Relocating Agrarian Development in Asia Food Regimes R D Programs and The Long Twentieth Century

The Journal of Peasant Studies
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Relocating agrarian development in Asia: food

regimes, R&D programs, and the long twentieth
century
Kuan-Chi Wang & Daniel Buck
To cite this article: Kuan-Chi Wang & Daniel Buck (2023): Relocating agrarian development
in Asia: food regimes, R&D programs, and the long twentieth century, The Journal of Peasant
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2023.2210510
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2023.2210510
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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2023.2210510
Relocating agrarian development in Asia: food regimes, R&D

programs, and the long twentieth century
a
Kuan-Chi Wang and Daniel Buckb
a
Academia Sinica, RCHSS, Taipei, Taiwan; bDepartment of Geography, University of Oregon
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper answers calls from the food regime scholarship for a closer Agricultural R&D; Asia;
analysis of the implicit rules, transitions, and regional scales of AVRDC; Cold War;
food regimes. Drawing on archival materials from the Japanese development; postwar food
regime; Shen Zonghan
colonial administration and Sino-American agricultural cooperation,
interviews with key actors, and secondary sources, this paper
examines instances of agricultural knowledge production and
exchange. We suggest that beyond the profound influence of the
US in the postwar food regime, the nuances and historical and
regional specificity of agricultural scientists’ life stories and
individual technological imaginaries can ‘scale up’ through the
translation of agrarian knowledge.
Introduction
In the process of ‘discovering’ and developing desirable lands and resources, colonizers
invented modern agricultural systems and mechanisms of knowledge production and circu-
lation. Elucidating these colonial roots of contemporary agrarian systems has become a
vibrant field of research (Azuma 2019; Patel 2013; Waldmueller 2015; Wang 2018; Wolford
2021), which we seek to extend by showing how colonial practices evolved and are impli-
cated in postwar and contemporary food regimes. Appreciating both the ‘new food
regime geographies’ (Jakobsen 2021) and ‘the power of small stories’ (Campbell 2020),
this study examines regional food regimes in Asia through the lens of Taiwan and parts of
Southeast Asia – as they were embedded in the empires of prewar Japan and Cold War Amer-
ican hegemony. Careful attention to regional scale (McMichael 2013, 2020; Rioux 2018) and
implicit rules (Friedmann 1993, 2016) reveals how the technological imaginaries guiding the
actions of Asian agricultural experts were influenced not only by colonial and modern agrar-
ian development doctrines, but also by regional contingencies that shaped their agricultural
institutions. Evoking the nuances and historical specificity of their roles sheds further light on
the variegated pathways in the (re)location(s) of modern agriculture in Asia.1
CONTACT Kuan-Chi Wang kuanchi@gate.sinica.edu.tw

This has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
1
In recent years, one of the major developments in the field of food regime analysis has been the introduction of the
concept of ‘scale’ (Jakobsen 2021). To avoid repeating too much of what has been achieved, we draw on the new
food regime geographies perspective with an emphasis on the ‘multipolarity’ or ‘polycentricity’ of food regimes. We
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s)
or with their consent.
2 K.-C. WANG AND D. BUCK
As the Japanese empire expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, it tried to modernize agriculture in its new territories and incorporate them into an
imperial division of labor similar to the UK-centered first food regime. It succeeded in
modernizing rice and sugar agriculture in Taiwan and Korea, establishing secure
sources of cheap food for the imperial economy (Chang and Myers 1963; Cumings
1984; Ka 1995; Myers 1984; Myers and Yamada 1984). After 1945, working through its
Cold War hegemonic umbrella, the United States reshaped the food systems of occupied
Japan and its former colonies, including Taiwan, in accordance with the second food
regime; China and some parts of Southeast Asia remained outside the system of alliances
and followed different paths. Studies of divergent paths of postwar agrarian development
in Asia – whether capitalistic green revolutions or communist-inspired red revolutions –
have traced them to different colonial experiences (McMichael 2005; Schmalzer 2016;
Stross 1986); we seek to add nuance to the view that modern agrarian scientific insti-
tutions and agronomists within the US-led coalition in Asia pursued similar patterns of
development. There continues to be insufficient understanding of the complex and dis-
parate regimes of agrarian knowledge production and circulation underlying these diver-
gent trajectories. Likewise, McMichael’s (2020) view of China’s BRIC initiatives in the
context of ‘agro-security mercantilism’ has contributed to deepening our understanding
of the multipolar patterning of contemporary food regimes in Asia, with its deliberation
on the rising neomercantilism at the Asian regional scale. Yet, without a further note on
the ‘old’ mercantilism in Asia, such as the food systems centered on the Japanese empire
and the US Cold War regime, the historical transitions of the food regimes in the context
of ‘rising China’ (Arrighi 2007), cannot be clearly explained.
This study follows Azuma Eiichiro’s In Search of Our Frontier (2019), which emphasizes
the role of Japanese (American) agricultural experts in expanding the formal empire of
Japan in Asia (ishokumin) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but
shifts attention to the postwar era, focusing not only on the role of agrarian experts,
who felt the influence of colonial doctrine in making a borderless empire, but also on
the rules and institutions they utilized to shape modern agrarian development in
different parts of Asia. Patel’s (2013) notion of the ‘Long Green Revolution’ reminds us
that there were different modes of agricultural modernization in different parts of the
world under the concept of a ‘green revolution.’ These modes were especially varied in
the ways in which they linked governments, non-profit organizations (NPOs), and food
corporations to legitimatize certain knowledge systems and facilitate mobilization of agri-
cultural development projects by governments or states. In addition, Patel (2013)
suggests that the demand for food security and its governance structures formed the dis-
course that states used to justify their expansion to seek out agri-food sources in hitherto
untapped territories during the postwar period. In this way, the ‘New Green Revolution’ is
tied closely to Cold War geopolitics and territorial strategies and presents an avenue for
reconsidering the internal links and transitions of food regimes. Schmalzer (2016) parallels
‘red revolution’ and ‘green revolution’ to suggest that the socialist China (PRC) in the
emphasize ‘regionalization’ processes that make scale in Asia, with particular attention to how certain nodes or places
of power in the postwar food regime were increasingly dispersed across new spatialities in the global political economy,
such as Taiwan (ROC) and parts of Southeast Asia. In this paper, our goal is to explain how regional food regime analysis
can benefit from such a ‘regionalization’ perspective, drawing on postcolonial approaches to understanding the roles of
translocal networks and knowledge translation in agricultural innovation, such as R&D.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 3
postwar era never adopted the idea of ‘green revolution,’ but rather, it mobilized the
movement of so-called ‘scientific farming’ (namely: ‘red revolution’) to combine
modern agricultural farming and traditional intensification (the Tu science) as a way to cir-
cumvent social and political revolution.
We follow Friedmann’s (2016, 682) suggestion that ‘for food regime analysis, cumulat-
ive histories shape cycles via the sediments left by past cycles in each phase’. Studies have
shown that colonial knowledge institutionalized by the Japanese empire contributed to
the development of modern agriculture in Asia (Azuma 2019; Moore 2013); that Japanese
colonies (including Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria) played key roles in the management
and extension of Japan’s military logistics networks during World War II (Cumings 1984;
Ka 1995; Kang and Hyun 2010); and that legacies of Japanese colonialism – resources,
infrastructure, even human capital – were inherited by the US-dominated Cold War
regime (Cumings 1984). But scholars have barely addressed their role in forming
postwar food regimes in Asia. Even fewer studies have addressed the pivotal role that
Taiwan (ROC), international agrarian research and development institutes, and the
Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR, 1948–1979) played in
modernizing Asian agriculture in the postwar period (Lin 2015; Wang 2018). The JCRR
viewed the development of agriculture as a modernization project designed to
improve agricultural productivity and foster development in order to combat commun-
ism.2 In this context, we address how the dynamics of agricultural modernization in
Asia came together to shape transitions between food regimes that were localized in
regional historical and geographical contexts. Our contribution is therefore to reveal
the qualitative changes in the nature of the food regimes by reconceptualizing the tran-
sition from the first to the second food regimes and explaining how these changes might
explain the emergence of the contemporary food regime.
The first section reviews recent efforts to regionalize the food regime framework and
the need to incorporate implicit rules in the analysis. We then turn to the historical
geography of modern agrarian development in Asia before and after 1945, using
materials from the Japanese colonial administration and JCRR archives to discuss how
these imperial regimes influenced the postwar development of agriculture in Asia. We
also draw on interviews with key actors, diaries, memoirs, biographies, interviews, aca-
demic works, and state-produced materials.3 These resources enable us to examine the
agrarian development of Asia through the lens of the story of Shen Zonghan, a leading
figure in Asian agrarian development and the founding of the Consultative Group for
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Asian Vegetable Research and Devel-
opment Center (AVRDC). These stories show that international agricultural research insti-
tutes and philanthropic institutions built for ‘green revolutions’ in Asia prioritized
opposing communism over ensuring food security. But they also demonstrate the impor-
tance of regionalizing food regime analysis and paying attention to the ‘small stories’ of
implicit rules by showing how one individual’s imaginary can ‘scale up’ through the
2
For instance, because of the influence of Cold War geopolitics, Taiwan’s experience with agrarian change demonstrates a
unique pattern of mobilizing rural society through the intervention of the JCRR and the US in order to develop Taiwan’s
agriculture through the Farmers’ Associations (FAs) (Looney 2020).
3
We collected data from archives and libraries including: US Agency for International Development (USAID) Archives;
Kroch Library at Cornell University; Institute of Modern History Archives (Academia Sinica, Taipei); Asia Vegetable
Center Library; and Academia Historia Archives.
translation of agrarian development knowledge. Doing so helps advance explanation of

