A Reluctant Expert

Abstract This article traces the career of John B. Griffing, an agricultural scientist who engaged in rural development projects in China, Brazil, and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. His career serves as a microcosm for the evolution of transnational agricultural development as it shifted from smaller, localized projects to the larger, top-down developmental schemes that characterized the postwar era. Trained as an educator and working as an agricultural missionary in China during the 1920s, Griffing viewed extension work as an educational endeavor aimed at helping farmers to help themselves. Skeptical of government intervention, especially by foreign governments, he prioritized the rural church as a key institution for the dissemination of agricultural technologies. As his career progressed, however, rural extension moved in different directions: a high modernist mentality came to value scale over the individual, while the emerging Green Revolution technologies required greater inputs and institutional support. By the end of his career, Griffing had become a reluctant expert who resisted the institutionalized development strategies of the postwar years in favor of smaller-scale approaches where foreign technicians such as himself could work alongside local farmers to improve rural life.