Nitrogen Revolutions: Agricultural Expertise, Technology, and Policy in Cold War Chile (2017)
Martin, William San (Author)
Walker, Charles F. (Advisor)
Schlotterbeck, Marian (Advisor)
University of California, Davis
Walker, Charles F.
Schlotterbeck, Marian
Physical Details: 211 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation studies the process of knowledge and technology transfer that led to Chile’s first massive expansion of nitrogen fertilizer consumption in the second half of the twentieth century. The increasing use of nitrogen fertilizer remains central to the process of agro-technological change known as the Green Revolution and is one of the main drivers of present-day global environmental change. To reverse the negative effects of the Green Revolution, scientists and policy-makers around the world are working today on expanding management practices, technologies, and policies to reduce the ecological effects of nitrogen fertilizers and enhance environmental protection, which is referred to as “the global nitrogen challenge”. Using Chile—one of the highest consumers of nitrogen fertilizer in the Americas today—as a case study, this research places Chile’s efforts to increase fertilizer consumption within the country’s long history of agro-technological change and offers a novel approach to the application of historical analysis to contemporary environmental issues. It argues that between 1951 and 1973, Chilean and U.S. government institutions and agricultural experts established a transnational model of state-led, multiagency cooperation that was critical in expanding agricultural research, technologies, and education. Within a Cold War context this transnational institutional framework dramatically transformed agricultural expertise, fertilizer consumption, and the state itself. This claim calls into question the generalized arguments that market-based policies and neoliberal models of agricultural production were more efficient for technology transfer and increasing food production, and that the Chilean state was structurally incapable of modernizing agricultural practices before 1973. Chile’s extensive increase in nitrogen fertilizer consumption—what I call Chile’s nitrogen revolution—was instead a product of this state-led transnational institutional framework. Radical anti-communist politics and market-based policies established after the 1973 military coup, however, largely disassembled this institutional framework. I conclude that Chile’s capacity to effectively face its nitrogen challenge and expand the use of more efficient fertilization practices and technologies depends on rebuilding this institutional framework for knowledge and technology transfer.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Carey, David, Jr.;
(2009)
Guatemala's Green Revolution: Synthetic Fertilizer, Public Health, and Economic Autonomy in the Mayan Highland
(/isis/citation/CBB001020838/)
Article
Joshua Frens-String;
(2023)
Natural Partners: Chilean Nitrates and the Rise of Intensive Agriculture in the US South, 1900–1945
(/isis/citation/CBB492686163/)
Article
Saha, Madhumita;
(2013)
The State, Scientists, and Staple Crops: Agricultural “Modernization” in Pre-Green Revolution India
(/isis/citation/CBB001212126/)
Article
Saha, Madhumita;
(2013)
Food for Soil, Food for People: Research on Food Crops, Fertilizers, and the Making of “Modern” Indian Agriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB001253139/)
Book
Jim Elser;
Phil Haygarth;
(2020)
Phosphorus: Past and Future
(/isis/citation/CBB000390480/)
Article
Baranski, Marci R.;
(2015)
Wide Adaptation of Green Revolution Wheat: International Roots and the Indian Context of a New Plant Breeding Ideal, 1960--1970
(/isis/citation/CBB001422121/)
Article
Melillo, Edward D.;
(2012)
The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB001212444/)
Book
Thomas D. Rogers;
(2022)
Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB172290706/)
Article
Helen Anne Curry;
(2023)
Diversifying Description: Sweet Potato Science and International Agricultural Research after the Green Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB369452091/)
Article
Leo Chu;
(2023)
With and against the Grain: The Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center and Modest Narratives of Green Revolution in Taiwan, 1963–2002
(/isis/citation/CBB265339233/)
Article
Santos, Gonçalo;
(2011)
Rethinking the Green Revolution in South China: Technological Materialities and Human-Environment Relations
(/isis/citation/CBB001231671/)
Article
Kaori Iida;
(2021)
Postwar Reconstruction of Japanese Genetics: Kihara Hitoshi and the Rockefeller Foundation Rice Project in Cold War Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB800955448/)
Book
Marci Baranski;
(2019)
Globalizing Wheat: Success and Failure of the Green Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB650890415/)
Book
Joshua Eisenman;
(2018)
Red China's Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune
(/isis/citation/CBB393548124/)
Book
Marci Baranski;
(2022)
The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB031473898/)
Article
Ferreiro, Larrie D.;
(2010)
Shipbuilders to the world: Evolution and revolution in Spanish and Chilean shipbuilding from the cold war to the 21st century: A study in international technology transfer in the naval industries
(/isis/citation/CBB001180163/)
Article
Christopher Michael Aldous;
(2022)
Replenishing the Soil: Food, Fertiliser and Soil Science in Occupied Japan (1945-52)
(/isis/citation/CBB598324661/)
Article
Shepherd, Chris J.;
(2006)
From In Vitro to In Situ: On the Precarious Extension of Agricultural Science in the Indigenous “Third World”
(/isis/citation/CBB000670841/)
Article
Reed, Peter;
(2015)
Making War Work for Industry: The United Alkali Company's Central Laboratory During World War One
(/isis/citation/CBB001202179/)
Book
R. Douglas Hurt;
(2020)
The green revolution in the global south : Science, politics, and unintended consequences
(/isis/citation/CBB077743452/)
Be the first to comment!