food regime transitions in their colonial and postcolonial contexts. The paper concludes
with a discussion of the wider implications for the formation of food regimes in Asia and
how further research could benefit from incorporating the analyses of food regimes
in Asia.
Reconsidering the postwar food regime in Asia

The food regime framework attempts to identify and explain the existence of, and shifts
between, relatively stable spatio-temporal configurations articulating agriculture, food
production, and consumption, and to show the roles these have played during
different periods of capitalist globalization (Friedmann 1987; Friedmann and McMichael
1989; McMichael 2009, 2013). Combining political economy and historical analysis, this
approach ‘prioritizes the way in which forms of accumulation in agriculture constitute
global power arrangements’ (McMichael 2009, 141) and simultaneously how food
regimes emerge out of political and economic processes. Until recently, the food
regime literature tended to assume the UK- and US-centered first and second food
regimes could explain most of what was important in the global food economy, overlook-
ing other regional dynamics (McMichael 2013). In addition, though analyses examined
how food regimes emerge out of social movements and powerful institutions, and thus
reflect the negotiated frames for instituting new rules in agricultural development and
food capitalism (Friedmann 2005, 234), they tended to downplay the complications of
negotiated agency, especially in non-center regional dynamics. This section will
address the need to regionalize the food regime literature, and pay more attention to
the implicit rules in regional formations.
At this point it is useful to recall the characteristics of the three historical food regimes
described in the literature. Simplified for analytical purposes, the first or ‘Colonial Project’
food regime (1870s–1930s) provided cheap food, labor, and raw materials from tropical
occupation colonies and temperate settler colonies to facilitate industrialization in
Europe (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; McMichael 2013). Metropole powers often
shifted crops and techniques between locations like pieces on a chessboard, attempting
to rationalize production based on geographies of climate and social relations (Wolford
2021). The second or ‘Development Project’ food regime (1950s–1970s) idealized food
self-sufficiency at the level of discrete, Keynesian-inspired national economies. This
‘inner-directedness’ – industrializing agriculture for national interests – facilitated the
incorporation of food consumption into an intensified capital accumulation that distin-
guished the US model of modernity (McMichael 2005). At the same time, the South-to-
North flow of food was reversed with the transfer of US New Deal surpluses to Cold
War allies in the Global South in the form of international food aid (Friedmann 1993;
McMichael 2009, 2013). Shaped by efforts to contain communism, it sought political legit-
imation using ‘a state-building process in the Free World through economic and military
aid, with the U.S. model of consumption as the ultimate, phenomenal, goal of develop-
ment’ (McMichael 2005, 275). The worldwide expansion of agricultural research and
extension programs during the second food regime was heavily funded by the US govern-
ment and international agencies. Finally, the third or ‘Globalization Project’ food regime
moved away from interlocked Cold War alliances toward international free-trade
agreements (FTAs) made in response to the global economic crises of the 1970s and
1980s, and the WTO governance structure, ushering in the current period of neoliberal
capitalist expansion (McMichael 2009, 2013, 2015; Pritchard 2009).
While some food regime scholars advocate moving beyond the idea of territorial states
as self-contained entities (McMichael 2020; Pritchard et al. 2016), others attempt to move
beyond the ‘relative scalar fixity’ of early analyses by incorporating more detailed empiri-
cal cases at smaller scales of analysis (Rioux 2018; Wang 2018; Jakobsen 2021). Some
recent literature has turned attention to conceptualizing food regimes in Asian or other
regional contexts (Roche 2012; McMichael 2013, 2020; González-Esteban 2018; Wang
2018). Despite progress in reshaping the food regime concept to address the incorpor-
ation of agri-food into a multilateral trading system and its multi-scalar governance struc-
ture, scholarship has not fully addressed the regionalization of the postwar food regime.
Scholarship has largely overlooked the distinctive, endogenous pathways of the postwar
food regime over time, shaped by the ‘implicit rules’ (Friedmann 1993, 31), underpinning
the transition of food regimes. In particular, there has been little discussion of how the
‘Development Projects’ of the postwar food regime were localized in Asia. For instance,
the literature on the postwar food regime has not paid sufficient attention to the reorgan-
ization of the Japanese empire’s mercantile apparatus (the zaibatsu groups, such as Mitsui
& Co.), and how these groups became the dominant conglomerates in managing USAID
during the postwar era and later evolving into today’s sogo-shosha (general trading com-
panies and retailers). Nor have scholars paid enough attention to the agricultural R&D
system built by the Japanese empire, and how these agricultural scientific institutes
and scientists became essential parts of the ‘green revolution,’ operating through the net-
works of Cold War US alliances in Asia and evolving into many of today’s global
agribusiness.
To this end, addressing the implicit rules of the postwar food regime is particularly
important for food regime analysis in conceptualizing the postwar period as the ‘tran-
sition’ – if we borrow Chakrabarty’s (2000, 41) concept of ‘transition narrative,’ which high-
lights the modernization procedure that privileges a Western-centered knowledge
system. Chakrabarty suggests that if ‘Europe’ is provincialized, we must condemn the
prioritization of the knowledge system embedded in institutional practices for the
purpose of (European) dominance. We further note that answering Friedmann’s (2016,
677) recent call to open an inquiry into the ‘simultaneously changing parts of a changing
totality’ of food regimes with ‘open historical interpretations’ can help to address the tran-
sition from the first food regime to the second and its ‘carryover’ for further development.
As such, in this study, we attempt to reveal the implicit rules that governed the postwar
food regime for agrarian development in Asia. We discuss the scientific agrarian knowl-
edge regime created for the purpose of dominance and how it constitutes an integral
part of the story of imperialism within the Asian regional history of food regimes.
In Hygienic Modernity, Ruth Rogaski (2004) notes that the expansion of the Japanese
empire in Asia facilitated the adoption of the modern idea of hygiene, providing a
bridge between China and Western countries through which Japanese colonial adminis-
trators worked together with Western specialists and the colonies’ native elites to con-
struct material and symbolic power over colonial societies. Similarly, in terms of
agriculture, the agency of local actors in Japan’s colonies was crucial for translating and
implementing Western agrarian knowledge systems. These local actors included people
from both China and Taiwan who had studied modern agriculture in either Japan or a
Western country, and who came to play significant roles not only as modern agrarian
scientists, but also as active participants in the production of the postwar order of agrarian
development (Geng 2015).
In this context, Aaron Moore’s concept of the ‘technological imaginary’ provides an
important lens. Moore borrowed the term ‘scientific colonialism’ from Goto Shinpei, colo-
nial Taiwan’s head of civilian affairs, to argue that the Japanese colonial regime was articu-
lated through a practical and inventive notion of technology ‘whereby different areas of
life were rationally planned and mobilized to exhibit their maximum potential and crea-
tivity’ (Moore 2013, 7). Regarding the scope of food regime analyses, the technological
imaginary resonates with Bernstein’s (2010) argument that capitalism is capable of
exploiting multiple forms of labor through different political arrangements, and so colo-
nial states can incorporate a variety of agrarian structures within a given food regime.
In addition, the construction of the technological imaginary for the postwar food
regime was synonymous with the simultaneous self-formation of the colonial subject
and the lure of the US model of modernity (Patel 2013). Agrarian development, alongside
other development projects, operated in the form of coordinating individuals who
reshaped their societies in the context of war-time discipline. Once the colonial elites
acquired positions of power, they laid claim to the ‘truth’ through the systematization
and modernization of environmental and agrarian knowledge (Mitchell 2002). Although
many colonial regimes shared unifying characteristics, the postwar food regime in Asia
had specific effects on societies during the Cold War. The circulation of modern scientific
agrarian knowledge did not merely flow between two monolithic entities, but rather was
a complex process that emerged at specific moments (Patel 2013). Hence, examining the
moment of emergence highlights patterns of cooperation and coercion, and ‘looks at the
sometimes intimate collaborations between multiple “colonizers” and various members
of “the colonized”’ (Rogaski 2004, 8–9).
Drawing on such approaches helps us to rethink Asia’s variegated geographies and
translocalities. It reconfigures how we think about food regimes in Asia, helping us go
beyond East – West binaries and the dominant role of the nation-state. In Asia as
Method: Toward Deimperialization, Chen Kuan-Hsing (2010) argues that Asia has not
entirely entered into the postcolonial period because the US-dominated Cold War
regime repositioned power relations among Asian countries with the installation of an
‘anticommunism-pro-Americanism structure.’ This Cold War regime retroactively
justified Japanese colonialism and imperialism, especially to Japan’s former colonies,
because the reflections toward Japan (including Japan itself) were suppressed in
service of the US need to secure Japan as the beachhead of its Cold War front in the
Asia-Pacific. Nevertheless, neoliberal globalization reconfigured the Cold War regime
and opened the door for new forms of decolonization and deimperialization, and the
de-escalation of the Cold War in Asia. In this context, Asia’s diverse historical experiences
and rich social practices derived from multiple local and regional traditions may be mobi-
lized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives.
As McMichael (2020, 118) notes, it is particularly important for future studies of food
regimes to pay greater attention to the synchronic dynamics of food regime ‘conjunc-
tures.’ We argue that, beyond the profound influence of the US in the postwar food
regime, the nuances and historical and regional specificities of the agricultural scientists’
life stories and individual agricultural technological imaginaries can ‘scale up’ through the
translation and circulation of agrarian knowledge in the transition of food regimes in Asia.
The Japanese empire-dominated first food regime in Asia

