In this note, I wish to explain how the Unquestion method came into being, how the Series voice and vocabulary, verbal and visual, are constructed, and their significance.
The Series is informed by my lifelong vocation in farming, from growing up as a smallholder farmer, through education in agriculture and agronomy and a career as an agronomy scientist, followed by over two decades of research, entrepreneurship, and scholarship on agricultural development. The Questions examined in the Series are Questions I have direct experience with, much of the provided evidence is familiar to many of us, and the interventions are ones that the development community has been implementing since the Green Revolution. That is why the Series says “we in Development”.
What brought me to launching the Unquestions Series now began over two decades ago at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) as my inquiry into why production science remains only lightly used by farmers in narrow economies.
My initial inquiry was focused on farmer science uptake and the use of information technology, and specifically on field testing a CD-ROM-based nutrient management Decision Support System to improve and deploy it, funded by USAID and implemented through a collaborative arrangement between the University of Hawaii NifTAL Center, Soil Management CRSP and IRRI. I found from that inquiry that farmers’ adoption decisions were not determined by science or extension, but instead by the yield that they could safely attain in the prevailing markets without placing themselves in jeopardy. Most farmers were also keen to acquire new seeds, the one thing they wanted from the extension service, not its advisory.
My inquiry then continued at Stanford University into market dynamics and trading relationships between smallholder farmers and their suppliers and buyers and the potential role for information technology in facilitating these relationships. The inquiry also expanded as I became acquainted with economic history and studies in institutional economics, and then continued into a field study on how smallholder farmers and their market parties made, kept, or unkept their trading agreements under Vipani, an NGO I founded with funding from the Mulago Foundation, Dawson Family Fund, USAID and others.
My papers in 2014 (George, T. 2014, Why crop yields in developing countries have not kept pace with advances in agronomy. Global Food Security 3: 49-58) and 2020 (George, T. 2020. A new look at agricultural development and the non-agriculture economy in low-income countries. Global Food Security 26: 100449) are from these continued inquiries into farmers’ non-use, partial, or rare high use of production science.
Having completed a manuscript for publication in 2024 with more evidence, I happened to read an economics textbook written for non-specialists (Masters, WA, Finaret, AB. 2024. Food Economics. Palgrave Macmillan). Chapter 1 described in quite some detail the basic economic theories of the indifference curve and the Production Possibilities Frontier (PPF). The indifference curve, along with the budget line, deals with how we spend income for consumption now and later. The PPF deals with production decisions we make as producers. Yet I found that we have not been using them in our interventions or in the analysis of data supporting those interventions.
The evidence I had assembled from all my inquiries, and the evidence I had already presented in my 2014 and 2020 papers, suddenly began to look very different and to fit with the PPF. What I then saw scattered through my inquiries, manuscripts, and published papers was the elements and evidence of the PPF always in effect at the producer level. It turned out that it is the income the producer sees before production starts that sets the producer moving up on the PPF. The things we have been focusing on, like farmer aversion to technology, bias, adoption during projects, and disadoption after projects, were all responses on the PPF, not behavioral anomalies. Suddenly, farming for sustenance became a predictable outcome on the PPF.
The PPF explains the widespread adoption of improved varieties during and since the Green Revolution, which my 2014 paper showed to be low-risk for farmers to try. The PPF also aligns with the perceptions and opportunity-cost points I made in that paper, and with why extension remains unused by farmers. The PPF also fits with the concept of “market yield potential” that I proposed in a 2016 manuscript for rethinking agricultural development: the average yield we measure is the highest the market allows, in contrast to science’s yield potential.
The evidence in my 2020 paper of average yield, farmer income, and GDP per capita growing in tandem is also consistent with the PPF. In addition, my 2020 paper showed that for technologies and skills to generate steady income growth, the market needs to function efficiently in the honoring of both formal and informal agreements by market participants. The PPF also supports what both my 2014 and 2020 papers showed, that adoption of production science is tied to what farmers see upfront in the income to be made from it. My 2020 paper also found that farmers who readily have knowledge and skills will switch to high use of production science only if there is income to be made.
The scarcity of inputs and knowledge that we have routinely taken to be limiting farmer income becomes relevant only when there is income to be pursued on the PPF. And it is the income that can be pursued on the PPF by farmers and also by the other market actors that then makes the value chain.
