Final Project Report Global Classroom Cohort II Students
Descripción
2015 May 5th
Final Project Report Global Classroom Cohort II Students Erin Barton Luca Brennecke Lyle Eric Johnson James Macdonald Hendrik Steppke Instructor Leonie Bellina Coaches Manfred Laubichler Sander van der Leeuw
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Introduction Research Context Among the many interrelated challenges the modern world faces, one of the most pressing is how to continue to provide food a human population that passed 7 billion in 2011 and shows no sign of slowing down within the coming decades. Depending on how global fertility rates change during the twenty first century, the population may level off between the middle and end of the century (at around 10 or 11 billion by some estimates), or continue climbing to reach around 17 billion. The latter scenario seems unlikely, given the steady decline in birth rates (“World population trends” 2015). Yet we struggle to adequately feed 7 billion people, so adding even several billion more, at the least, presents a serious problem. What’s more, the majority of those new mouths will be born into underdeveloped or developing countries (“World population trends” 2015). Many of these countries already have food security problems that have proved, despite many efforts, to be discouragingly intractable. The majority of those people will also be living in cities rather than as rural farmers. They will need access to food that they are not growing themselves. The pressing question we want to contribute to with our project is why, despite advances in agricultural technology and the great deal of research and policy focused on the topic, so many people are food insecure and how the (mostly urban) people of the future might avoid this fate. In short, how to feed a growing urban population. The debate about how to sustainably feed growing urban populations centers around what structures the global food system could, or should, have in the future, and which of those possible structures would best get food to the most people. The need to avoid a global food security crises–driven by
ecological, economic and social dimensions–is the reason why research on
sustainable global food systems is so relevant today, as is reflected in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the United Nations, and the emerging Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). A major focus of the MDGs was to halve the number of undernourished people from 1990 to 2015 (United Nations: The Millennium Development Goals Report, 2014). The need for further progress towards this goal is clear in light of how many people still remain malnourished as the goals reach the end of their timeline, and how the food and water crises, and extreme weather events that disrupted access to food and water, were among the most concerning global challenges in 2014 (World Economic Forum: Global Risks, 2014). The SDGs seek to add to this goal “the protection of Earth’s lifesupport system”, as a functioning ecosystem is now recognized as essential for a functioning human society (Griggs et al., 2013).
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The problems of both malnourishment and environmental degradation will only become more pressing as urban populations continue to grow. The demographic change from a mostly rural world population to a mostly urban population is leading to an increase in the demand for food in urban centers even as the distance between the sites of food production and the people who need access to food increases (United Nations: World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, 2014). And as the food production system becomes more removed from consumers, it becomes more complex and interconnected with global politics and economics.
Complex Adaptive Systems Theory, Path Dependencies, and Regimes In light of the complex interactions occurring within both cities and agricultural systems, the framework of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory is one that seems highly relevant to the question of how to feed a growing urban population. As articulated by Mitchell (2009), a CAS is “a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptations via learning or evolution.” In the case of the agricultural system that supplies urban populations, it is made up of many interacting components–corporations, governments, smallscale farmers, the environment, resources, technologies, philosophies etc.–that do not necessarily communicate with each other and are certainly not controlled by a central authority. Their interactions, though, have caused the system to “evolve and learn”: this learning can be represented by the related idea of path dependencies and regime shifts. Regimes are a concept from dynamical systems theory that are commonly used in ecology. They relate well with CAS theory as the word describes a dynamic state of a system (Scheffer, 2009) that can exhibit “learning” behavior. In dynamical systems theory this behavior is placed under the umbrella of adaptive capacity (van Bohemen, 2010). Part of that learning, and part of what makes the concept of the regime useful in analyzing agricultural systems, involves regime shifts. According to the Stockholm Resilience Center’s Regime Shifts Database (n.d): “All complex systems contain many feedback loops, but these can typically evolve and combine in only a limited number of ways. Over time, a particular combination of feedbacks will tend to become dominant, leading the system to selforganize into a particular structure and function – or "regime". However, if the system experiences a large shock (eg a volcano) or persistent directional change (eg accumulation of pollutants, habitat loss) the dominant feedbacks may be overwhelmed or eroded. At some point a critical threshold may be passed where a different set of feedbacks become dominant, and the 3
system experiences a large, often abrupt change in structure and function – or a ‘regime shift’.” In human societies, changes in feedback loops can be brought about by changes in driving variables, such as the introduction of new technologies or the addition of colonial powers to the political system. Path dependencies occur when certain patterns in a regime become lockedin, either keeping the regime from shifting to a new regime or driving it inexorably towards a new one. A useful way to understand all of these concepts is through the ball and cup model. In this model, the regime is represented by a cup, or a basin of attraction. The crest between two valleys represent the critical threshold, over which the ball (the system state) must pass for a regime shift to occur. Different drivers act on the ball to push it one way or another. Highly resilient regimes are very deep valleys which are difficult to transition out of; nonresilient regimes are shallow and the system state is easily pushed into another regime (although it is important to note that reversing a regime shift takes a different amount of effort than the original regime shift took). Our Project Corn has long played an important role in the global food supply (Kinchy, 2012). It is grown in large quantities, affects land use patterns and food availability through competition between different uses and with other crops, and has had a strong connection to growing urban populations since it helped fuel the creation of the preColumbian Mesoamerican empires. Because of this, we chose to use it as a representative example of how the global food system developed through different historical regimes and into the present. Considering the current dependency of urban populations on high yielding industrial agriculture, we ultimately want to look at which underlying assumptions and historical path dependencies currently competing agricultural methods are based upon. We also want to use our analysis to generate future scenarios as a way of discussing the possible consequences of different methods. The food security of future generations depends not only on decisions and their underlying assumptions that have been made in the past, but also the way certain problems were conceived and framed. Consequences of these decisions and ways of thinking affect people’s livelihoods, environmental integrity, water supply, economic relations and regional sovereignty, to name only a few areas.
