The recent death of Norman Borlaug, the ‘father’ of the Green Revolution, brought to mind one of the driving forces behind Peace Corps agricultural programming beginning in the late 1960s. Borlaug’s pioneering work was originally in wheat, but later branched out to include rice and corn as well.
His ‘miracle rice’ promised a far better future for the Philippines and the many other countries dependent upon rice as a food staple. His secret was two-fold: develop a plant that could make maximum use of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, and water to produce a great quantity of grain, and - vitally important - a stalk that was strong enough to keep the massive head upright in the sun.
Peace Corps Volunteers learning to plant “miracle rice”
The Department of Agriculture in the Philippines readily accepted the Peace Corps’ offer of Volunteers to be trained as extension agents at the world famous Los Baños agricultural development station on the island of Luzon. When they, and hundreds of Filipino associates, took the new techniques to the field the results were astonishing. Yields doubled and tripled, double cropping became the norm, the worldwide famine predicted in the early 60s never happened. Surely this was an accomplishment to be cherished and praised.
Yet, as Borlaug’s obituaries made clear, it wasn’t long before critics, especially from the developed world, began to condemn the use of chemicals because of environmental damage, and to lament the financial burdens placed on poor farmers who now had to buy the chemicals. There was even the suggestion the whole thing was a plot by the chemical companies! I have to wonder if those guys were ever missed a meal?
Fortunately wiser heads prevailed. In the end Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work, and, as current estimates suggest, several hundred million people did not starve to death.
I am told that the next generation of ‘miracle’ crops is in the laboratories now. When they emerge, Peace Corps volunteers can help out once again.
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Hi! That was funny….I went to that site and noticed several articles and quickly picked the Green revolution one, not knowing you had written it….of course I did have a question to the author of it and now that I know it’s you, do those rice crops have seeds that can be replanted? I guess the rice itself is a seed, but is it sterile? Some of the GMO foods are not fertile…..just curious. But yes it’s good to have more food so that people won’t go hungry and maybe it’s a myth that some of the GMO foods have sterile seeds. I am glad you will be blogging at that site, it looks great and maybe more people will buy your book!
Rachel Searles RPCV Malaysia
I copied my daughter’s remarks and the questions to the comment section hoping someone with a better agronomy background than mine can answer her. I think that the original rice work was done before GMO was around, and that the plant modifications were done laboriously by hand. I’m guessing that the seeds are not sterile. Help!
These are significant questions. We all should be able to retrive the answers from the Information and Cultural Exchange, ICE, at Peace Corps. I don’t know if it is available. It should be.
One of the most important things I learned from working with midwives in Colombia, during my Peace Corps service, was that our culture does not have generational studies on our technology. In other words, we introduce one technological “improvement” and we do not know how it will impact future generations. Many times, the “law of unintended” consequences operates. To me, this just means we must track change and record how it is impacting the ecosystem, including most importantly, human beings. I believe that this is a moral obligation of Peace Corps because we have been so intimately involved with bringing change at the community level. Also, many times, people accepted the change we were promoting because they came to have confidence in us, or we provided material incentatives. This makes our responsibiities all the more greater.
The other thing that we do, as a culture, is that we make risk/benefit decisions for other people in those countries where we are intervening. And it should be their decisions. For example, the use of DDT may increase the incidence of breast cancer over decades. We decide that the immediate benefit of reducing the risk of malaria justifies the risk. BUT, we are not the ones running the risk of breast cancer.
An classic example from my years of service was the eradication of small pox. We promoted vaccinations against that disease, even though, at the same time we were inadvertingly demonstrating the use of dirty needles because there was not an energy source available locally strong enough to sterilize the needles. I struggled with this.
I was told by my project director that eradicating smallpox justified the risk from dirty needles. But, what we actually did was to introduce the technology of injections and vaccination without the accompanying technology which would make those techniques safe. We helped lay the groundwork, or more importantly, the firewood, for the one of the world’s worse blood borne epidemics: HIV/AIDS/.
If we had not believed in the invinceability of our own technology, we might have more closely monitored our technologyical interventions and seen the potential for the spread of HIV/AIDS through dirty needles far sooner.
