Food regime analysis

'Food regime analysis' is the name given to the most amazing research literature on the historic governance of the agri-food system. Don't miss out! Key authors are Philipp McMichael, Harriet Friedmann and Tony Weis.

If I ever again have some spare time to blog I will sum it up for the Portuguese audience...

Just an extract of how it all started...
"In this stage early states have appropriated rights to land, thereby excluding the preceding population from access to it by force."
Seems impossible, doesn't it? Unfortunately also seems to be pure fact.

Decline of agricultural labour in the EU

EU agricultural labour down by nearly 25% since 2000

Agricultural labour in the EU has decreased by 24.9% since 2000 which, in terms of AWU, represents a drop of 3.7 million from 14.9 million AWU in 2000 to 11.2 million AWU in EU-27 in 2009. Because many farmers and farm workers are only employed part-time in agriculture, the number of people actually working in agriculture is greater than the number of annual work units.

Measured as a percentage of the total active population in the EU, agricultural labour input in AWU accounted for 4.7% in 2009 (based on active population 2008) compared to 6.7% in 2000. In EU-15 the respective percentages in 2009 were 2.8 as against 3.8 in 2000, although the shares – and the changes – in the 12 new Member States were much higher.

In 2009 agricultural labour input represented 12.1% in the 12 new Member States as a percentage of active population, while the percentage in 2000 was 17.3%, signifying that the fall in agricultural labour input on average in the 12 new Member States is equivalent to more than 5 per cent of the active population. It should be noted that these countries entered EU and the Common agricultural policy after 2000.

The rates of decrease in agricultural labour input in the individual countries range from 2.6% in Greece to 55% in Estonia, where labour input has more than halved in less than 10 years. Generally speaking, the decrease is lowest in the EU-15 countries, but also in Poland (−11.3%), which makes it an exception among the 12 new Member States. Portugal, on the other hand, is in the opposite situation: its decrease of 31.6% shows a trend similar to the average decrease in labour input for the 12 new Member States (−31.3%).

Despite the steep falls recorded in the new Member States, agricultural labour input in these countries in 2009 accounted for a little over half (51.7%) of EU-27 agricultural labour input.

The figures for agricultural labour input are recorded in the Economic accounts for agriculture as 'Non-salaried labour input' and 'Salaried labour input', respectively. Since 2000, non-salaried labour input, which represents the largest share in almost all countries (except the Czech Republic and Slovakia), fell by 28.3% in the EU-27, while the salaried portion decreased only by 9.6%.

(From the Eurostat website)

Higher education & the PhD process

“The PhD process can be the most harmful. Rehabiliating those who have been disabled by the experiences of education is tackling the problem too late. We have to go upstream and stop the harm at source.”

Chambers, R. (2008). Revolutions in Development Inquiry. Earthscan, London.

Tipo um milagre

Imaginem esta, não é que encontrei um livro sobre a política agrícola que se lê quase como um romance, semi-criminal, semi-comédia?
Admito que poderá ser que eu já esteja demasiado alienada do que é um verdadeiro livro de entretenimento, para que este me pareca uma alta diversão. Mas recomendo vivamente: "A agricultura Portuguesa na PAC" de J.A. Santos Varela. Trata da integração da agricultura Portuguesa na Política Agrícola Comum, e apesar de defender alguns ideais produtivistas é um livro histórico objectivo, e tem mais pontos de exclamação que algum livro do género que já me passou pela frente.

Está bem dito

"O modelo actual de desenvolvimento económico dá prioridade ao crescimento económico e à produção de bens, acima da melhoria das condições de vida das pessoas e da erradicação da pobreza."

in Redclift, M. (1984). Development and the Environmental Crisis. Methuen, London e New York.

Andamos a gastá-lo porque sim

É verdade, sim senhora. Se andamos a gastar fundos públicos com a agricultura, e depois deixamos a competição externa inviabilizar economicamente os investimentos...o que andamos a fazer?!

Ah pois, são na sua maioria fundos Europeus, por isso pouco importa estarmos a desbaratá-los, é isso? Queijarias abandonadas na paisagem ficam bonitas. É um investimento na arte e no embelezamento do país. Pode atrair turistas.

