Agriculture Reference
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astheirirstpriority,”perhapsrequiringthemtoenterranchingschemesthatprivatized
or strictly supervised access to pasture.
heenvironmentalandrelatedagrariancrisisofthe1970sprovedtobeaveritable
laboratory for economic ideas. Ecology, food, and climate fed into arguably one of the
founding documents in the rise and consolidation of neoliberal development and the
riseoftheWashingtonConsensus,namely,theBergReport(namedaterMichigan
economist Elliot Berg), released as Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
bytheWorldBankin1981.AtthecoreofAfrica'scrisiswas“domesticpolicy”anda
poor export performance in basic commodities in which the continent had a compara-
tive advantage. Distorted markets and state marketing boards became the conceptual
front lines in a ferocious assault on the African state, a critique backed up with the
prescriptive heavy artillery of structural adjustment and stabilization. he solutions
to the environment-development crisis resided in a technical fix (bringing the Green
Revolution and irrigation, and improved transportation, to the continent), and in
exploiting export markets by releasing peasant innovativeness from the yoke of the state.
The African peasant emerged, in this account at least, as one part indigenous ecologist
and one rational economic agent. But climate, environment, and populations needed to
be managed, and improvement, market forces, and property rights were modalities to
bedeployed.ItwasthevisionofJohnStuartMillandAdamSmith,conirmedbytherat
of market studies conducted in the wake of the famine by, perhaps appropriately, Elliot
Berg and his associates at the University of Michigan, who confirmed that markets were
efficient and “non-monopolistic” but required investments in transportation and credit
torealizetheirpotential(Berg1977).Africa,ifoverpopulatedandcrippledbystatecor-
ruption and poor weather, was at least inhabited by some form of Homo economicus .
Eventually, the neo-Malthusian model and the incomplete or distorted market (neo-
classical)accountwereincreasinglyquestionedbyanewwaveofsocialscienceresearch
rooted in careful ethnographic and local studies of human ecological dynamics and
the intersection of social and ecological relations of production among rural produc-
ers,whichinastatisticalsenserepresentedthemajorityofAfricans(Richards1985).
hechallengescamefromseveralfronts,severalofwhichI havealreadygesturedto.
AmartyaSen'spivotalbook Poverty and Famines decisively broke the purportedly causal
connection between drought and famine. Food crises and starvation bore no necessary
relation to absolute food decline, and the effects of drought were typically mediated
by farming practice and the market (in the latter case compounded by the deleteri-
ousefectsofpriceincreasesandentitlementdeclines).Second,abodyofworkoper-
ating under the sign of peasant studies saw African communities as less composed of
self-interested individuals ( contra Hardin)thanenmeshedinprocessesofcommodi-
fication and social relations of production that rendered significant proportions of the
rural populace vulnerable to all manner of ecological events even in “normal” times. The
effects of climate and of ecological conditions were, in other words, experienced differ-
entially in relation to class, asset holding, and the operations of the market.
The sense in which indigenous knowledge and vernacular peasant practice could be
captured and deployed was sharply constrained by the social relations of production in
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