in the Bouaké region to survey the foodways and agricultural mores of the Baule in Central Ivory Coast.32 In the wake of the FIDES modernization drive, ORSTOM was also contracted to train agricultural extension agents for the overseas territories. On the assumption that the colonial farmers would better produce only if they were guided appropriately, the FIDES managing directorate (comité directeur) granted substantial funds to ORSTOM to establish a training program for extension agents.33
It was perhaps in the earth sciences (pedology, entomology, plant sciences, and other related disciplines) that the early Orstomians associated with Adiopodoumé made their lasting impact on the field of development in postwar Ivory Coast. During the negotiations for the establishment of the Ivorian branch of ORSTOM, Professor Raoul Combes, the chairman of the research agency, told the governor-general of French West Africa that his institution would not fail to serve the interest of any territory willing to host ORSTOM’s facilities and research centers.34 A little earlier, he had pitched a similar argument to the territorial governor of Ivory Coast, emphasizing specifically that his organization would “render innumerable services” to Ivory Coast if it were allowed to open its leading tropical branch in the territory.35
Turning this promise into a reality, Orstomians carried out soil research in various regions of the French-ruled territories of West Africa in the late 1940s to determine soil types and suggest the corresponding best agricultural uses for them.36 Sometimes the contributions of ORSTOM researchers were at the request of private, if influential, individuals. This was certainly the case when Raymond Desclers—a leading voice in the white planter community—asked ORSTOM scientists to conduct pedological prospection on his plantation in view of helping him extend his coffee farm.37 Similarly, the Compagnie Bananière et Fruitière de la Côte d’Ivoire (COBAFRUIT) appealed to the organization when it planned on expanding its activities.38 In other instances, it was the public authorities themselves who mobilized the expertise of ORSTOM, directing the attention of its researchers to specific agricultural issues. Convinced that ORSTOM research might be useful in the agricultural development of the territory and given that the Bingerville agronomic research center was technically a federal institution directed from Dakar, colonial authorities in Abidjan requested in the early 1950s that an autonomous bureau be created within Adiopodoumé whose role would be to focus uniquely on Ivorian agronomic research. The request was granted, and a Section Autonome de Recherche Agronomique (Autonomous Agronomic Research Section, or SARA) was established in 1953 with its funding coming exclusively from Ivory Coast.39
ORSTOM’s practical involvement in Ivorian agronomic development was wide-ranging. While some of its researchers worked on ways to improve the cutting and grafting techniques of commercial tree plants, others mapped out the various pathologies affecting tropical plants, including coffee and cocoa trees. In addition, there was research done on the best feeding practices of commercial tree plants.40 Given that the early reputation of ORSTOM was built on soil science, it came as no surprise that the pedological expertise of the Orstomians was a “hot commodity” among planters and colonial bureaucrats in charge of agricultural development in Ivory Coast.41 In fact, even before the creation of SARA, the Orstomians had been pushed to map out the pedological profile of the Ivorian territory as a whole. In this regard, Jean-Marie Brugière and Maurice Schmid surveyed the soil characteristics of farmlands at La Mé experimental station as early as 1947.42 Subsequently, a sizable amount of research was conducted to determine the best soil types for growing coffee beans, cocoa beans, bananas, sugarcane, and other cash crops suitable for the colony.43
It is not a leap of imagination, therefore, to argue that the work of the Orstomians contributed to the Ivorian agricultural boom that came in the aftermath of the Second World War. Through their research on soil types, parasites, and plant pathologies, they helped make sense of farm management in a tropical setting. By developing pest-resistant breeds, they equally assisted in preventing outbreaks of plant diseases. In a sense, then, the activities of the Orstomians confirmed that knowledge production is part and parcel of the politics of development.
Significant as their work might have been, the importance of ORSTOM experts should not be overstated. First, the Orstomians shared the dissemination of agrarian knowledge in Ivory Coast with the technicians and earth scientists of the Bureau of Agriculture and the researchers of Bingerville’s agronomic research center.44 Moreover, as in many development encounters, there existed a time lag between agronomic research in the controlled environment of the experimentation station and its application in the “wild” field of the farm.45 There is also the fact that the farmers likely to have directly benefited from ORSTOM’s science of agriculture in colonial Ivory Coast were primarily the white colons with much larger plantations. Given that it was not the white planters who were at the forefront of cash cropping or food farming, and that the European agronomic experts had only a marginal direct impact on the farming practices of the Africans, other factors, including the agency of the Africans, must be taken into account in understanding the boom in agricultural production in late colonial Ivory Coast.46 The unsuccessful bid for a top-down policy of mechanization of farming clearly illustrated this point. As we shall see, it also puts into relief one of the paradoxes of postwar developmentalism in French West Africa.
MACHINES, PEASANTS, AND ECONOMIC REVIVAL
As they stepped up their developmentalist efforts through bigger funding for agronomic research, FIDES bureaucrats also bet on mechanization as the ultimate tool for modernizing colonial agriculture. In fact, impressed as they were by the output of American and Soviet agricultural models that relied heavily on machine technology, colonial rulers in France and Britain “sought to increase African agricultural production with the help of mechanical modes of production to cope with the postwar foreign-exchange crisis.”47 The labor shortage in the fields caused by the suppression of the institution of forced labor in the French Empire in 1946 made mechanization even more pressing in Ivory Coast. In this context, Raphaël Saller, in his capacity as director of planning at the Ministry of Overseas France, observed that the introduction of machines would help improve productivity while cutting down the cost of production.48
The Martinican-born colonial administrator was not alone in thinking in these terms. As early as 1946, the Ivorian Chamber of Agriculture had set up the Experimental Committee for the Mechanization of Cropping to investigate ways of modernizing the agricultural sector, especially cocoa and coffee production.49 As in other corners of the empire, this imperial interest in mechanization continued through the late 1950s, sustained by periodic scientific missions abroad, by conferences and agriculture fairs, and by the launching of promotional media campaigns to proselytize the idea.50
The dream to mechanize agriculture might have been big, but its realization was doomed—at least in the immediate aftermath of the war. First, mechanization required an enormous start-up capital investment in machines and other sophisticated equipment that only a handful of wealthier white planters could afford. The financial sacrifice was all the more difficult to contemplate because most of the commercial farming was done on smallholder plantations whose owners could hardly capitalize on a hypothetic economy of scale. Moreover, the suppression of forced labor in 1946 had meant that most African farmers could now mobilize a relatively abundant free supply of hands, which made the need for machines less pressing for them. Even more damaging for the plan of launching mechanized agriculture was the stubborn reality of the unregimented nature of the extant crop fields. Unlike in scientific agriculture, of which mechanization was a brainchild, most of the farms that existed in colonial Ivory Coast did not have their crop stands arranged in regular and linear alleys. The original spacing between tree stands was neither long enough nor standardized. Such an ungridded planting design ultimately prevented the use of machines. By the early 1950s, it was clear that the idea of mechanization would be hard to sell to both white and African farmers. Consequently, the experimental committee set up to promote the mechanization of agriculture was disbanded.51
Although the idea of mechanized agriculture did not jell, the postwar
