Sally Brooks

Pastoralism: A critical asset for food security under global climate change

Pastoralism is often written off as an unsustainable system. This paper takes a closer look at this position and examines the role that pastoralism plays in relation to food security, particularly in a future in which climate variability features more prominently. We focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where problems around food security are supposed to be more alarming and which is now also in the spotlight of development policies concerned with global food security (e.g., World Bank, 2009). The economic rationality and ecological sustainability of pastoral systems are amply documented (Homewood, 2008) and are attracting new attention vis-à-vis emerging interests in resilience and adaptability (e.g., African Union, 2010). However, there is still a deeply rooted apprehensiveness in rural development circles at national and international levels, that investments in securing pastoralism hold back development rather than promoting it, both with regard to the people in pastoralism and to the livestock sector as a whole (with important exceptions, for example, the African Union Policy Framework on Pastoralim; African Union, 2010). In the 21st century, this concern intersects with four crisis scenarios that have come to dominate global agricultural policies: the ecological crisis around the degradation of agricultural land, now accompanied by new alarms for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change; the fuel crisis which transformed allegedly “empty” and “resource-poor” drylands into a soughtafter asset for producing biofuel or securing the subsidies associated with governments’ pledges for green energy; the fi nancial crisis, as the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. and in Europe in 2005–2006 made commodities index funds, including those for agricultural land and grains, an attractive alternative for investors; and fi nally the food crisis, as alarm over food-price volatility during the 2007–2008 spike highlighted the dependency of agricultural commodity prices on the oil price and the infl uence of the global fi nancial market. At the crossroads of these scenarios lies the ongoing global undertaking of incorporating communal land into commodity markets, especially in Africa, legitimized, in ways that are disturbingly recalling of colonial times, by arguments that link entitlement to “natural” resources to the relative “potential” of production systems. Narratives of chronic food security in pastoral drylands, underpinned by the presupposition of pastoralism’s structural low-productivity and endemic vulnerability should be read against this background (Levine, 2011). In this article, we look beyond these general narratives, where pastoralism and the drylands often serve as a negative benchmark while remaining marginal to the main concern. We start by addressing the economic importance of pastoral production in arid and semiarid areas in Africa compared with other production systems in the same conditions. Second, we focus on the pastoral system of production and provide evidence of the contribution it makes to food security in these areas. Third, we consider the current and prospective constraints to the realization of the potential of pastoral production in relation to food insecurity. Finally, we examine a range of options that might enhance the contribution pastoral production is able to make, both to food security and economic prosperity in the region, and potentially elsewhere.

The digital revolution in financial inclusion: international development in the fintech era

ABSTRACT This paper examines the growing importance of digital-based financial inclusion as a form of organising development interventions through networks of state institutions, international development organisations, philanthropic investment and fintech companies. The fintech–philanthropy–development complex generates digital ecosystems that map, expand and monetise digital footprints. Its ‘know thy (irrational) customer’ vision combines behavioural economics with predictive algorithms to accelerate access to, and monitor engagement with, finance. The digital revolution adds new layers to the material cultures of financial(ised) inclusion, offering the state new ways of expanding the inclusion of the ‘legible’, and global finance new forms of ‘profiling’ poor households into generators of financial assets.

Is international agricultural research a global public good? The case of rice biofortification

The status of international agricultural research as a global public good (GPG) has been widely accepted since the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. While the term was not used at the time of its creation, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system that evolved at that time has been described as a ‘prime example of the promise, performance and perils of an international approach to providing GPGs’. Contemporary literature on international agricultural research as a GPG tends to support this view and focuses on how to operationalize the concept. This paper adopts a different starting point and questions this conceptualization of the CGIAR and its outputs. It questions the appropriateness of such a ‘neutral’ concept to a system born of the imperatives of Cold War geopolitics, and shaped by a history of attempts to secure its relevance in a changing world. This paper draws on a multi-sited, ethnographic study of a research effort highlighted by the CGIAR as an exemplar of GPG-oriented research. Behind the ubiquitous language of GPGs, ‘partnership’ and ‘consensus’, however, new forms of exclusion and restriction are emerging within everyday practice, reproducing North–South inequalities and undermining the ability of these programmes to respond to the needs of projected beneficiaries.

Enabling adaptation? Lessons from the new ‘Green Revolution’ in Malawi and Kenya

This article explores the extent to which efforts to improve productivity of smallholder agriculture through a new ‘Green Revolution’ in Sub Saharan Africa are likely to enhance the capacity of smallholder farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Drawing on empirical material from Malawi and Kenya, the paper finds more conflicts than synergies between the pursuit of higher productivity through the promotion of hybrid maize adoption and crop diversification as a strategy for climate change adaptation. This is despite an oft-assumed causal link between escape from the ‘low maize productivity trap’ and progression towards crop diversification as an adaptive strategy. In both countries, a convergence of interests between governments, donors and seed companies, combined with a historical preference for, and dependence on maize as the primary staple, has led to a narrowing of options for smallholder farmers, undermining the development of adaptive capacities in the longer term. This dynamic is linked to the conflation of market-based variety of agricultural technologies, as viewed ‘from the top down’, with diversity-in-context, as represented by site-specific and locally derived and adapted technologies and institutions that can only be developed ‘from the bottom up’.

