“Agricultural Expertise, State Power, and the Roots of Technical Aid: Developmentalism and Territorial Rule in Hawai‘i, 1898–1930”

Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia)

In the U.S. context, technical aid and development have usually been treated as products of cold war foreign policy. The confluence of scientific expertise, state power, and global affairs has a much longer-term history, however, and scholars are just beginning to understand the origins of cold war era policies in an earlier era of high imperialism, as well as the interplay between domestic state-building and imperial governance. This paper addresses these issues by examining agriculture--a classic site for both imperial rule and cold war aid and development programs--in Hawai‘i during the first half of the territorial period. The U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station in Honolulu, the territorial government’s Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry, and the research apparatus of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association together defined and contested the structure of Hawai‘ian agriculture and its role in shaping the future of economic development in the islands. The paper will use the case of Hawai‘i to suggest how early policy experiments within America’s overseas empire provided precedents for the cold war heyday of technical aid, and to explore the ties between the national, territorial, and international contexts of expertise as an adjunct to American power.

“Mutant Rice: Colonial Development and Postcolonial Technical Aid, Japan, India”

Hiromi Mizuno (University of Minnesota)

This paper demonstrates the dynamic and continuing relationship between colonial development and Cold War technical aid through an examination of rice breeding projects. It focuses on Tanchung 65, a high-yield hybrid rice developed in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial rule in the 1920s, and its offspring, Mashuri, a Malaysian hybrid rice developed in the 1960s and widely planted in India and Southeast Asia since the 1970s.

Initially developed by Japanese technical aid agronomists under the FAO and through Japan’s Colombo Plan, Mashuri embodies the colonial genealogy of rice development that has been made invisible by the triumphant US-centered Cold War narrative (around the International Rice Research Institute) of the Green Revolution. At the same time, the story of Mashuri also shows this genealogy’s Cold-War “mutations,” as the newer variety, Mashuri Mutant, is a product of radiation mutation breeding, a joint initiative by the FAO and the IAEA, itself a kind of a mutant out of the Atoms for Peace, UN international development, and USAID. Ambitious agronomists from postcolonial Asian countries such as India cooperated internationally to create mutant rice for higher yields.

I have just completed a research on Japanese technical aid and its connection to the colonial period. This paper is my new project to locate rice breeding in this context while articulating how Cold War development differs from colonial development by taking seriously the significance of nuclear research and postcolonial conditions of Asian agriculture.

“Southern Technocrats Feeding the Globe: Mexico-trained Agronomists and Hybrid Seeds”

Gabriela Soto Laveaga (Harvard University)

As is well known, the Green Revolution was launched from the wheat fields of northern Mexico when Norman Borlaug, under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed disease resistant hybrid wheat. These new wheat strains, shipped across the world, are the ancestor varieties of 90% of the wheat consumed today. Yet the seeds were only one part of a complex equation designed to provide food for the world. As vital to this endeavor was the human element – agronomists, molecular biologists, botanists, and bureaucrats – who traveled to train in Mexican wheat fields. Described as the “Mecca for wheat research” northern Mexico also produced and relied on an expansive web of technocrats who made scientific discovery possible and, crucially, exportable. As new strains and races of wheat were developed a broader net of global agronomists were needed to test, train, and develop more seeds suitable for any terrain. While these agricultural innovations have often been described as part of post-war development projects this paper argues that the ethos of discovery is linked not to the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation and Norman Borlaug but to an earlier period of Mexican agricultural science renaissance.

“‘Technical assistance cannot be exported, it can only be imported’: creating nuclear consumers for a developing world”

Gisela Mateos (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

In 1958 the recently created International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) became part of the United Nations Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (created 1949), along with other eight specialized agencies. The rules to promote technical and economic development for so-called less developed countries inherited colonial actors and tactics, but also enacted guidelines applicable in the new post-WWII geopolitical order. But, as the acting director of UN Technical Assistance Operations wrote in 1959, recipient countries were often “extremely sensitive to outside interference”, and “were unwilling to agree to programs masterminded from a distance”. Thus, officials were forced to accept that ‘technical assistance cannot be exported, it can only be imported’, and the principle that “assistance is given only at the specific request of a government”.

Nuclear technical assistance, comprising materials (mainly radioisotopes), skills and training, and technologies, however, were not obvious priorities for most countries. In this paper we argue that the creation of nuclear needs was a complexly staged project, beginning with the IAEA’s survey missions that traveled to Asian and Latin American countries to push for the use of radioisotopes in agricultural, medical, and industrial applications. The surveys were followed, among other programs, by two Mobile Radioisotope Exhibition trucks that visited sixteen countries in four different continents, and exploited synergies and tensions between local actors, UN Resident Representatives, and regional organization. Radioisotopes have been depicted as political instruments of the Cold War era before, but our paper will deal with their changing meanings as part of asymmetrical relations, in the context of nuclear technical assistance for development.

“Technical Assistance in an Age of Distrust: IAEA Experts and Uranium Prospecting in the 1970s”

Jacob Hamblin (Oregon State University)

Not long after the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, the Pakistani government enlisted the help of the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct an extensive uranium prospecting project. Using money from the United Nations Development Fund, along with geologists and engineers from the oil and uranium mining community in the United States, Pakistan drilled, sampled, and mined its most promising uranium region in the mid-1970s. And yet this was also the era of increased scrutiny of nuclear programs in South Asia and the Middle East, especially after the 1974 detonation of a “peaceful nuclear explosion” by India. The technical assistance to mine uranium, in a country suspected of planning its own nuclear weapons program, took place against the backdrop of international efforts to collect signatures for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, differences of opinion among donor nations about controlling the so-called plutonium cycle, and contentious bickering about the purpose and legitimate roles for the IAEA. Drawn from several national archives and the collections of the IAEA in Vienna, the present paper examines uses and perceptions of technical assistance during a period of unprecedented distrust among donors, recipients, and international agencies.