Joey
Thanks very much for your thoughtful comments. I agree that the law of unintended consequences can at times exact a pretty steep price, and the urge to do something, anything, can get in the way of good decision making. I think you and Rachel (my daughter) are looking at things in the same way.
Maybe there is a generational thing going on here.
In the 70s we proudly called ourselves ‘change agents.’ We still thought ‘progress’ was a good thing; books like Rostow’s ‘The Process of Economic Development,’ and Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beatutiful,’ gave us the certainty we wanted to go forward with things like The Green Revolution. We felt (at least some of the time) that we were indeed making the world a better place.
As it turned out our definition of ‘progress’ might have been too materialistic; Rostow and Schumacher didn’t have the complete answers; not all of the ‘change’ we were pushing was possible, or suitable, or wanted. All that didn’t become clear until years later, and approaches and strategies have changed appropriately. But, still, I’m happy we took action rather than spend our time and energy rethinking our undergirding principles while people went hungry.
Speaking of feeding the hungry: I’m involved in a small way with a program which provides packets of food on Fridays for children whose main meal is at school, and whose weekend meals are uncertain at best. One of my friends complained that we were just introducing the kids to a most unproductive lifestyle and making them dependent rather than self-sufficient. As politely as I could, I suggested he fast this coming weekend, and we could continue the discussion on Monday.
I appreciate the your response and your assumption, Dave, that I share your daughter’s generation. Sometimes I think that those of us who served are “forever young.” Let me claim my age and therefore my history. I am 68 and my Peace Corps service was 1963-65. so in a sense there is a generational factor here. But it is backwards. My Peace Corps generation brought back information from the people with whom we worked.
But your generation of PC/DC staff did not have that information, because it was never recorded or seen as worthwhile. So as staff you were reading books like “Small is Beautiful” rather than ten years worth of field reports and long term studies of each Peace Corps’ project. If that had been done, systematically, than patterns would have begun to emerge and we would have had invaluable insight, early on, of what was working, what was not, and where “attention had to be paid.”
That latter mandate was one I heard constantly from one of the Wise Latina Women I was priviledged to know. Dona Ermelinda was an indigenous midwife and always paid attention to evey detail in her practice; always gave an explanation for every single thing she did and always demanded that I explain how any new practice I was trying to introduce would impact women and their children. “Hay que pagar atencion, Juanita, echos in my mind to this day.
Now, I think your comments are invaluable because you reflect an important part of the history of Peace Corps: the values, the attitudes which made up the culture of the agency during the seventies. I look forward to more of your comments. I have not read your book, but it is on order.
Joey
Many thanks for the words “it is on order.” Nothing could please a fellow more. I would welcome your comments on the book since some feel that I was overly harsh in my crtique of the early Peace Corps years (which turn out to be your years).
I will look forward to reading your book. I quickly stopped thinking of myself as Peace Corps, but rather Cuerpo de Paz; a distinction which the people in my site explained to me. I will take no responsibility for the agency during the 60s, or any other time for that matter.I am sure that if Peace Corps had preserved any of the field report records of actual volunteers, you would have found many of them them to be far harsher than anything you could write.
I was reminded of one of my few encounters withPeace Corps when I was in Colombia, by your account of the weekend meal program for kids. Our program description was Health Education and evidently the thought was that Health Education would be sufficient to improve lives even absent medical facilities and treatment. A program evaluator from Charlie Peters Evaluation program came to my site, and asked how things were going.
At that point, we were absolutely overwhelmed by the poverty and desperation of the women we had surveyed. They counted the number of their children in terms of children living and children dead. They were anguished over their lack of access to medical care for their remaining children. I tried to explain to the Evaluator that our training was inadequate to meet the needs of these women and the expectations of the people who had requested Peace Corps assistance. He said to me that since one of Colombia’s main problems was overpopulation, perhaps we shouldn’t be trying to save the children.
Joey
As all of us ‘youngsters’ have learned to say (or is it’ text’): OMG!!
