Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
culture in the Developed World provide few clues for transforming food security and
the sustainability of food systems. After all, this was not their purpose. They were
designed to maintain the incomes of Developed World farmers and eah, in its own
way, has succeeded in that goal. They have enabled the Developed World to contin-
ue to eat cake.
So, if our prevailing Developed World models of agriculture are not providing a
useful template for sustainable global food security, do we just abandon hope? The
answer is clearly no! Just because these models turned out to be inely tuned meh-
anisms for creating incomes for Developed World farmers does not mean that the
compelling hallenge of food security has not been addressed from elsewhere. here
is more to the world of food than that encompassed by the aspirations of the US,
European and New Zealand models of agriculture. Part of the problem lies in the
very notion of a broadly applicable 'model' of agriculture. In a recent paper, McMi-
hael (2010) argued for a recognition of the dynamic process of 're-peasantization'
of global agriculture as a key contributor to the future sustainability of global food
relations. This argument brings together the collective efforts of all forms of agri-
culture whih seek to create conditions under whih the social, economic and eco-
logical reproduction of agricultural production forms can survive. Re-peasantization
is not about creating a new global 'model' for agriculture, it is about recognizing
the basic ingredients of long term reproduction of agriculture and recognizing those
ingredients when they occur in a range of setings - from both the Developing and
Developed World. There is an important reason why these kinds of solutions will
come in a multiplicity of forms. If the hallenge - seen in McMihael's (2010) terms
- is to foster agriculture that is socially, ecologically and economically sustainable,
then the hallenge of inding locally-appropriate ecological relations for agriculture
will not be well served by 'one size fits all' global-scale models for agriculture. Rath-
er, we need to foster spaces of experimentation and multiple pathways for develop-
ment of food security.
The grand narratives of agricultural intensification, productivity, liberalization
and multifunctionality all perform excellent service as the central motifs of large
policy projects at a global scale. They are less useful, however, in capturing the mul-
tiple contingencies and specificities of locally sustainable agriculture in a myriad of
regional and local food systems. My key contention is that these grand narratives
must shrink and recede in order to open up these other spaces where experiments in
food security can take place.
