Science and the Villager: The Last Sleeper Wakes

Richard Critchfield

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1982

Article preview: first 500 of 11,221 words total.

Summary:  Before the 1920s, change in American agriculture was slow. Silent films of the time wonderfully record the dusty dirt roads, farm wagons and Model-T Fords passing by, threshers in overalls pitching bundles, small family farms with cows, pigs and chickens, and the speed and power of a rural way of life set by the three-mile-an-hour gait of the horse. By 1940, as highly mechanized, highly capitalized farming took over, this way of life was just a nostalgic memory. Since 1940 the number of Americans who farm has dropped from about 30 percent to less than three percent. This is probably the most fundamental change in modern American history. Its cultural consequences have still to be calculated.

Richard Critchfield has reported rural development in the Third World for nearly a quarter century, during the 1970s as a regular contributor to The Economist and other journals. He is the author of Villages, Shahhat, The Golden Bowl Be Broken, The Long Charade and other works. He has lectured at many universities and been a consultant to the Agency for International Development, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is currently a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellow and is working on a comparative study of rural change in America and in the Third World.

Before the 1920s, change in American agriculture was slow. Silent films of the time wonderfully record the dusty dirt roads, farm wagons and Model-T Fords passing by, threshers in overalls pitching bundles, small family farms with cows, pigs and chickens, and the speed and power of a rural way of life set by the three-mile-an-hour gait of the horse. By 1940, as highly mechanized, highly capitalized farming took over, this way of life was just a nostalgic memory. Since 1940 the number of Americans who farm has dropped from about 30 percent to less than three percent.1 This is probably the most fundamental change in modern American history. Its cultural consequences have still to be calculated.

If the 1920s and 1930s brought decisive change to American agriculture, the decade of the 1970s now is likely to be seen, if at a much lower level of technology, as the start of a similar turning point for many of the people of the Third World, particularly the Asians. These were the years when contraceptive devices-the Pill and IUD, not widely available until the mid-1960s-first reached the villages. Scientific agriculture did not fully win acceptance by Third World governments until the successful application of breakthroughs in tropical plant genetics in the late 1960s (and not until the late 1970s in China, where dwarf, fast-maturing, short-stemmed grain had to be crossed with local colder-climate varieties). The postcolonial expansion of primary education and the training abroad of large numbers of students in Western technology did not begin to pay off until the 1970s. Transistor radios came in early, but television did not reach substantial numbers of villages in China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico and elsewhere until the end of the decade.

The change that really mattered came in the mentality of the villagers once they saw concrete evidence of how Western technology could improve their lives. To try and date this more precisely: In 1978, after a five-year absence in Africa and Latin America, this writer returned to a number of Asian villages, from India to Indonesia, where I had lived for months on end in the late 1960s and early 1970s and several times revisited, most recently in 1973. Among all the village people I knew personally, there was a marked difference: somehow, in those five years, something had happened in their minds. They felt that the future would no longer simply repeat the past, as it had always done, but could be radically improved by all the new Western technology. As I reported to The Economist in an article headlined "A great change has started," published on March 9, 1979, "Times change and men, once they have the technological means and enough years to culturally adjust, change with them."

The pace of this change has steadily quickened. One can now confidently say that a quiet agricultural revolution has begun in the Third World that is likely to have more dramatic effects on more human beings than any revolution that has gone before. ...

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