xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>Another way to say this is: improved agricultural
>technologies rarely help the poorest farmers because they dwell in areas
>where the conditions for market economies are weak and can't be
>artificially
>transformed through government intervention where there are market
>economies.
well, i've read innumerable criticisms of this approach, precisely because
it subordinates the community to the market.
>
>
>Then too, there is the entire range of so called "appropriate
>technologies"
>in which the extension people do not go out with a specific technology to
>offer but rather go out with a took kit of possible technologies and
>approaches and work collaboratively with the people to develop systems
>that
>fit the needs and the
possibilities
>.
the development research i've read here is referred to as "community
development" and usually begins with a qualitative study on what folks
want, how the community is structured, who controls the resources,
what is "possible" and who is literate, and so on.
> These approaches look a lot more like
>Freirean type interventions and his ideas have been seminal in a lot of
>that
>work. In some cases I think there is often an implicit activity systems
>type approach. One of these is known as "farm systems analysis" and it
>basically starts from an examination of the agricultural production unit
>in
>terms of all of the internal and external relations that make it up with
>reference to the basic productive activity. Interventions are based on an
>in-depth familarity with that totality and include an understanding of all
>of the various social and cultural elements.
i've never read this term "farm systems analysis" but i am well read in
community development in the development literature, where agriculture
practices around the world are studied as a way to understand what is
working, why, and what is lacking, and how to improve or alter traditional
practice without subordinating people to the larger market - a lot of the
communities supply their neighbours, so, facilitating this is part of a
wider community network.
there are, absolutely huge conflicts between capitalist investments and
cultural assumptions about, say, gender, where it is the women who work,
and so the women must learn the new practices, as well as continue to farm
in the traditional ways, and raise the children, and so on = indicating
the interventions are profoundly naive to cultural difference.
as you note, it's a wildly suspect "intervention" =- i was thinking of
Saskatchewan's subsidized farmers, and the
investments in retraining these people into other areas of tech, or
whatever -
the fundamental conflict being between the traditions of rural farming in
Canada and
the recent introduction of a service-based economy.
retraining involves not only new information, but new values about work,
and new contexts of activity, sociality, culture, urbanization and so on.
how these people might cross those bridges between resistance and
learning, let alone a reach towards expansion,
boggle my mind.
dr di
"my doctor says i wouldn't have so many nosebleeds if i would just keep my
finger out of there. "
Ralph Wiggums.
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