David, I have a research question for you. As I said before, I find your book, “The Peace Corps Experience” invaluable. In your endnotes, you reference Peace Corps Archives. I wanted to ask you more specifically about that source. I know you were researching and writing your book almost 15 years ago and PC/W has changed since then. What was once the Peace Corps Library was downgraded and then eliminated. Many documents were incorporated into the Information Collection and Exchange, or ICE. Were you referencing Peace Corps Archives, maintained by PC/W , independent of the defunct Peace Corps Library, the ICE, or the archives maintained by the National Archives and Record Administration? If so, do you know how to access them, today?
As an “60’s” RPCV from Colombia, I had been searching for site reports from that country and was recently informed that the Regional Office doesn’t keep them for that long. I was not told what happened to them. In your book, you mentioned “thousands of reports ” from PCVs in the Phillippines and I wondered where those reports were when you were writing your book. Did you see such a store in Peace Corps Archives or were you aware that such reports were maintained in the field offices in the Phillippines.
The older I get, the clearer my memories of my service in Colombia become. It is difficult to accept that all the history represented by the thousands of reports created by serving PCVs in Colombia are gone.
Any information you might offer about how the reports from PCVs in the Phillippines were maintained would be so appreciated. Thank you.
Joey
What a calamity!
The Peace Corps library housed in the main office during 1995-96 was the major source of my material, along with stuff I had brought home with me and contact with forner volunteers from that time and place. To think that all of that is gone bothers me no end.
There were files after files, well organized by subject, country, time period, and whatever else one can imagine. Some of it was ‘official’ stuff (like the volunteer magazine, press releases, speeches, etc.) but much of it was ‘raw’ material from the folks in the field. We in the Philippines regularly sent material to the desk offficer who routinely passed it on to the library. Just the sort of material an historian hopes to find.
The PC library was a very major source for me. And, now I learn that it has been ‘killed’ by he powers that be. I repeat: What a shame!
I know that there is a historian working on a project for the 50th anniversary celebrations. I wonder what he is using? John Coyne knows his name (I think) and maybe you could writethat fellow with your questions. You might also want to contact the woman who did ‘All You Need is Love’ (Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman at San Diego State University). She did a more ‘professional’ job than I did (mine was more personal) and probably has a better sense of where information was available, and may or may not still be.
“What fools these mortals be” to borrow a phrase from old what’s his name.
Thank you so much for the information, David. Now, all is not lost. Many documents were incorporated into the ICE, or Information Collection Exchange. I am requesting a list of the titles of the”field generated materials.” My impression is, however, that those materials are focused on technical applications developed by Volunteers, and are reviewed for relevancy annually. Documents no longer pertinent are purged and may or may not be archived.
This is what does break my heart. Your statement about the Peace Corps Library, that “There were files after files, well organized by subject, country, time period…but much of it was ‘raw’ material from the folks in the field.” That material would be invaluable. You are a witness that at one time such an archive did exist!
NARA, (National Archives and Record Administration) does have a collection of Peace Corps public records at its facility in College Park, MD. The catalog, although not the actual records, is available online.
Those documents are listed by subject, country and time period. But, almost all the records were generated in PC/W. There is almost no ‘raw’ material from the field. The evaluation reports done by Charlie Peters Evaluation Unit are out there.
I know that we are not on the same page on many aspects of Peace Corps, but David, your book is so significant, historically, because it is so well written and so well documented. I thank you again for that.
I need to clarify. I have visited the NARA archives and looked extensively at public documents from South American and Colombia. I could not find any site reports or ‘raw’ material generated in the field. (The exception were a few files of “school to school” materials which were just great, but covered only the last year or so of PC/Colombia). I also have made FOIA requests. Peace Corps recently informed me that the thousands of site reports and program materials generated in the field by Volunteers serving in Colombia are no longer avaliable. There was no indication of when or where they were maintained originally.
The material which you used for your book may indeed still exist. But the Peace Corps library is no more, and what happened to that entire collection is not clear and that information has not been forthcoming on my FOIA requests. Thanks again.
Joey
Thanks very much for the kind words about the book. Now, if I could only get the rest of the Peace Corps world saying the same thing and acting accordingly . . . !
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