Anthropologists could now be involved in projects from their inception, rather than as evaluators after the fact. In the context of FSRE applied anthropologists had to think in new ways, about constraints and opportunities and learn the language of team partners uninterested in the niceties of social science. FSRE research revealed women s role in development at the household level, and the idea of sustainability entered the field of anthropological concerns. The goal for agriculture then was to generate export income that would fill national coffers and permit countries to pay their debts to international funders. In all three scenarios, agriculture bears the burden of being something like a fuse that will ignite respectively, national food security, household food security, or national economic stability and participation in world markets.
Implications also exist for dialectic between levels of power.
As the author bluntly puts it, the development process has radically intensified meddling in the affairs of the poor. The role of applied anthropology has changed in parallel with the shifting priorities of development. Applied anthropologists have had to become more interdisciplinary, acquiring new skills and vocabularies of the physical processes that affect human communities. They have had to expand the proverbial methodological toolbox to include new technologies, such as GIS applied to social science problem solving. Finan sees anthropological work in development as removing anthropology from the esoteric and applying it to concrete problem solving .