The rise of development aid in the 1950s was linked to the early Cold War and the ongoing decolonization. From the ideological construction of “underdevelopment” as a global problem emerged an attitude that one could,
and ought to, help the increasingly independent so-called “underdeveloped countries,” but this attitude was linked to a rather shallow understanding of the societies encountered and the effect of the efforts made. Supporting development was seen chiefly as a matter of supplying capital as well as knowledge and technology that could instigate the transformation from tradition to modernity. FAO’s narrowly defined expert assignments, including efforts to introduce AI in cattle breeding in various countries, were typical examples of this modernization ideology in practice.
Yet as the example of Nils Lagerlöf shows, the ideology could be renegotiated on the ground. He did not subscribe to what he perceived to be the prevalent understandings within FAO of the driving forces and dynamics of animal production development. He could not support narrow attempts to transfer AI technology and methods and argued instead for a more systemic approach. Its core was the comprehensive development of local institutions based on a Swedish service science–oriented model for veterinary obstetrics and gynecology. In particular after his encounter with India, he became convinced that a veterinary educational reform that created more space for reproductive expertise was the only viable way ahead. Drawing on his international recognition as a scientist and expert, Lagerlöf proved able to convince FAO of this view. The organization helped fund his courses, and a decade later, at the second joint FAO/WHO international meeting on veterinary education, accepted a declaration that directly reflected Lagerlöf’s views in its attribution of “outstanding importance” to the “physiopathology of Animal Reproduction.”246
While Lagerlöf distanced himself from what he considered problematic attitudes to development, he engaged in renegotiation and not rejection, and it would be a mistake to understand his engagement as being of a fundamentally critical nature. His criticism of “Messrs. ‘agriculture men’” was not grounded in distancing himself from ideas of development or modernization. Lagerlöf in fact strongly believed in the benefits of a Westernizing modernization, and was in this respect no different from the FAO leadership. But he did question certain prevailing ideas of how development worked. To him, promoting modern animal breeding could not hinge solely on technology transfer. It had to focus on the promotion of the veterinarian as a modern professional, whose combination of theoretical knowledge and practical skills could efficaciously serve the needs of an animal reproduction that—to be sure—increasingly worked along
technological lines. Accordingly, his training courses served the dual purpose of providing both a necessary set of skills and a new professional identity.
Lagerlöf’s knowledge export was based on a combination of different standpoints. He resisted what he saw as the universalizing tendencies in the project of transferring knowledge and technology to the developing countries, and instead promoted local capacity-building. He was also strongly oriented to agricultural production and explicitly argued that the development of veterinary expertise presupposed an interactive relationship with farmers and their knowledge. Finally, like those theories of modernization Nils Gilman labels technocosmopolitan, Lagerlöf rejected the idea that modernity could come about through a clean break with the past. He instead argued for the need to take tradition and local conditions into account. But his engagement, though oriented to local problems, remained steeped in ideas of the superiority of the science and modernity that he himself represented. It was universalizing on a higher level: though Lagerlöf consistently argued for local knowledge production and the development of local capabilities, he had no particular interest in changing the contents of the model he wanted to export in response to what he encountered abroad.
Lagerlöf thus combined a strong service science ideal with a form of centrist thinking that set strict limits on what he understood as relevant to take into account. This illustrates the difference between recognizing the need to adapt to local contexts, problems, and obstacles on the one hand, and being open to change in response to new cultures and knowledge systems on the other. It provides further support for the idea that the two should not be conflated or understood as necessarily being intimately associated, as, for example, James Scott tends to do in his discussion of high modernism. The amalgamation of production-oriented localism with centrist thinking will also return as an important feature of Swedish agrarian expertise abroad throughout this book. We will next encounter it as a defining characteristic of the expertise represented at the Agricultural College as it found a place for itself in Swedish development aid planning and began to create the strategy that would inform one the major Swedish aid efforts in the 1960s.
Figure 6. Nils Lagerlöf (sitting, left) with students and the vice-chancellor of the Veterinary
College, professor of pharmacology Carl G. Schmiterlöw, at the closing ceremony for the 1967 FAO/SIDA postgraduate course in animal reproduction. Photo Allan Myrman. From the collections of the Nordic Museum.247
CHAPTER THREE