LAFF Society

NEWSLETTER

A Life in Development: "Seizing the Opportunities"

 

 
When William Gamble, who worked for the Foundation for 20 years in several overseas positions, observed his 95th birthday earlier this year, he said that he retains “great respect for the Ford Foundation, its objectives and, in particular, the support I always received from the Foundation officers, headquarters and regional program staff members.”
 
This article, in which he recounts his experiences during a long life-time spent working in international development, is adapted from a speech he gave 25 years ago in his hometown of Shenandoah, Iowa, after he received the Distinguished Achievement Citation from Iowa State University, his alma mater. The article on which this is based was published by his daughter, Kathleen Gamble Pilugin, earlier this year in The Baltimore Post-Examiner, a news web site. 
 
I have been fortunate throughout my life and have also had lots of opportunities. So, if I can take any credit for my career, it really comes down to seizing the opportunities as they presented themselves.  
 
Forty-two years ago we were living in Shenandoah. The Second World War was over. I had a good job teaching vocational agriculture at the high school. The world was full of opportunities. But somewhere along the way I had been bitten by the bug to get into international work. 
 
And then President Harry Truman presented his Point Four Program to the country in 1949 and it was as if he were talking directly to me when he said: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” 
 
So my wife, Virginia, and I embarked on our journey. By 1952 I had the job I wanted with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and we started our international career.
 
Our families must have thought we were a bit out of our minds to want to go to the other side of the world, to Burma, with two boys aged 6 and 4. Burma in the early 1950s was just starting to recover from the war and it had suffered a great deal. It was also just starting on its path as an independent country from its past as a part of the British Empire.
 
Burma was different from anything we had ever known. The language, the religion with 95 percent having strong Buddhist beliefs, the standard of living and many other things were completely new to us. But we soon learned the many good things about Burma and especially the Burmese people, who were kind, respected one another, were generous and had a great desire for education.
 
The country was starting on an education and development program to establish a national system of vocational agriculture in its secondary and high schools. This program fit my training and experience and I was able to work closely with Burmese colleagues to develop both of these programs.
 
One of the things I learned very early in Burma was that you do not transfer Iowa or U.S. agriculture to it or any other country. This is a misconception that one often hears: “We’ll go over there and teach them how to farm since we have such productive farms here in America.” But those other places 
aren’t America and a whole set of agricultural problems—supplies, roads, transport, size of farms, ability to take economic risk and many others—are very different. 
 
Farmers are very smart people and good economists in Iowa. The same is true in Burma as in any of the countries in which I worked. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the agricultural and economic conditions under which the farmers in another country must operate before trying to transfer any agricultural practice.
 
After two years in Burma I accepted a position with the Ford Foundation to help develop a National Agricultural Junior College to train agricultural teachers and extension agents. We moved up country to Pyinmana. In those days, the Burmese government only controlled the country during the day, and not always even then. Insurgents were always blowing up railroad bridges, and extension work in outer villages was doubly challenging as you really did have to make it home by dark or you might not make it home at all. 
 
For the first two years in Pyinmana we had permanent army outposts surrounding the college to keep the insurgents from stealing our livestock. Running gun battles were a regular form of entertainment. Virginia and I wondered what we had let ourselves into with gunfire about us almost every night, but the boys thought they were in heaven, with a real live cowboy movie being played out all around them.
 
We were the only foreigners in the town. Electricity was available only at night and often not even then. They always “rested” the local diesel generator on Monday.
 
I was able to speak and understand enough of the Burmese language to talk to farmers. I was never able to teach in Burmese but I worked out a system where I taught in English and the students could respond either in Burmese or English. I could understand Burmese sufficiently for this and the Burmese students could understand English but often had difficulty expressing themselves. The system worked very well.
 
After seven years in Burma we returned to the U.S. where I received my doctorate from Cornell University. We returned to Burma but the winds of change were blowing. The great expectations of independence were not achieved because of internal troubles between some of the tribes and the Burmese and a slower economic growth than desired. So, in 1962, General Ne Win and the army took over in a military coup. General Ne Win was quite xenophobic and with the army take-over all foreigners were asked to leave. General Ne Win did invite me personally to his office to tell me there was nothing personal in this but he just wanted the country to go it alone. 
 
