Tag Archives Agriculture

Contract farming is everywhere, but how does it affect agrarian relations in the Global South?

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Contemporary debates in agrarian studies have been predominantly focused on land and property issues, at times to the detriment of questions about production and exchange. The large and expanding footprint of contract farming is one example of a relatively neglected – yet significant – dimension of contemporary agricultural systems in the Global South. Farming contracts are one of many forms of coordinating production and exchange that seek to avoid the uncertainty for producers and buyers of finding each other more spontaneously in open markets. Contract farming involves a non-transferable agreement between farmers and buyers that specifies the terms of production and marketing, typically relating to the price, quantity, quality and delivery of the product.

Decades of research and case studies suggest that contract farming is widespread in local, domestic and export-oriented agricultural commodity markets, both linked to large multinational corporate buyers, as well as within the informal networks of small-scale traders. Research on contract farming in the Global South consistently attributes this expansion to two intertwined effects: one is the liberalization of agriculture due to structural adjustments that stripped states from their coordinating roles in production. The other is the active promotion of contract farming by multilateral development agencies, who proposed it as a win-win alternative after the demise of state-led coordination.

International organizations, governments and agribusinesses have promoted contract farming as key tool to integrate smallholders into markets and modernize agricultural sectors. Contract farming is hailed as a source of jobs, income and stable markets for smallholders, and for providing a stable supply base and profits to agribusiness. However, whether contract farming actually does lead to win-win outcomes remains highly contested. Political economy studies reveal that unequal power relationships are inherent to contract farming arrangements, demonstrating that (i) buyers tend to benefit more than smallholders, (ii) not all producers benefit equally (small producers are highly differentiated and many hire labor), and (iii) many smallholders actually lose out from these schemes as they bear the brunt of production risks and enter vicious cycles of indebtedness. As a result, we often see a mosaic of winners and losers.

 

Contract farming, an avenue for rural development?

Since the 1990s, international organizations such as the FAO and the World Bank have been promoting contract farming as a tool for inclusive growth in rural areas. Responding to criticisms that these arrangements tend to disproportionately benefit buyers and may expose small producers to indebtedness and impoverishment, international organizations have put their weight behind the promotion of “fair contracts” and better governance and transparency in contractual arrangements.    However, political economy studies still question this rebranding of contract farming as an inclusive business model by showing how “fair contracts” focus solely on the unequal power relations between small producers and agribusinesses, while missing the range of inequalities that exist among and between farmers, agricultural workers, unpaid household labor and those who provide ancillary services to small-scale producers. Moreover, many contract farming schemes rely on monopsony power, often leaving producers unable to renegotiate or withdraw from contracts, let alone benefit from price spikes. The monopsony position of the contracting firm refers to a situation where it is the only buyer of the crops produced by the contract farmers. This gives the contracting company exclusive access to the crops of the contract farmers.

 

Supermarkets, food multinationals and small traders: the new cast of actors in contract farming

With the ongoing restructuring of the global food system, contract farming and a cast of new actors have come to the fore. On the one hand, corporate buyers are expanding their customer base and sourcing geographies. For these actors, contract farming arrangements are a way to ensure standardized and steady supply of agricultural commodities in globalized markets. Most notably, supermarkets make use of contract farming arrangements to supply high quality and standardized vegetables and fruits to consumers around the world. Even though smallholders who are able to comply with the standards set by supermarkets tend to benefit from supermarket contracts, poorer farming households tend to benefit less and may even be excluded from such arrangements altogether.

On the other hand, specialist traders and local procurers increasingly use contract farming (both formally and informally, i.e. with and without written contracts) to source directly from smallholders or act on commission as intermediaries between smallholders and agribusinesses. In the absence of government support, these intermediaries may take on a seemingly developmental role by offering informal extension services, providing road infrastructure and loading necessary materials and machineries to smallholders.

 

Agency and resistance

Despite the uneven contribution of contract farming to rural development and productive upgrading for small scale producers and agricultural sectors of the Global South, political economy studies highlight that smallholders are not passive victims of corporate buyers and merchants (whether large or small), but often resist and challenge the contract farming relation. This may take the form of overt resistance through protests and strikes, but also of informal and often hidden strategies that take the form of everyday struggles. For example, oil palm contract farmers in the Philippines have reacted to a lopsided contract, unsustainable levels of indebtedness, and the risk of losing their land by side-selling their produce to other agribusinesses, refusing to harvest, or burning oil palm trees. Tobacco contract farmers in Zimbabwe have responded by switching to other crops or diversifying their sources of finance. However, both cases show that contract farmers’ agency and resistance is limited by available resources and alternatives.

 

Towards a new research agenda

Over the past three decades, political economy studies have contributed to a much better understanding of the differentiated impact of contract farming in the Global South. Yet, important questions remain. For example about the interface of contract farming and changes in land tenure; the prevalence of unpaid household labor and the exploitation of hired labor among small-scale producers; contract farming as a form of extractivism (of the resources and labor contained in the commodity); and the ecological burden of the expansion and intensification of agriculture associated with contract farming. To move towards this new contract farming research agenda, we have founded the Contract Farming Initiative, a network that brings together a diverse group of critical contract farming scholars and activists. The initiative is geared to support cross-country analyses of contract farming schemes. As one of our first tasks, we are mapping contract farming arrangements in the Global South to get an overview of where contract farming scholarship is concentrated and where more research is needed. We warmly invite other scholars to contribute to this project.

As part of our activities this year, we will host a panel at the EADI CEsA General Conference 2023 to bring together scholars from different geographies and critical perspectives to discuss contract farming’s potential for rural development by focusing on dynamics of financialization, resistance from smallholders, social differentiation as both a cause and outcome, and labor exploitation dynamics.

This article was first published on EADI’s blog, Debating Development Research.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Caroline Hambloch (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Mark Vicol (Assistant Professor, Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University) and Helena Pérez Niño (Assistant Professor, International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague) are co-editors of the recent special issue in the Journal of Agrarian Change The Political Economy of Contract Farming: Emerging Insights and Changing Dynamics (January, 2022), and co-founders of the Contract Farming Initiative research network.

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India’s farm ordinances: fuelling a famine

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India’s countless farmers have rallied together en masse over the past few months to protest farm ordinances imposed by the Indian government. These ordinances may have severe implications for agriculture in India, including reduced state support for agriculture, the increased domination of corporate interests, and a threat to food security, land rights, and livelihoods of the farmers. The intersection of this development with already tenuous conditions may fuel a famine and further increase vulnerability of the agrarian classes, writes Karishma Shelar.

Editor GoI Monitor/Flickr

Starting late November 2020, millions of farmers have marched to and gathered on the outskirts of New Delhi, India’s capital, where they have been met with water cannons of the riot police, barricades, tear gas and lathi charges (the police-led beating of protesters with clubs). Defying COVID-19 restrictions and the bitter cold, the farmers are protesting newly passed national government farm ordinances[1] that seek to dismantle former regulations and legislations protecting the farmers from laissez-faire price and purchase mechanisms. This blog attempts to break down why the ordinances will escalate in a famine-like disaster while discussing the debt-cum-groundwater crisis in the state of Punjab which lies at the heart of the ongoing protests.

Paving the way for corporate farming

Simply put, the farm ordinances, if passed, pave the way for full-fledged corporatisation of India’s agricultural sector through free market price mechanisms and the eventual withdrawal of all forms of state support for agriculture. This spells disaster for nearly 60% of India’s households directly or indirectly relying on the agricultural sector for jobs or survival, of whom 86% are small and marginal landholders (holding plots of land of less than two hectares).

The farm ordinances can have three devastating impacts:

  1. It is a step towards disassembling mandis (state-regulated marketplaces where agricultural produce is traded) to make room for agro-business-driven open market trading.

The mandis are not flawless systems of trade. They are limited in number and geographically favourable to certain regions and class groups. Nevertheless, these are important systems of price discovery and signalling. The mandis are supposed to assure farmers a minimum support price (MSP) declared by the state for their produce. What is required of the government, then, is to strengthen and expand procurement through the mandis and to legalise MSP than abolish the system and shrug off its responsibilities.

  1. No legal assurance of the MSP in the ordinances leaves the farmers vulnerable to the whims and fancies of agro-businesses and other private players.

Such firms are more concerned about making profit than ensuring accessible and affordable food to the public. While the ordinances allow for farmers to enter pre-determined contract farming arrangements with private entities, the former’s financial precarity and no protection against potential discrepancies on part of the latter compromises the farmers’ bargaining power.

In addition, over the past three decades, the increased privatisation of agricultural inputs has resulted in a rise in input costs that has now spiralled into a debt crisis for agrarian households. Private entities with their enormous financial capacity will have free reign to dictate the terms of exchange, pricing, type of produce and inputs, enslaving the farmers to market dictates and furthering the debt crisis in the country. A recent report also suggests that 45–60% of India’s rural households are unable to meet their daily nutritional requirements. Securing the interests of private players in agriculture will only escalate a famine-like crisis in the country.

  1. The ordinances allow for the unregulated storage of harvests, with limited regulation thereof by the state except in the case of extraordinary circumstances such as war, famine, or excessive price increases (exceeding 100%).

