Doctoral Project: Leo Chu
This thesis studies the relationship between agriculture and diversity in Taiwan and its outreach in Southeast Asia from 1960 to 2000. I focus on the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC), an institute founded in Taiwan in 1971 for the adaptation of vegetables to the humid tropics. The marginalization of AVRDC due to the geopolitical complication prompted it to secure funding by engaging with different concepts of diversity, such as the diversification of crops and cultivation methods, the inclusion of ecological processes into food production, and the role of cultural diversity in agricultural development. By tracing the transnational circulation of agricultural knowledge as both science diplomacy and local innovation, I analyse how ideas of diversity in Taiwan and Southeast Asia evolved both separately from, and in connection with, environmental politics in Europe and America. I propose that learning from these actors’ success and failures is crucial in forging a new praxis of diversity that takes seriously the contradictions these ideas embody.
Keywords: Vegetables, diversity, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Cold War
Recent presentations by Leo Chu on vegetable research in Taiwan and beyond:
'Diversifying Green Revolution: The Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) from the Cold War to the Dawn of Sustainability, 1963–1988', European Society for the History of Science 2022 Annual Conference, Brussels, Belgium, September.
'Between Gardens and Genebank: The Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) and the Rise of Urban Agriculture, 1971-2008', Agricultural History Society 2022 Annual Meeting, Stavanger, Norway, August.
'Reforming the Green Revolution through Ecology in Southeast Asia, 1964-2000', British Society for the History of Science 2022 Annual Conference, Belfast, Northern Ireland, July 2022.