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Our project examines the complex interrelations among the properties–technology, politics, economics, demographics, and philosophy–that drive agricultural regime shifts. It also attempts to understand the connections between the different properties and the path dependencies that are formed by and help form different regimes. By doing this, we wish to contribute to a better understanding of the way problems like persistent hunger are framed and approached. In this way, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the present agricultural regime and the struggle between different solutions to the most relevant question of how to feed growing urban populations.
Questions & Hypotheses The research questions driving our overall project are: 1. What path dependencies were created during past agricultural regime shifts that were significant in creating current approaches to supplying growing urban populations? 2. Based on these path dependencies, how might these approaches play out in future scenarios? Our hypotheses are: 1. Maize is an important staple in the diets of both urban and rural people, particularly the poor. 2. The three agricultural regimes – colonial, industrial, and development – would be both distinct from each other and contain important shifts in the maize agricultural regime that became the path dependencies that are currently influencing how we address the problem of feeding our growing urban populations. 3. Developments in Mexico and the United States would both play important roles in all three of these historical regime shifts.
Methods and research materials Methods Our research project will be carried out in three phases. In the first phase we analyze past agricultural regime shifts and conduct a literature review regarding their respective characteristic properties. We will examine the regime shifts in order to gain an understanding of systemic change 5
over time. We will also be looking for connections between temporal and spatial dimensions (e.g. between colonial times and the present and between rural and urban areas) in order to understand the emergence of current approaches to supplying growing urban populations. The second phase is a detailed analysis of the present regime in which we will identify and examine current approaches to supplying growing urban populations. Our examination will focus on how different approaches emerged out of past regimes, and how they are situated within current political, economic, technological, and epistemological contexts. Using our historical analysis, we will identify the circumstances in the past which allowed certain ideas to become dominant and others not, shaping which approaches to the urban food supply are currently being considered. Circumstances in the past shaping and constraining circumstances in the present are known as path dependencies. In the third phase we will develop future scenarios based on the previously established path dependencies. Our aim is to show possible pathways of future development in the playing field of different approaches to feeding growing urban populations.
Phase I: Historical network analysis In the historical analysis section we will analyze past agricultural regime shifts that are relevant to the development of the currently dominant neoliberal regime and how urban populations are supplied under that regime. We will use corn as our example case study to illustrate how agriculture changed during the chosen regime shifts and what path dependencies were created during these regimes. The regime is a system state that can be changed by the functional influences of its properties, and as such is dynamic rather than static.
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We chose to analyze three past regimes based on several criteria. The first criteria was that the historical periods are already thoroughly researched, making sufficient material for the literature reviews available. We also wanted to choose regimes that have been widely identified as having had relevant societal impacts, including in agriculture, due to technological, economic, and political changes. Thus our choices of historical regimes were the colonial agricultural regime, the industrialization of agriculture, and the development regime. Each of these regimes has a large body of literature associated with it and each has had significant impacts associated with it. During our research we will explore whether the chosen regimes actually constitute distinct phases in agriculture. For each of the three regimes, we will research properties and drivers and organize them according to the impact they have had on the present regime. We will then create networks illustrating the principle drivers of each regime shift, with a focus on changes in history of corn and coffee agriculture. We will use the networks created by Cumming et al. (2014; see Fig. 1) as templates for our networks. We will create one networks for each regime characterizing the regime and showing functional influences of the characteristics. These characteristics, or
properties,
combined with their functional influences create the drivers that push the old regime into a new regime (such as shifting the colonial regime into the industrial regime), and thereby represent the dynamic nature of each
regime.
The
properties we will examine are of technological, economic, political, demographic, and epistemological nature. Furthermore, in each regime we will identify the drivers that have had the most significant impacts on the creation of our present regime. These drivers are the ones that create path dependencies that are shaping our present regime, or the “red line” threading through history. 7
Phase II: Present network analysis Our present analysis will be based on the methods used by van der Leeuw (2014) in his analysis of agriculture in the Argolid region in Greece. He created indepth, qualitative networks (see Fig. 2) of the sociotechnicalecological system of the Argolid and of the decision pathways of the Argolid farmers. His network illustrated the system before and after the regime tipping point and examine some of the main consequences of the changes that occurred.
