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Arabica Robusta

Remarks to the World Food Prize Panel on "Stakeholders & synergies: Socio-economic dime... - 0 views

www.iatp.org/...ergies-socio-economic-dimensio

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels chappell

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately, the power of these tools has been blunted. It has been blunted because science—which at its most basic is the careful and systematic study of the world around us, and the consistent testing of our ideas against reality—this wonderful and powerful process has been narrowed too often in discussions of food to mean technology. Technology is but one way to use science; it is only the tip of one particular tool that can be found in the powerful toolbox that is science.
  • Scientifically, these are two different things. We know that what is produced is not the same as how much actually goes to become food for people[1], but too often we forget this. Luckily, this is a place where the toolbox of science can help us, but only if we open it wider to use all of the tools—including social sciences like sociology, anthropology, ecological economics and political ecology.[2]
  • in India, as in many other places, this is tied to the legacies of monoculture, cash crops, and a lack of support for smallholder farmers, household equality, especially gender equality, and agrobiodiversity.[6]
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  • We’ve consistently seen that smallholder farmers very often produce more per unit area than larger farmers. Indeed, the observation is so common that it has been formally named the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity.
  • I think the same type of skepticism has quite often accompanied new innovations and new ideas. Skepticism, for example, about the usefulness of biotechnology, should not and has not stopped investigation of how it might be used.
  • We have to be brave enough to ask ourselves, especially about this Inverse Relationship and its implications, whether we may need to move away from large farms and invest more heavily in small farms.[7] We have to ask ourselves if our skepticism may reflect certain biases or a reluctance to engage against the current trends of agricultural consolidation—or whether it reflects the empirical reality, where this relationship is seen, again and again[8].
  • Too often, the diverse crops that smallholders rely on for stability, resilience, and nutritional diversity are defined as “women’s crops.” Traditional crops, and the fact that often they cannot easily be made into large-scale monocultures, can be both a strength and a weakness.
  • Well, estimates put the value of unmarketed ecosystem services at three times the size of the nominal world economic size.
  • And those farmers, especially larger-scale farmers, who make the rational decision to focus on producing only what they’re paid for—just making one crop, and a lot of it—are simply following a rational response in narrowing diversity, separating crops and livestock, and using energy-intensive and unsustainable levels of inputs.
  • We need to keep realizing that science does not simply mean production, and that production does not at all mean food security.
  • So if I am to conclude with one message, it is for us to remember that science is a powerful set of tools, but to use it we must learn about how to use all of its tools. Social, natural and technological—and we must expressly and purposefully use them to support small farmers, especially women farmers, and must never let “social” approaches be the second step in our conversations about feeding the world, but always—in line with the science—be at the forefront of our considerations.
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