Agricultural research for whom?
Auteur(s): GRAIN
Publié par: http://www.grain.org
Agricultural research for whom?Agricultural research: for whom? by whom?Until relatively recently agricultural research was the domain of farmers. Over generations, they built up an impressive base of agricultural biodiversity, technology, and knowledge that was adapted to their local environmental conditions and cultural interests. Research was carried out by and for farmers.
The twin processes of colonialism and industrialization turned agricultural research upside down. Research was pushed off the farm and moved into far away institutes and labs run by Western scientists. In developing countries, the ’green revolution’ is probably the most dramatic example of this push to industrialise agriculture and do away with a broad mosaic of local and diversity-based production systems. Launched in the 1960s by Northern donor agencies, and presented as an effort to eliminate hunger in poor countries, it relied on the introduction of a few uniform crop varieties that need chemical fertilizer, pesticides and other external inputs, to deliver the promised ’high yields’. It is a prime example of how an effort to ’modernise’ can put the very basis of sustainable development at risk, simply by bypassing and undermining local resources, knowledge and experience generated over millennia. Rather than eliminating hunger, the ‘green revolution’ moved control over agriculture and rural livelihoods from local communities to international development agencies and private corporations.
Today this top-down model of agricultural development is increasingly being questioned. Throughout the world there are initiatives and efforts to take agricultural research back to the farm and to reassert farmer control over research, through such things as seed security programmes, exchange networks and community based breeding. Also in academic circles, it is increasingly understood that research should take the role and input of local farming, fishing, pastoral and forest communities as a central starting point. Concepts, such as ecological agriculture, participatory research, and farming systems research are now widely accepted and being put into practice.
But these promising and exciting openings are in real danger of being marginalised and undermined by a new wave of technological imposition and privatization. The main threat comes from agribusiness. The green revolution model of research and development set the stage for the rise of the transnational pesticide, seed, fertiliser and food and feed industries, which now dominate much of agriculture in the world. These same corporations, which are constantly merging together, are now spending billions of dollars promoting yet another technological fix: genetic engineering. This new technology, which, like pesticides before it, is fraught with risks to human health and the environment, is particularly troubling because it has the potential to give corporations complete control over the global seed supply and, therefore over the production of food in the world. In this agriculture, farmers are merely recipients of technology, forced to sign contracts that dictate what can and cannot be done in their fields and with their crops.
Langue(s): anglais