Cashman, Kristin (author / Research Associate, Center for Indigenous Knowledge for Agriculture and Rural Development (CIKARD), Iowa State University, Ames, IA)
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
1991
Published:
USA: Gainesville, FL : University of Florida, Agriculture, Food, and Human Value Society
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 87 Document Number: C05936
High yielding agriculture in less-industrialized countries, the green revolution, has been both honored and criticized over the past twenty years. Supporters point to the increased food supplies produced with the new practices, but detractors argue that the new technologies are environmentally destructive, unsustainable, and socially inequitable. This paper explores the origins of high yielding agriculture in order better to understand how the arguments over sustainability and equity originated. The Rockefeller Foundation was an important agency in promoting the development of the new agricultural science. Its programs in Mexico and India, initiated in 1941 and 1956, were key building blocks in creating high yielding agricultural practices. The Foundation scientists saw rapid population growth as the main source of hunger and communist subversion. In order to alleviate hunger and instability, they created a strategy of agricultural development based on increased yields but paid no attention to the problem of distribution of harvested food. Sustainability was not recognized as a problem at the time Foundation scientists began their work. Indeed the technical successes of their programs promoted the development of concerns about sustainability. Equity of distribution was brought to the attention of the Foundation before it began its work, but the scientists paid no attention to the issue.
15 pages, Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) are central to sustainability standards and certifcation programmes in the global cocoa chain. Pruning is one of the practices promoted in extension services associated with these sustainability efforts. Yet concerns exist about the low adoption rate of these GAPs by smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana. A common approach to addressing this challenge is based on creating enabling conditions and offering appropriate incentives. We use the concepts of inscription and afordance to trace the vertically coordinated travel of recommended pruning from research to extension
and farming sites, and to describe how pruning is carried out diferently at each site. Our analysis suggests that enactments of pruning at the extension site reduce the number of options and space for interactions, and this constrains making the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. The conventions guiding and legitimising actions at this site, reinforced by sustainability standards, certifcation schemes and associated inspections and audits, favour standardised recommendations
and consequently narrow room for context-specifc diagnostics and adaptions. Therefore, we reframe the adoption problem as a matter of fitbetween different sites in the ‘agricultural research value chain’ embedded in the operational cocoa chain. Our contribution problematises the dominant framing of low adoption and highlights that the movement of pruning and the sequential enactment at different sites constrain the affordances available for rendering the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. Consequently, addressing the low uptake of GAPs requires institutional work towards conventions that can construct a fit between sites along the agricultural research value chain