In the late nineteenth century, modern agricultural knowledge from Western countries,
especially the United States, was introduced into Japan and China, mediated by mission-
aries, educational networks and international agencies (Duke 2009; Love and Reisner
[1964] 2012). Japan adopted and adapted American knowledge and practices and trans-
mitted them to its colonies; among them, Taiwan then played a prominent role in the
further development of the empire’s agriculture. But Japan also directly influenced
China’s agricultural modernization and development prior to the war, during the late
Qing and early Republican period (1912–1920). Chinese agricultural experts and scientists
trained in American but also Japanese universities, and then returned and applied Japanese
approaches and practices – adapted from American agrarian science – to Chinese farms
(Dong 1997; Geng 2015; Perkins 1997; Stross 1986). Meanwhile, as the Japanese empire
stretched its physical boundaries through military conquest, some first-generation Japa-
nese-Americans with agricultural expertise acquired there returned to Asia to carry out
their own colonial ventures, contributing to Japan’s territorial expansion (Azuma 2019).
From the late nineteenth century until 1945, Taiwan and many parts of Asia were
increasingly enmeshed in an emerging food regime centered on the Japanese empire
as it strove to mold itself as metropole in the classic ‘old international division of labor’
characteristic of Western colonial empires. Consolidation of this food regime involved
re-orienting the colonies toward an imperial division of labor with Japan receiving
imports of rice and sugar from Taiwan, rice and soy from Korea, and soy, cotton, and
coal from Manchuria; and conversely, Japan exporting manufactured goods, especially
textiles, to its colonies (Hiraga and Hisano 2017, 18). A key feature of this regime was
the production of agricultural knowledge by Japanese actors, and the deployment and
circulation of knowledge, trained personnel, and seeds throughout the empire, mimicking
Western imperial powers. But the story is more complex: Japanese practices and insti-
tutions of knowledge production were heavily influenced by America in multiple ways,
and knowledge produced in Japan’s Taiwan colony was circulated to other parts of the
Empire.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the government began efforts to modernize agri-
culture in the Japanese homeland, and later extended those efforts to its occupation
and settler colonies (Lynn 2005). In addition to the land reforms of the 1870–1880s and
conversion to tax payments in cash (Hirano 2015, 198), the Meiji government sought
advice from Western experts, which led it to promote modern and capital-intensive
farming methods, such as increased use of animal power, and replacing traditional self-
sufficient soil management techniques with purchased fertilizer. Initially this was dom-
estic fishmeal, but supply was limited, and soymeal imported from Manchuria became
increasingly dominant in the 1890s (Hiraga and Hisano 2017, 9). The early Meiji also
adopted American modes of agricultural knowledge production and circulation, including
agricultural schools and extension agencies. To give just one example, Horace Capron, a
former US Commissioner of Agriculture under President Ulysses Grant, was hired by the
Meiji from 1871 to 1875 to advise on the settler colonization of Hokkaido. He established
demonstration and experimental farms in Tokyo and then Hokkaido, and his recommen-
dations led to the founding of Sapporo Agricultural College4 in 1876 by William S. Clark, a
professor of chemistry and botany and a leader in American agricultural education
(Hirano 2015, 202; Gowen et al. 2016).
These institutions and practices became part of the colonial machinery, and Japan
transferred them to Taiwan as soon as it gained sovereign control in 1895 after the first
Sino-Japanese War. The Taiwan Colonial Governor-General’s Office (TCGO) brought
experts from Japan, many of them graduates from the abovementioned agricultural
college in Sapporo, to establish and staff modern agricultural institutions. Two of note
were Iso Eikichi (1886–1972), who helped found the Agricultural School of Taihoku Imper-
ial University in 1925 (now National Taiwan University), and Hikoichi-I Oka (1916–1996),
who would become one of the founders of the Taiwan Governor’s Office High School
on Agriculture and Forestry (now National Chung Hsing University) in 1944
(Kitamura et al. 2016).5 The TCGO established its first agricultural extension station as
early as 1896 (Fujihara 2018, 141), followed later by a chain of experimental and extension
stations (Wang 2018).6 It implemented major irrigation works and consolidated a network
of Farmers Associations (Looney 2020, 57).
Taiwan was expected to become an important source of rice for the Japanese home
islands, and the TCGO directed the Japanese experts in Taiwan to improve rice yields.
Early efforts to transfer japonica varieties developed in Japan to the relatively tropical
Taiwan were not successful, so the TCGO prioritized selecting and improving the
highest-yielding local indica varieties. An early success was the DGWG indica variety devel-
oped in the 1910s. It was high yielding but not welcomed by Japanese consumers, so after
the 1918 rice riots the experts in Taiwan were directed to refocus on developing japonica
varieties.7 Iso Eikichi, who played a role in developing DGWG at Taihoku Imperial Univer-
sity, was sent by the TCGO in 1918 and 1928 to study under Professor Harry H. Love at
Cornell University (Iso 1954). There he was exposed to photoperiodism, a new set of the-
ories and techniques. He returned to Taiwan and by 1926–1928 applied these to lead the
development of a japonica variety – Taichung 65 or horai – that produced high yields in
Taiwan and was welcomed by Japanese consumers (Fujihara 2018).
After colonizing Hokkaido and Taiwan, Japan continued to expand its empire and
extend modern agricultural practices into new colonies in Korea and Manchuria.
Victory against Russia in 1905 conferred control of China’s Liaodong Peninsula and
Korea. Full annexation of Korea followed in 1910, but as early as 1906 the Japanese Gov-
ernor-General in Korea established an Agricultural Experiment Station in Suwon, near
4
Later renamed Tohoku Imperial University, then renamed Imperial Hokkaido University in 1918, and simply Hokkaido
University after the war.
5
From unpublished documents archived at the NTU Eikichi Memorial House. The influence of these agricultural experts
trained by the university in Sapporo was felt at multiple levels of the school education in colonial Taiwan (Kitamura,
Hiura, and Yamamoto 2016).
6
Originally there were only nine sub-regional agricultural experimental stations and laboratories, but the number of
research institutions increased significantly during the Pacific War (Wang 2018).
7
‘Rice Riots 1918’ is a research topic that has attracted a fair amount of attention in academia. In general, they were due to
the convergence of social, economic, and political crisis, caused by the inflation and the skyrocketing price of rice in
Japan which happened right after the end of World War I, and involved series of mass demonstrations and armed
clashes that spread across Japan for eight weeks from July to September 1918. The riots led to the resignation of
Prime Minister Terachi and his cabinet. To learn more about the historical background of the riots, refer Steven
J. Ericson’s article (Ericson 2015): Japonica, Indica: Rice and Foreign Trade in Meiji Japan.
Seoul. More substations followed, some Koreans were allowed to study agronomy in Japa-
nese universities, and by the late 1930s new rice varieties were being developed in Korea.
But dynamics differed from Taiwan in one important regard: japonica varieties developed
in Japan grew well in Korea, and by colonial fiat had mostly replaced indigenous strains by
the 1920s (Kim 2018, 191–192). Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 but did not establish
