Getting started with online historical research

First off, it's official that I'm a PhD and I have a two year fellowship at the USDA's Climate Change Program Office! I'm moving from Arizona to Virginia and I couldn't be happier.

In the course of my dissertation research I utilized many online databases and archives. Some of these were through my library, so they required a university login and password, but many are freely available to anyone. I thought I'd list some of these resources.

Universally helpful:

• Google n-gram viewer. When I'm learning about a new historical topic, this is one of the first places I turn to, especially when I want to know about the etymology of a specific phrase or word. I can then click on the link to Google books from specific time frames and check out how the word is used, in what contexts, etc. 
• WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a database of virtually all published (and some unpublished) materials. While no website has a universally perfect search function, typing keywords or authors into WorldCat's search usually turns up a relevant list of publications. WorldCat is helpful because it lists the complete biographical information and what libraries hold a specific item. If it is available online, it will often link to it.
• Hathi Trust and Archive.org. These sites contain thousands of open-access digitized texts. You may have to refine your search terms to find relevant texts. (FYI "hathi" is Hindi/Urdu/Bengali for elephant, so it's pronounced with a hard aspirated "t". Listen here!)
• Google.com and Google Scholar. I'm not an expert at database querying so I spend a lot of time trying out different keywords and strings of words in Google and G-Scholar. Google often leads me to documents that I wouldn't have been able to find even within an institution's website. For example I find a lot of documents scanned and uploaded on USAID's website (because USAID funded many of the projects I studied), but there was not a good way to access these through USAID and there is no hierarchy or organization of the information, so it's just random.

International agricultural research history:

• CIMMYT Repository and University of Florida Digital Collections. CIMMYT's repository has been organized by topic, the link provided is for "wheat" but there is a sidebar on the left titled "Collections." In this case I sorted the repository by year. This repository contains published materials as well as a large amount of published and unpublished CIMMYT reports and conferences. UF's Digital Collections has a repository called "International Farming Systems" that is a collection of materials donated by Peter Hildebrand, an agricultural economist. I'm not sure what his professional affiliations were, but this repository has over 2000 international agricultural reports, some in English and some in Spanish, from roughly the 1950s onwards.
• University of Minnesota Library's digital collections. There is a large amount of scanned materials deposited here. The green revolution collection (no link, just cntl-F it on the homepage) hosts correspondences, diary notes, and biographical details of Norman Borlaug, John Gibler, and Elvin Stakman among others. It takes a while to load each scanned page, but if you're interested in finding the "raw" archival data, this is it. Borlaug's oral history is included here, so if you can't make it to the Rockefeller Archive Center but still want to read it, find it here!

Foreign policy history, Cold War era-specific:

• US State Department Historical Documents. This repository spans from 1945 to 1980 and the archivists here have helpfully separated various documents (memo's, correspondence, etc.) by date, topic, and region. All materials are transcribed so it is easy to read and to copy-paste exact quotes.
• Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. I haven't browsed this fully, but it has a collection of digital material from Truman and his cabinet, advisors, and other policy-related people. It has a large collection of oral histories.

Drinking the Kool-Aid while attempting to be an unbiased researcher

I realized today that I’ve spend the past week and a half drinking the Bioversity Kool-Aid; meaning that I’ve been surrounded by great ideas like “custodian farmers”; researchers who are really interested in “farmer first” technologies, networks, and access to resources; and in the past few days, getting a chance to talk to farmers who are involved in Bioversity’s projects here in India. Which is all great, especially considering that Bioversity’s mission aligns with my own ideological commitments. But this is something my academic committee has pushed me to think about: how will I deal with my own pro-farmer, pro-local biases when conducting my research?

One of the things I’m studying is the difference between/evolution of the scientific paradigms of “wide adaptation of crops/top-down technology transfer” and “location-specific adaptation/participatory research.” The first approach is dominant in the state-run agricultural organizations; the second (I’m hypothesizing) is more likely to crop up among NGOs and individual researchers. But, is one approach necessarily “better”? My own bias pushes me towards thinking the second approach is better, because it takes into account the local socio-economic as well as environmental conditions of farmers. But from an innovation systems perspective, we probably need some combination of both approaches. The first approach works well for large farmers on productive lands; the second works better for marginal farmers/areas. I think if I’m able to take a more even-handed (or “academically agnostic”) approach to my research, my scholarship will be better. One step I can take to reduce my bias is to be very careful in my interviews, and to carefully consider what my respondents say. In my historical research, I think the best strategy for now is just to document all relevant material, and then sort out my theoretical argument later.

