LAFF Society

NEWSLETTER

Lowell Hardin, World Leader In Agriculture

 

CIAT Director General Ruben Echeverría with Lowell Hardin, right, at Purdue University, in April 2011.
 
Lowell Hardin, who was instrumental in establishing an international network of agricultural research centers that generated what has become known as the Green Revolution, died April 28 at his home in West Lafayette, Ind. He was 97.
 
Soon after going to work for the Ford Foundation in 1965, Mr. Hardin helped develop a network of research centers around the world that are designed to promote food security, eradicate poverty and manage natural resources in developing countries.
 
His work built on what was learned at the first such institution, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, which now is one of 15 research centers around the world co-ordinated by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a worldwide partnership whose work “contributes to the global effort to tackle poverty, hunger and major nutritional imbalances, and environmental degradation.” It has 10,000 scientists and staff working in 96 countries. 
 
The concept took root, Mr. Hardin once explained, during a conversation on a New York City commuter train between two early innovators in international development, George Harrar, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Forrest “Frosty” Hill, vice president of overseas development for the Ford Foundation.
 
As Mr. Hardin described it in an interview in Agricultures Magazine, a publication of Purdue University where he had taught agricultural economics, Harrar said, “You know where it’s most difficult to fill the food bowls for people? It’s the rice bowls in Asia,” and Hill said, “Why don’t we go to The Philippines and take a look?”
 
“They talked a lot about it,” Mr. Hardin said, “and came up with the idea of establishing an international center in the midst of where the problem was. Employ a cadre of multi-national scientists, they figured, then turn this small academy of able people loose and see if they can’t do something about the food supply….The upshot was that Rockefeller put in the staff and Ford built the facility” in 1960. IRRI, Hardin said, “with its sister corn and wheat center in Mexico, catalyzed the Green Revolution in Asia.”
 
Mr. Hardin was head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue when Frosty Hill retired in 1965, and he was asked by Ford to work for one year to develop an agricultural program in Latin America. His abilities and foresight were clearly evident, however, and, as he recalled, “about two-thirds of the way through the year Ford said, ‘Why don’t you stay?’”
 
He did, and for the next 17 years traveled throughout the world building a series of research centers that would coalesce into the CGIAR network and define the revolution in agricultural development. 
 
One of those institutions, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), in Colombia, noted at his death that Mr. Hardin’s “seminal role in the creation of CIAT was an amazing institutional achievement….” Citing his ability to adapt his ideas to regional needs, it noted that the original proposal to set up the center, written by Mr. Hardin and Lewis M. Roberts of the Rockefeller Foundation, was unique in that it focused not “on just one crop or just one specific activity. Instead it would concentrate on identifying and solving problems in the agriculture and livestock production of the tropics”, an idea that Mr. Hardin himself later characterized as making CIAT a “center with a difference”.
 
“Our job as a foundation is to be catalytic,” Mr. Hardin once said. “We start things. We help them get to the place where we hope they can grow, and the world will support them.”
 
In the Purdue magazine interview he summed up his guiding principles. “The root cause of hunger is poverty,” he said. “The world hasn’t figured out how to alleviate poverty. We haven’t solved the poverty problem at home, either, so who are we to tell somebody else how to deal with it? Hunger results from one’s inability to get access to food, not from the world’s inability to produce it. We will produce it as long as we keep our universities and research centers strong.”
 
In one newspaper interview he explained his success in working with farmers around the world as a result of his having been raised on a farm in Indiana. “I had no language skills,” he said, “but I could talk to a farmer. You’d get out your jackknife, you’d dig into the soil, and you’d look at the plants. You were communicating.” 
 
Mr. Hardin earned a bachelor’s degree from Purdue in 1939, where one of his fondest memories was being managing editor of The Exponent, the university’s daily student newspaper—and of meeting a student who, a year after he graduated, became his wife, Mary.
 
He earned a doctorate from Cornell University and returned to teach at Purdue in 1943, becoming head of the agricultural economics department in 1953. He taught until leaving to work for Ford, an offer he often described as “the chance of a lifetime”.
 
He moved back to Purdue after leaving Ford in 1981 and became the assistant director of International Programs in Agriculture, a position he held until retiring in 2007. 
 
Mr. Hardin is survived by three children, four grandchildren, a brother and a sister.

 

Comments (1)
Willard J. Hertz 6/11/2015 3:51:09 PM
The two stories on Lowell Hardin in the spring issue of the LAFF newsletter tell only part of the story. They focus on his key role in the establishment of an international network of agricultural research centers. However, they say nothing about Hardin's part in bringing the Green Revolution in wheat production to Pakistan, then a major wheat-importing country.

In 1965, Haldore Hanson, the Foundation's representative in Pakistan, attending a meeting of Ford representatives, learned from F.F. "Frosty" Hill and Hardin about the great strides in wheat yields at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico. Recognizing the potential for Pakistan, Hanson visited the Center, saw the results of its success in developing high-yielding wheat, and met Norman Borlaug, the top wheat grower. At Hanson's invitation, Borlaug visited Pakistan, and he and Hanson persuaded the Pakistan government to introduce the high-yielding wheat into that Asian country.

A parallel effort to propagate the high-yielding wheat was getting underway in neighboring India, also a wheat importer. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations decided to share the financial load for these assistance programs-- Rockefeller taking India and Ford, Pakistan.

Rockefeller already had a history of supporting agricultural research in India and had to expand and redirect that program. Ford had no prior agricultural program in Pakistan, indeed it had only limited experience in agricultural research at any location. Consequently, it was necessary for Ford to venture into a major new program area. Hardin, as the resident agriculturalist in the Foundation's New York office, played a key role in persuading the Foundation's executive officers and board members to support this new tack in Pakistan.

With Ford grant support, CIMMYT assigned to Pakistan its top Mexican wheat breeder who had worked as Borlaug's assistance. Borlaug himself reinforced this initiative with periodic back-up visits to Pakistan. Hanson also gave major attention to the program, and was supported by the late Bob Havener, an agricultural adviser on his staff who later became the CIMMYT director. Also instrumental was the influential Harvard team of economic advisers to the Pakistan government, also provided with Ford support.

As a result of the program's efforts, Pakistan wheat production increased from 4.6 million tons in 1963 to 7.3 million tons in 1970, and the country achieved self-sufficiency in wheat production by 1968. Narvaez received a high award from the Pakistan government, and Borlaug, given his role in developing the high-yielding wheat in Mexico and propagating it in Pakistan and other countries, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

In 1968, Hardin visited several wheat farms in Pakistan and saw for himself how its farmers had benefited from their new prosperity. He said it was a high point of his career, and his moving account of that experience was reported in the Summer 2007 issue of the newsletter.

 

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