| Scientific agriculture originated in Latin America between 1898 and 1930, a time that one observer described as the "agricultural awakening." Scientific agriculture emerged in response to environmental and ecological pressures on the rural economy during the late nineteenth century. In an attempt to maintain their profits, agricultural elites organized research stations dedicated to the improvement of export crops. This dissertation compares the origins of agricultural research in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Cuba. It combines political and environmental history with the history of science. It understands the efforts to build distinctive scientific institutions in Latin America in the national contexts, as opposed to seeing such efforts as failures to replicate North American models.; The scientists who worked at these institutions--botanical gardens, natural history museums, and agricultural experiment stations--constructed a new vision of tropical nature through two parallel processes. On the one hand, they sought to naturalize commodities, to apply the techniques of the "new" ecological botany of the 1890s to crops, which had hitherto received little attention from botanists. Ecological insights were essential to controlling the mosaic disease of sugar in Puerto Rico, and in making improvements in the coffee industries of Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. On the other hand, scientists sought to commodify nature. Through the production of floras, botanists organized tropical nature into lists of economic and intellectual resources, to be used by scientists, businessmen, doctors, planters, and politicians.; The economic, political, and ecological order that had provided the impetus for the organization of research institutions collapsed in the late 1920s. In the sugar industry, scientists had been so successful at improving yields that they contributed materially to the crisis of overproduction that drove down sugar prices. Agricultural elites in Latin America were hit hard by the drop in demand for tropical commodities, so institutions for agricultural research lost their most important supporters. Some research centers folded during the Great Depression, while others sought to define a new role for themselves. A new paradigm for agricultural research emerged in the early 1940s in the shape of the Green Revolution. |
