Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

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study is bigger than we imagined, and has to be posed big enough to fit an answer. If
we do not encompass a large enough terrain, the important causes of phenomena are
all external to the system we study, and all we can do is estimate their magnitude and
treat them statistically. But in a larger system we can examine the feedbacks, sinks and
sources, mutual determinations. Thus it is useful to brainstorm at the beginning of
an investigation and ask for possible connections among phenomena that do not
seem to be connected: how might the affinity of wheat genotypes for nitrogen affect
the economic independence of women? How might chemical fertilizers reduce soil
fertility? Under what conditions should we make sure that pests have a food source
all year round? When should we plant crops in regions where the yield is inferior to
the best places? After the freewheeling speculations, during which the rule is that any
idea is allowed without being ridiculed, we pass to the next stage of evaluating which
connections are too far-fetched or weak to be necessary in our research or too lacking
in information to be manageable.
Once we have expanded a problem as broadly as we can, we have to remember that
there is more out there and that we can be surprised at any moment. This is an
argument for a diversity of approaches. While we have to concentrate on the most
likely directions, we always have to have a reserve of less popular research and less
fashionable scientists, just in case. The history of science teaches us that theories and
fashions have half-lives and that today’s certainties may become tomorrow’s jokes.
The present is not unique in having at last arrived. Each of you should be able to at
least pose a question such as: under what circumstances might the second law of
thermodynamics be overthrown?
The emphasis on the whole also directs our attention to the possibility that a given
phenomenon has a completely different significance in a different context. For
instance, mutual aid in a farming community is a very common practice. Farmers
lend draught animals and tools, exchange seeds and labor and information, and may
lend each other money. As long as this is mutual, it is part of the dynamics of cohesion
in the community. But if these exchanges become asymmetric, with some always
the lenders and others always the borrowers, we are on the road to class differentiation
and the disruption of community coherence. Or a new, “nontraditional” crop
may gain high prices for the labor invested, and raise the level of prosperity of a community.
But when everybody gets the idea, and farmers from Vietnam to Guatemala plant
coffee for export, prices can fall precipitously and a community can sink into poverty
without the buffers they previously had available. Even land redistribution also can
have opposite effects to common-sense expectation: if peasants get land from the
large landholders and are supported with technical help and credit, this can be a liberating
land reform. But if collectively owned village land, as in southern Africa or the
ejido in Mexico, is privatized, land distribution is but a step on the way to a land market
and concentration of land in the hands of urban elites or foreign corporations.
If we accept the priority of processes over things, and see things as snapshots of
processes, we then face two fundamental questions:
yale school of forestry & environmental studies