Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
project conducted by the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development
(Griffin 1972; Pearse 1980). The results of village studies were generalized, however, in a
way that is unjustifiable. In Bangladesh, for instance, two-thirds of the 127 village studies
included in one listing of them were conducted in just five of the (then) nineteen districts of
the country—and their findings were shown to have been locally specific once large-scale
nationally representative surveys were undertaken (Orr 2012; see also Harriss 1977 on bias
in the perception of agrarian change in India). Return visits to villages and regions from
which evidence had been obtained that supported the critique of the GR also showed that
the early fears were sometimes unjustified, and that, for example, small farmers were able
successfully to adopt MVs and to benefit from them—leading some of the critics to recant
(Orr 2012). Different underlying concerns (reflecting different beliefs) influenced the
design of research and the interpretation of empirical findings (Harriss-White and Harriss
2007; Orr 2012). All these problems of knowledge—the methodological problems that
have to do with determining what “the facts” are, those that relate to the judgment of these
facts (and their deployment as “evidence”) in the light of preferred hypotheses or models,
and the ways in which science is influenced by beliefs and values—are all also extremely
important in the controversy over transgenics.
Reaching general conclusions about the economic, social, and environmental implica-
tions of the introduction of the GR technology is, then, fraught with difficulty. All “gen-
eral” conclusions are liable to reflect fallacies of aggregation, and there is a sense in which
only findings that are specific to place and time can possibly be valid. Yet much of the
evidence calls the generalization of the “polarization model” into question, and it dem-
onstrates that very many people, including very large numbers of very poor people in a
country such as India, have benefited. Econometric studies generally “find high poverty
reduction elasticities for agricultural productivity growth” (Pingali 2012, 12303; and see
Lipton 2007), though nutritional gains have been uneven (Pingali 2012, 12304). It is dif-
ficult, however, as we have pointed out, to tease out the effects of changes in agricultural
technology from those of other factors that have been in play at the same time (Harriss
1992). This affects assessments of both positive and negative outcomes. As Pingali writes,
The GR also spurred its share of unintended negative consequences, often not
because of the technology itself, but rather because of the policies that were used
to promote rapid intensification of agricultural systems and increase food supplies.
Some areas were left behind, and even where it successfully increased agricultural
productivity, the GR was not always the panacea for solving the myriad of poverty,
food security and nutrition problems facing poor societies.
(Pingali 2012, 12304)
The fact that the GR can be described as a “tragedy,” when there is strong evidence of its
having had many positive outcomes, is due in large part to the pervasiveness of the early
critiques in public consciousness, and these were given a new lease of life by the surge of
environmentalism in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Environmentalism, internationally,
gathered force in the 1970s and 1980s (for a history see Guha 2000), and it was in this
context that concerns about the impact of the GR on genetic diversity; about the effects
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