Leitura de Pedro Lains (2009) "Agriculture and Economic Development in Portugal, 1870-1973".

De onde vem o termo "organic"?

Pois bem, pq é que a Agricultura Biológica é designada "organic farming" nos países Anglófonos?
O Lord Northbourne escreveu um livro em 1940 em que usou este termo "organic" para se refeir a quintas que trabalham como se de um organismo se tratasse. Isso inspirado nas ideias do amiguinho Dr. Rudolf Steiner que defendeu que a agricultura para ser sustentável tinha que acontecer de forma integrada, em sistemas com ciclos quase fechados, as tais originais quintas orgânicas.
Como o termo "organic" hoje já vai longe destes ideais de sustentabilidade! Fico velhinha!

Os 3 bloqueios à aprendizagem

Segundo Coenrad van Houten existem três bloqueios fundamentais que fazem com que as pessoas resistam à aprendizagem ou tenham sérias dificuldades em aprender algo de novo...

Bloqueio do pensamento - basicamente corresponde à dificuldade em superar as nossas ideias feitas e pré-concebidas sobre o mundo. Em vez de estarmos abertos para perceber como o mundo realmente é, aplicamos os nossos modelos mentais, para fazer sentido das coisas sempre de acordo com o familiar.

Bloqueio emocional - aprender alguma coisa nova requer admitir que não se sabe já, e confrontar essa realidade sobre nós próprios pode ser muito difícil. Aprender envolve sempre um reality check entre o que nós pensamos que nós somos e a realidade. Portanto, é mais aprazível estar quieto.

Bloqueio da vontade - para aprender, por um lado é necessário querer aprender, e por outro, complementarmente, é preciso que queiramos intervir no mundo, para admitirmos que é necessário desenvolvermos novas capacidades e conhecimentos para podermos agir melhor. Mas para querermos aprender e intervir no mundo precisamos de ver um sentido naquilo que fazemos e ter a coragem para tomar os riscos associados ao agir.

Permaculture - a detail

Main forms of sustainable agriculture, in their relation to markets and levels of biodiversity. Not the ideal of each, but how they seem to be now. Translated from Guzmán-Casado et al., 2000.

Reflecting upon this figure in Sevilla-Guzmán's book on agroecology I came up with the concept of "post-partum spirituality". The basis and principles of permacuture come from natural science, biogeography and the likes, the spiritual aspects that the movement tries to develop seem to be independent and post-hoc additions, that do not really flow into the making of permaculture.

Feeding the world or letting it feed itself

"Moreover, we agree on promoting solutions to help the world feed itself, to enable communities to produce their own food instead of solutions of those who aim at feeding it. And this is because we defend the rights of the peoples to define and control their food and food production systems, local, national, ecological, fair and sovereign. In fact, that is food sovereignty: the ability for people to choose what and how to produce, and how to trade it. "

La Via Campesina

Socorro!

"Também a concentração numa visão orientada para a produção agrícola de base desligada das actividades de comercialização e transformação tem diminuído as suas possibilidades de desenvolvimento, designadamente através do efeito multiplicador que estas podem ter a montante. Pela integração a que obrigam, pela promoção de valor que fomentam e, ainda, pela estruturação indirecta, pela via funcional, que possibilitam, pode-se ganhar a dimensão económica que outros instrumentos mais clássicos não asseguram."

Plano Estratégico Nacional de Desenvolvimento Rural 2007-2013, p. 3

O que é que eles quererão dizer?
Ou eu sou muito burra ou isto simplesmente não é para ser percebido...
Ou então isto é um daqueles jogos em que tiraram as vírgulas para mostrar como elas são importantes para se perceber um texto?

Interpreting desertification

"The ‘Holistic’ Interpretation: Desertification Embedded in Notions of Human Intervention in Nature
The final interpretation of desertification may be termed a ‘holistic’ interpretation, in which desertification is understood as a wider phenomenon, and where the focus is placed on humans’ negative relationship with nature. This interpretation was only expressed by few of our respondents (about 5%), partly because it diverges most from both the ‘official’ and ‘popular’ interpretations of desertification highlighted above, and because it is, arguably, predicated on well informed and well educated stakeholder backgrounds. Some stakeholders mentioned both excessive urbanization and depopulation of rural areas as major causes for desertification, although this view was largely restricted to the academic sector. Interestingly, however, some of the stakeholders with agricultural backgrounds (e.g. members of farmers’
organizations and extension officials) also occasionally suggested this interpretation.

