Mapping technological trajectories of the Green Revolution and the Gene Revolution from modernization to globalization

Abstract

The dynamics of technology development along the technological trajectories of the Green Revolution and the Gene Revolution could be explicated by the social morphologies of modernization and globalization. The Green Revolution was shaped by the exigencies of modernization, while the Gene Revolution is being shaped by the imperatives of neo-liberal economic globalization. Innovation, development, and diffusion of technologies followed different trajectories in these two realms because of being part of different innovation systems. Considerations of private gain and profit in the form of high returns to shareholders of agro-biotech corporations of global reach, largely, determine the dynamics of technological innovation in the Gene Revolution. Technology transfer and local adaptive work in the Green Revolution was carried out in the international public domain with the objective of developing research capacity in post-colonial Third World agriculture to increase food production to avert hunger-led political insurrection during the Cold War. Differentiating these two trajectories is important not only due to the normative implications inherent in comparing the impacts of these two “revolutions”, but also due to the important lessons we learn about how different contexts of innovation in the same technology cluster could evolve into contrasting research policy regimes.