Lead author Neil Dawson from
the University of East Anglia in England writes in the scientific journal World
Development that only a relatively wealthy minority have been able to keep to
enforced modernisation because the poorest farmers cannot afford the risk of
taking out credit for the approved inputs, such as seeds and fertilisers.
Their fears of harvesting
nothing from new crops and the potential for the government to seize and
reallocate their land means many choose to sell their land, the study says.
This comes as no surprise to
me. In 1969, I saw it happen in Obregon, Mexico, where the late Dr. Norman
Bourlaug conducted his Green Revolution plant-breeding research to develop
dwarf wheats.
There the first adopters became
so much richer, and so fast, that they
were able to build haciendas that occupied a quarter of a city block. But
thousands of subsistence-level farmers sold their land, moved to Mexico and
ended up in horrific slums.
Bourlaug was dismayed. He said
his technology needed to be accompanied by social revolutions, including birth
control.
Now Dawson writes that ”similar
results are emerging from other experiments in Africa.
Agricultural development
certainly has the potential to help these people, but instead these policies
appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural
inhabitants, says the research team.
The Green Revolutions “may
increase aggregate production of exportable crops, yet for many of the poorest
smallholders they strip them of their main productive resource - land, Dawson
explained.
The team looked in particular
into eight villages in Rwanda where the researchers found the technology has disrupted
subsistence practices, exacerbated poverty, impaired local systems of trade and
knowledge, and threatened land ownership.
“It is startling that the
impacts of policies with such far-reaching impacts for such poor people are, in
general, so inadequately assessed,” Dawson stressed.
I wonder what Dawson and his
team would find if they studied a typical Canadian rural community and the
changes technology has introduced over the past 40 years. Perhaps much the same
– fewer, bigger farms embracing land that once supported scores of farm
families.
But, they should ask, are more
people better fed?