This wider understanding of the problem considers social issues as well as natural resource management, but is expressed mainly by stakeholders, who, by not being involved at the operative level of land management, can afford this moralizing approach. It is, therefore, an interpretation that is unlikely to influence practice, and is mainly held by actors who, due to their independent position (e.g. academics), lack of involvement with the practice of land management (education) or an already explicit connection to conservation issues (some government officials), can afford to have a wider view of the phenomenon that may even involve criticizing contemporary environmentally destructive processes."

JUNTTI, M. A. W., G.A. (2005) Conceptualizing Desertification in Southern Europe: Stakeholder Interpretations and Multiple Policy Agendas. European Environment, 15, 228-249.

São todos uns visionários

Apetece-me dizer: são todos uns visionários.
Estive a navegar no site da Sociedade Europeia de Sociologia Rural e fiquei admirada com a quantidade de potencialidades a serem investigadas. Parece que o presente já não conta. Já passou à história. É tudo visões futuristas dos territórios rurais, e preocupações que me parecem absurdas, como se sistemas agro-alimentares locais serão justos para com os socialmente excluídos... Uma falta de pragmatismo imensa.
Até me sinto envergonhada de querer falar de uma situação actual, bastante bruta e crua, que parece não ter nada a haver com as discussões teóricas de como o mundo rural é hoje em dia. O que eles chamam de "hoje em dia", de acordo com a minha experiência de campo, é algo que se tornará realidade...talvez de aqui a 50 anos...
Muitos beijinhos ;-)

Hollow, circle

Reading about social constructionism...
It goes a bit too far.
There is supposedly no reality as such, just the social construction of knowledge and reality.
And who is constructing this reality?
The constructed.
Who constructed the socially constructed?
Neither the egg nor the chicken.
We come back to Steiner's example: the thought of a hot burning steel does not burn, but the steel does.
Does anything like a hot, burning steel exist or is it just socially constructed?
Is there a reality beside the text?
Is there a truth to be discovered?
I've got burned too many times to belive there isn't.

Colonialism

Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler or exploitation colonies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled, displaced, or exterminated. Colonizing nations generally dominate the resources, labor, and markets of the colonial territory, and may also impose socio-cultural, religious, and linguistic structures on the indigenous population (see also cultural imperialism). It is essentially a system of direct political, economic, and cultural intervention and hegemony by a powerful country in a weaker one. Though the word colonialism is often used interchangeably with imperialism, the latter is sometimes used more broadly as it covers control exercised informally (via influence) as well as formal military control or economic leverage.
The term colonialism may also be used to refer to an ideology or a set of beliefs used to legitimize or promote this system. Colonialism was often based on the ethnocentric belief that the morals and values of the colonizer were superior to those of the colonized; some observers link such beliefs to racism and pseudo-scientific theories dating from the 18th to the 19th centuries. In the western world, this led to a form of proto-social Darwinism that placed white people at the top of the animal kingdom, "naturally" in charge of dominating non-European aboriginal populations.

Copy-pasted from Wikipedia, due to its immediate relevance to current rural development practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism

Grounded theory soultions

"If particular sensitizing concepts prove to be irrelevant, then we dispense with them. In contrast, the logico-deductive model of traditional quantitative research necessitates operationalizing established concepts in a theory as accurately as possible and deducing testable hypotheses about the relationship between these concepts. In this model the research is locked into the original concepts."

