Of the many CGIAR research centres around the world there is none as historically important to the organization’s international development of wheat and maize interests than the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), headquartered in Mexico. CIMMYT, launched in 1966, is both a local and a global creation. Rooted in Mexico’s approach to agricultural research, CIMMYT’s mission is equally intertwined with international development promises and growing food security concerns of the mid-twentieth century. Initial research that led to Norman Borlaug’s famous high-yielding hybrid wheat seeds took advantage of Mexico’s microclimates – and existing experimental stations – to solve narrower agronomic questions while later programs expanded in focus to include an increased socioeconomic bent and emphasis on the farmer. This chapter examines how CIMMYT, modeled after the successful Mexican Agricultural Program of the 1940s, evolved from a nation-centred agenda to become a mold-breaking international organization, while remaining rooted in and influenced by Mexican realities. The chapter illustrates that to speak of CGIAR is to engage with locally centred histories.

After the Green Revolution successfully raised wheat and rice yields in more auspicious farming contexts, attention in agricultural development turned to crops that grew on poorer soils and in regions of indifferent rainfall. When Rockefeller Foundation agronomists reached out to India with an urge to establish an international center for research on such crops in the 1970s, they found eager hosts. The foundation’s agronomists had been active in India during the 1950s and 1960s and built a community of local collaborators. Indian scientists saw the proposal for an international center as offering the next frontier in crop development. The possibility of a center also met with considerable appeal among the political establishment in India. Two prime ministers from opposite political camps, Indira Gandhi and Chaudhary Charan Singh, came to support the eventual International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) due to common ground in their respective politics of the poor and farmers’ politics. As the chapter shows, the circumstances of postcolonial India allowed for the emergence of institutionalized expertise outside the direct realm of the local state.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) exists as a lonely island in a sea of corporate sugarcane. Standing at the gates of CIAT outside Palmira, Colombia, one absorbs the contrast between the research orientation of the CGIAR’s global food system model and the reality of corporate monoculture. This chapter situates CIAT’s history globally and locally. It introduces Colombian precursors, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Colombian Agricultural Program (1950–64), and the pivot to globally oriented international agricultural research centres in the 1960s. It contextualizes how CIAT came into existence amid broader Cold War and Green Revolution transitions. Just as scholars of the Colombian conflict have examined the effect of “deterritorialization” in the intensification of conflict, the chapter shows how the CGIAR network further internationalized and detached agricultural science from local contexts and applications. Paradoxically, despite the Green Revolution’s well-known Cold War geopolitical aspects, the creation of CIAT and CGIAR inadvertently contributed to the specific geographic, political, and economic conditions that fed armed conflict in Colombia.

In the aftermath of the self-proclaimed Green Revolution, donors, diplomats, and agricultural scientists met for a series of meetings, Bellagio I through VII. There they discussed and diverged over the assessment of recent agricultural transformations and their social impacts, as well as the next steps to be taken. By centering on discussions that led to the creation of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in 1972 in Hyderabad, India and ICRISAT’s groundnut (peanut) research program, this chapter shows how agricultural experts reimagined strategies of international agricultural research to suit a different mode of development that took shape in the 1970s and fully emerged in the 1980s. Although the conference participants worried about “second-generation development problems” related to the unequal economic fallout of the Green Revolution, they also wanted to expand the Green Revolution to populations in areas of rainfed agriculture. ICRISAT was the scientific answer to both concerns. This chapter shows how development strategies remained stable while their meanings shifted for a world of free trade and competition.

The outbreak of World War II saw a remnant League of Nations’ Secretariat relocating to Princeton. This ‘Princeton Mission’, supported by private American foundations and the US government, spreads the double taxation movement in the Americas, making inroads into Latin America that culminate in the negotiation of the 1943 Mexico Model.Faltering inter-American relations and the birth of the new United Nations lead the Mission to hastily organise the Fiscal Committee’s Tenth Session with little developing country representation in the attempt to legitimise its wartime work before the dissolution of the League. The result was the 1946 London Model.

Chapter 1 presents the historical context and the key players who called for statistics to be collected as part of the interwar public health programs presented in later chapters. Striving to promote the health of “others” – poor rural communities, or people in foreign countries – using scientific methods, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Milbank Memorial Fund provided support to statistical initiatives with the help of bacteriologists trained in laboratory methods, who aimed to extend those principles to the social world. Missionaries’ sons born in China – with knowledge both of Chinese conditions and North American public health training – made implementation of such programs possible in China. It was these driving forces that enabled these public health programs, including related statistical practices.

Chapter 1 constitutes the dramatis personae. It introduces the main protagonists of the story, a heterogenous group of international associations (the predecessors of today’s NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (the League of Nations), philanthropic organizations that have delivered humanitarian aid in the Near East since 1918.

The Thomas Jefferson Center Annual Reports credit the Volker Fund for a founding grant and the Earhart Foundation for providing critical support to graduate students. The Rockefeller Foundation supported Nutter’s NBER Soviet growth project and provided Tullock’s initial fellowship at the TJC. The Earhart Fellowship program has been neglected in previous histories of this period, perhaps because it was decentralized. The Foundation selected faculty sponsors to award graduate fellowship to students of their choice. The chapter presents the history of the fellowship program by major departments over the whole of the foundation’s existence. Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia had fellows a year before the University of Chicago but Earhart fellowships at those institutions declined over time while those at Chicago and Virginia survived. Thus, the association of the Earhart Foundation with Chicago seems to be a result of a survival bias. The number of sponsors or fellows who were president of the American Economic Association or Nobel laureates is also remarkable. Earhart funded Nutter’s “rational debate” series exemplifying government by discussion at the early Virginia School.

Chapter 2 describes the role that chemists played in the construction of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939). It explores how many of them became allies of the leftist policies of the new regime, with its dreams of secularism, liberal universalism and peace, as opposed to the dark images of chemical weapons of the First World War. The freethinking rationalism of the JAE placed chemistry in a comfortable position to highlight material progress and a positivistic scientific culture as solid allies of the new Republic. Within that framework, the chapter covers the opening in 1932 of the Instituto Nacional de Física y Química (INFQ) – nicknamed ‘The Rockefeller’ after the source of funding used to create it; the university reforms in teaching and experimental chemistry; the International Conference on Pure and Applied Chemistry held in Madrid in 1934; and further attempts to link academic chemistry to industrial growth, which challenges the frequent criticism of a supposedly overly academic chemistry. Utopian dreams of material progress opposed any use of chemicals for war purposes as a sign of the internationalism of the time, which supported the invitation of foreign chemists to visit Spain, as well as the sending of large numbers of young chemists for training abroad.