Imperial Science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Agricultural Science in Peru, 1940-1960

摘要

When in the 1940s the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) set its sights on the agriculture of Latin American countries, it had a vision that this was both backward yet held real possibilities for improvement. The source of the problem, however, was thought to lie not with farmers but with the inadequacies of the existing scientific structures in Latin America, the scientists they housed, and the methods deployed. For the RF, these were failing to produce good scientific knowledge which would then 'trickle down' and out into society. Even the best scientists there were seen to be hampered by vocational surroundings in which agricultural research and education were believed to suffer from ignorance, indolence, politics, insecurity of tenure, lack of physical facilities, lack of adequate salaries, and an attitude that work in experimental plots was demeaning. From the perspective of the RF, little of merit could be said for science and agriculture in Peru or in the rest of Latin America. Yet there was the expectation that if agriculture there could be properly established as an experimental science, true knowledge would then flow from the laboratory out into the fields thereby redeeming what the RF perceived as inefficient and unscientific farming. With a characteristically individualistic approach to scientific development, the RF began a series of initiatives to foster a system of experimental science that was 'still in the embryonic stage' by promoting scientists who were seen to be exceptional. Over the coming decades, this approach was to become the dominant model that informed the emergent postwar discourse of agricultural development and its ever-expanding network of international research centres and development institutions (Escobar, 1995).