Theoretically, I find the correlation of the “wide adaptation/top-down” approach with a socialized political system extremely interesting. This would require me digging into more political science than I currently have under my belt, but I think it would be really interesting to compare 20^th century agricultural development in the US, Soviet Russia, and India. For example, what was the political context; proportion of public vs. private research investment; scientific paradigms; and ultimately the success of agricultural technologies in each of these nation-states during critical periods of agricultural development? Maybe I can find someone already working on this stuff and collaborate…

In other news, baby goats are the cutest things ever and I want one!

Agroecological zones and climate

Much of my research on climate change and agriculture over the past year has focused on how innovation-- mostly biological, such as plant breeding, but also technological, such as irrigation-- has expanded the range of certain crops, such as wheat and soybeans in North America. Looking at these historical cases, we might be able to learn something about adaptation of crops to new climate zones due to climate change.

The Consultative Group for International Agriculture (CGIAR) has also picked up on this idea of climate adaptation through crop innovation. This makes perfect sense, given their historical roots in plant breeding, and their access to large repositories of plant genetic material around the world. They have lately focused on bridging gaps between climate modeling, plant breeding, and climate-tolerant crops. For example, if we can predict that the climate in Nepal is going to be similar to Bangladesh in 20 years, then Nepali farmers and plant breeders should be not only learning from their Bangladeshi counterparts, but also starting to grow Bangladeshi varieties of rice.

But Bangladesh alone has about 30 agroecological zones (see figure above). Agroecological zones are based on regional soil types and climate zones. This means that farmers in each zone are likely to differ, even if by just a little, in the type of irrigation they use, variety of crops they grow, and when they plant and harvest those crops. Agroecological zones are also useful in categorizing the maximum yield productivity of a region-- for example, rice just might grow better in certain zones.

Today many crops have mixed genetic heritages that span not just countries but continents, and we can even grow traditional Japanese rice in Australia. If we look back to the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug introduced a variety of wheat to India that was originally bred in Mexico. Borlaug also innovated a plant breeding technique called "shuttle breeding," which is where you test a new crop in two different climate locations. This would make the plant "hardier" and able to survive in a larger climate zone.

The problem lies in reducing agriculture to a simple equation of climate and genetics. The CGIAR is falling a bit too closely into a "Seeing Like a State" mentality. The drive to simplify and cross-apply broad agricultural knowledge across regions ignores many local factors, both biophysical (types of local insects, soil salinity, climate variability) and social (gender roles in farming, innovativeness, access to resources).

I've written about these generalizations of climate vulnerability before, and how such generalized information is likely limited in its use. Climate change is not the only challenge to farmers: in fact, short term climate variability may be more important. Miguel Altieri and other agroecologists argue that local networks of agrobiodiversity and seed sharing are more important than international efforts to improve yields through modernization of agriculture. On the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, an author writes about the problems with using recent online climate-zone tools produced by the CGIAR and FAO.

So despite my skepticism about the usefulness of climate models and technological fixes, I'm extremely excited to work on this issue more in the upcoming year, and especially looking at farmer participation and innovation for climate adaptation in India.

Foreign policy, food security, and climate change

President Johnson visiting the International Rice Research Institute in 1966. Related video here.

I recently submitted a fellowship proposal where I framed my research in terms of National Security. This is part of my proposal.

Foreign policy between the U.S. and India has evolved around Indian food security since 1946, beginning with an era of grain exports from the fertile U.S. Midwest to famine-stricken India [1]. The twin problems of overpopulation and Communism in India provoked U.S. responses, foremost President Johnson’s Food for Peace program in 1959. From 1965-1966, President Johnson and his national security advisers used the Food for Peace program as a bargaining tool with India to promote a transition from food aid to self-sufficient Indian grain production [2]. This coincided with efforts by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and private foundations to overhaul India’s agricultural research infrastructure and the transfer of new agricultural technologies [1]. 

