Agriculture in South Asia faces the spectre of the four modern day apocalyptic horsemen of the global economic system — hunger, climate change, trade competition and knowledge exclusion. In July 2008’s LINK LOOK Andy Hall and Rasheed Sulaiman V. argued that South Asia — a region that is home to half the world’s poor — is vulnerable to these challenges because of weaknesses in current patterns of agricultural innovation capacity. They also, however, argued that many of the capacity building blocks are already in place and that a few relatively simple institutional changes could unleash powerful creative forces capable of converting these harbingers of doom — Hunger, Climate Change, Trade Competition and Knowledge Exclusion — into poverty-reducing opportunities.
How well placed is agricultural research to tackle the looming crisis in South Asia? Not very well, according to Andy and Rasheed. And this is not necessarily because South Asian countries lack scientific capacity; in fact, it’s quite the opposite in India with its highly-developed agricultural science tradition. Numerous examples point to the fact that the problem lies in — among other things — the low priority given to research on sustainable agriculture; the lack of scientific validation and support of farmers’ own innovations; and the moribund and outdated agricultural extension services.
The great paradox of South Asia is not so much that it has scientific capabilities and cannot make science count for development, but rather that it has such a rich experience of innovations in research and technology practice that its public research organisations could learn from, but don’t. Andy and Rasheed discuss what they think needs to be undertaken to tackle the looming crisis (see LINK July 2008 News Bulletin). What do you think? Please comment below.
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Dear Andy and Rasheed,
In the August edition of LINK, you identify the complexity of the environment-agriculture-globalized market economy interactions as the crucial difference between 20th and 21st century contexts for agricultural development.
These points, and the rest of your article, are all valid, but they miss the elephant in the room (again).
The real difference between 20th and 21st century context is that now we have exceeded ecological carrying capacity. While uneven distribution of resources, economic and political power and information access all play a role, overpopulation is the underlying force which prevents movement out of poverty, and has prevented the many positive interventions of the past decades from having sustainable benefit.
It's time agriculturalists stopped pretending to the policy-makers that we can actually deliver the required increases in food production and environmental enhancement, if enough resources are thrown at us. This is a self-serving falsehood.
What is needed (if anything can prevent a return of famines this century) is a systemic approach to development of sustainable communities, with ALL technical interventions coupled with socio-cultural interventions, to ensure education and economic empowerment of women, access to family planning and reproductive health, and engagement of the whole community in discussion of sustainable outcomes. Communities need to reach a common understanding of how the gains that may be achieved through a particular project can either improve the wealth of the current or smaller population, or be lost through population expansion. They need to look at ways of ensuring security for the aged and infirm that do not depend on their own children. They need to know that those who move to towns for work are still fed from the land, and place greater pressure on farming communities to produce marketable surpluses rather than feeding themselves. The higher proportion of people who live in cities, the lower the value paid for farm produce compared with the total cost of living, simply because it is a smaller proportion of total human endeavour that the economy must reward.
You have taken a valuable step away from reductionism in advocating the integration of scientific, institutional and social capacity. We need to go the next step in integrating a holistic package of intervention that can improve community outcomes sustainably.
Jane O'Sullivan
University of Queensland
{Originally published at www.link-look.blogspot.com)