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

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quite different from reduction as a research tactic, the careful examination of subsystems
within subsystems within systems, which is a necessary part of investigation.
But these errors are simply errors of philosophy. They are supported by the present
political economy of the knowledge industry that places a premium on those
kinds of knowledge that can be sold repeatedly to farmers or patients. A pesticide or
drug is far more marketable than the idea that beans protect tomatoes from late blight
or that a shorter workday would reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and heart disease. A
patentable gene related to cancer is a better commodity than the identification of the
polluters who expose us to carcinogens. Therefore we have the growing contradiction
between the increasing sophistication of science in describing detail, at the level of the
laboratory, and the increasing irrationality of the scientific-technical enterprise as a
whole. The internal needs of our science are in increasing conflict with the political/economic
organization of the creation of knowledge. This exposes us to a noise
explosion more than an information explosion.
Throughout this international workshop, speakers pointed out the harmful role of
the kind of development that disrupts ecosystems and human communities. We have
seen that rural assistance programs rarely change the pattern of poverty, even if they
help some poor individuals escape and leave their communities behind. We have been
shown with rich examples that corporate development brings false promises of good
jobs. In various ways, participants have raised the demand that people come before
profits; that food and drinking water and health care are rights, not privileges; that
knowledge is our shared inheritance; and that when they become commodities, the
impact on people’s lives is a random side effect, the collateral damage of profitable
“progress.” We have been warned that “free trade” is free for the owners of that trade
alone. Struggles for 50 liters a day of free drinking water in South Africa, against privatization
of natural resources in Bolivia, for community land rights throughout our
America, for food sovereignty against neoliberalism, are all implicitly struggles
against our being ruled by the logic of commodities.
Therefore it is necessary to look again at commodities as such, as the dominant
relationship under capitalism. A commodity is something or some service produced
in order to sell in a market. This has several implications that are so obvious they are
usually not stated, but have major importance for the welfare of peoples.
There is no necessary relation between the economic value of a commodity and its
usefulness. In a sense, commercial farming does not produce food, but profit. Among
alternative investment opportunities, the most profitable ones are produced. These
are usually the ones that aim at the consumption of the rich. Usefulness sometimes
helps sales, but sales are also assisted by driving out competing commodities, by sales
efforts, by exaggerating the benefits of a product and hiding its harm, by promoting
social arrangements that make that commodity a necessity, by bribing bureaucrats for
contracts. What is produced, where it is produced, how much is produced, are all
determined by profitability.
Much ingenuity under capitalism goes into inventing ways of turning all of our
needs into commodities. Thus eyes and kidneys are for sale, wombs for rent, emotional
support is sold by the hour, artistic creations are described by price, and pubagroecology
and the struggle for food sovereignty
yale school of forestry & environmental studies