The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in relation to the postwar Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Planners, drawing on climate models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But their rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the improvisation of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. The chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of (1) the geopolitical logic of international agricultural research and (2) dryland agricultural science as the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.

This concluding chapter extends the scope of the book in three ways. First, it explores the relevance of its argument for other Latin American countries. Second, it examines how well the argument travels outside this region. Finally, since the book’s argument would seem to reflect negatively on the possibility of attenuating Latin America’s profound social divisions, it closes by discussing its implications for this issue and pondering the way forward for advocates of equality. The chapter argues that the account developed to explain tax burden differences among the core cases also sheds much light on at least some other Latin American countries. While its grounding in the distinctive socioeconomic and political context of Latin America means that the argument does not perform as well elsewhere, it does speak usefully to a number of theoretical debates that transcend this region. With regard to the equality question, the chapter finds that a strategy based on gradual reform centered on the fiscal system represents the least bad of the available alternatives.