Fig. 2: A schematic model of the whole of the socionatural system of the Argolid Valley, designed by van der Leeuw et al. (2014). We have labeled the present agricultural regime as “neoliberal”, and, similar to the historical analysis, we will do literaturebased research to identify key properties and drivers acting on the present regime and to identify what the current proposed solutions are to how to supply a growing urban population. We will use the findings from our historical analysis to identify the path dependencies, developed in past regimes, that are now affecting the present regime and constraining the urban supply solutions being considered by decisionmakers. 8
Phase III: Scenario creation Based on the models of systemic change we created in our historical analysis, we will create two open future scenarios around present day approaches to supplying urban populations. Our scenario approach is rather limited compared to the framework for scenario analysis developed by Swart et al. (2004), nevertheless we will orient our approach on their best practice guidelines for scenario analysis. This includes the development of an adequate knowledge base, clear statements about the current state of knowledge, explicitly naming the normative position, exploring uncertainty and addressing the broader context. Creating a network In order to collaboratively create our networks, we followed a simple, stepbystep procedure. First, we all did individual research on each regime, with each group member focusing on a particular propertygroup of the regime (technology, economics, politics, epistemology, and demographics). During our research, we identified key drivers associated with our specific property and the functional influences of the property. For instance, during the colonial regime the introduction of European grazing animals and European farm technology altered the ecology in many parts of Mexico, hastening erosion, flooding, and soil exhaustion. These technological changes displaced many native farmers and changed how, where, and by whom crops such as corn were grown. We identified drivers as “key” using several criteria. One was the frequency with which they are referenced in literature, both of that regime and of regimes before and after it. Another was how much they connected to the other drivers. Once each completed a thorough literature review, we wrote up a set of paragraphs summarizes the major drivers of each propertygroup in each regime. We shared these paragraphs with each other and used them to create our historical networks. The creation of the qualitative networks was the final part of our historical analysis. Each regime network contained the drivers of each property group as nodes, and the directional lines between the nodes represented the functional influences of each node and how they were situated in the larger context of the regime. We used different colors to indicate which propertygroup each node belonged to, and we used red lines to highlight connections that illustrated path dependencies constraining the present and future regimes. As stated previously, our historical network design will be based off of the work of Cumming et al. (2014), as seen in Fig. 1. Our present network design will be more indepth and will be based off of the work of van der Leeuw (2014), as seen in Fig. 2.
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Fig 3: Illustrated research design Materials and IRB We initially submitted our IRB application under an exempt status. This was due to the nature of the study we undertook and as a result meeting the requirements for the IRB exemption scenario #1 and #4. This meant we were conducting research in a established or commonly accepted educational settings, involving normal educational practices and sources that are publicly available. Furthermore, the successful outcome of our study did not require any interaction with human subjects. As a result, since we were focused on a literature review and network analysis, not a human study, the IRB decided to dismissed our application, it was not necessary.
Results Historical Analysis: Over the course of our historical review, we found several interesting results. The first is that our three historical regimes were not as clearly defined as we had hypothesized. One reason for this was that each regime that we identified was a continuation of the previous regime, and separation
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points were not easy to identify. Another reason is that different geographic locations shifted regimes at different times. Another key finding was about the effects of scale on our research. As stated previously, the geographic scale affected when regime shifts occurred. Mexico, for instance, was not going through major industrialization until well after both the U.S. and Europe had begun to expand their agricultural capabilities on account of new, industrial technology. As our analysis moved from the past towards the present, we also found that the geographic scale of the corn agricultural network increased such that there could be changes occurring in one part of the network, the United States during the Industrial Revolution for instance, while other areas, such as Mexico, remained relatively unchanged or experienced similar change with a delay in time. However, the network as a whole became more complex as time went on, revealing a temporal element: after a decrease in maize cultivation in the early colonial period, due to the drastic decline in Indian population, the scale of maize production increased both in output and complexity. This development was driven by a combination of evolving technology, and increasingly international economies and politics. Both population growth and continued urbanization were facilitated by this increase in agricultural scale and created a positively reinforcing feedback between the developments.
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Fig. 1: networks a– precolonial regime; and network b–colonial regime. The red coloring indicates potential origins of path dependencies affecting the present. 12
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Fig. 2: network c–industrial regime
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Fig. 3: network d– development regime One of our most important findings for our continued research is that after the early colonial period where Spain colonized Mexico and helped trigger a change in how maize was grown and used, Mexico did not play a significant role in the development of maize agriculture until the development regime beginning after WWII. Technological innovations that allowed for farmers to increase the amount of land they could successfully farm came primarily from the United States during the industrial regime, while economic drivers of change in both the colonial and industrial regimes were situated primarily in the U.S. and Europe. In fact, because of internal strife and its lack of a wellconnected transportation system, Mexico, despite having a long precolonial history in maize growing and agricultural development as well as being the first place where maize was cultivated, was not historically significant in the larger corn agricultural system until the development regime. This finding, although unsupportive of our third hypothesis, revealed a path dependency that is present in all three regimes and is still operating today: many decisions surrounding key food crops, such as maize, originated in Western, “developed” nations. It also suggests that as we go forward we should not focus on specific countries as much as we did previously.