modern agricultural institutions immediately; however, a series of local agricultural acade-
mies had sprung up in Japan in the 1910s and 1920s, with their curriculas eventually
melding nationalism and modern agricultural techniques, and in the 1930s these took
on the role of training potential settlers to Manchuria (Young 1998, 332, 360). Similar in
climate to Korea and parts of Japan, modern japonica rice strains developed in Japan
transferred well to cultivation in Manchuria (Fujihara 2018, 141), and agricultural exper-
iments may not have been as immediately necessary.
Japan began to invade China proper in 1937, occupying Beijing, Shanghai, and
Nanjing. As it continued its expansion into the less familiar climates of southern China
it looked to Taiwan, seeking to take advantage of the useful colonial and agricultural
knowledge it had developed in its only tropical colony (Chang 2007; TCGO 1943). The
TCGO was eager to oblige, hoping to bolster its importance within the Empire in the
face of fierce enmity and competition between itself (founded by the Imperial Japanese
Navy) and the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), founded by the Japanese Guandong Army
(Azuma 2019; Hotta 2014). Even before Japan’s invasion of China, TCGO Governor-General
Nakagawa Kenzō had initiated official surveys of ‘tropics’ to prepare for Japan’s expansion
towards Southeast Asia (TCGO 1935), and then founded the Taiwan Development CO.,
LTD in 1936–1937 to promote Japanese mercantilism. The TCGO launched policies to
increase agro-industrial production in wartime Taiwan and simultaneously drew on this
experience to design colonial policies in anticipation of the need to reconstruct,
govern, and industrialize Japan’s newly occupied territories in the more tropical southern
China and Southeast Asia (Kao 2005). During this period, TCGO ceaselessly reiterated that
the knowledge of tropical agriculture it had developed in Taiwan would be key to the
Empire’s expansion in Asia. One example of implementation occurred in Hainan, where
the Japanese started to implement a system based on the horai rice and sugar
economy the empire had developed in colonial Taiwan (Chung 2003).
In 1941 Japan began the conquest and incorporation of Southeast Asia with the
purpose of securing self-sufficiency in key resources, mainly petroleum (Hotta 2014).
The Japanese military expected each territory to be food self-sufficient and also feed
the occupying forces: even with Taiwan and Korea producing rice for Japan, food supplies
were tight, shipping was fraught with risks, and such resources were needed for the war.
However, many areas of Southeast Asia were net importers of food, having become
specialized in export crops such as pepper, sugar, coffee, tobacco and rubber for Euro-
pean markets; only Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand were net exporters (Chang 2007).
The tropical varieties of rice were not amenable to Japanese consumers anyway, so the
Japanese military mandated some trade between territories within the region. It also
undertook efforts to increase local rice production, bringing seeds and experts and begin-
ning training and extension. In the Philippines, the Japanese Military Administration
planted experimental farms with horai rice, and after declaring success, ordered some
areas to plant only horai (Jose 1998, 73–75). In Malaysia, the Japanese dispatched
‘soldier-farmers’ to introduce and promote cultivation of horai (Kratoska 1998, 107). In
Sarawak, agricultural stations and training schools were established (Cramb 1998, 147).
None of these efforts were very successful. It can be inferred that localizing even the
more tropical indica and horai rices developed in Taiwan would have required sustained
experimentation and adaptation (Kurasawa 1998, 33), but the Pacific War simply ended
too quickly in September of 1945.
Japan tried to increase food production in its new colonies, but also restructured the pat-
terns of agricultural production in other ways. Before the war, northern China, Manchuria
and the colony in Korea had served as Japan’s main production bases for soybeans, and
northern China in particular as an important source of cotton (Hiraga and Hisano 2017).
During the 1920s, British India and the United States together produced roughly 85% of
Japan’s cotton imports (Ellinger and Ellinger 1930), but these sources were cut off with
the beginning of the Pacific War. Because cotton was such a crucial input for munitions,
clothing, and Japan’s competitive textile exports, Japan attempted to increase cotton cul-
tivation in northern China but also in other colonies such as Taiwan, Hainan, and Southeast
Asian territories in Java, the Philippines, Sarawak, and Vietnam in order to ensure cotton
self-sufficiency within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Moore 2013; Nagano
1998; Sato 1998, 179; Jose 1998, 74–75; Cramb 1998; Nguyen 1998, 210; Chung 2003).
Finally, the empire also deployed trained personnel as part of its efforts to restructure
agriculture in southern China and Southeast Asia to support military expansion and occu-
pation, and to integrate and consolidate the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The
agrarian education system was originally available only to Japanese citizens in colonial
Taiwan, including Taiwanese with Japanese citizenship (Ka 1995; Kitamura, Hiura, and
Yamamoto 2016), but it was gradually opened to Taiwanese students, and modern agri-
culture became central to the colonial education system during wartime (Sugai 1943).
Modern agricultural education and training became part of the social reform that stu-
dents in Taiwan experienced during the Kominka Movement, the radical Japanization
campaign that started in 1937 and lasted throughout the war (Ching 2001). Starting in
1938, in order to increase the supply of food for the empire from the new territories in
southern China and Southeast Asia, the TCGO repurposed its agricultural research insti-
tutes and experimental stations, creating regional and local centers to train Taiwanese
farmers and villagers as agricultural experts. In the meantime, the Japanese Civilization
Association (1943) and the Farmers’ Associations in Taiwan also assumed responsibility
for the basic training of agrarian settlers (Chang 2007). The TCGO drew on these to dis-
patch agrarian experts and settlers to implement modern agriculture and produce mili-
tary crops in other colonies. For example, in April 1938, the Japanese army formally
requested that the TCGO to dispatch agricultural experts and about 1,000 farmers to
plant vegetables near Shanghai to feed the army. The group of experts and farmers
who were subsequently sent were called the ‘Taiwanese Agricultural Volunteer Team’
(see Figure 1).8 There were also Taiwanese among the ‘Japanese’ experts sent to South-
east Asia (Chung 2020; Wang 2018).
After the war, the Japanese wartime regime was interwoven with the US Cold War
system through US foreign aid, rural development projects, and ‘green revolutions.’ At
the same time, agriculture in China was influenced by the emergence of the socialist
8
This is an unpublished and unclassified archive collected by the authors from Kaohsiung Museum of History in Kaohsiung
City, Taiwan.
Figure 1. The Taiwanese Agricultural Volunteer Team in Shanghai. Source: The Taiwanese Agricultural
Volunteer Team Photo Album (1940). (This is an unpublished and unclassified archive collected by the
authors from Kaohsiung Museum of History in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan.)
Chinese state and its experiments in socialist agricultural development, which resulted in
the so-called red revolutions (Schmalzer 2016). Although the world structure changed sig-
nificantly in the transition towards the postwar period, the circulation of modern agricul-
tural knowledge, carried out (and re-located) through the agricultural scientists and their
institutions, has remained a crucial part of the emerging postwar food regime.
The postwar food regime in Asia

