Solving malnutrition through business and science?

Graham Harrison - Professor of Politics, University of Sheffield

For all the bells and whistles that accompany political agenda-setting and summitry, the proposals that have emerged over the last few years seem familiar. Transnational corporations involved in the globalised and complex food commodity chains have been developing myriad ways of enhancing their control – directly or indirectly – over the way food is produced, processed and traded.

The possibilities of this corporate solution to hunger are extremely limited. There is certainly evidence that private investment in agriculture can have positive effects on livelihoods. Agricultural wage labour, new trading relations, opportunities to produce new cash crops – all have potentially positive effects for small-scale farmers. Indeed, the broad history of peasant farming shows that, where the basic productive unit of a household is pretty robust, farmers have taken advantage of new market opportunities very effectively.

But the bigger picture generated by this specific model is less encouraging. Despite the hype, GM crops have not been proven to offer sustainable solutions to hunger: claims of increased yields are not supported by convincing evidence and the adoption of GM crops has profound repercussions on the way farming is practised. Adopting GM crops reduces the autonomy of farmers and increases reliance on seed and chemical markets. Other issues impact on farming communities in worrying ways as well: land grabbing, the dispossession/pollution of waterways, and the effects of large-scale and possibly GM farming on nearby small-scale farmers.

Furthermore, peasant farmers are already integrated into broader trading and production networks. There is no such thing as a subsistence farmer, producing to consume and not relying on wages, cash income and market interactions. Hunger is as much a modern and market phenomenon as it is a product of poor rains or low technology production. All of these factors comingle to produce hard work, poor diets and social insecurities.   In sum, ‘more market’ is not a panacea to millions of working poor farmers already integrated into the global economy.

Can science ‘solve hunger’? The issue here is what one means by ‘science’. The G8 discourse has framed ‘science’ as the research and development performed by large chemical and agriculture companies – either through their own R&D departments or through research centres and universities that they (and Western governments) fund. This is an alienating science: one in which ‘technologies’ are devised as property rights, which are then sold to farmers for a (reduced?) profit.

There is very little information on how these new technologies will be introduced into existing livelihoods and cultures, which are themselves producers of knowledge, albeit less high-tech and more socially-embedded. Current literature on high-tech agricultural solutions tends to mention ‘training’ only in the most cursory way.

We know very well that new ‘top-down’ agricultural technologies produce unintended consequences and failures because of the cavalier approach that governments and corporations adopt towards agricultural communities. New seed types will only succeed in significantly reducing malnutrition if the poorest farmers have stable purchasing power to access the technologies over a period of years, and if they can ‘localise’ the new technologies into existing livelihoods, environments and labour assets.  You cannot just ‘drop’ new high-tech seeds into communities via short-term training programmes and expect the genetic enhancements to work themselves through a diversity of specific social conditions. This evokes a tired history of assumptions about generic peasantries and the need to rescue these farmers through bold modern interventions.

How should we address hunger and malnutrition? There is no single social condition of hunger; it is a manifestation of a range of different vulnerabilities and social dynamics. All technological innovations are also social innovations, and require consideration and evaluation. This approach has long been recognised by researchers and institutions, notably the FAO and perhaps most prominently in recent times in the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The current ‘science and business’ agenda looks naïve and narrow when compared to this approach.

Ultimately, there needs to be a more open-minded understanding of ‘we’. We live in a world where there is a vibrant and diverse range of agrarian/food sovereignty movements that base themselves on political struggles to defend access to land and water, to present hunger as a political and rights issue and to try to evoke vernacular norms of legitimacy, justice and order in the ways that agrarian markets function. Recall a familiar adage of social movements: ‘nothing about us without us’.  Or simply note the common sense that those most motivated to solve problems of hunger are those who suffer it: they also happen to be those best placed to make solutions workable and sustainable.