Whatever they were, Lysenko had nothing to do with it.
His argument with Vavilov was a purely scientific one - Lysenko campaigned for epigentic heredity, while Vavilov was a reductionist geneticist who was against epigentics on principle. (Modern science vidicated Lysenko, by the way.)
Their argument was very dirty - "administrative resource" was mobilised and political sides were picked, but there is no way Lysenko had enough clout to be anywhere near setting government policy.
This is not really hard to explain. In both the USSR and in China you had massive famines in the countryside during the initial periods of rapid industrialization. Why? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the party officials:
1. They wanted to rapidly convert the society from one that was based on subsistence farming with very few factories (read, steel production) to a modern industrial society in which a small group of farmers produced large amounts of surplus food that can support a growing urban population of factory workers (and thus produce lots of steel. Never underestimate the fetish for steel production in early communist economic planning).
But how to reach that point when most people were peasant farmers growing just enough for themselves and there was no surplus for all the planned factories?
2. All communist (and indeed, left-wing) movements in Europe originated among urban intellectuals that viewed the poor serfs/farmers as dangerous political enemies (although sometimes there was a romanticism involved). This was because actual farmers tended to be very conservative, devoutly religious, and not really interested in building utopian societies. The hotbed of "class consciousness" was always the factory (in the city) and sometimes the mine, but never the poor rural farm. This divide between the higher income urban left and the lower income conservative/religious rural areas continues to the present, and from the slaughter of the farmers in the Vendee during the French revolution to the slaughter of farmers by Mao, it's usually the rural population that gets hammered in the wake of a successful left-wing revolution.
So there is an obvious opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: confiscate food from the farmers, take it to the cities to feed the new urban workforce, and in the process you eliminate a lot of people who were never really part of the revolutionary team.
Now in both China and Russia, this was not advertised as a program to kill farmers. It was advertised as bold new agricultural reform program that would unlock massive productivity gains via collectivization, and wouldn't loyal workers in the countryside want to send some of their extra food to the city? The party will be sending someone by to collect.
And this is the good-enough first order explanation of why we had all these famines, rather than specific scientific theories about agriculture.
You see to be asserting that the scientific theories (which led to executions, don't forget) were never instituted, but there's a lot of evidence that digging deeper was used in China before their famine, and planting seeds closer together, resulting in stunted crops, also played a part.
Where are on earth did I say that "scientific theories were never instituted"? I have no idea how could be parsing my comment, so I can't point out where your parser went off the rails.