Charmaz, 2006

GMO news

Auf Wiedersehen, agbiotech
Henry I Miller The Hoover Institution, 434 Galvez Mall, Stanford University, Stanford, California

"In April, the rector and external advisory board of Nürtingen-Geislingen University "urgently recommended" that a faculty member terminate his field trials, which had begun in 1996, on insect-resistant and fungus- resistant recombinant DNA- modified corn. [...]
Also in April, the Justus Liebig University announced that it would stop its planned initiation of two small field trials of insectresistant recombinant DNA-modified corn after protests by activists and local politicians [...]
Germany is the only country in which the universities--which are normally refuges dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and to the freedom to perform legitimate research--have fully capitulated to hoodlums. One might expect such deplorable, dastardly behavior in Russia or Sudan, but in a major Western democracy it is inexcusable. [...]
This capitulation to the vilest sort of antiacademic and antisocial behavior is grotesque and has dire implications. Violent, antitechnology, antisocial activists of all sorts will now smell blood. If German universities continue along this path of circumscribing a kind of "Entartete Forschung", 'degenerate research', and allowing persecution of practitioners of certain intellectual approaches, such as the use of the most precise and predictable techniques for genetic modification, the stridency and absolutism of the activists' pronouncements--and their violent tendencies--will only increase. It is not hard to draw parallels with some of the excesses of intellectual persecution in the 1930s, when the regime's objections to Entartete Kunst, or 'degenerate art', drove out such great minds and innovators as Albert Einstein, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch and Pablo Picasso. Those who ignore the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them."

Come on, only two universities it seems have shown concerns over some genetic engineering research, it's highly grotesque to view it as a repression of the pursuit of true knowledge! In addition, the techniques used in genetic engineering are highly unpredictable and random, to claim they are precise is to try to make them seem to be something they are not. And, by the way, in what way does genetic engineering contribute to advance knowledge? And, most importantly, what legitimizes DNA manipulation?

The pathology of natural resource management

Zareen forwarded me this article form 1996 from Holling & Meffe in Conservation Biology.
The idea is very similar to James Scott "Seeing like a state": in order for a distant top-down management of natural resources to be put in place the system has to be simplified or thought of as a simple system, as a result of which it becomes simpler, because it's complexity is ignored. Efficiency of management is defined in narrow terms, e.g. agricultural yield. Sooner or later something goes wrong because part of the system has been ignored or outrightly been destroyed for it was belived to be non-essential. Then stakeholders call for more command-and-control measures. Firstly, state agencies cannot operate in a diffferent way, 'cause that's how they're organized to work, secondly, it's of economic interest to maintain short term benefits, and therefore a restructuring of the system is not desirable, but rather an end-of-pipe solution is advocated. This is what Holling calls "The pathology of natural resoucre management": command and control sooner or later goes wrong, because it ignores essential elements of the system, then the measures to solve a problem are as narrow as the measures which created the problem in the first place. The "soultion" of simplifying the system always causes new problems, and only preserving diversity, even if we don't understand what it's good for, can overcome the trap, they say.

Alegadas "Causas do abandono agrícola"

"O abandono da actividade agrícola resulta, entre outras causas, da baixa produtividade do trabalho, a qual ocorre fundamentalmente nas explorações de pequena dimensão, localizadas em regiões frágeis, onde as alterações estruturais e tecnológicas verificadas no passado recente tiveram uma pequena ou nula expressão.

O abandono ocorre fundamentalmente em Portugal, tal como nos restantes países da União Europeia, nas Regiões de Montanha, nas quais a existência de handicaps naturais, designadamente a topografia, a pequena dimensão das explorações e a baixa produtividade dos solos determinou inevitavelmente uma reduzida produtividade do trabalho."

Alves, 2003

Mas olhe lá...atão isso é tudo o que tem a dizer sobre o assunto? E o mercado agrícola comum da UE? Não nos lixou, não? Porque não explica as "outras causas"?...

Milk & Madness

"Our existing economy is production-driven—that is, the focus is on keeping businesses alive and profitable for as long as possible even if a product is not really needed. A recent example of a new product that meets no real need and is created purely to expand production and to generate profits is Bovine Somatotropine (BST), a hormone that is injected into lactating cows to increase milk production. There is presently an overproduction of milk in this country with many dairy farms going out of business. The federal government initiated a dairy herd buy-out program several years ago to encourage farmers to stop farming. What could be the reason for producing a product no one asked for and for which there is no real need? The chemical industry stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars each year, as farmers will be enticed to buy and use such a product because of the possibility of increased production and a stronger competitive position in the market.
[See Michael Wildfeuer, "A Dairyman’s View of BST," The Threefold Review, Issue No. 3, Summer 1990.] "

(Lamb, 1994)