The food systems that emerged in postwar East Asia largely followed the same ‘replication
and integration’ pattern as in Western countries during the Second Food Regime, empha-
sizing the tight articulation within Keynesian container states of agricultural self-
sufficiency, industrial development, and consumption. The Cold War and US containment
policy were key factors in the development of Japan and the New Industrial Countries
(NICs). But the domination of Japan and its former colonies under the US Cold War
umbrella resulted in some key regional differences. Postwar reconstruction was
accompanied by vast amounts of food aid but also sweeping, American-designed land
reforms. US occupation forces allowed Japanese trade companies (sogo-shosha) to re-
establish their prewar and wartime networks, and Taiwan played a prominent role; in
the 1950s and 1960s it grew to be one of the world’s leading exporters of a range of agri-
cultural goods, which went mostly to Japan (Cumings 1984; Hamilton and Kao 2018;
McMichael 2000; National Development Council 1994; Schonberger 1973).9 As part of its
Cold War efforts to prevent communist revolutions, the US amplified its role in modern
agricultural research and development in Asia (Cullather 2010), and Taiwan became an
important partner in these efforts. The case study presented here of the Sino-American
JCRR and one of its leading figures, Shen Zonghan, helps foreground the central role
played by international agricultural research and R&D programs in the postwar food
regimes. A close examination of the creation of the AVRDC illuminates the implicit
rules of the regional food regime, in which agency did not belong to the US alone;
rather, Taiwan leveraged the geopolitics of food security to position itself internationally.
The expansion of US hegemony was not limited to territorial expansion through either
settler colonialism or geopolitical strategies (Arrighi 1994); the postwar food regime
that mobilized agricultural R&D, including scientific knowledge, scientists, and modern
agriculture, was a constituent part of US hegemony, mixed with both territorial strategies
and geo-economic interests.
Shen Zonghan and the JCRR