This move is aimed at providing private entities freedom to stockpile and control the storage and distribution of harvests. It threatens food and nutrition security to millions of people and particularly those dependent on one of the largest state-run public distribution systems (PDS) in the world. Under the National Food Security Act of India (GoI, 2013), 65% of the households (or around 800 million people in India) are legally assured a right to food at subsidised rates from the PDS and through welfare programmes such as the Integrated Child Development Services and the Mid-Day Meal Scheme.

Additionally, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is legally mandated to maintain a central pool for procuring, storage, transportation and maintenance of food stocks in the country to which the mandi system and the PDS are closely linked. Besides, as per the Government of India’s estimates, the PDS supported food security for 750 million people during the COVID-19 lockdown (PIB, 2020). The ordinances indicate the intent of the government to downscale the role of the FCI and the PDS by promoting open-market food procurement, thereby dismantling the existing state structures that ensure nutrition security.

Punjab: a case in point

The state of Punjab is one of the major benefactors of the state-based system of procurement through the MSP. In the 2019-20 agricultural year, it contributed 28% and 21.5% of the total wheat and rice produced in the country to the central pool of procurement (FCI, 2020b, 2020a). Therefore, while the farm ordinances are being opposed by farmer unions across the country, the Punjab farmers have become the face of the protests around New Delhi.

It must be noted that Punjab was one of the leading states to adopt the assemblages of Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, which brought about prosperity to farm households in Punjab and self-sufficiency from food imports to India. However, this dramatically shifted the traditional cropping patterns of the state. In 1966, rice occupied around 5.2 million hectares (MHa) of land in Punjab (Mann, 2017), spiking to 23.39 MHa by 2012 and displacing other food crops that occupied over 50% of Punjab’s area under cultivation in the pre-Green Revolution period to around just 10% in 2012. Over time, the ecological impact of the Green Revolution has become visible in the form of deteriorating groundwater tables and soil quality that have led to stagnating production levels (Sarkar and Das, 2014).

The period also witnessed the average debt per cultivator household in Punjab increase to INR 216,524 in 2014–15 from INR 7,125 (USD 97.21) in 1991–92 (NSSO, 1998; GoI, 2014). Literature on the agrarian crisis in Punjab also acknowledges an increase in landlessness, with small and marginal farmers resorting to wage labour and forced to sell their land and other assets to pay off. Often, the income earned from wage labour is so meagre that it becomes impossible to pay off incurred debts. The unremunerative nature of agriculture further impoverishes households when they are forced to take on a debt to meet social obligations and cover health-related expenses(Padhi, 2009; Singh and Bhogal, 2020).

While it must be acknowledged that the agrarian dynamics of caste, class and gender differ greatly across geographies in India and also in Punjab, the current farmer protests mirror the larger agro-ecological crisis that has penetrated the country. The farm ordinances will only aggravate indebtedness, escalate land degradation, open the floodgates for corporate landgrabbing, and further deteriorate the socio-economic situation of the landless.

References

FCI (2020a) ‘Statewise Procurement of Rice for RMS 2019-20’. Food Corporation of India. Available at: https://fci.gov.in/app/webroot/upload/Procurement/Statewise%20Procurement%20of%20Rice(KMS%202019-20)_56.pdf (Accessed: 10 October 2020).

FCI (2020b) ‘Statewise Procurement of Wheat for RMS 2019-20’. Food Corporation of India. Available at: https://fci.gov.in/app/webroot/upload/Procurement/Statewise%20Procurement%20of%20wheat_57.pdf (Accessed: 10 October 2020).

GoI (2013) The National Food Security Act, 2013. Available at: http://www.egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2013/E_29_2013_429.pdf (Accessed: 12 October 2020).

GoI (2014) Key Indicators of Debt and Investment in India – NSS 70th Round 2013. New Delhi, India: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation – National Sample Survey Office, Government of India. Available at: http://www.mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/KI_70_18.2_19dec14.pdf (Accessed: 10 May 2020).

Mann, R. S. (2017) ‘Cropping Pattern in Punjab (1966–67 to 2014–15)’, Economic and Political Weekly. Economic and Political Weekly.

NSSO (1998) ‘Debt and Investment Survey: NSS Forty Eight Round (January – December 1992)’. National Sample Survey Organisation, Department of Statistics, Government of India. Available at: http://mospi.nic.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/419_final.pdf (Accessed: 12 July 2020).

Padhi, R. (2009) ‘On Women Surviving Farmer Suicides in Punjab’, Economic & Political Weekly, 44(19), pp. 53–59.

PIB (2020) ‘Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana Phase-I: April 2020 to June 2020’. Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, Government of India. Available at: https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1643542 (Accessed: 5 December 2020).

Sarkar, A. and Das, A. (2014) ‘Groundwater Irrigation-Electricity-Crop Diversification Nexus in Punjab: Trends, Turning Points, and Policy Initiatives’, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(52), pp. 64–73. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24481208 (Accessed: 10 October 2020).

Singh, S. and Bhogal, S. (2020) ‘Punjab’s Agricultural Labourers in Transition’, Economic and Political Weekly. Economic and Political Weekly.

[1] These are the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Ordinance of 2020, the Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Ordinance of 2020, and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the authors:

Karishma Shelar has recently graduated with a MA in Development Studies from the ISS, part of Erasmus University. Her dissertation focused on the agro-ecological crisis in rural India and investigated the interlinkages between agro-ecology and indebtedness at the level of the state, agro-businesses, and households.

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

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Seeds of resistance: Palestinian farmers fight against annexation and pandemic

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Olives in the hand of an old woman

The violent Israeli encroachment and annexation of Palestinian land is compromising the future of the West Bank and putting its residents in an extremely vulnerable position. Palestinians are resisting both annexation and the Covid-19 pandemic by returning to their land and cultivating it, with the support of social justice movements. A concrete example of their contribution to Palestine’s rich agrarian heritage is a seed bank, whose hardy indigenous seeds are feeding people in the short term and protecting the climate and defending territory for generations to come.

Olives in the hand of an old woman
Image Credit: Salena Tramel

It has not been an easy year for Palestinians, if there ever was such a thing. With the turn of a new decade in January, the U.S. administration unveiled the paradoxically branded calling for Israel to unilaterally annex about a third of the West Bank. Then the coronavirus slipped through the checkpoints into Bethlehem in March, sending millions of Palestinians into lockdown. And in April, Israel formed a unity government with an eye on the immediate annexation of the Jordan Valley in direct violation of international law.

The land grab is set to be pushed through this month, and many Palestinians worry that it could go largely unnoticed as the world’s attention is focused squarely on defeating the Covid-19 pandemic and curbing its economic fallout.

Palestine is often presented as an anomaly in global politics. Apologists of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories have been able to effectively present a narrative of exceptionalism by emphasising the relatively small size of this hotly contested corner of the Mediterranean, insisting that there are irreconcilable religious divisions. The fight against Covid-19 points to similar dynamics as the Israeli government has received lavish praise for its response to the pandemic within its own borders while letting it spill over into the occupied territories essentially unchecked.

In the context of crisis that has recently been compounded by the looming annexation plan and the health threats presented by the pandemic, social justice movements in the agricultural sector have elevated their struggles to new levels. Key among these endeavours are the protection of natural resources such as land, water, and seeds, as well as the ongoing struggle for the recognition of multiple forms of Palestinian sovereignty.

“Our response to the coronavirus pandemic has been to urge our people to go back to their lands and cultivate,” said Amal Abbas* of the Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC), a small-scale food producers’ movement representing some 20,000 peasant farmers and fishers in the West Bank and Gaza. This Palestinian version of sheltering in place mirrors UAWC’s broader strategy of resisting occupation and annexation, work that it has been doing since 1986.

Settler colonialism, the invasive process that seeks to replace an indigenous population with an external one, has its own Kafkaesque set of rules upholding it in the Israeli legal system. An important example of this is a law that stipulates that if land is not worked for three years, it automatically becomes [Israeli] state land. The Israeli military has gone to great lengths to fold as much “idle” Palestinian land as possible into the architecture of the state. This law is used in part to justify the establishment and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements by means of violent evictions, home demolitions, the confiscation of cultivated agricultural land, and the separation wall.

Palestinian human rights defenders are working to flip this narrative and the overarching political project it sustains on its head. Farmers and rural workers in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip—just like anywhere else—have been longstanding agents of social change, and for this reason are among the most targeted sectors of Palestinian society.

This slow form of violent encroachment, together with the fast-tracked one of annexation that is on the Israeli parliamentary table with strong U.S. support, puts the future of the West Bank and its residents in an extremely vulnerable position. “The Israeli military has been taking advantage of our current emergency situation and accelerating its actions,” offered Amal.

Some of the most egregious actions taken by Israeli authorities in the current context of pandemic have occurred in the Jordan Valley, which is precisely the area they seek to annex. This area already falls under the classification of Area C, meaning that it is part of the more than 60% of the West Bank that is under full Israeli civilian and military control. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Area C is rich in natural resources such as underground water and fertile growing land. Not only is the Jordan Valley the unequivocal agricultural jewel of Area C, but it is also a strategic border with Jordan and a gateway to the Arab countries of the greater Levant.

