Reconnecting Agricultural Technology to Human Development

Human development has repeatedly been transformed by huge gains in food production; especially the ‘Neolithic settlement’, as former hunter-gatherers became farmers. However, even in Europe alone, this took many centuries to spread. Until about 1750, technical progress raised on-farm productivity too slowly, at national level, to achieve rapid increase in food availability or employment income. Yet between 1750 and 1914, new farm techniques (better crop rotations, plant and animal varieties, guano and fertilizers and, later, refrigeration and tractors) transformed human life in Europe, North America and Australasia. New farm opportunities meant more food, more labour income, and the conquest of mass rural hunger. Later, rising farm productivity released millions of farmworkers to higher-earning, mainly urban activity. Between 1950 and 1990, an analogous process, the Green Revolution, brought unprecedented rises in food production, falls in poverty, and human development (including better health and education) to much of South and East Asia and Central America. These outcomes then fuelled more farm growth. However, this virtuous circle has become a crawl since 1990. Farm yield growth and poverty reduction have slowed right down — before even reaching most of Africa, uplands, and drylands. The farm changes of 1950– 1990 were based on the adoption of mainly public sector research by smallholders, employment intensively and with irrigation or fairly secure rainfall. But agricultural research has shifted to the private sector; its results have become less smallholder friendly and less employment intensive; poverty has concentrated in rural areas with little water control; and rural water shortages are intensifying. The positive connections between agricultural research and human development have sharply weakened. This paper explores those connections, and how to revive them. Agrotechnical progress is a three-stage process comprising: