Abstract
Most members of the development community take for granted that policy should be evidence-based. Accordingly declarations of the need to ‘learn the lessons of history’ are a commonplace in the literature. At the same time there are also indications that this task is not usually taken very seriously in policy formulation. Summarising the history of peasant-friendly plant breeding from Central Europe around 1900 to the global South today, this paper argues that attempts to assist smallholder agriculture since 1945 have repeatedly failed to take into account the success or failure of earlier approaches. The evidence suggests that this neglect has been the result less of ignorance of past experience than of indifference toward it. The paper concludes by briefly considering possible reasons for this.
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