Public services are in short supply for the Jordan Valley’s majority Bedouin population. That is why movements of farmers and workers like UAWC are filling that gap, providing basic services like water, sanitation, education, seeds, food, and nutrition. Even these services face relentless and aggressive opposition. For instance in late March, the Israeli military destroyed an emergency coronavirus field clinic that Palestinians were in the process of erecting in the northern Jordan Valley.

Despite these threats, UAWC and other Palestinian grassroots organisations visit elderly people and pregnant women in mobile clinics, distribute educational and protective supplies, and construct rooftop and urban gardens across diverse communities. This coronavirus crisis response work has largely been successful because it is a reflection of the kind of work Palestinian social movements continually engage in throughout the ongoing crises that occur under military occupation.

“Some of the best work that we are doing to fight off the virus and resist the annexation is through our seed bank,” said Amal. UAWC has maintained a seed bank since 2003; in it they safeguard rare heirloom Palestinian seeds that have been carefully passed down from one generation to the next. These seeds and the food sources they produce have a multiplicity of purposes. “Not only do our indigenous seeds make it easier to return to our land and protect it through cultivation,” Amal explained, “they hardly use any water and shield us from climate change.” She added: “And with so many still locked down because of Covid-19, continuous access to seeds allows people to feed their families and neighbours when it is unsafe to access food via the marketplace.”

UAWC insists on the importance of internationalism and solidarity in normalising the plight of the Palestinian small-scale food producers it represents. It is a member of the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, which has taken a strong stand against colonialism and corporate control of agriculture and is active in 81 countries. Maintaining that important political relationship has allowed Palestinian activists the opportunity to host learning exchanges in their territories and also participate in those that take place abroad.

“Together with La Vía Campesina, we are using this opportunity to prove to the whole world that the global health care and food systems are not working and put forth our solution of agroecology as an alternative to the neoliberal model,” Amal explained.

Our contributions to the food sovereignty movement as Palestinians can help people understand that the occupation is about control over natural resources just like most other land grabs – Amal

Certainly, the militarised Israeli conquest of Palestinian territory has its own history, but it is also indicative of settler colonial processes that have taken place elsewhere, such as in the Americas, Australia, and South Africa. As this next phase of annexation plays out in the West Bank, against the distracting backdrop of the pandemic, these connections are critical. Far from an anomaly of the global politics of natural resources, Palestine has encapsulated them in a microcosm.

* Name has been changed to maintain confidentiality

This article was originally published on Open Democracy and has been reposted with permission of the author.

About the author:

Salena TramelSalena Fay Tramel is a journalist and PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, where her work is centered on the intersections of resource grabs, climate change mitigation, and the intertwining of (trans)national agrarian/social justice movements.

EADI/ISS Series | Digitalizing agriculture in Africa: promises and risks of an emerging trend by Fabio Gatti and Oane Visser

Posted on 6 min read

The potential of the digitalization of agriculture in Africa to contribute to food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability agendas is being increasingly claimed by international development actors, and reflects in growing investments in digital technologies that are supposed to help small-scale farmers to ‘upgrade’ the way they farm. However, these technologies should not be considered panaceas from the get-go and require critical scrutiny to ensure that they will benefit who need it the most. There is a strong need for independent and in-depth social science research able to go beyond the surface of international donors and policy makers’ discourses and assess the effectiveness ‘on the ground’ of such new and greatly emphasized developing trend.

Drones used to map the boundaries of fields and monitor plant health, ground sensors to measure soil moisture levels, air temperature and humidity to prevent crop diseases, digital apps to provide farmers with localized weather forecasts, market price information and agricultural advice—these are just some examples of an emerging rural development trend called digital agriculture.

Assuming different guises (‘digital agriculture’, ‘smart farming’, ‘climate-smart agriculture’, ‘precision agriculture’), digital technologies and ICTs have started to penetrate the agricultural sector in the Global South in the past few years. Africa, with more than 60% of the population employed in the rural sector and relatively low agricultural yields, has become the main target of this ‘development’ strategy. For some, this is ‘the new Green Revolution’, an opportunity which Africa, having failed to seize before, cannot afford to miss this time.

These technologies, however, are not without concerns and limitations. Our ongoing research on digital agriculture in Africa draws out some of the hidden dimensions of the digitalization agenda, showing that we need to be aware of the risk that digital agriculture – when implemented without critical debate – might primarily benefit tech companies and multinational input providers, rather than smallholders or the environment. In the next section, therefore, the purported benefits of digital agriculture are discussed, along with some concerns.

Drone flying above beautiful landscape with vineyards

A triple-win strategy

Most proponents of digitalization in agriculture—governments, international donors, development agencies, and high-tech companies—convey the idea that it represents a triple-win solution which could be used to ‘feed’ a rapidly growing population while at the same time reducing rural poverty levels and mitigating the environmental impact of farming.

In terms of food security, digital and mobile technologies promise to deliver better yields and reduced losses arising from bad crop management. The rural poor will purportedly benefit from better market integration from being able to sell their product at higher prices, for example by being able to guarantee the traceability and origin of the product or to reduce the time between crop harvesting and selling, therefore enabling a shift toward more perishable (and profitable) crops (Asad 2016). In addition, the environment would benefit from a reduction in the use of pesticides and wasteful irrigation practices. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that enable achieving such promises remain a ‘black box’.

An expanding market

Digital agriculture seems to be first of all an appealing business opportunity for companies. According to some recent estimations, the market for precision and digital farming products has been growing at 12% per year and is expected to reach €10 billion by 2025. ‘Big tech’ players like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba, as well as big agribusiness companies like Bayer, Syngenta and John Deere have started to move into the market by making preliminary acquisitions, forging partnerships, and developing new products. In 2013, for example, Monsanto bought the Climate Corporation, a data analytics company specialized in weather forecasting technologies, for US$1.1 million.

Food security

The most intuitive effect of digital innovations in agriculture is an increased food production that would boost farmers’ income. A better reach of agricultural extension services and real-time information (for example regarding short-term weather conditions or market prices), combined with improved access to high-quality inputs and the reduction of losses due to unexpected weather events or bad pest management, are believed to allow small farmers to improve agricultural output both in terms of quantity and quality. Post-harvest losses could also be reduced with the improved monitoring of storage conditions. Additionally, an increasing ability of smallholder farmers to sell to larger markets by allowing buyers to track crops to source (certification and provenance) would allow countries and governments to achieve food security targets due to the much wider availability of lower-cost and more nutritious food products.

Poverty reduction

In mainstream discourses, smallholder farmers are considered the main target of such digital innovation policies. In terms of poverty reduction, easier access to credit and improved traceability of agricultural products, together with better integration into the supply value chain, are believed to eventually increase selling prices and consequently boost smallholder income, therefore contributing to lifting people out of rural poverty. Aker et al. (2016) found, however, that there is limited evidence to support this claim and that farmers do not always manage to sell their products at higher prices when making use of digital market information systems.

In order to make the services economically affordable, one of the solutions offered resides in the ‘Facebook model’: a digital platform collects farmers’ data and gets revenues from using and/or selling this data. In exchange, the users don’t pay (see for example this post). In this way data becomes the ‘exchange good’ with which the farmer effectively pays for the services provided by the company. This opens questions related to data ownership and which arrangements can be put in place to protect farmers’ sensitive data.

Sustainability

In the end, market and economic considerations seem to prevail, so far, over concerns about sustainability and environmental change. A recent report by the Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in Wageningen states that “hard evidence of the impact of [such innovations] on climate resilience has yet to emerge”. The main climate change-related use case so far seems to be the highly localized weather forecasts, combined with the fact that “by increasing their productivity, [they] can help farmers earn additional income needed to invest in adapting to climate change”. Similarly, for the FAO “the effectiveness of these tools for advancing sustainability goals is unknown”. What are the real implications for the environment, then?

Other challenges and obstacles

From a socio-cultural point of view, there are other aspects that need to be taken into account. Agricultural knowledge transfer is a highly social process based on ‘on-field’ experience: human-to-human interaction might not be easily reduced to blocks of data analyzed by external algorithms (see for example Stone 2010). Also, what Friends of the Earth in a recent position paper calls the ‘erosion of tacit knowledge’ must not be overlooked: the risk is that delegating all farm-management decisions to an ‘expert app’ would reduce farmers’ autonomy and lock them into a dependency relationship with data analytics companies. Last, the lack of infrastructure, the ‘digital divide’ between urban and rural areas, and the high costs of telecommunication services in some countries represent obstacles which should be overcome before digital agriculture would be able to deliver the promised benefits for the rural poor.

In conclusion, the potential of the digitalization of agriculture in Africa to contribute food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability agendas still requires a proper assessment based on empirical evidence. More research is required in order to go beyond initial overoptimistic accounts and to facilitate the bridging of local barriers and yet unknown or unexpected effects.

