My father, Patrick Haynes, who has died aged 84, was an agronomist who specialised in tropical root crops and worked for international agencies around the world, helping farmers to get the most out of what they grew.
One of Patrick’s most important contributions was his defence of subsistence crops being grown in developing countries, which he felt had been neglected in favour of cash crops. Partly as a result of his interventions, there is now much wider recognition of the importance of subsistence crops, as well as a change in funding priorities among development agencies. He was also a promoter of the benefits of traditional forms of cultivation.
Patrick was born in Barbados to Douglas, the island’s chief housing officer, and Ada (nee Skinner), a dressmaker and schoolteacher. After schooling at Harrison College, in Bridgetown, Patrick left Barbados in 1950 to study for a diploma at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, where in 1953 he was awarded a commonwealth scholarship to study for an agriculture degree at Queen’s University in Belfast.
During his studies in Belfast he travelled around Britain and continental Europe, attending events organised through the Society of Friends as well as agricultural conferences and athletics meetings. During this time he also met Ruth Naylor, a fellow student at Queen’s, and they married in 1956. Two years later they moved to Barbados, where Patrick worked for the government as an agricultural chemist.
In 1962 he took up a lectureship in crop production on the Trinidad campus of the newly formed University of the West Indies. It was there that he developed a special interest in subsistence crops, and became one of the organisers of the first international root crop symposium. This helped to change attitudes to the growing of subsistence crops, the importance of which were being played down by economists at the time as the race to grow cash crops continued apace.
In 1973 Patrick took up an agricultural development post in Fiji funded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, working there until 1976, when he moved to Zaire as director of the country’s national research programme on cassava. In 1978 he went back to the UK, where he worked on several short-term assignments before joining Atkins Land and Water Management, a consultancy based in Cambridge, in 1980.
There he was an adviser on tropical root crops, working on development projects across the world for funding agencies such as the World Bank and the UN. He was involved in a number of projects where agricultural development was a significant component in helping local communities to improve their prosperity, in countries including Brazil, Burkina Faso, Bangladesh and Ethiopia.
Patrick rose to become senior agronomist at Atkins, and eventually retired in 1991. In his later years in Cambridge he enjoyed church architecture, his allotment, working as a volunteer guide at the Cambridge University botanic gardens, and playing an active role in the local parish church.
He is survived by Ruth and by their two sons, Andrew and me.