It was both a shock and a relief to me at once. An inquiry I started over 20 years ago has now come full circle to the same consistent farmer response and non-response to technology adoption that we have in our data. And that response could be explained simply by the basic economic principle of PPF that was long in the books. For production science to scale, it must align with production economics at the individual level. Every farmer looks for income on the PPF and only then looks to optimize production science on the input response curve. To bring this new observation to the attention of all in the development community and into use in our support to smallholders, I named it the Income Theory of Development. My inquiries, papers, and manuscripts then simply became the documents holding the evidence.
But bringing the theory to the fore was also a far stretch given our long history of interventions based on a thesis of inputs and knowledge scarcity. What I needed to do was bring the evidence and let others look at it through the lens of the PPF. Thus, I developed the Unquestion Method to see the evidence again and the Unquestion writing form so that I am not asking readers to take my word for that new reading. Instead, my goal is to take the readers through the same evidence to see it again and reach their own conclusions. If readers reach a different conclusion, or have evidence to add that aligns with or counters it, hopefully the Series will prompt them to raise it and move the discourse forward.
That is why an Unquestion is written the way it starts and ends. Many of the contradictions surfaced in the Series could be stated simply, sharply, or even sarcastically, or as a critique of people, papers, or organizations, but in actuality there is nothing specific in the past to point to. We were all doing what we could with the logic we inherited or knew worked in contexts that are familiar to us. Even more importantly, looking for why those contradictions exist has no useful purpose and would turn attention away from the evidence and what can be done about it to who is right, who is wrong, and what was intended.
Thus, an Unquestion starts with something we already know, something in the record, or something we routinely do, and lets the tension build from there. The quiet lines and repetitions, perhaps annoyingly repetitious, are all deliberate in the Unquestion writing form. So too are some terms that must repeat exactly, while the same meaning returns later in plainer language once the reader knows what it refers to.
A machine can read a full episode fast and probably reduce it to a few paragraphs. But people rarely read that way. A few may read the full episode, but most may simply scan, look for the conclusion, stop at a bold phrase, catch a sentence along the way, and move on. We may look through an episode on LinkedIn, Substack, the website, or elsewhere, usually in small bits or out of sequence in the storyline. After all, what is evidence to each of us differs when we work in different disciplines or fields and see it only from our own perspectives, without needing all the other evidence.
An Unquestion is written for that kind of human reading in the hope that it can reach the most people in Development and outside. Its central point therefore returns in different forms within an episode. It may be in the title, short title, preview line, or the minimal figure; may be read through the highlights as a summary that may invite more reading; or it may be seen in a line marker that may catch attention. If it is missed there, or if the episode itself is missed, it may return in another episode in another form or from a different angle.
The recurring paragraph closing marker “This we Question” has a specific purpose in pausing the reader to ask: is there a contradiction here, or is what I routinely say or do the reverse of what the record is actually showing? For example, when we see consistently low yield, we ask how to get the farmer to use more fertilizer or more knowledge instead of asking why the farmer is consistently not using more fertilizer or more knowledge in the first place. The other recurring paragraph closing markers pause the reader to ask: do I know this, is this indeed in the record, do we do this, does this hold, and so on. These markers may prompt the reader to read the paragraph again, check the figure, check the record, and so on. They keep repeating because the reader may not have read through every line that came before them.
The cadence is also deliberate. An Unquestion usually begins somewhere familiar and moves slowly as what we already know builds to a crescendo before the contradiction surfaces on its own, and the reader is likely already thinking of the same closing pair of questions. The reversals and inversions repeat too because that is where the contradictions lie. The evidence may be the same seen earlier, but what we have been calling the cause, the constraint, or the response looks different when it is seen again.
There is another important reason for the repetitions in the cadence. Much of the evidence has already been seen, measured, analyzed in multiple ways, and repeated for decades, and we still missed the recurring patterns that were present even in simple records like average yield and total factor productivity. The Unquestions reveal these recurring patterns in about six decades of record by repeating them too, only compressed in time. Without that recurrence within and across Unquestions, I will have to assume that this time we will not miss them. That would defeat the whole purpose of the Series.
The Series can therefore be summarized much faster than it is written, and the writing form is meant for the reader to recognize the contradictions in their own terms, verify them, and decide what follows from them. Hopefully, that is what readers feel too, and if so, the writing form, still evolving, is doing what it is meant to do.
What I hope the Series does is prompt readers to add evidence, challenge the reading, or take what they see forward to change what we in the development community do, so that smallholders who choose to continue farming can grow income from it, and farmers across narrow economies can sustain that income growth.
The Unquestions themselves becoming shorter, and the Series itself becoming irrelevant, would be the ultimate evidence of the success of the method, the writing form, and the Series itself.