Alternative Paths to Food Security - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 218

Once farmers understand SRI principles and methods, they can raise their outputs
with reduced inputs, while also gaining other benefits such as quicker crop maturity
and not needing to take out loans. They can also freely share their knowledge and
experience with others. This does not mean that with agroecology there is no need for
institution-based research or for research products that can be patented and sold. But
the balance between privatized and publicly accessible research, which has been shifting
to the private sector, has to some extent shifted back to the public domain by agroeco-
logical innovations like SRI. Such a rebalancing is unlikely to be welcomed in commer-
cial and administrative circles, however.
The SRI experience raises some interesting questions about the ways in which sci-
entific research is evaluated. For statistical testing of hypotheses or evaluating claims
about scientific facts, we learn the difference between Type I and Type II errors, that is,
between false positives and false negatives. The first category includes things that are
claimed to be true but which are not; whereas the second refers to rejecting something
as being false when it is actually true.
It is curious that these two kinds of errors, ostensibly symmetrical, are treated so
differently within the scientific community and in public policy. Persons making
false-positive claims are subject to scientific attack and possibly to legal or other penal-
ties. Yet false-negative conclusions do not receive similar disapproval or suffer serious
sanctions. Persons who have, by their criticisms, impeded funding for the evaluation
of SRI methods, let alone their dissemination, have no liability under present institu-
tional arrangements, including biases in the peer-review processes of scientific jour-
nals. Although this can result in the withholding of benefits to millions of farmers (and
consumers), there is no responsibility or accountability for Type II errors, whatever the
motives, innocent or ignoble. There is, however, penalization of Type I errors, which can
deter the timid from venturing into contested terrain.
This observation does not confirm a view that large institutions conspire to main-
tain the status quo, presenting an impregnable front against innovation. While some
government agencies have been slow to respond to SRI opportunities, as noted above,
in the major rice-producing countries there is now acceptance and promotion of SRI
methods. The president of the World Bank has publicly endorsed SRI ( Hindustani
Times , December 2, 2009), and the World Bank Institute has produced a “toolkit” to
promote SRI ( http://info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/245848/index.html) .
The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), in conjunction with the International Crop
Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), supported evaluation and
expansion of SRI in India, and also the extension of SRI methods to sugarcane produc-
tion (ICRISAT-WWF 2009). The WWF has cooperated with other major NGOs in pub-
licizing the benefits of SRI achieved in Africa and Asia (Africare, Oxfam America, and
WWF-ICRISAT Project 2010).
It is not that large institutions, through their normal processes of decision making,
make commitments to embarking in significantly new directions. Rather, the impetus
to support innovation has come mostly from certain individuals within institutions who
have a greater commitment to the institutions' expressed goals and a higher propensity