1 Why have Green Revolutions so often failed to help peasant - farmers ?

This paper emerges from a book I am writing entitled ‘Europe’s Green Revolution: the Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant-Breeding, 1890-1945’. For the most part it concentrates upon the emergence in Central Europe during the 1890s of a movement which aimed to bring the advantages of modern plant-breeding to smallholders, the work of the state plant-breeding stations which were founded as a result, and the decline of the German stations under National Socialism. Unlike so many of the Green Revolution (GR) programmes since the 1940s, however, these stations were quite successful in developing improved plant-varieties which were eagerly adopted by small farmers. The question is ‘why’. One of the concluding chapters, therefore, compares the stations’ work with that of the GRs of the 1940s to ‘60s in order to draw inferences about why programmes have failed or succeeded. And the other uses this European perspective to examine present-day claims that a ‘second wave’ of GR programmes just getting underway will finally succeed in alleviating rural poverty.