Shen Zonghan (1895–1980) was the primary designer of the JCRR and later became its
chair from 1964 until his retirement in 1974. He received a master’s degree from the
Georgia State College of Agriculture (now University of Georgia) in 1924 and then
entered the agricultural college at Cornell University. There he was trained by Harry
Love in breeding, genetics, and plant pathology with a focus on rice and weed cropping.
Love, who’s training led Iso Eikichi to invent horai rice, had close connections with China
through missionary agricultural education. One of Love’s students, John Reisner, was a
founder and the first director of the College of Agriculture and Forestry at the missionary
University of Nanking. Together, Love and Reisner started the Cornell-Nanking Program in
1925, a cooperative project that lasted twenty years and combined missionary work with
spreading modern agriculture. Thus, the first international technical cooperation in agri-
culture was designed to improve Chinese agriculture (Myers 1962,10 quoted in Love and
Reisner [1964] 2012). According to the program’s mission statement, each year a Cornell
representative would visit China and conduct research, training, and extension at the Uni-
versity of Nanking with the support of a start-up fund from the Rockefeller Foundation
and churches in the US. Three Cornell professors were deeply involved in the program,
with Harry Love in residence in 1925 and 1929, Clyde Myers in 1926 and 1931, and Roy
Wiggans in 1927 and 1930 (Stross 1986; Love and Reisner [1964] 2012). Shen graduated
from Cornell in 1927, and with Love’s support he joined the agricultural program at the
University of Nanking. During the ten years he taught there, he was a pioneer of
Chinese agricultural modernization and became ‘China’s foremost plant-breeding
expert’ (Ladejinsky 1977, 137). Shen recalled his participation in the Cornell-Nanking
Program:
I should also like to express my gratitude and pleasure in having been privileged to take part
in the Program. The International Education Board granted a research fellowship to me in
9
Over 50% of Taiwan’s exports were sent to Japan, including rice, sugar, canned asparagus, canned pineapple, and fresh
fruits and vegetables (Taiwan Statistical Data Book 1994, 194). Starting in the late 1960s, Taiwan’s agricultural exports
also began to supply the US Army in Vietnam until the end of the Vietnam War (Hamilton and Kao 2018).
10
The document is a lecture quoted in Love and Reisner [1964] 2012.
1926–1927 on the recommendation of Professor H. H. Love and C. H. Myers. While on the

