Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
spur the kind of changes necessary. Agroecological initiatives require
social learning, which regulation alone cannot achieve.
Few agroecological partnerships have been as successful as the Lodi
winegrape partnership or the Wisconsin Health Grown potatoes project.
We should not conclude that every agroecological initiative could be as
successful as they are. The genuine significance of these partnerships lies
in the way these participants joined together in a social learning effort
engaging all four Latourian loops, and linked scientific, economic and
social knowledge to strengthen the ties that bind them together. Latour's
model calls our attention to the wide range of social activities necessary
to successfully deploy scientific knowledge. Other groups of growers, in
other commodities (especially those federally subsidized crops), may
have had access to more sophisticated scientific knowledge about their
crop production, but they have not integrated agroecological knowledge
into their social networks.
Local or regional groups of growers seem to be better positioned to
facilitate the kind of social learning required by agroecology. Small
groups of neighboring growers can develop new practices, but they often
lack the influence to achieve broader, systemic change. Large, national
commodity groups generally appear uninterested in agroecological ini-
tiatives. This may be because they are deeply invested in farming the
existing federal crop subsidies, or because very large corporate interests
dominate the organizations, or because food processing groups such as
the national association of corn millers merely want to continue business
as usual. Medium-size commodity groups of growers have sufficient
resources to organize new initiatives, yet remain responsive to their
member growers.
A few NGOs, including the World Wildlife Fund, have engaged in
partnerships because they want to demonstrate that improved environ-
mental stewardship in agriculture is possible. The working model they
helped shape is commendable, but the WWF does not have the resources
to address the full scale of the agro-environmental problems this country
faces. The US Environmental Protection Agency, the California
Department of Pesticide Regulation, and similar agencies have made a
positive contribution to agroecological initiatives, but the impact of their
participation might have been greatest within their agencies. Elected offi-
cials have not passed necessary legislation to authorize environmental
