Environment and Development -- Seventh Class: Agriculture and the Politics of Knowledge

Last week in my Environment and Development course (ERST-IDST-POST-SAFS 3602H), we took a careful look at agriculture -- and specifically, at the politics of agricultural knowledge.

Most of my students already have a good grounding in key aspects of global agricultural issues, such as the historical significance of the Green Revolution, and the contrasting politics of GM foods and organic agriculture.  So this week I decided to focus on a specific aspect of agriculture: the politics of knowledge.

I had already introduced this topic the previous week, with some aspects of agriculture and environment issues, just to ensure that we would have a common grounding.  These included links between food and other issues; conflicting trends in food & agriculture (between small-scale, community-based agriculture, and large-scale, industrialized agriculture), and some social and environmental dimensions of agriculture.  Here are my slides summarizing these:

I then moved onto a fairly detailed discussion of the politics of agricultural knowledge.  I framed this in terms of contrasting visions of the future of agriculture: industrial agriculture or agroecology.  (These are, of course, somewhat ideal types, but they do provide a useful dichotomy.)

After introducing some basic concepts in the politics of knowledge (STS 101, in a sense), I then explained how we could frame the politics of agricultural knowledge in terms of the lingering influence of the Green Revolution.  Agricultural research today has some important similarities with that of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, but also some important differences, including the dominance of corporate research, and the search for patentable innovations.  Together, these have encouraged a focus on genetic manipulation -- and hence, the development of GM crops with their associated "packages" of herbicides and other inputs.  Drawing on work by Sheila Jasanoff and others, I also explained the framing today of Africa as a "patient" requiring expert intervention by agricultural scientists.

Then, I contrasted this perspective on knowledge with that embodied in agroecology -- including the framing of farm-based knowledge in terms of agricultural ecosystems, and also in terms of the social dimensions of agriculture.

And finally, I returned to where I began, with those general concepts of the politics of knowledge, and explained how they could provide a basis for understanding agricultural knowledge today.