the history of science and environment.

Keywords: Taiwan, Cold War, Green Revolution, Southeast Asia

Access the thesis via the University of Cambridge repository.