Biofortification: lessons from the Golden Rice project

Biofortification is an umbrella term for a diverse range of projects and possibilities. It is best understood on three levels: as a range of technologies for developing micronutrient-dense crops; a development intervention to improve public health; and an idea that links agriculture, nutrition, and health in a particular way. This paper focuses on the Golden Rice project as a well-known example of biofortification. It show how two sets of questions – concerning effectiveness of Golden Rice as a delivery mechanism for vitamin A to malnourished populations and its acceptance by those populations as a rice variety and staple food item – have been narrowed down to parameters set by an increasingly polarized GM crop debate. It is not too late for these trends to be reversed, however. The Golden Rice project is a case study in the non-linearity of complex innovation processes, which exposes limitations of binaries such as ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’. Recent developments point to the possibility of a more open d...

Living with Materiality or Confronting Asian Diversity? The Case of Iron-Biofortified Rice Research in the Philippines

This article draws on findings from a multi-sited study of international science policy processes in rice biofortification. It focuses on the ten-year period between the discovery of a “high-iron” elite line named IR68144-3B-2-2-3 and the publication, in 2005, of the findings of a bioefficacy study that proved crucial to securing the support necessary to scale up biofortification research as a global Challenge Program. During this time, IR68144 took on many guises, defined and redefined in relation to different disciplinary, institutional, and sociocultural perspectives. This article highlights the ways in which different actors responded to the material agency of IR68144, drawing implications for reflexive practice and context responsiveness in a research effort increasingly distant from its projected beneficiaries. The case of iron rice research shows that while attempts to shape rice (in whatever form) to suit a particular research or policy agenda may be successful within carefully tailored and time-bound settings, once these conditions are removed, the reality of rice, in all its complexity and heterogeneity, inevitably bites back. Today, the center of gravity of rice biofortification research is located in a more mobile global science community. This article shows how an instinctive appreciation of the materiality of rice, in interaction with humans (researchers and their subjects) and other material elements, was a key factor that differentiated the early research practice from that of a new generation of scientists attempting to achieve a set of global research targets.

Inducing food insecurity : financialisation and development in the post-2015 era

Abstract The G7 ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ follows an established approach of ‘connecting smallholder farmers to markets’, while extending the role and influence of corporate agri-business in new ways. This paper explores the implications of the ‘New Alliance’ model’s incorporation into the Sustainable Development Goals framework for smallholder producers already facing greater uncertainty in financialised agri-food chains, and in light of a consensus around the primacy of private finance in the post-2015 era. The question for alternative food and development movements is how to confront the ‘value chain challenge’ in an increasingly financialised global agri-food system.

“Simultaneous immersion”: How online postgraduate study contributes to the development of reflective practice among public service practitioners

This paper examines how the process of engaging simultaneously in study and work – through online distance-based study – affects students’ capacity to apply their learning in and for the workplace. The paper takes as its starting point the importance of extending notions of “educational effectiveness” beyond course-based attainment to encompass the impact of learning within the workplace. It explores the interface between study and work, focusing on the case of online postgraduate programmes in public management at the University of York. It finds that simultaneous immersion in study and work can create the conditions for “public reflection” that underpin work-based learning and that a key factor is the student-practitioners ability to mobilise “episodic power.” The paper suggests ways in which existing approaches to online postgraduate learning might be enhanced in order to capitalise on these conditions of simultaneous immersion.

Investing in food security? Philanthrocapitalism, biotechnology and development

This paper traces the evolution of philanthropic involvement in developing country agriculture from the ‘scientific philanthropy’ of the Rockefeller Foundation during and after the Green Revolution era to the ‘philathrocapitalism’ of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by examining two cases of ‘pro-poor’ agricultural biotechnology research: pro-Vitamin A-enriched ‘Golden Rice’ and drought tolerant maize. In each case, novel institutions developed for technology transfer have created conditions conducive to future capitalist accumulation in ways that are not immediately obvious. These initiatives can be understood as institutional experiments that are shifting debates about the governance and regulation of genetically modified (‘GM’) crops. Meanwhile an emphasis on silver bullet solutions and institutions that ‘connect to the market’ diverts attention from more context-responsive approaches. This trend is likely to intensify with the announcement at the recent G8 summit backing a ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ in which agri-business corporations are to play a key role.