The confluence of foreign policy and scientific advances led to the highly productive agricultural system of northwestern India from the 1970s to present; this is known as the Green Revolution. Today, the yield gains of last century’s Green Revolution have now stagnated. A convergence of demographic, ecological, and climate factors threaten India’s agricultural yields and food security. By 2030, northwest India may once again become food insecure, threatening the political stability of this region [3]. My research will focus on how climate change is impacting food security in northwest India, and the capacity of agricultural research to address climate change adaptation.

Northwest India is historically important for international agricultural science, and today faces the new threat of climate change. My research will examine both the institutional and technological dimensions of climate adaptation in agriculture. Technologies such as climate-tolerant crop varieties are invoked as future solutions to counter new climate constraints on crop yields [4]. Yet in an agricultural research system that is diverse and has inevitable time lags for crop variety development, it is uncertain whether the existing research system has the capacity to address new, highly uncertain global challenges like climate change. My research will critically assess the capacity of agricultural research to address climate change adaptation in northwest India, particularly in the state of Haryana.

Regardless of current climate change mitigation efforts, agriculture must adapt to an uncertain climate future. India’s ability to adapt to climate change is crucial to U.S. national security. The U.S. military calls climate change a “threat multiplier” to existing foreign policy tensions: exacerbating food insecurity and political instability especially when food prices rise sharply [5,6]. India itself faces several national security threats due to climate change and food insecurity, from Bangladeshi climate refugees to water resource-based conflict along the Pakistan border [7]. Indian agriculture is especially vulnerable to climate change, and scholars warn that the Green Revolution style of agriculture lacks resilience to climate pressures and shocks [3,4].

My research is particularly focused on sustainable development, and how agricultural innovation can support resilient local economies, gender equity, and local democracy. Sustainable development is increasingly intertwined with “climate smart” development: development that is sensitive to both climate mitigation and adaptation goals. Indian agriculture is tied to rural livelihoods, and climate change can compound existing gender and income disparities [8]. Leichenko and O’Brien call this the “double exposure” model [9]. I experienced these overlapping factors during a three-month internship in Bangladesh in 2008. While working for a non-governmental organization, I studied farmers’ adoption of a new hybrid rice variety. I interviewed male and female farmers and found that many scientists and policy-makers (wrongly) assumed that women did not farm rice; thus excluding women from education about hybrid rice and access to agricultural inputs. My research will examine the how agricultural research systems address sustainable development goals through climate change adaptation.

[1] J.H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997).

[2] K. Ahlberg, Diplomatic History 31, 4 (2007).

[3] N. Chhetri, P. Chaudhary, Journal of Disaster Research 6, 5 (2011).

[4] S.J. Vermeulen et al., Environmental Science & Policy 15, 1 (2012).

[5] F. Morring, Aviation Week & Space Technology 166, 16 (2007).

[6] R. Naylor, W. Falcon, Population and Development Review 36, 4 (2010).

[7] N. Pai, The Indian National Interest Policy Brief no. 1 (2008).

[8] K.L. O’Brien, et al. Global Environmental Change 14, 4 (2004).

[9] R.M. Leichenko, K.L. O’Brien, Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008).

STS perspectives on the Green Revolution

Over the next few weeks, you'll be hearing a lot from me and some collaborators about the future of food and agriculture. Consider this a warm-up, although it's a bit academic. And if you're in the Phoenix area, check out this panel I'm participating in this week, "Feed 8 Billion."

The Green Revolution is an era of rapid agricultural innovation and diffusion that is critical to my own research, and I would argue, to the future of agricultural research. Narratives of the Green Revolution are invoked by different actors for different purposes; Robert Zeigler might invoke the Green Revolution as a reason to support public agricultural research. Activists like Vandana Shiva might invoke it to warn of the dangers of monocropped agriculture and top-down international development projects. I prefer to take the middle road, but the aim of my research is not to make a normative judgment about the Green Revolution. Instead, I aim to interpret how different visions of agricultural change and innovation drive organizations and technological development.