Path Dependency Analysis Through our historical and network analysis, our team was able to identify several path dependencies that have been key in forming our current methods of supplying urban populations with food. We found that each of our five main drivers–technology, economics, politics, ways of knowing, and demographics–have an overarching path dependency associated with them that can be followed throughout the history of maize agriculture and into the present day. These path dependencies are a reliance on technological innovation to increase environmental carrying capacities; the economic and political control of agricultural markets by transnational corporations and transnational political institutions primarily based in “Developed” countries (also sometimes called the Global North, Western countries, or other such contested terms) like Syngenta and the World Bank; the politics of knowledge acting as the main axis along which the fight around agriculture is played out; and a steady decline of rural populations and subsequent growth of urban populations. 15
Technological path dependencies: Largescale negative feedback loops between the environment and urban centers, where populations reached a certain point and the environment then ceased being able to support them, were one characteristic that emerged in our historical and network analyses of precolonial Mesoamerican societies. However, as can be seen in the precolonial network technological innovation in agriculture added a second feedback loop and helped Mesoamerican civilizations overcome their environment’s carrying capacity for a time and also to urbanize their growing populations, since fewer people were needed to work the land. Eventually they were unable to innovate fast enough to support their lifestyle, though. This type of feedback loop – technology enhancing the scale and intensity of agriculture, allowing for both population growth through more available food and urbanization through a decreased need for agricultural labor – is repeated throughout history, according to our analysis, with the main difference being that the technologies used to transcend environmental limitations get evermore sophisticated and entangled with economic and political drivers. This entanglement led to the creation of the main technological path dependency that we identified: more and more technological innovation is needed at an increasing rate to sustain agricultural production in an artificially expanded environment. By the time the present, neoliberal regime comes into play after the NAFTA agreements and the fall of the USSR, rural populations and smallscale farmers had been declining since colonial times and large, transnational agrooligopolies (all of which use mechanized, industrial agricultural technology to continually increase their output while decreasing labor) overwhelmingly dominated the urban food provision system. Through our network analysis, we found that although there were many negative consequences stemming from the dominant agricultural methods (industrial, Westernoriented, neoliberal) that are driving the growth of alternative agriculture (not centered on industrialized technology), the technological path dependencies the system is locked into mean that these methods are not wellconnected to other areas of the network. As can be seen in Fig. 3, unlike increasingly large scale, highintensity farming or chemical and biological technologies, alternative agriculture is not centralized within the network, nor is it connected closely to economic drivers This in turn could make it difficult for them to affect dominant ways of knowing (driven by economics and neocolonialist politics) on a largescale in the future, or alter the demographic patterns (mainly urbanization and the emptying of rural communities) that have long been driven by agricultural intensification. 16
Demographic path dependencies: Demographic change has also significantly shaped the basis on which a food system exists, influencing the amount of people living in rural and respectively urban areas. A key path dependency from the demographic dimension is the continuous relative decline of rural populations and the relative increase in urban populations. During the colonial period (Fig. 1) large parts of the native Mesoamerican population died or were killed, through disease, physical violence and starvation (Socolow and Johnson, 1981). This changed landholding patterns, as large rural areas were no longer under anyone’s control. The redistribution of land contributed to the centralization of ownership of land. Not all people living in rural areas worked in agriculture, but they were part of often regionally closed economies. The decline in rural population impacted the functioning of these rural economies, decreasing the opportunity for livelihood in rural areas (Moerner, 1984). The declining population in rural areas acts as a positive feedback loop oin This pattern can be seen in the starting in the colonial regime continuing into the present, showing that, although drivers changed between regimes, it was an ongoing process not easily altered (in other words, path dependent). Since Mexico’s independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, several attempts were made to counter the centralization of landholding and redistribute land so as to increase ownership among the rural population. Mexico’s unstable political history in the beginning of the 20th century provided no supportive environment in which the redistributive initiatives could succeed, rendering them largely ineffective (Suchlicki, 1996). In some successful initiatives common landholdings were established, contributing to rural livelihood opportunities. These attempts did not have a strong impact on the overall system but provided places in which approaches to food systems based on diversity could continue to exist that today provide resistance to the developments of genetically engineered crops, especially maize (Kinchy, 2012). The overall development of agricultural technology made it necessary for fewer people to work in rural areas in agriculture. Technological developments and the connected potentials for increased production reinforced this trend, as it provided the means for increased agricultural output in spite of relatively decreasing rural population. Alternative livelihoods in rural areas were and are limited due to the widespread previous destruction of rural economies, causing emigration to urban regions, further contributing to urban population growth. The dynamic between urban and rural regions is mostly one sided, as few people move from urban areas to rural regions. Urbanization is connected to and drives centralized food systems which are usually characterized by highindustrialization, intensive use of agrochemicals and negative side effects like environmental degradation. 17
OVERALL COMMENT: I feel like there needs to be more focus on the ideas of path dependency, drivers, feedbacks etc throughout the text , so that we can understand the context of these historical happenings in our project Economic path dependencies: Economic drivers were initially limited to local regions where surplus crops were traded regionally to meet basic needs. In the US this led to the pig to maize equation that can be seen in the colonial network (Fig. 1), which in turn led to the first commercial use of the crop. Initially, the equation was used to determine which was more valuable, the price of the maize on the open market or the price of a pig that could be fed the corn and sold on the open market (Warman, 2003). Fueled by the drive for American independence, the pig to maize equation became prominent in the economics of the colonial periods as the colonies looked to reduce their reliance on foreign trade. This created positive feedback loops that increased the colonies’ dependence on local goods, leading to greater consumption of maizebased products including cured meats and, more importantly, whisky (pork and whisky were both considered to be concentrated maize at the time). The consumption of whisky in the colonies increased as the colonies attempted to reduce their reliance on foreign goods, including imported alcohol like brandy and rum (Theobald, 2008) . As demonstrated in the industrial network the popularity of whisky aided in the rapid commercialization of maize, which motivated advances in production technologies as the U.S. colonies moved toward the Industrial Revolution. However, as technology advanced, leading to greater economies of scales during the industrial era, wealth disparity grew. The result left millions of poor in Europe and the US to subsist primarily on a diet of unprocessed maize, which led to an epidemic of disease related to malnutrition. Here there is a path dependency that leads to a similar epidemic for millions today. Due to the overconsumption of high fructose corn syrup, epidemic levels obesity and diabetes are disproportionately affecting the urban poor in food deserts around the world (Hurt et al, 2010). Meanwhile another path dependency was created as science continued to evolve and the economies of scale increasingly reduced the need for farmbased labor. This caused a mass exodus from rural communities as the farms were consolidated and incorporated, displacing millions of subsistence farmers (Warman, 2003). Mexico staved off this exodus by implementing a subsidy program called Pravana in the early 80’s, which allowed the farmers to preserve their ejidos (small farms) and continue to produce maize even though they did not have a comparative advantage in the production of maize in the global 18