faculty of the University of Nanking in 1927–1937, I had the rare opportunity to acquire valu-
able experience from the Cornell University professors, Drs. H. H. Love, C.H. Myers, and R.G.
Wiggans. (Love and Reisner [1964] 2012, 57)11
Reisner and Love appointed Shen to manage the Cornell-Nanking Program when they
returned to the US,12 and he actively strengthened US–China connections through agri-
cultural knowledge exchange programs (Shen 1975, 1977; Love and Reisner [1964] 2012).
Shen became an official in the Nationalist (KMT) government in 1937, and was put in
charge of agricultural development for food security during the war with Japan. In this
role, he recruited many of his former students as assistants and government employees
(Shen 1975). When the JCRR was created in 1948, at the beginning of the Cold War,
Shen was well positioned and played a leading role in its design and organization
(Shen 1975). Again, he recruited former students, such as Jiang Yanshi. Shen attributed
his achievements to the Cornell-Nanking Program:
With confidence in the international cooperation built up from my early association with the
triangular cooperative program, I have enjoyed working, since 1948, in my present position
with the China-United States Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction in China. (Love and
Reisner [1964] 2012, 57)13
After defeat in 1949, the KMT retreated to Taiwan and became a pivotal US ally. More than
two million people moved with it, including the leadership and staff of the JCRR. The JCRR
and USAID collaborated to rebuild the agricultural schools and units founded by the
TCGO, including the Agricultural Research & Extension Stations and the Tropical Horticul-
tural Experiment Branch. These units had trained Taiwanese as agrarian experts before the
end of the war; many who survived were now hired back as government employees,
though they mostly served under the Mainland Chinese experts and administrators
that had relocated with the JCRR in 1949. Most of the surviving Japanese agricultural
scientists returned to Japan, but some stayed. The rice researcher Iso Eikichi, for instance,
was hired by the agricultural school he had helped found at NTU and continued to
conduct his research. He revived his connection with agricultural scientist Harry
H. Love, with whom he had worked as a TCGO-supported visiting researcher at Cornell
University. Later, with the support of JCRR and FAO (Japan branch), Eikichi published
his lifelong findings in rice research, Rice and Crops in its Rotation in Subtropical Zones,
in 1954 (Iso 1954). In a letter, Love urged Shen to ask Iso to publish his rice research
findings:
Dear Dr. Shen … There is a great deal of value in Dr. Iso’s compilation, and as you will recall,
sometime ago, Dr. Fendleton and I wrote JCRR urging that efforts be made to publish your
book on Chinese agriculture and Iso’s manuscript covering the valuable results from his
many rice experiments … 14
11
See also letter from Shen to Love on Oct 12, 1962. Source: Harry H. Love papers, 1907–1964. Collection Number: 21-28-
890. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
12
In terms of qualifications, one of the main reasons, besides being a well-trained agronomist, was that Shen was a
devout Christian. Shen’s older brother converted to Christianity in high school around the age of 15, and Shen followed
in his footsteps, becoming a Christian around the same time (Shen 1975).
13
See notes 10 and 11.
14
See letter from Love to Shen on Apr 9, 1953. Source: Harry H. Love papers, 1907-1964. Collection Number: 21-28-890.
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Following that, Shen responded to Love:
My dear Professor … Referring to my letter under the date of April 30, 1953, I wish to inform
you that Mr. Iso is leaving for the United States today under the support of the Chinese
National Government for the final editing and publishing of his manuscript … 15
The JCRR mission, preventing communist revolution by alleviating rural poverty, shifted
focus from Mainland China to Taiwan. In 1953, Samuel P. Hayes, the assistant director
of the Far East branch of the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), wrote to Hubert
G. Schenck, chief of the Mutual Security Mission to China (MSM/C), then located in
Taipei. The letter reveals that the MSA had extended loans to the JCRR amounting to
approximately NT$30 million (about 20% of the JCRR’s annual budget of around NT
$150 million)16 – just one example of the ways JCRR mixed agrarian improvement and
military security interests. Most of the funds were spent on land reform projects, irrigation
engineering, and agricultural improvement in Taiwan.17 Shen played key roles in the
design and implementation of these projects, helping to mediate and translate techno-
logical and agricultural improvement knowledge from Cornell for JCRR projects. In the
1950s and 1960s, the US started to reposition the JCRR to contribute, alongside other
international organizations, to the Cold War project of managing global food security.
Shen later recalled:
As a trustee of the International Rice Research Institute, Manila, I met Mr. John D. Rockefeller,
III at the opening ceremonies of the Institute on February 7, 1962. I expressed my gratitude to
him for my research fellowship from his father’s foundation, the International Education
Board, and commented on this triangular cooperative program as the earliest and also the
best example of technical assistance by American institutions to foreign countries. (Love
and Reisner [1964] 2012, 57)18
Taiwan was a pivotal site for training experts who contributed to developing the agri-
culture of US Cold War allies. For instance, Cameron F. Bremseth, the Training Officer
of the MSM/C, authored An Evaluation of the Participant Program in Taiwan, which was
published in 1959 by the MSM/C, the JCRR, and the US under the Mutual Security Act.
The report examined the extent to which participants from Taiwan had utilized their
training from USAID since their return home. The study was based on interviews with
715 of 787 participants. Most of them had returned directly from the US (548) and a
few of them had returned from training in other countries (157, mostly in Japan)
between 1951 and 1957. The largest group of these trainees had specialized in agri-
cultural training (24.1%), while industry and mining training was second (21.6%). The
US government had arranged several training programs in other parts of Asia to
expand its postwar influence, but Taiwan became a unique regional center for agricul-
tural development, like a secondary outpost disseminating US knowledge, with
experts trained in the US in turn training experts that came to Taiwan from other
Asian countries because they could not go directly to the US. By contrast, a report
15
See letter from Shen to Love on May 5, 1953. Source: Harry H. Love papers, 1907-1964. Collection Number: 21-28-890.
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
16
We have used the New Taiwan Dollar as the monetary unit based on the original information from the archive.
17
Letter from Samuel P. Hayes to Hubert G. Schenck. 1953. JCRR Archive in the Institute of Modern History, Academia
Sinica, Taipei (36-16-002-001, 201).
18
See note 10.
on the contributions of US foreign aid in Korea (Rogers et al. 1958) devoted only three
of its 156 pages directly to agriculture, and even that concerned the reorganization of
the Suwon agricultural research institute founded by the Japanese in 1906 and made
no mention of training agriculture experts in or from Korea.
Under US guidance in the 1950s, Taiwan’s agricultural institutions started allocating
more resources to the research and development of high-value-added crops such as
fruits and vegetables (Wang 2018). This would contribute to Taiwan’s growing food
exports to Japan, but to Shen and the JCRR this was not just about improving agricultural
productivity to support economic development, nor did they see it simply as a way to
fight against communism. The JCRR’s partner and sponsor, USAID,19 molded international
food security discourses in service of Cold War strategies, drawing upon the expertise of
US universities, nongovernmental and private voluntary organizations, multilateral devel-
opment partners, and overseas universities (Shah 2016). Green revolutions of basic grains
and staples received more attention in the Cold War project of developing global food
security, but in the 1950s USAID, the JCRR, and many partner institutions started to
focus on increasing vegetable production as well (GAO 1978). Shen would again play a
key role in these efforts. Close examination of his role and actions in founding the
AVRDC, in the context of Taiwan’s geopolitical circumstances, reveals that his motivations
exceeded US Cold War umbrella interests in containing communism. Ostensibly about bol-
stering Third World nutrition and wrapped in security concerns, the focus on vegetables
would later play a significant role in the emergence of New Agricultural Countries (NACs)
and transitions beyond the Second Food Regime (McMichael 2000; Rosset et al. 1999).
Seeding ‘the world’ for food security in the postwar period: CGIAR-IARCs and the
AVRDC in the postwar food regime
One of Shen’s major contributions was to deepen the ROC’s international agricultural
cooperation. In this regard, the most important project he worked on was founding the
AVRDC (Shen 1975), which he framed in Cold War terms as ‘Free China … making its con-
tribution to world agriculture’ (Shen [1964] 2012, 57, quoted in Love and Reisner [1964]
2012). Shen started working on the AVRDC right after he was appointed chair of the
JCRR in 1964. The idea had been initiated that year by USAID to address the insufficient
production and consumption of fruits and vegetables worldwide (General Accounting
Office 1978). But USAID had difficulty securing funding for the new research institute,
and it originally intended to locate it in Thailand, not Taiwan. Shen worked tirelessly
and was instrumental in convincing USAID and members of the US government, such
as Congressman Otto E. Passman, to provide funding and change the location to
Taiwan (Shen 1975, 88–108). The AVDRC was founded in 1971 and became operational
in 1974, with the official purpose of ‘alleviating poverty and malnutrition in the develop-
ing world through the increased production and consumption of nutritious and health-
promoting vegetables’ (AVRDC 1976). Taiwan provided 116 hectares of land, facilities
to house the center, and more than one-third of the budget, while USAID-JCRR provided
19
The USAID was formally created by the US in 1961, but to the ROC (and KMT), based on the Mutual Security Act 1951,
the ROC and the US co-founded the USAID Council to arrange foreign aid directly from the US to the ROC starting in
1951. We use the term USAID in this context.
40 percent of the budget; the Asian Development Bank, 10 percent; the Republic of Korea,
Thailand, and the Philippines, 5 percent each; Vietnam, a symbolic contribution; and
Japan, technical support and a one-time US$40,000 donation. Currently, the AVRDC is
supported by contributions from governments worldwide20 and international develop-
mental agencies,21 but Taiwan has been the single largest donor at 40 percent of the
average annual budget since 1990 (see Table 1).22
The AVRDC was formed independent of other mainstream global food security insti-
tutions of the Cold War. For example, it was not part of the Consultative Group for
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which was co-organized in 1971 by eigh-
teen governments and international organizations. Co-organizers including the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United Nations Development
Programme, and the World Bank provided financial assistance and technical support,
and participated in decision-making. In order to extend its early achievements,
additional International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) were established in the
following years to support research to improve important staple crops (such as
beans, root vegetables, and cereals) as well as livestock and other agricultural, forestry,
and aquatic sectors. Several research centers that did not originally belong to CGIAR
have been moved under its umbrella. Currently there are 16 IARCs, and many
additional research centers that share the same purpose but are not formally under
the CGIAR umbrella with ‘non-associated centers,’ one of which is the AVRDC (Green-
land 1997).23
In 2017, CGIAR’s budget totaled US$849 million, with industrial countries account-
ing for two-thirds of its funding. Most of the funding sources are supported by diplo-
matic or foreign aid programs in these countries. Funds granted by sponsoring
members are based on the IARCs or projects they choose to support, and each IARC
is responsible for reporting expenditures to each sponsoring member.24 In other
words, the CGIAR can be seen as an officially recognized institution under the US
Cold War security umbrella, an identity that could not be directly afforded to the
Taiwan-centered AVRDC.
The CGIAR Technical Advisory Committee recommendation to include the AVRDC
among the IARC system was denied for ‘political reasons’ (Greenland 1997, 471), partially
due to the US rapprochement with the PRC. In the 1970s, the US was gradually developing
formal relationships with the People’s Republic China (PRC) and officially ended diplo-
matic relations with Taiwan (ROC) in 1979. But the CGIAR and AVRDC had close informal
ties from the beginning. The founding director of the AVRDC, Robert F. Chandler Jr. (1972–
1975) and his successor, James C. Moomaw (1975–1979), were both agricultural scientists
from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines (Fletcher 1993), one
of the original four of the CGIAR’s IARCs, and arguably the most important and famous.
20
These countries include Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and the United States.
21
Special support comes from the ADB, International Development Research Centre, Swiss Development Corporation,
Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, and World Bank.
22
See Table 1 for the statistics of the Taiwan government’s budget in supporting the AVRDC.
23
There are five ‘non-associated centers’ of CGAIR that only received limited support from CGIAR, including AVRDC, the
International Board for Soil Research and Management (IBSRAM) in Thailand, International Centre for Insect Physiology
and Ecology (ICIPE) in Kenya, International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC) in USA, and International Centre for
Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal (Greenland 1997).
24
See also https://www.cgiar.org/impact/finance-reports/dashboard/.
Table 1. Taiwan’s (ROC) contribution to the budget of the AVRDC.

