Training for specialists vs. education for agroecologists

I admit to being a slow learner. Graduate school training in agronomy at U. C. Davis and in plant breeding at Cornell provided me with top-quality opportunities to acquire the tools for crop improvement, plus the contacts to join professionals at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia. As a young scientist dedicated to building on successes of the Green Revolution, I was convinced that genetic changes would solve global hunger. This had been amply demonstrated with the yield increases of wheat in Mexico and India, and with rice in Southeast Asia. Should this success not be extended to small farmers everywhere? In the late 1960s we were excited with the demonstration that opaque-2maize hybrids, uncovered at Purdue University and developed by the Colombian Institute for Agriculture (ICA) and Rockefeller Foundation in Colombia, could substantially contribute to reducing malnutrition in children. Young people’s diets depended on this dominant cereal deficient in two key amino acids, lysine and tryptophan, and the new maize was higher in both essential elements. It was disheartening to learn that people were not interested in a floury-typemaize could not be easily turned into the classical arepas important in the Colombian diet. New hybrids languished in the breeder’s seed banks. I was still convinced that we were doing things right, but there was a nagging feeling that our breeding programs may have not been doing the right things! The excellent training at Cornell had provided me with an effective hammer, but perhaps I was spending too much time searching for nails? It became clear that malnutrition was the right challenge, but that solutions would not come from plant breeding alone. And it was obvious that problems are more complex, and my hammer was only one among many tools. I remembered as a graduate student visiting a small farmer in southern Luzon in the Philippines, describing how I could solve his major problem of downy mildew disease in maize in the monsoon season with breeding we were doing for genetic resistance. With a respectful smile, he told me that this research sounded important and very scientific, but that it would not help solve his four major challenges in loss before harvest: crows, monkeys, wild pigs, and people. It was another early awakening, but one I would not heed for at least two decades. My hammer was of no use here.