This article is part of a series launched by the EADI (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) and the ISS in preparation for the 2020 EADI/ISS General Conference “Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice”. It was also published on the EADI blog.

About the authors:

photo_cvFabio Gatti is a graduate from the Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies (AFES) major at the International Institute for Social Studies (ISS). Together with dr. Oane Visser, he is currently investigating the impact of digital innovations on smallholder agriculture in Africa.

Foto-OaneVisser-Balkon-1[1]Oane Visser (associate professor, Political Ecology research group, ISS) leads an international Toyota Foundation-funded research project on the socio-economic effects of – and responses to – big data and digitalization in agriculture.

 

Fleeing the farms: the devastating effect of conflict on youth involvement in small-scale agriculture in Pakistan by Hassan Turi

Posted on 5 min read

[Ελληνική έκδοση παρακάτω]

Rural youth unemployment is a serious crisis facing countries of the Global South. Small-scale agriculture, which has long been the single biggest employer of the developing world, has the potential to be ecologically rational, socially just, and capable of absorbing unemployed youth. However, contemporary agrarian research has increasingly found that young people are not attracted to agricultural work. While a global urbanization trend is leading to exodus from rural areas, Hassan Turi shows the devastating impact of protracted regional and local conflicts on agricultural practices in Kurram District in Pakistan that further diminish the youth’s willingness to engage in small-scale agriculture.

With a global land rush triggered by rising food prices, the consolidation of large-scale industrial agriculture is not only dispossessing people from their lands, but also bringing energy-intensive and climate-warming practices. Small-scale agriculture, which has long been the single biggest employer of the developing world, has the potential to be ecologically rational, socially just, and capable of absorbing unemployed youth. However, contemporary agrarian research has increasingly found that young people are not attracted to agricultural work. Understanding the causes behind youth flight and unemployment is a key priority for developing a long-term youth policy and strengthening the agricultural economy.

According to a 2018 UNDP report, Pakistan currently has the largest youth population in the world, with 64% of the population less than 30 years of age. While there is a labour shortage in Pakistan and elsewhere, small-scale agriculture is no longer en vogue as youths leave their families to pursue careers in cities. But unlike the rest of Pakistan, where rural labour is migrating to cities, the rural youth from Kurram is increasingly migrating outside of Pakistan and becoming vulnerable to wider geopolitical conflicts. The conflict in the region has played a significant role in shaping Pakistan’s agricultural landscape, driving youths away from farms and changing agriculture in a way that makes it unattractive.

Conflict on the frontier

The village of Bilayamin, where I conducted my fieldwork, is located in the Kurram District of Khyber Pakthunkhwa Province that borders Afghanistan. This region has been affected by severe violence for decades. An ugly proxy war with the US lasting for years and a wider regional war have had a profound impact on people’s livelihoods, especially on agriculture, which had been the primary source of income for decades.

Before, most households employed family labour for agriculture, except during peak stages of farming. These patterns changed after the arrival of Afghan refugees in the 1980s (from the first Afghan war) to refugee camps in Kurram. With the launch of the War on Terror in 2001 and subsequent conflict in Kurram, farming practices took another hit. Land remained uncultivated during the war, and many people died, suffered injuries, or were displaced. Farmers could not bring their products to markets or buy new farming inputs. The conflict also forced many people, especially the youth, to flee from the villages in search of safety and better livelihoods. Those remaining behind were less interested in farming, seeking jobs related to their education, but without much success. Despite the sharp need for agricultural labour, young people were massively un- or underemployed and preferred to leave the country as migrant workers abroad.

Effects on farming practices

This labour shortage pushed farmers to change cropping patterns. Many have stopped growing rice. More farmers are planting plums and apricot orchards or rearing livestock. The proliferation of wild boars has stopped the cultivation of groundnuts and crops like rice or beans near the riverbanks and mountains. Young farmers are now tasked by their families with guarding their crops, often staying awake all night for the last two months of the harvest. In addition, there is an emerging trend of wage labour hired daily from villages with smaller landholdings. Remittances have also acquired increasing importance. Households with income from remittances are successfully reproducing themselves by spending money on better farming inputs and hiring labour on time. Families without remittance incomes are either decreasing the cultivation of labour-intensive crops or involving more household members to bring prices down.

Changing preferences

Farming in Kurram, as in many places in the world, used to be a familial responsibility, but preferences have changed. Children traditionally would be involved in farming practices from an early age. Accompanying the adults to farms, children would fetch water, tea, food, and farming tools when the elders are busy. They would graze cattle and cut firewood or complete tasks reserved for children, such as weeding onions. Research suggests that exposure from an early age is crucial to engage interest in farming. But rural children who go to school are not exposed to these practices and consequently begin to lose interest in farming.

After the conflict in Kurram, households foisted more farming responsibilities onto those youths who remained in the region to compensate for labour shortages due to the war. For instance, before the conflict, children were not involved in difficult labour. However, this changed after the conflict, which seems to create an aversion for farming as the youth feels overworked. Most who are still engaged in farming see it as a transitory phase before securing a future in the cities. Yet some continue to wait and never make it to the cities, wondering if this temporary phase will ever end and despising the growing burden placed on them.

The effects of the multiple conflicts facing the Kurram District in Pakistan have been profound, exacerbating a global move away from small-scale agriculture towards cities or towards industrial agriculture. Small-scale agriculture, which can address the growing youth unemployment problem, needs to be made more attractive for the youth, who should see it as a viable enterprise instead of as a familial responsibility.

This is a shortened and edited version of an article that was originally published by Jamhoor.

About the author:

Sibth ul Hassan Turi is an Orange Knowledge Programme Fellow who studies at the ISS in 2016/2017. He comes from the Kurram district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and is a member of the Awami Workers Party Islamabad/Rawalpindi.

Εγκαταλείποντας τη γη: οι καταστροφικές συνέπειες του πολέμου στην συμμετοχή των νέων στην καλλιέργεια γης στο Πακιστάν του άρθρου τoυ Hassan Turi 

Τα υψηλά ποσοστά ανεργίας των νέων που ζουν στην περιφέρεια, αποτελούν ένα από τα ουσιαστικότερα προβλήματα που αντιμετωπίζουν οι χώρες του Παγκόσμιου Νότου. Η καλλιέργεια μικρών εκτάσεων γης, η οποία αποτελούσα και συνεχίζει να αποτελεί τον μεγαλύτερο παροχέας εργασίας των αναπτυσσόμενων χωρών , έχει μια δυναμική προοπτική στο να παράγει με οικολογικό τρόπο, κοινωνικά μη-άδικο και ικανό να απορροφά μεγάλο πληθυσμό αναξιοποίητου, νέου σε ηλικία, ανθρωπίνου δυναμικού που αντιμετωπίζει την ανεργία στην περιφέρεια. Παρόλο, που η σύγχρονη έρευνα στον τομέα της γεωργίας και της αναπτυξιακής οικονομικής υποδεικνύει την ολοένα και μειούμενη τάση των νέων να ασχολούνται με την καλλιέργεια γης. Την ίδια ώρα που ένα παγκόσμια -κινούμενο από τις δυνάμεις του καπιταλισμού- κύμα αστικοποίησής προωθεί την ‘’μεγάλη έξοδο’’ από την περιφέρεια στα αστικά κέντρα , Ο Hassan Turi μνημονεύει σε αυτό το άρθρο το καταστροφικό πλήγμα των παρατεταμένων περιφερειακών και τοπικών συγκρούσεων στις γεωργικές εργασίες στην περιοχή Kurram του Πακιστάν. Αυτές οι συγκρούσεις ασκούν περαιτέρω πιέσεις και  μειώνουν την προθυμία των νέων να ασχοληθούν με τη μικρής-κλίμακας γεωργία.

Με μια παγκόσμια τάση προσφυγής στην καλλιέργεια γης, που έχει προκληθεί  από την άνοδο των τιμών των τροφίμων και την ενοποίηση της βιομηχανικής γεωργίας μεγάλης κλίμακας , που όχι μόνο εκτοπίζει τους ανθρώπους από τη γη τους, αλλά οδηγεί  επίσης στην υιοθέτηση πρακτικών αυξημένης εντάσεως-ενέργειας και πρακτικών, που οδηγούν στην περεταίρω επιδείνωση του φαινομένου της υπερθέρμανσης του πλανήτη. Η γεωργία μικρής κλίμακας, που εδώ και πολλά χρόνια είναι ο μοναδικός και ο  μεγαλύτερος εργοδότης του αναπτυσσόμενου κόσμου, έχει τη δυνατότητα να παρέχει μια ορθολογικά οικολογική παραγωγή αγαθών, κοινωνικά δίκαιη και ικανή να απορροφήσει άνεργους -νέους που ζουν στην περιφέρεια- και είναι δύσκολο να βρούνε εργασία σε άλλους τομείς. Ωστόσο, η σύγχρονες έρευνες έχουν διαπιστώσει  ότι όλο και περισσότερο ότι οι νέοι δεν θεωρούν τη γεωργική εργασία ως μια   προτιμητέα εναλλακτική μορφή απασχόλησης. Η κατανόηση των αιτίων πίσω από τη ‘’φυγή των νέων’’ και την  ‘νεανική’ ανεργία αποτελεί βασική προτεραιότητα για την ανάπτυξη μιας μακροπρόθεσμης πολιτικής για τη νεολαία και την ενίσχυση της γεωργικής οικονομίας.