economy. The network analysis of the development regime in Fig. 3 shows that the Pravana program was successful in preserving the ejidos, which were a constitutional right of the Mexican farmers, through the development period until the introduction of NAFTA. Conversely, as the US commercial complex continued to grow it virtually eliminated all forms of domestic subsistence farming, leaving corporate conglomerates in charge of feeding the growing urban populations. Pravana was effective in delaying the same fate for the Mexican farmers, however NAFTA opened the door for the commercialization of farming in Mexico by global oligopolies, ultimately displacing the Mexican farmers and eliminating the constitutionally guaranteed ejidos . Thus in the present, neoliberal network only large, transnational companies appear as an actor in feeding urban populations. Although resistance to this has contributed to the creation of alternatives, these alternatives are not yet significant actors in the urban food system (Warman, 2003). In the end, the economic drivers that began innocuously enough with the simple pig to maize equations created positive feedback loops that shifted the system away from small subsistence farming to large scale commercial farms. The end result was a mass exodus of rural farms that led to rapid urban growth causing a global economic system that increased reliance on trade and forced nations to rely on their comparative agricultural advantage. In the case of Mexico, the unintended consequence led to the loss of constitutionally guaranteed subsistence farming, a loss of heritage, and large scale emigration. Knowledge path dependencies: Discussions of the precarious conditions our current global agricultural system often revolve around what appear to be two fundamentally opposed approaches to growing plants: one is technical, Western, scientifically reductionist and universalistic; and the other is indigenous, traditional, local, holistic and spiritual. Arguments made by opponents of the former (Shiva qt. in Charkiewicz et al., 1995) claim that concepts such as property and technologies such as genetic engineering are fundamentally Western or Lockean and have no appeal to Third World farmers who come from cultures with deep ties to the natural world and oppose the ownership of life because they are wholly different than modern, white people. But since, in the course of the 20th century, the view of science as an objective truthtelling machine was shown to be illusionary, the indigenous versus scientific distinction no longer holds up. On the one hand, science and technology studies have advanced the claim that scientific observations are never not culturally and contextually embedded (Rheinberger, 2013; Daston, 2007), even though it claims to be. Henceforth, all knowledge might be considered ‘indigenous’ (Philip, 2001). On the other 19
hand, postcolonial studies on the history of environmentalism and the indigenous knowledge discourse tell us that the narrative of authentically indigenous tradition against ethnocentrically European modernity does not hold up to a conceptual scrutinization (Agrawal, 1995) and, albeit being told in an anticolonial language, is “reminiscent of eighteenth and nineteenthcentury EuroAmerican romanticist and primitivist discourses in its desire to value a naturecentered spirituality over a technicist instrumentality” (Philip, 2001). So any position suggesting to have a definite answer for a question like “how to feed a growing urban population?” is better understood as a strategically generalized expert narrative. The politics of knowledge (Philip, 2010) can be seen in both certain types of ecofeminism arguing for a holistic cosmology that avoids dualistic thinking as well as the progresspromising neoliberal market fetishism. A form of collaboration across ideological borders that does not conceal power relations and is sensitive to issues of race, gender and class is as needed as always. The trope of ‘othering’ differences, which blocks such collaborations, may be one of the most consistent path dependency in the European politics of knowledge, seen for example in the way that until the 1970s, development planning and conservation policies were based on negative assumptions about traditional rural societies (Dutfield, 2000), a belief that consistently was faithful to modern linear development norms. Whereas historically, purported difference has been equated with inferiority, because it has been seen as either a legitimation for subjecting the those who are different as in the colonial age (Brunstetter, 2011), a disturbance that needs to be normalized in the industrial age (Mader, 2011) or a state of backwardness in a normative temporality as in the development age (Charkiewicz et al., 1995), this is now changing in the neoliberal regime since it marks a significant tipping point. In the current stage of late or advanced capitalism, difference is constantly being proliferated to expand the market volume (Braidotti, 2013). In fact, the Human Rights Campaign has named Monsanto the best place to work for LGBT equality. Equally, in the discourse around developments, nowadays arguments are being made that ‘development workers’ should stimulate and facilitate participatory learning and development to strengthen farmers’ knowledge (Rengalakshmi, 2010), which shows that even participatory action research can be misused as a tool for domination through which the local people’s perception is manipulated in an imbalanced power relation (Rahnema qt. in Charkiewicz et al., 1995). The policies of neoliberal publicprivate partnerships as the current main driver have, through the feedback loop of capitalistcritic voices, integrated difference into the system that selforganizes the geopolitics of knowledge. 20
OVERALL COMMENT: good info but needs tying back to path dependencies, our networks, feedbacks, drivers, etc. Political path dependencies: Manipulation of less politically dominant populations and a control of resources is a path dependency we identified starting in the colonial regime and going up to the present regime. As seen in Figure 1, control over native populations in Mexico becomes a clear path dependency starting during the colonial regime when the Spanish started to colonize Mexico. The native populations fought the Spanish, though, and eventually force ceased to be an effective, or efficient, way for the conquistadors to gain resources. Instead, they secured continued control over native populations by commandeering their political system. The Spanish created arbitrary leadership role for native to make them feel more in control and thus appease them. For instance, the Spanish gave local leaders limited power over land (with Spanish oversight) so long as those leaders gave the Spanish the resources they sought. Land control was clear result from Spanish colonization (shown in figure 1) and had longterm consequences. It continued the colonizers ability to manipulate native populations, especially regarding resources like corn. The Spaniards control was also spread during colonization through biological interaction. The diseases, plants and animals that the Spanish brought from Europe acted as effective biological control agents over native populations and ensured original native populations drastically declined. This decreased the natives’ ability to resist their colonial masters both because of their decreased numbers and their decreased moral and faith in their own way of life. .
