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Development: Harvest of hope
Abstract
An economist believes that a five-year aid effort in a dozen villages across Africa can teach the world how to defeat poverty. Sarah Tomlin reports on the project's progress in Rwanda.
... One example that may provide a model for achieving this nexus is the Millennium Villages project being managed by the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City (Tomlin 2006). Here a global NGO is providing direct funding to rural villages for improving their agricultural productivity and has combined this effort with enhancing medical care. ...
... In Rwanda the government has taken a strong lead in integrating this foreign aid program with the activities and lifestyles of the villagers, who are being trained and certified in the skills that underpin improved food production. Tomlin (2006) does remind us that developing policy for Africa is fraught with two powerful factors: natural variation (rains do not arrive every season when needed) and local fears and beliefs that control the villagers' attitudes. One project participant in Rwanda is sure that while foreign help is present, the rains come, but when the foreigners leave, the rains stop. ...
Developed nations intervened in conservation policy across Africa during the 20th century to address needs to protect species and biodiversity that were based on their own perceptions and priorities. In the 21st century, conservationists in Africa have revised these perceptions and begun the process of identifying conservation priorities from an African perspective and in consideration of Africans’ priorities. Although foreign conservation interveners struggled to identify mechanisms to which local people would respond, African conservationists are now demonstrating how to integrate the continent's unique socioeconomic circumstances into efforts to protect biodiversity. In Africa effective conservation policy must include the generation of wealth, reduction of disease and hunger, and support of traditional land-use practices.
Resumen: Las naciones desarrolladas intervinieron en las políticas de conservación en África en el siglo 20 para atender necesidades de protección de especies y biodiversidad que se basaron en sus propias percepciones y prioridades. En el siglo 21, conservacionistas de África han revisado estas percepciones y han comenzado a identificar prioridades de conservación desde una perspectiva africana y en consideración de prioridades africanas. Aunque los interventores extranjeros pugnaron por identificar mecanismos a los que respondieran los habitantes locales, los conservacionistas africanos están demostrando como integrar las circunstancias socioeconómicas únicas del continente en esfuerzos para proteger la biodiversidad. Las políticas conservación efectivas en África deben incluir la generación de riqueza, reducción de las enfermedades y el hambre y soportar prácticas tradicionales de uso de suelo.
... In saying this, we do not downplay the importance of observing two knowledge systems. In mainstream agricultural policies in Africa, for instance, local knowledge is often seen as a (or even the) problem (Norgaard 1984), and the solution is to modernize agriculture by harnessing modern science and technology to boost crop yields (Juma et al. 2001, Tomlin 2006, Toenniessen et al. 2008, Juma 2015. According to one of the most influential scholars in development economics, John Mellor, "farmers may well innovate but innovation is generated locally from local practices and is innately slower paced than that from modern research institutions. ...
The calls for evidence-based public policy making have increased dramatically in the last decades, and so has the interest in evidence-based sustainability studies. But questions remain about what "evidence" actually means in different contexts and if the concept travels well between different domains of application. Some of the most relevant questions asked by sustainability studies are not, and in some cases cannot be, directly answered by relying on research evidence of the kinds favored by the evidence-based movement. Therefore, sustainability studies must also harness other forms of knowledge, based on forms of practical experience. How to integrate these two sources of knowledge is one of the most fundamental epistemological and practical problems society is facing. Identifying what kind of practical experience and research evidence we need to integrate is another challenging question. We draw on examples from our research in the Global South and suggest an efficient principle, problem-feeding, for harnessing practical experience within an adapted version of evidence-based sustainability studies.
... 18 These are stark signs of an aggravating and deeply rooted socio-ecological problem as also emphasized by FAO. 3 Poverty alleviation through agricultural modernization and market integration dominates the development discourse on Africa, particularly since the formulation of the Millennium Declaration in 2000. 19 This is epitomized in the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), 20 where a donor driven 'big push' of massive investments in agriculture, energy, telecommunications, transports, and health, is aimed at assisting 78 selected villages in 10 countries in rapidly reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The short-term results are impressive especially when it comes to increased crop yields and reduced malaria prevalence. ...
One billion vulnerable subsistence farmers across the global south depend on risky livelihoods in need of adaptation to climate change impacts. Simultaneously, their aggregated emission of greenhouse gases from land use and fuelwood consumption is substantial. Synergies between adaptation to climate change and mitigation should therefore be actively promoted. In the context of poverty, such synergies should ideally be designed specifically for the poorest of the poor who are notoriously difficult to reach by policies and projects. In this experimental case on subsistence farming in western Kenya we assume that only the poorest inhabit the most degraded lands and use the simplest form of cooking over open fire. As the study location is typical of sub-Saharan areas affected by drought, flooding, land degradation, diseases and persistent poverty, findings can be scaled up, transferred to and tested in similar settings. Seeking multiple synergies of adaptation, mitigation, and social change while using sustainability science in intervention research, we reframed peasant farmers from vulnerable victims into agents fighting livelihood stressors and climate change impacts. In collaboration with them we performed small-scale experiments on agricultural production practices and domestic energy efficiency resulting in multiple synergies. Findings show that the ‘smokeless kitchen’ and carbon sequestration from improved land management can mitigate climate change while increasing energy efficiency, health standards, food security, and community-based adaptive capacity. Preferably, climate policy should therefore explicitly address synergies and support peasant farmers' efforts to create synergies when the ‘food imperative’ limits their agency to fight climate change alone. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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What explains the recent re-emergence of ‘model village’-style social experiments, and what does this tell us about the contradictions of neoliberal development? This paper focuses on two experiments of this kind – the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa and the Rural Cities Project in southern Mexico – both of which aim to achieve the Millennium Development Goals through an integrated set of interventions at the village level. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's work on the colonization of everyday life, I argue that the Millennium Development Goals function in these cases to facilitate and legitimate the production of social reality based on a naturalised vision of market society. These utopian projects embody the paradoxical character of neoliberalization, demonstrating the necessarily social production of the supposedly natural order on which neoliberalism is discursively premised, while reproducing the strategies of social engineering that the neoliberal project is rhetorically oriented against.
Africa's scientists tell industrialized nations what they need to hear.