Karin Bugow

• This dissertation examines the role of multinational corporations in the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The author understands the Green to be a technocratic and commercial approach to rural development, which promoted a package of agricultural inputs including high-yielding seed varieties, fertilizers, and plant protection chemicals. The research highlights how multinational companies influenced the rural development agendas of their home countries, international organizations, and governments in the Global South. Chapter 1 provides a literature review and discusses the research approach. Chapter 2 examines a philanthropic-government-corporate network that disseminated hybrid maize seeds in the early 1960s in India. Chapter 3 analyzes the interrelationship of development aid and the fertilizer industry in India. With a case study of the Bimas Gotong Royong project, Chapter 4 focusses on public-private partnerships in the dissemination of plant protection chemicals in the framework of development aid. Chapter 5 shifts the analytical focus to the 1970s, examining the transition from the Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution. It illustrates the decision of chemical corporations to invest in the seed business as a counter-reaction to rising environmental and leftist criticism, and assesses the significance of these changes in terms of the larger history of rural development. Chapter 6 concludes the know-how of multinational companies in the production and dissemination of agrichemicals was indispensible in the increasingly commercial logic of rural development strategies. Meanwhile, multinational corporations were dependent on support from, and partnerships with, the development community when it came to expanding their markets to so-called developing countries and turning rural development into a profitable business.