15 Pages, Online Journal via U of I subscription, As a bottom-up, grassroots paradigm for sustainable rural development, agroecology is particularly promising for smallholders in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. However, by adopting agroecology, smallholders will be challenged to take on new perspectives and compile and integrate different sourced information to innovate. Today’s fast evolving information and communications technology in sub-Saharan Africa represents great opportunities for rural populations to enhance the adoption and success of agroecology and to address their daunting challenges simultaneously while conserving, protecting and enhancing natural resources. Agroecology combined with information and communications technology will probably be smallholders’ “precision agriculture” in many developing countries to enhance their food security and livelihood.
10 pages, Prior to the year 1970, agriculture was the main source of livelihood and backbone of the Nigerian economy until the discovery of oil drastically decelerated its potential to sustainably maintain food security and generate significant export earnings. Despite its sudden fall in productivity, agriculture still remains the main sector providing the highest employment (70% of the population) for the populace. To tackle these problems, many policies were formulated (from 1960 to 2015) to resuscitate the sector but to no availdue to failure in tailoring suitable policies to engage small-scale farmers and address other socio-economic problems. This paper constitutes an in-depth review of agricultural production and food security in Nigeria with relative importance attributed to local food supply and small-scale farmers. The article analyzes several documents of the Nigerian Government and international organizations, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and a number of peer-reviewed journals across various disciplines to provide a balanced interdisciplinary review. The paper concludes that food insecurity is at its peak in Nigeria and urgent attention is required in the agricultural sector to compensate for the unstable food balance in the country. There is a need for the Government to take strong measures against the food deficit situation and to support the development of the primary agriculture sector. The paper proposes viable policies that could involve smallholders, aid transformation and positively restructure the agricultural sector.
13 pages, This article looks at the United States’ federal H-2A Temporary Agricultural Visa Program and reforms proposed by the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. In this policy analysis, we draw on media content analysis and qualitative interviews to compare the viewpoints of farmers, workers, grower and worker advocacy groups, intermediary agents, and politicians. We find that perspectives on the program are dependent upon actors’ level of direct interaction with workers. Moderate-sized farmers and regionally based worker advocacy groups tend to be the most concerned with day-to-day program operations and fair working conditions. In contrast, national-level advocacy groups, intermediary agents, and politicians are less critical of the program and seek to broadly expand farmer access to guestworkers, justifying proposed program reforms with discourses of national food security and immigration reform. Ultimately, we suggest that engaging a food systems lens to understand these policies provides a more nuanced perspective, addressing national food security and immigration as related issues.
31 pages, Imaginaries of empty, verdant lands have long motivated agricultural frontier expansion. Today, climate change, food insecurity, and economic promise are invigorating new agricultural frontiers across the circumpolar north. In this article, I draw on extensive archival and ethnographic evidence to analyze mid-twentieth-century and recent twenty-first-century narratives of agricultural development in the Northwest Territories, Canada. I argue that the early frontier imaginary is relatively intact in its present lifecycle. It is not simply climactic forces that are driving an emergent northern agricultural frontier, but rather the more diffuse and structural forces of capitalism, governmental power, settler colonialism, and resistance to those forces. I also show how social, political, and infrastructural limits continue to impede agricultural development in the Northwest Territories and discuss how smallholder farmers and Indigenous communities differently situate agricultural production within their local food systems. This paper contributes to critical debates in frontiers and northern agriculture literature by foregrounding the contested space between the state-driven and dominant public narratives underpinning frontier imaginaries, and the social, cultural, and material realities that constrain them on a Northwest Territories agricultural frontier.
