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This book is a chronicle as well as a critical account of tropical agricultural science in the twentieth century, its successes as well as its fads and failures. Its ambition is to cover most of what has been significant in tropical agricultural science and agricultural development, although that qualification becomes less certain as one draws closer to one’s own time. The book was written by a practitioner who has been directly involved in tropical agriculture for 45 years in different capacities. But this author is not a genius who can speak with equal authority about the very diverse disciplines which together form the agricultural sciences, or about all three continents where tropical climates are found, so I must make a few important restrictions at once. First, the emphasis in this book will be on the areas I am most familiar with, that is tropical West, Central and East Africa and Indonesia. Furthermore, I will draw most extensively, some will say excessively, on Dutch sources, both historical and more recent. That is because I am a Dutchman. Finally, and most importantly, the perspective from which the chronicle was written is that of an agronomist whose discipline, although referred to unquestioningly by its practitioners as ‘agronomy’, is rather illdefined. So let us see first whether we can decide what tropical agronomy and agronomists are.

What I like are clear problems with clear answers, or at least the promise that such answers can somehow be found. Agriculture in developing countries mostly does not belong in that category. In Africa in particular, peasant agriculture is not easily amenable to exact study. The reason is that, as in much of Europe a few hundred years ago, agriculture is not simply a repertoire of techniques to produce agricultural goods. It is a way of life, steeped in folklore and tradition if you look at it with a romantic eye, and one which is marred by outdated beliefs and superstition if you are a sceptic. Whereas in industrialised countries farming is the chosen profession of a few skilled farmers, in most tropical countries it is an inherited way of life and one which many parents, especially in Africa, would rather like to see their children escape from if they can. So, when you deal with tropical agriculture there are many things which will distract you from the strictly technical or even hide it from view entirely.

Sending a Dutchman without any relevant experience to Indonesia as a development worker in 1968 was perhaps more than a little arrogant. But development projects were the craze of the time, the need for personnel was large and available expertise scarce. The new development industry therefore recruited young graduates who were shoved into the projects from which it was hoped they would emerge a few years later as new experts. Their seniors were men (mostly) of the old school, many of them retired, not always voluntarily, from the colonial services.

Paradoxically, working at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) was my first real encounter with African agriculture. Paradoxically, because I had already spent 3 years in Cameroon working at a genuine national institution, whereas the international research centres were often regarded as luxurious anomalies, where overpaid scientists carried out their leisurely research in splendid isolation from a destitute host country. That of course was not entirely fair. International research has had some spectacular successes for the benefit of peasant farmers, especially in crop improvement and in biological control of crop pests.

I have spent a lot of time discussing the rise of FSR and there is much more to come. I think that is justified, because after all FSR has been one of the defining features of tropical agricultural science in the second half of the twentieth century. But FSR is software, it deals with methodologies, approaches and attitudes. The hardware is agricultural production: farming practices used by farmers and of course improved technologies invented by scientists. To maintain good balance I will devote the next three chapters to that, before continuing with the FSR story.

After completing a long tour of the technicalities of farming in Africa I must now pay attention to the farmers themselves. They were there in the previous chapters all right, but in a rather impersonal way. In this chapter I will redress the balance a little by looking at individual farmers as operators of their farms and how skilful they are in that.

The word technology does not mean what it seems to. Cosmology, entomology, physiology, anthropology are the study or science of something, the cosmos, insects, life processes, etc. Not so with technology, it denotes the techniques themselves. When agronomists speak of technology it can mean practically anything that farmers use or do to produce a crop: a maize variety, a threshing machine, fertiliser, a recommended planting density, counting insects to decide whether a crop needs spraying or growing crops in mixture. Technology is a collective name for all those things. But it can also be used with an article: technology. A new maize variety is technology. For someone with an exaggerated sense of linguistic propriety that is perhaps distasteful, but it provides the kind of shorthand which students of human behaviour find convenient.

I will now pick up the story of FSR at the point where I left it in Chapter 4. FSR was the first movement in the post-colonial era which argued that research should support the development of existing peasant agriculture, rather than trying to replace it as soon as possible by farming models from the west. It has had an enormous influence, not only on agricultural research but on agricultural development generally and, through its offshoots, on practically every other branch of development as well. So it is worth further examining how it developed and eventually became corrupted, in spite of its essential sanity.

FSR was not of course the only novel research concept of the second half of the twentieth century. Another one was the use of computer power to simulate the growth of whole organisms and the behaviour of complex systems under different circumstances by a technique called systems or computer modelling. We are now going to look at this.

In the previous chapters I have talked a lot about agricultural research but only little about agricultural development. I will redress the balance a little here, by first picturing a background of post-independence development in Africa in general followed by an account of agricultural development on that continent.