The immediate and noticeable effects of the Spanish colonization lasted into Mexico’s
agricultural development stage. Control shifted from the Spanish to wealthy Mexicans after the Mexican War of Independence. When the Spanish gave native leaders limited power during colonization, the leaders eventually gained wealth as well. This wealth inequality became apparent after the Mexican War of Independence. Shown in Figure 1, a direct result of colonization was the class system created. A class system had emerged in agriculture ranging from poorest, peons, to the wealthy, hacienda owners. The Porfirio Diaz Regime (the ruling leadership) promoted haciendas and in effect controlled the people who were reliant on agriculture for their livelihoods. By promoting the hacienda system, the wealthy continued to get richer, thus controlling the lower class and forcing them into further indentured servitude. Shown in Figure 2, The hacienda agricultural system was dismantled due to the Mexican Revolution. The Ejido system was put in place in the early 1920’s. As can be seen in Figure 2, the 21
Ejido system leads to a loss of trade and economic development. The Ejido system in Mexico lasted until the early 1990’s. Shown in Figure 3, during the final years of the Ejido system the United States and Mexico created NAFTA. This resulted in foreign control over agriculture in Mexico resulting in neocolonialism. After this agreement came into full force, it became evident that Mexico could not compete with the United State’s economic success; it succumbed to trade control by the United States. Mexico became a net importer because their system could not compete with the US’s advanced production techniques. Local farmers in Mexico lost control of their small markets to supranational oligopolies. NAFTA acted as an driver for the creation of supranational oligopolies by providing the opportunity to gain market control. Commercial entities continue to dominate and control Mexican agriculture markets today.
Discussion: Future Scenarios From our case study on Mexican and US maize agricultural development, we found several key variables that seem to be likely pivot points in the future of food systems. Technological variables were synthetic inputs, such as pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers; and biotechnology. Both of these technologies are tightly intertwined with global economics and politics, and are highly controversial. However, despite being relatively recent, these technologies have played a large role in the development of the mechanized, industrial agricultural model that dominates our modern food system. Their continued, or discontinued, role will affect how future cities are fed. In terms of ways of knowing, the trajectory of the agriculture system seems based on whether the debate between indigenous and scientific accounts of knowledge systems continues to segregate different agricultural actors such as farmers, scientists and development advocates, unless the findings of science studies showing the incorrect assumptions of this distinction is taken seriously. “Big Agriculture” Scenario: In a “business as usual” big agriculture scenario, transnational agricultural oligopolies will continue to dominate the global food system and dictate how the growing urban population is fed. In this scenario, “alternative” agriculture will not gain a significant foothold in the global food system and will, for the most part, remain a niche market frequented by the welloff. Additionally, as large corporations continue to dominate and control food markets, the displacement of small farmers will
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likely continue. This, in turn, will increase the size of cities even more as the farmers will need someplace to go in order to find new work and access to food they do not grow themselves. In such a scenario the rise of “megacities” seems an inevitability.
Fig 5: Closeup of the “Big Ag” future scenario network showing the connection between domination of the the food system, and control of GM crops, by transnational agricultural oligopolies and the continued growth of megacities. There are a very small number of companies that currently control most of the world’s commercial agriculture, along with the inputs that go with it–pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer. These inputs all help to increase yields in less space, which is one reason that the highintensity, industrial agriculture that uses them is touted by supporters as the solution to how to feed the growing urban population. However the longterm sustainability of this method has been called into question for several reasons. Not only do pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers all introduce pollutants into ecosystems, they all have a significant cost to farmers, particularly smallscale farmers like some of the ones that are still farming in rural Mexico. When GM maize is said to increase yields, their dependence on irrigation, agrochemicals, and mechanized farm tools such as tractors–all expensive and many of which rely on fossil fuels or other increasinglyhardtoget resources such as phosphorous–is often not factored into the equation (Fitting, 2011). As for biotechnology itself, it is primarily controlled by big agricultural companies. They also can have unintended, and unsustainable, , and unsustainable, , and unsustainable, consequences when deployed, in part due to mismanagement and misuse by both farmers and governments (Fitting, 2011). However, biotechnology has shown a potential for creating crops that can address issues such as drought and malnutrition. This potential is drawn in magenta in the “Big Ag” scenario network, 23
showing that while GM crop technology, as it is currently used, is arguably unsustainable, the technology and even the industry has potential to move in a more socially and environmentally sustainable direction by cooperating with public research institutions to create marketable crops that are adapted to things like drought or warmer weather, or crops that require less waterpolluting fertilizer instead of more. Largescale urban vertical farming is another “magenta” scenario that could alter the way growing urban populations are fed in a world where big ag dominates. Although the vertical farms would likely be controlled by transnational corporations just as their rural counterparts would be (and are), the presence of these structures within cities could create jobs for displaced farmers who have come to the city and could be a solution to rising fuel costs that may hamper the longdistance transportation of food. As the technology for such an operation is not perfected yet, it is difficult to say what inputs and outputs such an agriculture would create, and what the externalities would be, except to say that it would change the dynamics of the urban food provision system.
