Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
in the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia. Despite the increasing severity and dur-
ation of drought in the region, a deep-seated focus on productivism in Australian
agriculture and culture more generally appears to overwhelm calls for more sustain-
able practice. he irst hallenge, in their case, is inding credible pathways for en-
acting alternatives to productivist agriculture. Jeff Nielson and Bustanul Arifin use
the example of rice production in Indonesia to illustrate the potential for political
expediency and privilege to displace concerns regarding access to food through a
myopic focus on production. Their critique is muted to some extent, however, by the
apparent benefits of self-sufficiency policies in the context of a food crisis driven by
escalating commodity prices - a situation indicative of the complexities of domest-
ic and global food systems. The case studies from Africa and South America inter-
rogate the impacts on livelihoods and social relations as food producers in develop-
ing countries seek to benefit from access to wealthier export markets. Navé Wald,
Christopher Rosin and Doug Hill examine a more threatening situation in whih an
export crop (soybeans) favours large-scale production to the detriment of existing
campesino
production and the environment. In the case of Argentina, the import-
ance of a high-value agricultural export to the legitimacy of the national government
interferes with the actions of the
campesinos
, who have adopted the rallying cries of
food sovereignty in their efforts to defend the tenuous rights to the land. Kiah Smith
and Kristen Lyons ind that production for nihe export markets provides both bene-
fits and social disruption for small-scale production in Kenya and Uganda. Where-
as suh markets can act as a means to encourage a greater focus on food qualities,
they also expose producers to social and economic valuations that may be ill-suited
to local cultures. In the inal hapter, Alec hornton provides a more optimistic case
study of the adaptation of small-scale producers to increasing urbanization in Samoa
and Fiji. The ability to engage in urban agriculture, selling to both the domestic and
tourism markets, provides an economically viable production alternative.
Together, the case study hapters demonstrate the capacity that the ideal of glob-
al food security has to impact local food production systems and the daily lives
and survival strategies of rural populations. The ideology of productivism has long
served the global community through the rapid escalation of food quantities in the
face of equally rapid increases in demand. As the cases of Australia and Indonesia
demonstrate, however, this ideology is increasingly hallenged on the basis of the
environmental and social externalities of production-driven food systems. The ideo-
logy of the free market represents a further ideal that often reinforces productivism.