Σύμφωνα με μια έκθεση του UNDP του 2018, το Πακιστάν έχει τον μεγαλύτερο πληθυσμό νέων στον κόσμο, με το 64% του πληθυσμού να σε έχει ηλικία μικρότερη των 30 ετών. Ενώ υπάρχει έλλειψη εργατικού δυναμικού στο Πακιστάν και αλλού, η γεωργία μικρής κλίμακας δεν αξιοποιείται πλέον, καθώς οι νέοι αφήνουν τις οικογένειές τους για να αναζητήσουν δουλειά στα κέντρα των πόλεων. Αλλά σε αντίθεση με το υπόλοιπο Πακιστάν, όπου η αγροτιά μεταναστεύει σε πόλεις, οι νέοι που είναι υποψήφιοι εργάτες γης από το Kurram, μεταναστεύουν όλο και περισσότερο έξω από το Πακιστάν και γίνονται ευάλωτοι σε ευρύτερες γεωπολιτικές συγκρούσεις. Η σύγκρουση στην περιοχή έχει διαδραματίσει σημαντικό ρόλο στη διαμόρφωση του γεωργικού τοπίου και της αγοράς γεωργικής εργασίας του Πακιστάν, στην απομάκρυνση των νέων από τα αγροκτήματα και στην αλλαγή της γεωργίας με τρόπο που την καθιστά πλέον μη ελκυστική εργασία.

Σύγκρουση στα σύνορα

Το χωριό Bilayamin, όπου διεξήγαγα την έρευνα μου για την πτυχιακή εργασία, βρίσκεται στην περιοχή Kurram της επαρχίας Khyber Pakthhwa που συνορεύει με το Αφγανιστάν. Αυτή η περιοχή έχει πληγεί από σοβαρά φαινόμενα βίας και συγκρούσεις εδώ και δεκαετίες. Ένας άσχημος  πόλεμος «δι’ αντιπροσώπων»  με τις ΗΠΑ που διήρκησε για χρόνια και ένας ευρύτερος περιφερειακός πόλεμος είχε σοβαρό αντίκτυπο στην επιβίωση των ανθρώπων, ειδικά στη γεωργία, η οποία ήταν η κύρια πηγή εισοδήματος εδώ και δεκαετίες.

Αρχικά, τα περισσότερα νοικοκυριά απασχολούσαν μέλη της οικογένειας στη γεωργία, εκτός από τις  θαλερές γεωργικές περιόδους. Αυτά τα μοτίβα συνηθειών άλλαξαν σταδιακά μετά την άφιξη των Αφγανών προσφύγων τη δεκαετία του 1980 (από τον πρώτο Αφγανικό πόλεμο) σε στρατόπεδα προσφύγων στο Kurram. Με την έναρξη του Πολέμου κατά της Τρομοκρατίας το 2001 και την επακόλουθη σύγκρουση στο Kurram, οι γεωργικές πρακτικές δέχτηκαν ένα ακόμη πλήγμα. Η γη παρέμεινε ακαλλιέργητη κατά τη διάρκεια του πολέμου και πολλοί άνθρωποι πέθαναν, υπέστησαν τραυματισμούς ή εκτοπίστηκαν. Οι αγρότες δεν μπορούσαν να διοχετεύσουν τα προϊόντα τους στις αγορές ή να αγοράσουν νέες γεωργικές εισροές. Η  πολεμική σύγκρουση ανάγκασε επίσης πολλούς ανθρώπους, ιδίως τους νέους, να εγκαταλείψουν τα χωριά αναζητώντας ασφάλεια και μια καλύτερη μοίρα. Όσοι έμειναν πίσω ενδιαφέρονταν λιγότερο για τη γεωργία, αναζητούσαν θέσεις εργασίας που σχετίζονται με την εκπαίδευσή τους, αλλά χωρίς μεγάλη επιτυχία. Παρά την αυξημένη  ζήτηση για γεωργική εργασία, η ανεργία των νέων ήταν υψηλή σε ποσοστιαίους όρους  ή οι νέοι υποαπασχολούνταν και προτιμούσαν να εγκαταλείψουν τη χώρα ως μετανάστες εργαζόμενοι στο εξωτερικό.

Επιδράσεις στις γεωργικές πρακτικές

Η έλλειψη εργασίας ώθησε τους αγρότες να αλλάξουν τα πρότυπα καλλιέργειας και τις ποικιλίες που καλλιεργούν. Πολλοί έχουν σταματήσει να καλλιεργούν ρύζι. Περισσότεροι αγρότες πλέον φυτεύουν δαμάσκηνα και οπωρώνες βερίκοκων ή εκτρέφουν ζώα. Ο πολλαπλασιασμός των αγριόχοιρων έχει εμποδίσει την καλλιέργεια αραχίδων και καλλιεργειών όπως ρύζι ή φασόλια κοντά στις όχθες του ποταμού και στα βουνά. Οι νέοι αγρότες έχουν τώρα επιφορτιστεί από τις οικογένειές τους με τη φύλαξη των καλλιεργειών τους, και συχνά μένουν ξύπνιοι όλη τη νύχτα τους τελευταίους δύο μήνες της συγκομιδής. Επιπλέον, υπάρχει μια αναδυόμενη τάση μισθωτής εργασίας με άτομα που προσλαμβάνονται καθημερινά από χωριά με μικρότερες εκτάσεις γης. Τα εμβάσματα έχουν αποκτήσει επίσης αυξανόμενη σημασία. Τα νοικοκυριά με εισόδημα από εμβάσματα αναπαράγονται επιτυχώς ξοδεύοντας χρήματα για καλύτερες γεωργικές εισροές και προσλαμβάνοντας εργασία την κατάλληλη περίοδο. Οι οικογένειες χωρίς εισόδημα από εμβάσματα, μειώνουν είτε την καλλιέργεια καλλιεργειών υψηλής έντασης εργασίας είτε εμπλέκουν περισσότερα μέλη του νοικοκυριού για μείωση των τιμών.

Αλλαγή προτιμήσεων

Η καλλιέργεια στο Kurram, όπως σε πολλά μέρη του κόσμου, αποτελούσε οικογενειακή ευθύνη, αλλά οι προτιμήσεις έχουν αλλάξει. Τα παιδιά παραδοσιακά εμπλέκονταν σε γεωργικές πρακτικές από μικρή ηλικία. Συνοδεύοντας τους ενήλικες σε αγροκτήματα, τα παιδιά συνήθιζαν να μαζεύουν νερό, τσάι, φαγητό και εργαλεία καλλιέργειας όταν οι ενήλικες ήταν απασχολημένοι. Επίσης, συνήθως θα έβοσκαν βοοειδή και θα ‘έκοβαν καυσόξυλα ή θα ολοκλήρωναν εργασίες που προορίζονται για παιδιά, όπως το ξεχορτάριασμα κρεμμυδιών. Οι έρευνες υποδεικνύουν, ότι η έκθεση των παιδιών  από μικρή ηλικία σε αγροτικές δραστηριότητες είναι εξαιρετικής  σημασίας παράγοντας που καθορίζει την ενασχόληση τους με τη γεωργία. Όμως τα παιδιά της υπαίθρου που πηγαίνουν στο σχολείο δεν εκτίθενται σε αυτές τις πρακτικές και κατά συνέπεια αρχίζουν να χάνουν το ενδιαφέρον τους για την αγροτική καλλιέργεια.

Μετά τη σύγκρουση στο Kurram, τα νοικοκυριά επιφορτίστηκαν με περισσότερες γεωργικές ευθύνες, εκείνους τους νέους που παρέμειναν στην περιοχή για να αντισταθμίσουν τις ελλείψεις εργατικού δυναμικού, λόγω του πολέμου. Για παράδειγμα, πριν από τη σύρραξη, τα παιδιά δεν συμμετείχαν σε επίμοχθη εργασία. Ωστόσο, αυτό άλλαξε μετά την  σύγκρουση, η οποία φαίνεται να δημιούργησε μια αποστροφή για τη γεωργία καθώς η νεολαία άρχισε να αισθάνεται ότι έχει δουλέψει υπερβολικά πολύ. Οι περισσότεροι που εξακολουθούν να ασχολούνται με τη γεωργία το βλέπουν ως μεταβατική φάση πριν ένα εξασφαλισμένο μέλλον  στις πόλεις. Ωστόσο, ορισμένοι συνεχίζουν να περιμένουν και να μην φτάνουν ποτέ στην ‘’γη της επαγγελίας’’ που γι’ αυτούς είναι η πόλη, και  αναρωτιούνται εάν αυτή η προσωρινή φάση θα τελειώσει ποτέ έχοντας  απαυδήσει από το αυξανόμενο βάρος που έχουν φορτωθεί στις πλάτες τους.