I have created a public folder of my essential Green Revolution articles, and I would also highly recommend these books by Kloppenburg, Perkins, and Cullather for an even richer perspective. There are so many things written about this topic, but I've attempted to cull it down to my favorites. I've also included my paper on the Green Revolution and the Population Bomb in Asia from 1960-1970, which I wrote for a class last year and hope to turn into a dissertation chapter. Please ask for permission if you'd like to cite or circulate my paper.

I'm going to highlight 3 papers for this post. They are articles I picked because they cover the basics of the Green Revolution, biotechnology, globalization, and some of the core STS concepts I want to explore in my research. The common theme between these 3 articles is agricultural innovation systems, and the dynamic between technologies and institutions/organizations.

Let’s start with Parayil’s 2003 paper on technological trajectories from the Green Revolution to the “Gene Revolution” (biotechnology and molecular techniques for plant breeding). Parayil borrows the concept of technological trajectories from a paper by Giovanni Dosi in 1982. The unique contribution of Dosi’s theory is that technological development occurs in a specific technological paradigm that both produces innovations, but also constrains these innovations to a specific trajectory. The physical properties of the technology and its path of development, the institutional environment that produce technologies, and the economic forces driving innovation all contribute to a specific technological trajectory. 

Parayil uses this theoretical framework to explain how the research organizations, technologies, and economic incentives during the Green Revolution are very different than today’s Gene Revolution. Other factors, like globalization, neoliberalism, and intellectual property rights also characterize today’s innovation environment. To Parayil, it is wrong and possibly dangerous to imagine the Gene Revolution as a continuation of the Green Revolution. I am proposing to empirically study an actual innovation system, using the case study of northwest India. What actors are involved in research, seed sales, and extension? To what extent are farmers included in participatory research, and does this feed back into the system? How do conceptions of biotechnology and the Green Revolution shape future imaginations of agricultural adaptation to climate change?

Onto the next article, Brooks (2011) on international agricultural research and global public goods (GPGs). Brooks discussed how the CGIAR (an international consortium of public agricultural research centers, several of which were critically involved in the Green Revolution) markets itself as a purveyor of GPGs and that the “CGIAR centres would now play a ‘brokering’ role in global, heterogeneous networks comprising a wide range of public and private institutions (Rijsberman 2002, 3). The implication was that ‘the CGIAR was uniquely placed to act as honest broker’ and steer these complex networks in directions consistent with a public goods research mandate (Brooks 2010, 4)” (Brooks, 2011, 70). Brooks frames her argument against a 2008 paper by Dana Dalrymple, an economist at the USDA who has promoted public international agricultural research since the Green Revolution. 

She uses the case studies of Golden Rice, iron biofortification, and the CGIAR’s HarvestPlus program to show how despite the CGIAR’s claims of knowledge brokering and new research paradigms, and despite ostensibly new research partnerships and institutional innovations, the CGIAR has maintained both institutional dominance (in a top-down paradigm) and technological and economic reductionism (assuming scale-neutral technologies, and silver bullet solutions to complex social problems). My research on climate change adaptation and agricultural research aims to uncover similar dynamics. How do international, national, and local agricultural research organizations (including public, private, and NGOs) use climate change as a leverage point for power? Have research paradigms actually changed because of climate change, or are the same technological and institutional goals maintained? 

Finally, Busch and Juska (1997) discuss political economy, actor network theory, and globalized food and agricultural systems. The authors frame their article against political economy approaches, which focus on social power. They claim that this approach generalizes and simplifies the range of actors involved, and demands that non-human actors (such as food and nature) are passive. Instead, they recommend embracing actor network theory, which seeks to remedy these oversights. They use the case study of Canadian rapeseed (canola) to show the relationships between scientific institutions (particularly plant breeding and organic chemistry), technologies, and nature that were necessary to make rapeseed oil edible for humans. Furthermore, the liberalization of global rapeseed markets led to shifts in production and consumption. I find the actor network theory approach to agricultural systems extremely helpful in empirically conceptualizing the connections between scientific research, commodity chains, and producers and consumers. In my own research, I plan on conducting a network analysis of rice and wheat research in northwest India. I’m not as interested in the global commodity chain, but rather the interaction between local, national, and international actors.