Fig 6: Closeup of the “Big Ag” future scenario network showing, in magenta, a potential alternative future path where GM technology is deployed as an adaptation measure to aid the creation of a more sustainable and/or resilient agricultural system within a Big Ag regime.
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As it stands, the reliance on expensive and unreliably available inputs, as well as their socially and culturally fraught use of biotechnology, makes the current “big ag” industrial model one that may not be able to sustainably feed a growing urban population over the long term, at least not without significant changes to how the industries operate. The conglomeration of such large amounts of agricultural power in such a small group could also make the possibility of corruption and inequitable distribution of food resources harder to guard against, a factor which would decrease the resilience of a future food system and the cities that it fed. Inequitable distribution is a particularly urgent problem as it is one of the primary drivers of widespread malnutrition and hunger, rather than lack of food production (“Trade and Environment Review…,” 2013). That the big agriculture commercialindustrial model generally only gives a potential solution for increasing food production in the future is another reason that the model appears to be unsustainable in the longterm in the context of feeding growing urban populations. In the domain of validity claims concerning agricultural knowledge, there are two main scenarios that could play out: Either the hardened debate between indigenous and scientific accounts of knowledge systems continues to segregate farmers, scientists and development advocates, which would clear the path for the further dominance of largescale corporate farming (the “big agriculture” scenario), or the findings of science studies disclaiming such a categorization is taken seriously, which would encourage the further exploration of technically supported agroforestry and allow for an economically and ecologically for sustainable future of farmers (an “alternative agriculture” scenario). Regarding the politics of knowledge in the big agriculture scenario, the ideologically laden contention between two knowledge systems proclaimed to be incommensurable continues. In this case, the inevitably enrolling failure of high input biotechnological agriculture will cause multinational companies to incorporate the socalled indigenous knowledge stock. The World Intellectual Property Organization has already set in place a system to study and digitally archive traditional knowledge (Rengalakshmi 164). Philip notes that “indigenous knowledge activists are doing enormous amounts of work in the hope that databases in English and French will protect indigenous knowledge […]” (260). These attempts by neoindigenistas , Agrawal argues, to archive indigenous knowledge “are likely to divorce indigenous knowledge from the source that presumably provides it with its vigour [sic] – the people and their needs” (429) and, in the end, “fail to address the underlying asymmetries of power and control that cement in place the oppression of indigenous or other marginalized social groups” (431). This scenario would effectively restage the colonial trope of the now “ecologically noble savage” (Redford and Stearman qt. in Dutfield 276) who gets deprived of his resources, which here would be
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indigenous knowledge that is embedded into the natural whole, while the extrapolated worth gets integrated into the circuit of capital. Alternative Agriculture Scenario: Shown in Figure ___, with the continuation of NAFTA there will be corn subsidies given to big agriculture companies. This will lead to a lower price of corn which will cheapen the overall market for corn. Since these big agriculture conglomerates are based solely in the United States, the U.S. will continue to have economic and political control on corn markets in Mexico. Due to political contribution laws in the United States, legislators will essentially be controlled by big agriculture conglomerates that donate to their reelection campaigns. Shown in Figure ___, this will lead to less regulation control of agriculture trade for less dominant countries like Mexico. We predict that the social and environmental pressures these events create–civil unrest paired with human right abuses and environmental abuses–could become powerful enough drivers to trigger a regime shift from a “big ag” regime to an “alternative ag” regime. In other words a global agrarian reform. Although there are many outcomes, Figure ___, shows our prediction that this reform will include redistribution of subsidies and farmland to local farmers. One possible outcome of redistribution is a reduction of modern demechanization, which will not use chemical fertilizers but still relies on technology, and deindustrialization of the agriculture industry and eventually lead to subsistence farming and/or possible more sustainable practices such as agroecology or more advanced organic farming methods. Agroecology already has a foothold in parts of Mexico, stemming from the 1960s (CITE), which makes its reemergence as a possible alternative in Mexico a plausible scenario. As big agriculture continues to grow there will be a point of diminishing returns. This has the potential to create a global crisis as we begin to reach our global carrying capacity. The understanding is that even technology is limited and can only do so much to increase yields. Here, in addition to biotechnology, the most likely advances will come in the form of advanced robotics used to maintain and harvest the crops. The end result would displace even more labor, continuing to drive urban growth and increasing food demands. Additionally, science driven yield increases tend to diminish over time. For example relevant to the applications of fertilizers which generate the greatest gains after the first application and diminish to almost no increase after the fourth application. This could potentially result in a global crisis leading to demands for agrarian reform as illustrated in the alternative agriculture scenario (Warman, 2003). 26
The key demographic path dependency that went through the different historical regimes and is prevalent in the present regime is the growth of urban populations and the decline of rural populations. This dynamic had different causes through the historical regimes, from death of the rural population, to loss of land rights and lacking livelihood opportunity in changing economic environments. In a future scenario characterized by a continuation of the trend of monopolization and economic liberalization of agriculture the demographic trend of rural depopulation continues. The economic and social livelihood opportunities in rural areas are limited. The economic opportunity lies in cities, with large parts of the economies being based in service sector. In societies with aging population the rural population is aging and, in the long term, dying, since younger generations move to cities in hope for economic opportunities. In populations with predominantly young people, the overall movement is the same: young people in rural areas move to cities seeking economic opportunity.In an scenario of alternative agriculture, the importance of rural livelihoods is acknowledged and supported. Farms are sized so that they can be integrated into rural communities and are owned by locals, rather than corporations. Economic connections between urban and rural regions are explicitly formed in a way that is not distorted by corporate interest, or agricultural enterprises managed by a corporate logic are put under such regulations that they do not interfere with rural livelihood opportunities. The alternative agriculture scenario furthermore suggests that in the realm of knowledge politics, the distinction between scientific and indigenous knowledge is eschewed. In this account, it is accepted that science studies have shown how all types of knowledge are culturally permeated and contextually bound and might be considered ‘indigenous’.” Agroforestry that combines the potential of technologies such as tractors and the insight into the benefits of ecofarming could possibly provide a viable alternative to highinput largescale farming. In this scenario, the main goal of agricultural policy, practice and activism is not to fight for one ‘right’ way to approach agriculture, but more about finding strategies to combat the ongoing capturing of life by capital. Next Steps and Future Considerations
Highlight: ● the nature of change ○ what changes?
