After the Green Revolution successfully raised wheat and rice yields in more auspicious farming contexts, attention in agricultural development turned to crops that grew on poorer soils and in regions of indifferent rainfall. When Rockefeller Foundation agronomists reached out to India with an urge to establish an international center for research on such crops in the 1970s, they found eager hosts. The foundation’s agronomists had been active in India during the 1950s and 1960s and built a community of local collaborators. Indian scientists saw the proposal for an international center as offering the next frontier in crop development. The possibility of a center also met with considerable appeal among the political establishment in India. Two prime ministers from opposite political camps, Indira Gandhi and Chaudhary Charan Singh, came to support the eventual International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) due to common ground in their respective politics of the poor and farmers’ politics. As the chapter shows, the circumstances of postcolonial India allowed for the emergence of institutionalized expertise outside the direct realm of the local state.

In the aftermath of the self-proclaimed Green Revolution, donors, diplomats, and agricultural scientists met for a series of meetings, Bellagio I through VII. There they discussed and diverged over the assessment of recent agricultural transformations and their social impacts, as well as the next steps to be taken. By centering on discussions that led to the creation of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in 1972 in Hyderabad, India and ICRISAT’s groundnut (peanut) research program, this chapter shows how agricultural experts reimagined strategies of international agricultural research to suit a different mode of development that took shape in the 1970s and fully emerged in the 1980s. Although the conference participants worried about “second-generation development problems” related to the unequal economic fallout of the Green Revolution, they also wanted to expand the Green Revolution to populations in areas of rainfed agriculture. ICRISAT was the scientific answer to both concerns. This chapter shows how development strategies remained stable while their meanings shifted for a world of free trade and competition.