Τα αποτελέσματα των πολλαπλών συγκρούσεων που αντιμετωπίζει η περιοχή Kurram στο Πακιστάν είχαν ισχυρό αντίκτυπο στις ζωές αυτών των ανθρώπων, επιδεινώνοντας μια παγκόσμια απομάκρυνση από τη γεωργία μικρής κλίμακας προς τις πόλεις ή προς τη βιομηχανική γεωργία. Η γεωργία μικρής κλίμακας, η οποία μπορεί να αντιμετωπίσει το αυξανόμενο πρόβλημα της ανεργίας των νέων στις περιφέρειες, είναι  αναγκαίο να καταστεί πιο ελκυστική για τους νέους, οι οποίοι θα πρέπει να την αντιμετωπίσουν ως μια βιώσιμη επιχειρηματική δραστηριότητα ή εργασία, ως βιώσιμο τρόπο ζωής και όχι ως οικογενειακή ευθύνη.

 Το άρθρο αποτελεί συντομευμένη και τροποποιημένη έκδοση ενός άρθρου που δημοσιεύθηκε αρχικά στο Jamhoor.

Λίγα λόγια για το συγγραφέα του άρθρου:

Ο Sibth ul Hassan Turi είναι  υπότροφος του προγράμματος: Orange Knowledge Programme,  σπούδασε στο ISS το έτος 2016/2017. Κατάγεται από την περιφέρεια Kurram της Khyber Pakhtunkhwa και είναι μέλος του εργατικού κόμματος του Ισλαμαμπάντ (Awani Workers Party Islamabad/Rawalpindi).

Το άρθρο μεταφράστηκε από τη Χρυσάνθη Κούτρη, μεταπτυχιακή φοιτήτρια στο International Institute of Social Studies, με εξειδίκευση στα οικονομικά  της ανάπτυξης και ερευνητικά ενδιαφέροντα στο πεδίο: Children and Youth in Development.

 

 

EADI/ISS Series | Two faces of the automation revolution: impacts on working conditions of migrant labourers in the Dutch agri-food sector

Posted on 5 min read

by Tyler Williams, Oane Visser, Karin Astrid Siegmann and Petar Ivosevic

Rapid advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling production increases in the Dutch agri-food sector, but are also creating harsh working conditions as the sector remains dependent on manual labour, while implementing new technologies. To ensure better working conditions for migrants forming the majority of manual labourers in this sector, ‘worker-friendly’ implementation of new technologies is necessary to limit the negative effects of the automation revolution.

The ‘Threat’ of Automation?

Decades-old debates about the extent of job loss induced by the automation revolution were re-ignited by the seminal work of Frey and Osborne (2013), who suggested large numbers of jobs would be replaced by automation. Where jobs are not lost, automation impacts labour conditions as facilities are geared towards the optimal use of new technology. Novel ICTs offer possibilities to increase labour productivity and to free workers from harsh and repetitive tasks (OECD 2018). Yet they also enable high levels of remote, covert monitoring and measurement of work, often resulting in increased work pressure and the risk of turning workplaces into ‘electronic sweatshops’ (Fernie and Metcalf 1998).

Ever since Keynes (1930) warned about “technological unemployment” in his essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, tech innovations have been eliminating jobs across sectors (e.g., in manufacturing), while simultaneously leading to the creation of new types of work (e.g., machine engineers). However, the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ (Schwab 2016) currently taking place might differ from earlier ones: automation is accelerating, affecting a wider variety of jobs, and is now also penetrating sectors like agriculture. Likely candidates for new automation waves are ‘3D jobs’ (dirty, dangerous and demeaning) which are overrepresented in agriculture and often performed by migrant workers (manual mushroom picking, for example, which is physically demanding and carries myriad other risks like respiratory issues). Therefore, this sector – understudied in research on automation – deserves attention.

Farm Robots and Migrant Workers

‘Milking robots’, drones, and (semi-)automated tractors have appeared on farms in the U.S. and the EU. As the second largest exporter of agricultural products and the ‘Silicon Valley of Agriculture’ (Schultz 2017), the Netherlands is at the forefront of such innovations. Yet despite this position, Dutch agriculture still depends strongly on manual labour, as the complexity and variability of nature (crops, animals, soils, and weather) have hampered automation.

Technological innovation and the recourse to low-paid, flexible migrant labour in the Dutch agri-food sector both represent cost-saving responses to the increased market power by supermarkets (Distrifood 2019) and the financialisation of agriculture. A FNV (Federation of Dutch Trade Unions) representative asserted: “Employers see those people as machines […]. Employers need fingers, cheap fingers, if I may call it like that”[1].

However, an educated migrant workforce provides benefits to employers beyond ‘cheap fingers’. The majority of labour migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the largest group of migrant labour workers on Dutch soil (CBS 2019), hold a post-secondary education (Snel et al 2015: 524). As the Dutch are reluctant to do the low-paid 3D jobs, agriculture depends heavily on migrants from CEE countries, especially from Poland (Engbersen et al 2010). An estimated 30 percent of all CEE migrants in the Netherlands work in agri-food, contributing almost 2 billion euros to the country’s GDP in that sector (ABU 2018).

While technology can and does assist in and accelerate the harvesting process, this educated workforce can flexibly perform manifold tasks like identifying and communicating inconsistencies in products or processes to their supervisors, including plant illness, irregular production, etc. This makes them invaluable in improving agricultural production processes and output[2]. However, their working conditions remain precarious. Consequently, grasping the impact that technological innovations have on agriculture necessitates studying transnational labour.

To this end, ISS scholars – with the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) – initiated a research project titled ‘Technological change in the agro-food sector in the Netherlands: mapping the role and responses of CEE migrant workers’. So far, it has included interviews with organisations in the agri-food sector, trade unions, engineering/labour experts, and migrant workers; this formed the basis for the MA theses of Petar Ivosevic and Tyler Williams. First results were discussed during an ISS workshop with practitioners in December 2018, and a follow-up workshop will be held on 17 March 2020. In addition, two sessions on the topic will be organised at the 2020 EADI Conference taking place from 29 June to 2 July at the ISS.

Industry versus Workers

To date, the benefits of automation for industry and farm workers are highly unevenly distributed. For example, technologies such as (semi-)automated LED lighting allow for more crops to be grown indoors, accelerating crop growth and extending the growing season. This benefits the agricultural industry and supermarkets by leading to all-year production. It also initially improved agricultural labour conditions: workers received a more stable, year-round income and a reduction in time spent working outdoors in difficult weather conditions. However, these improvements also brought negative consequences for labourers. The workweek increased (from 40 to roughly 60 hours – occasionally 80 hours – per week), and smart LED-lighting technologies, sterile environments, and novel ways of conserving heat and humidity created harsher working conditions (cf. Pekkeriet 2019).

Moving Forward

 How can decent labour conditions for (migrant) farmworkers be ensured while further automation of agricultural workplaces takes place? First, further research involving (migrant) workers themselves, growers, and other practitioners is needed to inform policy. So far, policy debates on the future of agriculture have paid only scant attention to (migrant) workers and labour conditions. Farm labour ‘shortages’ in agriculture are often narrowly and one-sidedly discussed in terms of supposed ‘unwillingness’ to work in agriculture per se or the tendency of CEE migrants to return to their home countries where economic growth has picked up. Such a position ignores the harsh (and often insecure) working conditions or postulates them as a given. It strongly underestimates the (potential) role of ‘worker-friendly’ implementation of new technologies and decent labour conditions in shaping the quality (and attractiveness) of farm work. Support from Dutch labour unions – which have started to organise and include CEE migrant workers – could increase migrant workers’ voice. Insecure, dependent work arrangements, language problems, and fragmentation of the migrant workforce have thus far impeded migrants’ own collective action. Finally, food certifications in the Netherlands primarily target food safety and sustainability. Including social (labour-related) criteria would reward farms with sound labour conditions[3].

[1] FNV Representative. 18 June 2018, interviewed by Karin Astrid Siegmann and Petar Ivosevic.
[2] Municipality Westland Presentation, World Horticulture Centre, 19 February 2019.
[3] For instance, the pillar of fair food in the slow food manifesto includes respectful labour conditions.

This article is part of a series launched by the EADI (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) and the ISS in preparation for the 2020 EADI/ISS General Conference “Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice”. It was also published on the EADI blog.

Photo-Tyler-image1About the authors:

Tyler Williams recently completed the ISS MA Development Studies’ track in Migration and Diversity and co-organised the abovementioned workshop.

 

Foto-OaneVisser-Balkon-1[1]

Oane Visser (associate professor, Political Ecology research group, ISS) leads an international research project on the socio-economic effects of and responses to big data and automatization in agriculture.photo-KarinSiegmann-fromISSwebsite

 

Karin Astrid Siegmann is a Senior Lecturer in Labour and Gender Economics at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), studying how precarious workers challenge marginalization of their labour.Photo-Petar-image1

 

Petar Ivosevic graduated from the ISS MA program in Development Studies in 2018, with a major in Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies.

