دانلود رایگان مقاله انعطاف پذیری بازار کار بیشتر برای نوآوری بیشتر؟ شواهد از کارفرما و کارمند مرتبط با اطلاعات میکرو

abstract

Poverty reduction during the Asian Green Revolution has been attributed to the inherent scale neutrality of new crop varieties making them equally beneficial to small-scale and large-scale farmers. The term ‘scale-neutral’ is now reappearing in debates on agricultural development in Africa with claims that crop technology is inherently scale-neutral and that African smallholders will significantly benefit from new crop varieties not specifically developed for their contexts. Using a social shaping of technology (SST) perspective and the concept of biological embeddedness, this paper critically examines whether it is helpful to describe crop technology as scale neutral when drawing lessons from the Asian Green Revolution about how new crop technology can be of benefitto African smallholders. The paper describes how political commitment, rather than inherently scale-neutral crops, was central for the outcome of the Asian Green Revolution. It also highlights that while the effects of crop biology are often disregarded in adoption studies, biology significantly affected the ability of Green Revolution crop technology to benefit smallholders, and continues to do so today. Using maize and GM crops as examples, this paper suggests that GM crops in their current form have reinforced a technological trajectory established with hybrid technology and directed it away from smallholder practices and agroecologies. Consequently, describing crop technology as inherently scale-neutral is not helpful for understanding how crop technology works in Africa today and prevents important lessons being learned from the Asian Green Revolution.

6. Conclusions

This paper describes how the crop technologies used and the political and economic environment have both changed since the Asian GR, in ways that are not favourable for smallholder farming. Governments today spend less on support to agriculture, including agricultural advice, and the corporate shaping of crop technology research and development has significantly shifted the technological trajectory away from smallholders. This corporate control of crop technology and the shift away from smallholders’ needs and interests have been strengthened by biological factors inherent in the crop technologies promoted as key drivers in the transformation of African smallholder agriculture today. In hybrid technology and the more recent GM technology, a highly controlled development process is needed to ensure the functioning ofthe technology. By virtue of their biological functions, hybrid crops and, even more so, GM crops thus facilitate corporate control over technology. This is not to say that the relationships are fixed, but it indicates that significant political and economic commitment is needed if new crop technology is to be of benefit to African smallholders.