In 1968, Taiwanese planners began to consider how to market their considerable expertise in agricultural science, accumulated after decades of success at increasing agricultural yields and raising daily caloric intake. At the same time, the rise of the Green Revolution placed high-yield crop cultivars front and center globally, starting with wheat and maize, followed by miracle rice. Taiwanese scientists in 1971 and 1972, in conjunction with US Agency for International Development and Rockefeller Foundation officials, founded several international scientific research institutes built along similar lines: the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) and the Food and Fertilizer Technology Center (FFTC), to disseminate Taiwanese vegetables such as broccoli rabe to other subtropical, Global South societies.
This paper discusses the rise of international science networks as centered on agricultural research institutions, and how they embodied changing scientific ideas of agriculture and nutrition. It argues that scientific networks and research institutions were shaped by political headwinds: the expulsion of Taiwan (The Republic of China) from the United Nations and the shifting importance to the Global South; the increasing global attention to humanitarian issues of poverty and hunger; and the politics of nutritional science that shifted from calories to minerals and vitamins. Taiwan attempted to position itself at the vanguard of these trends by leveraging their scientific expertise. Although "modern science" sometimes proved a powerful ideological tool, Taiwan in the 1970s and 80s was ultimately unable to utilize science to transcend politics.