In spite of being asked to leave, Burma holds a special place in our memories.
 
In 1963 I was asked by the Ford Foundation to go to Mexico. It was a great opportunity for me. Mexico was a county with a very old culture, not as old as Burma, but with a proud history. It was a country of great contrasts, with a very highly educated and sophisticated elite, a growing middle class and a great mass of poor.
 
My first responsibility in Mexico was to determine what programs the Foundation should support in agriculture. In order to do this it was necessary to travel throughout the country, learn the language, meet with the most prominent Mexicans in leadership positions in agriculture and to meet and talk to farmers. I spent my first year really educating myself on Mexican agriculture and gaining the confidence of the Mexican leaders. 
 
As a result of my observations and recommendations, the Ford Foundation entered into a long-term program to support the development of a strong post-graduate college of agriculture with an excellent library, good research facilities and many fellowships for outstanding young Mexicans to study for their Ph.D. degrees in the United States. The agricultural graduate program has become one of the foremost in Latin America today.
 
We also assisted in developing the now world-famous International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which the Mexican Government, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation created in 1965. It was for his work at this Center that Dr. Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize.
 
(See Lowell Hardin’s obituary in this issue.)
 
After seven years in Mexico, we continued our Latin American adventure with a move to Bogotá, Colombia, for two more years, where the Ford Foundation helped establish the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), another center that worked on the development of improved food crops for the tropical part of South America.
 
From there we moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where I assumed responsibility for programs in support of agriculture, education, social sciences, family planning and management in 14 West African countries, from Senegal to Zaire. This was a real change from the Latin culture. Living in Africa as a white person, one learns what it is like to be in a minority group. It was a good experience for me and my family. We had it reaffirmed that basically all people are good and an understanding of race, religion and culture is just part of what we need in order to appreciate and respect one another.
 
After three years in Lagos, I was invited to become the Director General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) with headquarters in Ibadan, Nigeria. IITA was built on 2,500 acres with cooperating research programs in countries in West and East Africa and in Brazil, with cooperating varietal trials in about 50 countries. About 150 scientists from 25 countries were on staff with a total of 1,200 employees. Support for the Institute came from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, West Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, Japan and agencies from these and other countries.
 
In Nigeria, we could never depend on the power or water supply from public sources, nor were supplies available or facilities to maintain equipment. Therefore, we had to be able to generate our own electricity, provide our water and sewer system, repair shops for all the scientific equipment, maintain a fleet of about 400 cars and trucks, and purchase our supplies and equipment abroad. It was like operating a small but highly technical city that was very well maintained at the best international standard.
 
We always had about 30 post-graduate students in residence each year doing research for work with our senior scientist toward their master’s or doctoral degrees at universities in the U.S., Europe or Africa. We had many short courses and international conferences each year that we organized and conducted with simultaneous translation in English and French.
 
After five years at IITA, I was presented with another opportunity. A new International Institute, the thirteenth in the international network, was just being established in The Hague, Netherlands, with a mandate to assist developing countries, on their request, in agricultural research and management. I was invited to be the founding director. It was too challenging an assignment to pass up.
 
Again, we moved to a new culture, but fortunately the Dutch are outstanding linguists and almost everyone speaks English. Our work had little to do with Holland as it was only a convenient headquarters location but the Dutch were always most helpful to us. It was in the developing countries where we had our responsibility. In the first year as head of the Institute I traveled the world and met with the directors of agricultural research from 40 countries to discuss our potential support to them and to better understand their problems. 
 
It all went well and over the next four years our staff had real success in helping about 20 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America evaluate their research programs and initiate improvements in their research organization and management.
 
When I was young and riding my pony to the one-room country school, I dreamed about a lot of things, but never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine such an interesting career and life as I have had. It has been through the excellent work of others that I have had these achievements. My role, for the most part, has been to provide leadership and to take the opportunities that have arisen.

 

 

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