 

Food security, agricultural policies and economic growth through the eyes of Niek Koning by Dorothea Hilhorst

Posted on 3 min read

One of the pleasures of summertime is that I get to read some of the books that have piled up over the years and this is how I came to read Niek Koning’s monumental monograph on: ‘Food security, agricultural policies and economic growth: Long-term dynamics in the past, present and future’. For someone like me, who usually finds herself working around the immediacy of crises, disaster and displacement, the book gives me a solid reminder of how the critical moments of emergencies are interlinked with each other and emerge from global histories and contexts.

Food security is today increasingly linked to climate change but this book spells out how throughout history it is especially interlinked with agricultural policies and economic growth. If there is one lesson the book brings out, it is that policy matters! Good or bad policies make a crucial difference for whether people have or have not enough to eat to sustain themselves. Economics – to say it once more – is not a value-free science and requires clear policy goals and values behind them.

Niek Koning is driven by some pertinent questions, such as “Why has Asia surpassed Africa in economic development? Why have social reform experiments failed in Latin America? Why has communist China achieved miracle growth whereas the Soviet Union collapsed?” Unlike most authors that focus on such big questions, Koning does not provide a monocausal explanation (such as the absence or presence of a ‘Protestant’ ethic, the inclusivity of institutions or different leadership styles), but he puts together a framework that covers several aspects of world history. He starts with secular cycles and techno-institutional change. Looking through that lens, he zooms in on the fossil fuel revolution that has enabled modern economic growth and has entailed a demographic transition. He analyses how the socio-political fabric of societies, international power relations and changing political tides have induced different policy responses to the problems that were involved in modern growth, with vast consequences for both the fate of nations and global population growth. And yes, he also talks about what may happen when fossil fuels will be exhausted. A major message of the book is that agricultural policies have failed to ‘use’ the springboard that was created with the fossil fuel revolution to transform the global economy for a sustainable future.

This is not a book review and I am skipping some major parts of the book, showing how different ideologies and histories have created different outcomes. They are a good read – often more like a novel than an economic textbook – with among other a long conversation between Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx. Browsing through the chapters, one realises that indeed politics matter, and the political views of the author shine clearly through. In his view, supporting self-employed farmers are indispensable for obtaining and maintaining food security. Agricultural and industrial development going hand in hand would be an effective approach, coupled to more explicit pro-poor politics, including social safety nets. He is clearly opposing the neo-liberal trade models and analyzes how these are driven by self-interest of strong countries.

The book is not just an amazingly resourced piece of scholarly work, it is also in many ways a long essay. In the eyes of Koning, the impending exhaustion of fossil fuel create major risks to forge global food scarcity that will exacerbate the food insecurity of the poor. In his view, several things are needed to mitigate this threat. Claims on farmland for luxury foods and urbanization should be limited. New breakthroughs should make the economy less carbon-dependent to prevent a dramatic increase in the demand of the affluent for bio-energy and bio-materials. Biological and ICT-based innovations should overcome limits in land productivity. However, a vital overall condition is that global food and energy markets are stabilized to enable timely investment in innovations that enable poor countries to protect their farmers while securing economic growth. The propositions coming from the book may be agreeable or disagreeable, but coming from decades of deep scholarly work, they merit a lot of discussion.

Koning, N. (2017). Food security, agricultural policies and economic growth: Long-term dynamics in the past, present and future. Routledge.

 

Thea
About the author:

Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

She is a regular author for Bliss. Read all her posts here. 

 

 

Right-Wing Populism and Counter-Movements in Rural Europe by Natalia Mamonova

Posted on 6 min read

Right-wing populism has gained high levels of support among rural population in Europe. How could this happen and what are the solutions? Natalia Mamonova, of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, explains the causes of populism in the European countryside and shares some ideas on potential resistance and the building of alternatives to the regressive nationalist politics.

Right-wing populism can be found right across Europe. Today, every third European government consists of or depends on a populist party. Not for the first time, populist movements have been spreading across this continent, but the current wave is, perhaps, the most significant one since the end of World War II. The contemporary right-wing populists have a strong rural constituency, as was evident by recent elections and referenda, where 53% of British farmers voted in favour of Brexit, for example. The ‘Law and Justice’ party enjoys substantial support from Polish countrymen for its aggressive nationalism and strict Catholicism. French far-right presidential contender Marine Le Pen gained the support of many French food producers with her ‘buy French act’ campaign, in which she called for more food to be produced and consumed in the country.

Does this imply that contemporary European populism is a rural phenomenon? Certainly not, but Europe’s populists are rising by tapping into discontent in the countryside and exploiting rural resentments against elites, migrants and ethnic minorities. Despite the significant rural support for populist parties, the European countryside has remained largely overlooked in the contemporary debates on the political crisis and the ways out of it. Meanwhile, it was in the countryside that both Mussolini and Hitler won their first mass following, and it was angry farmers who provided their first mass constituency. The countryside, however, provides not only a breeding ground for populist parties, it also may for other progressive solutions in form of emancipatory rural politics. The latter is the focus of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a scholar-activist community that aims at understanding the rise of right-wing populism in rural Europe, as well as the forms of resistance occurring and the alternatives being built.

In the contemporary political and academic debates, the right-wing populism is commonly portrayed as a result of economic and cultural crises that hit Europe during the last decade. Indeed, the economic distress, created by the Global Financial Crisis, followed up by the Eurozone Crisis, has exacerbated economic inequality and social deprivation in rural Europe, which influenced the villagers’ support for populist parties. Likewise, the fears of losing the cultural identity due to globalisation, multiculturalism and the refugee crisis are especially profound in the countryside and make rural dwellers more receptive to the populist message that they are the true protectors of their nation’s culture and heritage.

However, these arguments do not explain why in Spain and Portugal, two of the countries hit hardest by the economic crisis, the far right remains only marginal. Meanwhile, Poland – which has one of the fastest growing economies in Europe – has become paralysed by right-wing populism. Likewise, if we consider the migrant crisis as the reason for right-wing populism, we would not be able to explain why the vote for the Front National in France was particularly high in certain rural areas that have never seen a single immigrant, or why the strongest support for banning minarets in Switzerland was expressed in rural cantons where the number of Muslims and immigrants in general was low.

We argue that the true cause of right-wing populism in Europe (and the world) is the fundamental crisis in globalised neoliberal capitalism. This crisis is the most pronounced in rural areas, where the neoliberal agricultural model of development has failed to provide benefits to the majority, instead facilitating accumulation by the ‘one percent’. For example, according to the European Commission report on the EU Farm Structures, during the last ten years, 100 000 small-scale farms have disappeared in Germany, 300 000 in Bulgaria, 600 000 in Poland and 900 000 in Romania. In total, the number of full-time farmers across the EU fell by over a third during the past decade, representing almost five million jobs. The European Common Agricultural Policy primarily supports larger companies that are oriented to boosting yields and industrial production, while small-scale farmers have become marginalized and forced to close.

The crisis of neoliberal capitalism is directly related to the crisis of advanced representative democracies, which is especially profound in the European context, where the EU is responsible for Eurozone decision-making. In the countryside, the peoples’ feeling of being politically ‘overlooked’ and ‘forgotten’ is not completely groundless. Europe’s political mainstream used to ignore the interests of the rural population because of the following reasons. First, rural votes are not decisive as villagers constitute just 28% of the EU-28 population. Second, the division between the urban and the rural is usually less pronounced in Europe and, therefore, politicians appeal to the working class, not to rural dwellers. And finally, villagers are commonly perceived as apolitical and, thus, not a reliable electoral group. These factors may explain why at the recent UN Human Rights Assembly in Geneva, nearly all European countries voted against or abstained the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.

The political underrepresentation of rural Europeans is also their own responsibility. Although the last years bear witness to what Michael Woods calls the ‘rural reawakening’ – an increase in rural mobilisation and activism in Europe – rural protest groups remain mostly fragmented and only informally linked. Moreover, rural activists are unable to build coalitions with consumer movements and urban-based food activists who are often more advanced in sustainable food politics. Despite the tremendous efforts of the European Coordination Via Campesina and other EU-focused rural movements, European farmers groups lack an ideological and organisational coherence and, until now, failed to develop strong transnational networks of solidarity and coordinated action. The lack of powerful social movements and political parties that could represent the interests of rural dwellers has contributed to an electoral success of right-wing populist parties in rural Europe.

We believe that top-down initiatives are unable to defeat the right-wing populism in Europe and elsewhere, the resistance should come from below. The first step towards this is to generate a common identity among various groups of food producers and consumers connecting them across class, gender, racial, generational, ideological, and urban-rural divides. Food sovereignty can be the tool to enhance solidarity, collective identity and political participation in rural Europe. It advocates for people’s rights for healthy and culturally appropriate food and offers a sustainable alternative to the neoliberal agricultural model and the way of life.

Furthermore, since the cause of right-wing populism is the failure of globalised neoliberal capitalism, cosmetic changes will not have a long-lasting effect, we need to change the entire system. We need to put food producers – not multinational corporations and supermarket chains (!) – at the centre of the European food system and decision making. This requires a radical transformation of power relations, which is impossible without a large-scale mobilisation of food producers and consumers. The first seed of the transformation has already sprouted. In January 2019, 35 000 of farmers and food activists from around Europe took to the streets of Berlin calling for ‘Agricultural Revolution’. They were ‘fed up’ with industrial agriculture and demanded a reorganization of EU farming policy towards a more sustainable model which supports the welfare of the environment, animals and small-scale farmers, and restores democratic and accountable governance in the food system.