Years Unrestricted Grants ($) ROC ($) % Restricted ($) ROC ($) %
1990 $6,913,576.00 $4,129,104.00 60% $724,576.00 $724,576.00 100%
1991 $6,839,682.00 $4,241,098.00 62% $1,182,708.00 $1,110,408.00 94%
1992 $7,848,757.00 $5,085,061.00 64% $769,635.00 $769,635.00 100%
1993 $8,698,641.00 $5,386,901.00 62% $1,427,594.00 $1,414,172.00 99%
1994 $8,148,514.00 $5,337,614.00 66% $820,710.00 $799,973.00 97%
1995 $8,727,327.00 $5,544,741.00 64% $1,081,509.00 $1,035,450.00 96%
1996 $6,956,736.00 $4,177,912.00 60% $2,381,593.00 $698,833.00 29%
1997 $7,644,720.00 $4,604,014.00 60% $2,799,210.00 $758,485.00 27%
1998 $5,753,728.00 $3,744,384.00 65% $3,461,517.00 $1,510,293.00 44%
1999 $5,512,545.00 $3,867,851.00 70% $4,710,084.00 $445,682.00 9%
2000 $6,007,330.00 $4,498,516.00 75% $3,666,199.00 $860,191.00 23%
2001 $4,526,956.00 $3,390,437.00 75% $4,384,584.00 $1,186,031.00 27%
2002 $4,398,684.00 $3,746,089.00 85% $4,845,157.00 $1,277,877.00 26%
2003 $5,401,000.00 $4,152,000.00 77% $4,612,000.00 $1,261,000.00 27%
2004 $5,546,000.00 $4,065,000.00 73% $5,925,000.00 $1,462,000.00 25%
2005 $5,018,000.00 $4,065,000.00 81% $5,561,000.00 $1,919,000.00 35%
2007 $7,751,000.00 $5,557,000.00 72% $4,574,000.00 $509,000.00 11%
2009 $6,759,000.00 $5,619,000.00 83% $11,642,000.00 $4,763,000.00 41%
2010 $7,309,000.00 $5,767,000.00 79% $7,135,000.00 $2,699,000.00 38%
2011 $8,362,000.00 $6,214,000.00 74% $5,314,000.00 $2,042,000.00 38%
2012 $8,733,000.00 $5,301,000.00 61% $4,313,000.00 $557,000.00 13%
2013 $9,225,000.00 $5,211,000.00 56% $8,277,000.00 $1,416,000.00 17%
2014 $8,817,000.00 $4,714,000.00 53% $10,268,000.00 $693,000.00 7%
2015 $9,306,000.00 $4,516,000.00 49% $11,234,000.00 $1,322,000.00 12%
2016 $7,372,000.00 $4,407,000.00 60% $13,483,000.00 $1,245,000.00 9%
2017 $8,324,000.00 $4,687,000.00 56% $11,626,000.00 $587,000.00 5%
2018 $8,742,000.00 $4,768,000.00 55% $9,353,000.00 $1,525,000.00 16%
2019 $8,617,000.00 $4,586,000.00 53% $13,280,000.00 $4,117,000.00 31%
2020 $7,602,000.00 $4,771,000.00 63% $13,708,000.00 $7,181,000.00 52%
Sources: We calculated the numbers collected from the budget report published by the AVRDC. Annual data before 1990
and for the years 2006 and 2008 were missing. Unrestricted grants bear no external restrictions as to use or purpose and
can be used for any purpose, whereas restricted grants are restricted externally for specific operating purposes, or
designated as endowment funds. This table shows that Taiwan has become the single biggest donor of the AVRDC.
The AVRDC’s desire to gain official entry into these international networks can be seen
in its significant, but unsuccessful, efforts to join the Global Forum on Agricultural
Research (GFAR).25 The GFAR was established in 1996 by international and regional
organizations, government agricultural institutions, scientific societies, nongovern-
mental organizations, and business groups to promote dialogue and cooperation
among all agencies concerned with international agriculture and food security.
These founding entities and GFAR itself have actively participated in academic
exchanges and technical projects with CGIAR and with AVRDC. Thus, AVRDC never
had a chance to formally participate in the CGIAR-IARC, but the GFAR is one of
many channels through which a network of informal ties links AVRDC in close com-
munication and cooperation with international society.26
Among the AVRDC’s many initiatives, two were integral to the postwar food regime
and are discussed here in greater detail: the distribution of vegetable seeds and the
25
This information is based on my interviews with the (former) Deputy Director General for Administration and Service of
AVRDC, Yin-Fu Change, and a senior researcher, George Kuo, who was in charge of the international cooperation of the
AVRDC in 2001–17. The interviews were conducted by one of the authors at the AVRDC, Tainan, Taiwan, August 22,
2019.
26
Though AVRDC only received limited funding from GCIAR, according to the annual budget reports, the support has
lasted for decades, and as we have demonstrated, the goal of AVRDC and its practices are somewhat aligned with
the mission of GCIAR.
training of agricultural experts. More than 50% of the AVRDC’s budget has been dedicated
to maintaining a large collection of public domain germplasm, and breeding new varieties
of vegetables. In 1974, it founded the Genebank seed database to collect vegetable
species; this has since become the largest vegetable seed database in the world. In the
same year, it started to distribute seed samples of germplasm accessions and advanced
breeding lines to other US Cold War allies. Between 1974 and 2019, the AVRDC distributed
406,817 samples of different varieties of vegetable seeds to fulfil 15,421 requests made by
private and public actors and agencies. After the end of the Cold War, the three major
countries making requests were Thailand (12,114 samples), the Philippines (2,493
samples), and the US (1,163 samples).27 Another important mission of the AVRDC has
been its role as a training center. Between 1974 and 2019, the AVRDC trained 1,973 agri-
cultural scientists and experts. The majority of these trainees were from US Cold War allies,
including the Philippines (202), Thailand (110), Indonesia (82), the Republic of Korea (100),
India (82), and Malaysia (71).28
The AVRDC’s extraordinary contributions to international food security, with its
advanced research and training programs, and vegetable crop seed development
and distribution, has fulfilled its mission set by its founder Shen Zonghan: to
expand the international political space of Taiwan (ROC) through its capability in
scientific agricultural research.29 From the beginning, the role of the AVRDC has not
been limited to agricultural R&D. None of the representatives of the founders of
the AVRDC had backgrounds related to agriculture. Rather, they were ambassadors
or ministers of foreign affairs representing their countries (AVRDC 1976, see Figure
2). The founding of the AVRDC was part of the international politics of food security.
Considering the international political environment that Taiwan (ROC) was facing in
the 1970s and 1980s, the AVRDC was more like a piece of driftwood that Taiwan
had to grasp onto to survive, as its position in world politics was deteriorating
rapidly. Since then, the AVRDC has become one of the few international organizations
that Taiwan has remained involved in, despite losing its de jure and de facto inter-
national political status.30
Conclusion
When the Japanese empire occupied southern China and Southeast Asia and attempted
to realign existing agrarian regimes to its ends, it drew heavily on its experience with tro-
pical agriculture in Taiwan. The TCGO was key to these endeavors, actively participating in
27
Our data sources are annual reports and the unclassified and unpublished data of the AVRDC. We have provided the
metadata to the journal (note that the data documented in 1974–1994 were not allowed to be disclosed by the AVRDC
and so we only provide the data from 1995 to 2019).
28
Our data sources are annual reports and the unclassified and unpublished data of the AVRDC. This part of the infor-
mation is not allowed to be disclosed by AVRDC, so we have decided not to submit it with our paper.
29
See note 25.
30
This is not to suggest that the AVRDC has had no influence on the evolution of the global food system. Within a larger
context, the AVRDC was actually the pioneer of developing the R&D of high-value crops. For instance, based on the
archives of the official letters we were allowed to read during our interviews with the AVRDC, we find that at the
annual meeting of the CGIAR-IARCs in 1985, the CGIAR-IARCs proposed including vegetable R&D, and, at its annual
conference in 1987, the CGIAR-IARCs formally proposed the establishment of an international vegetable research
service center. The World Bank also started to support this sort of research in the 1990s, including allocating US
$250,000 to the AVRDC in 1989, and later increasing its annual sponsorship to US$550,000 in 1993.
the reconstruction of the occupied territories with the goal of increasing food production.
Concurrently, the scientific practices of modern agrarian development emerged in Asia,
facilitated by intellectual contact driven by the Japanese empire. In the postwar era,
the US and the KMT government preserved the Japanese colonial agrarian scientific insti-
tutions and incorporated tropical agricultural researchers. Moreover, the postcolonial con-
nection of agricultural trade between Taiwan and Japan remained a constituent part of
the postwar food regime, which contributed to maintaining the food security of the
US-centered Cold War order.
Although Taiwan was the model state for ‘green revolutions’ due to its extraordinary
performance in increasing agricultural production in the postwar era (Cumings 1984), its
agrarian development must be interpreted within the context of both its unique local
conditions and the translocal agrarian networks influenced by the US, the Japanese
colonial legacy, the KMT government, and agricultural experts who immigrated from
China. Recent studies generally agree that the emerging multipolarity of food
regimes in the neoliberal era is an expression of the neoliberal architecture of the
WTO. Yet McMichael points out that ‘each food regime is formed temporally: juxtapos-
ing residual, dominant, and emergent relations’ (McMichael 2020, 118). Accordingly,
through the case of the JCRR, the AVRDC and the proactive role played by Dr. Shen
Zonghan in building both organizations and beyond, we have demonstrated that
Taiwan (ROC) and the US began redefining the meaning of food security and expanded
their missions to cover broad definitions of nutrition and food security, including the
development of R&D and production of vegetable crops, alongside other crops in the
1970s. This trajectory paved the way for the neoliberal trend of agricultural R&D and
the commodification of high-value crops in the contemporary food regimes. In effect,
to understand the ‘carryover’ from the second food regime, we must consider the
Cold War legacies and postcolonial contexts that have structured the institutions or
practices of food regimes.
Finally, this study is very much in line with McMichael’s (2020) view of China’s BRIC
initiatives in the context of ‘agro-security mercantilism’ and how they contribute to
the multipolar patterning of contemporary food regimes. However, there is a risk that
food regime scholarship might overemphasize China and portray it as the single pole
of the food regime, while ignoring other parts of Asia that still maintain the food
regime developed in previous eras. As Chen (2010) reminds us in Asia as Method, the
economic miracle of Asia during the Cold War unfolded in the shadows of the ‘antic-
ommunism-pro-Americanism structure.’ Without shedding light on the power struc-
tures underlying ‘Asian triumphalism,’ the rise of Asia (or China) could be seen as a
mimic of the western empire. Additionally, we appreciate the perspective of ‘the
power of small stories’ in analyzing the food system by recognizing the nuance and his-
torical specificity of colonial farming without undermining our capacity to tell bigger
stories of capitalism or food regimes (Campbell 2020). The complexity of Shen Zon-
ghan’s life story in forming the postwar food regime – being a converted Christian
and missionary, Chinese farmer and US-trained agronomist, diplomat and public
official for the Taiwanese government – demonstrates how an individual’s agricultural
technological imaginary can ‘scale up’ through the translation of agrarian knowledge
for development, and further explains the transition narrative of food regimes in their
colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Figure 2. The AVRDC’s founding countries and their representatives. Source: Memorandum.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their
invaluable comments and feedback, which have greatly improved the quality of this research.
Special thanks go to Bryna Goodman, Serena Chou, Ryan Holroyd, and Shuxi Wu, whose invalu-
able advice has been essential to the development of this project. We are also deeply indebted
to the librarians at various institutions, including the Kaohsiung Museum of History, the Library
of Institute of Modern History (Academia Sinica), Archives of the Institute of Taiwan History (Aca-
demia Sinica), AVRDC Library, USAID Library, and Cornell University Library, for their generous
assistance in collecting archival sources, which have been instrumental in our research. We are
grateful to the researchers and staff at AVRDC for their unwavering support, whether it be
through interviews or by providing relevant data. Their contributions have been invaluable to
the success of this project. Finally, we extend our heartfelt thanks to Yushuan Chen, Wayne Lo,
Julia Xua, and Angus Yen, for their invaluable assistance in collecting and organizing the data
and archives applied in this paper. Their hard work and dedication have been critical to the
success of this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by Academia Sinica, Taiwan (ROC) [grant number 700508]; National
Science and Technology Council, Taiwan (ROC) [grant number 110-2628-H-001-006-MY2].
Notes on contributors
Kuan-Chi Wang is an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica. His current theoretical interests
address critical geopolitics, environmental governance and politics, new economic geography, and
geospatial modeling with a particular focus on Asian foodways. His works appear in academic jour-
nals such as The Journal of Peasant Studies, Area, Geography Compass, Environment and Planning E,
Geographical Review, among others.
Daniel Buck is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Director of the Asian
Studies Program at the University of Oregon. His research interests include political economy, pol-
itical ecology, development, and food and agrarian studies.
ORCID
Kuan-Chi Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9161-710X
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Relocating agrarian development in Asia: food regimes, R&D

CONTACT Kuan-Chi Wang kuanchi@gate.sinica.edu.tw

translation of agrarian development knowledge. Doing so helps advance explanation of

Reconsidering the postwar food regime in Asia

The Japanese empire-dominated ﬁrst food regime in Asia

The postwar food regime in Asia

Shen Zonghan and the JCRR

1926–1927 on the recommendation of Professor H. H. Love and C. H. Myers. While on the

Following that, Shen responded to Love:

Table 1. Taiwan’s (ROC) contribution to the budget of the AVRDC.

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