According to this article, in the 1940 and 1950s, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations initiated overseas rural and agricultural development activities in a number of countries in Asia and Latin America. They began with country programmes. These programmes often involved creating new institutions in the recipient countries, and while the perspective was long term--as long as it took to achieve program goals--the foundations also explicitly sought to work themselves out of a job and turn over responsibility to the nationals. By 1960, the two foundations had moved beyond national assistance programmes to invent a new model, the international agricultural research centre, designed to improve the lives of poor rural people by increasing the productivity of developing world agriculture. Some of the national programmes were morphed into international centres. The international agricultural research centres proved attractive to other donors and by the 1970s, international agricultural research had become institutionalised in the form of the CGIAR and its associate centres.