The text is prepared based on multiple discussions with Jaume Franquesa and other ERPI scholars from the research project ‘Right-wing populism in rural Europe: causes, consequences and cures’. It was originally published on ARC2020. 

 

About the author:

csm_natalia-mamonova1_855f13fd5cNatalia Mamonova is a Research Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme, Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) and Affiliated researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) of Uppsala University, Sweden. She received her PhD degree from ISS in 2016. Since then, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, the New Europe College in Bucharest, and the University of Helsinki.  

 

A green revolution using frugal innovation: crop insurance for Tanzanian farmers by Meine Pieter van Dijk

Posted on 4 min read

What is the best way to help traditional small maize farmers in Tanzania to increase their production? A crop insurance project in Tanzania showed great success in decreasing the vulnerability of these farmers to drought through a simple frugal innovation called Weather Index Insurance. However, a transition from traditional to hybrid seeds is recommended to further decrease vulnerability and increase agricultural productivity.

What is the best way to help traditional small maize farmers in Tanzania to increase their production? Droughts occur more frequently in Tanzania, but the core problem is low agricultural productivity. Local extension services are not functioning properly (Lamek, 2016), while farmers are still using traditional seeds instead of hybrid seeds, which could contribute to achieving food security in the country. A non-commercial private sector initiative is helping these farmers by providing crop insurance. Between 2011 and 2014, the Swiss Capacity Building Facility (SCBF), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) financed by ten Swiss insurance companies, funded four training projects in Tanzania aiming to familiarise maize farmers in the Iringa, Mwanza and Arusha regions with crop insurance.

No new technological options were introduced to reach as many farmers as possible at minimum cost. Instead, the project used a Weather Index Insurance (WII) based on existing satellite images to determine whether drought prevailed in the area concerned during the seeding, germination or ripening period. If the signal is less rain than normal, the farmers registered through their mobile phones are compensated for the damage, ideally by topping up the amount available for calling or making mobile phone payments. This is a frugal innovation (using existing technology), because farmers can insure as little as one bag of hybrid seed bought from the seed company (SeedCo) using their telephone, covering only the germination period), or through signing up for a package for one acre of land through NGOs.

The training projects were carried out by Acre Africa (AA), an international NGO, with a local affiliate (Acre Tanzania). The project contributed to the training of thousands of farmers in the three regions studied. In total, more than 20,000 farmers are insured in the Iringa region and more than 10,000 in the Mwanza and Arusha regions taken together.

Assessing Weather Index Insurance

To assess the effects of Weather Index Insurance for Tanzanian maize farmers, a survey has been undertaken by the author in the Arusha, the Mwanza and Iringa regions. A total of 200 farmers were interviewed using cluster sampling with the villages as sampling units and then selecting farmers’ households per village as randomly as possible. The objective was to analyse the effects of the crop insurance introduced with the support of SCBF on household’s income and assets and on agricultural productivity.

Different ways of supplying insurance were compared. Farmers supported by a local NGO, the One Acre Fund (1AF), showed that insurance is particularly useful if it is embedded in an institutional support structure that is non-commercial and close to the farmers; not using a profit-oriented intermediary (SeedCo) or a combination of a commercial and non-commercial organisations also led to greater success. All modalities re-insure the final risks with a local commercial insurance company and a re-insurance company.

Most farmers did not know how much they pay for the insurance, but were generally positive about it, since the insurance offers a feeling of security and the intermediary organisations reduce the loan in case of a crisis. However, some farmers were critical because no payments were made despite limited rains, or the payouts were too low. They wanted support to find better markets for their produce and more transparency concerning payouts.

Transition from traditional to hybrid seeds required

Supporting the transition from using traditional to hybrid seeds is recommended to increase rural incomes and food supply and contribute to food security in the country. It is important to select the intermediary carefully and to consider crop insurance as part of support package, which should also include fertilisers and additional inputs like pesticides and access to water. There is scope for making the innovation more frugal by really using only mobile phones for registration and payouts, which was currently not always the case. There is demand for this service from other regions, for other crops and risks (like caterpillars). More information and training should be provided to farmers and the insurance needs to be made more transparent. Complaints of farmers should be taken seriously.

An extended version of this article has been published on researchgate: “Going for hybrid maize: the importance of land for the success of maize crop insurance in Tanzania”. Contribution to a World Bank conference on Land and Poverty, Catalyzing innovation in Washington, March 25-29, 2019.

References
Wilfred Lamek (2016) Agricultural extension in Tanzania, PhD, Free University Amsterdam.

Image Credit: ICRISAT on Flickr.

About the author:

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

Meine Pieter van Dijkis economist, em. professor of Water Services Management at UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, visiting professor at the Beijing University for Civil Engineering and architecture, and em. professor of Urban management at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and the Institute of Housing and Urban development Studies (IHS) of Erasmus University.

Symbiosis in Russia’s and Ukraine’s agricutural sectors by Natalia Mamonova

Posted on 3 min read

One of the main characteristics of agriculture in the post-socialist countries is its dualistic structure—large- and small-scale farms coexist in countries such as Russia or Ukraine. ISS alumna Natalia Mamonova in this interview explains the relationship between these two forms of farming, examining whether they cooperate or compete against each other.

Why is the structure of agricultural production in most post-socialist countries dualistic, where large- and small-scale food producers coexist? 

The contemporary bimodal agricultural structure is rooted in the Soviet past, particularly in the failure of collective agriculture to provide enough food for everyone. In order to deal with food shortages and the peasant unrest after the cruel collectivization campaign of the 1930s, the Soviet government allowed rural dwellers to cultivate their household plots for personal consumption. Since then, the so-called ‘personal subsidiary farming’ has been playing an important role in the Soviet and, later, post-Soviet agriculture. Just prior to the USSR’s collapse in 1990, rural households contributed to 27% of the gross agricultural product, while kolkhozes and sovkhozes (collective and state farms) produced the rest.

Today, this bifurcation has become even stronger. For example, the share of personal subsidiary farming in Russia and Ukraine is about 40% of the total output, while large-farm enterprises contribute to nearly 50%. There are many explanations for why the bimodal agricultural structure was preserved and even reinforced in these countries. The main reason is the failure of the post-socialist land reform to create commercially oriented private family farms. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the land of kolkhozes and sovkhozes was distributed among rural dwellers by means of land share certificates. However, rural dwellers were unable to use them. The distributed land was concentrated in the hands of local rural elites, and later, in the early 2000s, domestic and foreign land investors accumulated it.

How do you explain this peaceful coexistence from the economic and governance perspectives?

The rural households are not completely independent food producers. Their phenomenal productivity is partly a result of their symbiosis with large farms. In the Soviet time, kolkhozes and sovkhozes used to help rural dwellers with various farm inputs and outputs (such as seeds, fertilisers, machinery, etc.). Moreover, rural dwellers could take some ‘for free’ without any permission. The contemporary large agribusiness often continues practicing such productive symbiosis under their corporate social responsibility programs. In general, lots of former Soviet structures and networks remain vital in the contemporary post-Soviet countryside, which largely influenced the societal attitudes towards large-scale agricultural development.

Another reason for the peaceful coexistence of large-scale industrial agriculture and smallholder farming in the post-Soviet countryside is a division in agricultural markets. Large-scale agribusinesses are specialised in monocrop export-oriented agriculture (predominantly grain) and have more recently started to invest in industrial style meat (poultry and pork) production. In contrast, rural households engage in labour-intensive and time-consuming production of potatoes, vegetables, milk, and meat for family consumption and sale in local markets. Until these two forms of farming do not compete with each other for land and markets, they are able to coexist side by side.

What about the attitudes of small landholders toward large-scale investors?

Some critical researchers and journalists call the post-Soviet land accumulation process an instance of land grabbing. Indeed, the land redistribution was often accompanied by deprivation of land rights of local population and various frauds. However, I would not necessarily use the term ‘land grabbing’ because of the lack of resistance to land deals among the rural population. I conducted a lot of interviews with Russian and Ukrainian villagers—the majority of them do not oppose large-scale land accumulations. Contrarily, they often welcome land investors in their villages. Why? The answer is in the bimodal agricultural structure.

Land grabbing remains one of the key focus areas at the ISS, with many researchers in the Political Ecology research group devoting their attention to this area of research. Natalia’s ISS PhD dissertation focused on land grabbing and agrarian change in Russia and the Ukraine. Her dissertation can be viewed at https://repub.eur.nl/pub/94152.

View the original article here.

Image Credit: www.volganet.ru

About the author:

csm_natalia-mamonova1_855f13fd5cNatalia Mamonova is a Research Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme, Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) and Affiliated researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) of Uppsala University, Sweden. She received her PhD degree from ISS in 2016. Since then, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, the New Europe College in Bucharest, and the University of Helsinki.