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■ there are changes to existing nodes eg always technological parts of ag but type of tech changed ■ connections changed ■ can observe plenty of evidence how changes in one element swept through the whole network and had an influence on the whole network ● the interesting interdependencies ● validate method–>networks allow us to systematically discuss change in the food system ○ reason that we need to do this is that we need to be aware of different types of change in order to figure out how to deal with future changes in the future food system Throughout our project, our goal was to explore how the a CAS framework could be used to illustrate the nature of While the future scenarios provide interesting and predictable explanations of the future outcomes in agriculture, the scenarios are not based in fact which shines a light on our project’s biggest hinderance; our project has no factual information. Our system is complex, which is reliant on the individual action of each aspect in the scenario. This results in a positive feedback loop which have inimical unintended consequences and makes it difficult to predict beyond the near future of agriculture The historical analysis of epistemic regimes suggests that an effective mode of resistance to the ongoing incorporation of critique through feedback loops by the logic of capital might be to find possibilities of interventions that force the system to adapt to ruptures by partially integrating the political agenda of the interrupters. This political consciousness does not allow for dominant ideologies, grand narratives or overarching generalizations but instead favors practices of daily activism and micropolitical interventions. On this account, there are no longer those ‘inside’ the neoliberal capitalist world system dominated by corporations and those ‘outside’ of it, living an ecologically noble indigenous life. Instead, the challenge is to work within and with the rules of a capitalist global economy by making use of its mutating nature by making it incorporate the political agendas that will be necessary to sustain livelihood opportunities for farmers who are not on the Big Agriculture bandwagon but attempt to build agricultural systems that incorporate the principles of 28
biodiversity, crop rotation and vertical stratification, thereby leaving behind the corporate goals of ‘customer retention’ and profit maximization that drive highinput monoculture farming. Many sustainable agriculture movements are focused on demechanizing, to a certain extent, the agricultural process. For instance agroecology was a reaction against the social and environmental damage that industrialized agriculture was causing in the postWWII Development regime, particularly in traditional societies such as rural Mexico but also in developed nations, such as the US (Gliessman, 2013). It’s goal is to create an agriculture that mimics natural ecosystems and thus uses techniques such as limiting synthetic inputs (chemical fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, etc.) and using polycultures rather than monocultures (Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability: Ecosystem Management and Sustainability). But because of long use of technology to overcome the ecosystem’s carrying capacity, economic and political drivers, as well as dominant ways of knowing, are all oriented towards driving technological domination and continued innovation–there is no largescale policy or economic place for nonindustrialized agriculture, or a noncapitalist mindset. The fact that, b Alternative agricultural movements are still sidelined in the present, reveal the strength of the technological path dependency. Importantly it also shows how the economic, political, and philosophical path dependencies reinforce the technological path dependencies and vice versa. Works Cited
Agrawal, A. (1995). Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge. Development and change , 26 (3), 413439. 29
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman . Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Brunstetter, D. R., & Zartner, D. (2011). Just War against Barbarians: Revisiting the Valladolid Debates between Sepúlveda and Las Casas. Political Studies , 59 (3). Charkiewicz, E., Häusler, S., Wieringa, S., & Braidotti, R. (1995). Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development (Second impression ed.). London, New Jersey and Santo Domingo: Zed Books in association with INSTRAW. Cumming, G. S., Buerkert, A., Hoffmann, E. M., Schlecht, E., von CramonTaubadel, S., & Tscharntke, T. (2014). Implications of agricultural transitions and urbanization for ecosystem services. Nature , 515 (7525), 50–57. http://doi.org/10.1038/nature13945. Daston, L. (2007). Objektivität (C. Krüger, Trans.). Suhrkamp. Dutfield, G. (2000). The Public and Private Domains Intellectual Property Rights in Traditional Knowledge. Science Communication , 21 (3), 274295. Fitting, E. (2011). The Struggle for Maize–Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside . Durham and London: Duke University Press. Griggs, D., StaffordSmith, M., Gaffney, O., Rockstöm, J., Öhman, M. C., Shyamsunder, P., … Noble, I. (2013). Sustainable development goals for people and planet. Nature , 495 , 305–307. Hurt, R., Kulisek, C., Buchanan, L., & McClave, S. (2010, December 1). The Obesity Epidemic: Challenges, Health Initiatives, and Implications for Gastroenterologists. Retrieved May 4, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3033553/ . 30
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