مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

During the past decade, new crop technology1 has been at the centre of debates on how to revitalise African smallholder agriculture. Parallels are frequently drawn with the so-called Green Revolution (GR) in Asia, where new varieties of wheat and rice (referred to interchangeably as high yielding varieties (HYV) or modern varieties (MV)2) introduced from the 1960s onwards proved to have significant poverty-reducing effects. These new crop varieties were described as scale-neutral, i.e. of equal bene- fit to large-scale and small-scale farmers (Feder and Umali, 1993; Feder, 1980). After two decades of inattention to agriculture in the global development community (Scoones and Thompson, 2011; McMichael, 2009), during which the term ‘scale neutral’ was seemingly dormant in the academic debate, the term is now reappearing in the debate on the potential of new crop varieties in general, and genetically modified (GM) crops3 in particular, to benefit African smallholders.4 It is being argued that as new crop technology is scale-neutral, it can be a key driver in the transformation of African smallholder agriculture (see e.g. Juma, 2013; Mosley, 2002; Wiggins et al., 2010; Qaim, 2009; Collier and Dercon, 2014). The factthatthe Asian GR occurred under quite different circumstances seems not to temper these expectations. On the contrary, scale neutrality is frequently described as a function inherent in crops, seemingly unaffected by context. Collier and Dercon write in the present tense that “most of these [HYV] are scale-neutral” (۲۰۱۴, p.94). Qaim transfers the term to GM crops and state similarly that “GMcrops may also be well suited for small-scale farmers, because such seed technologies are scale neutral” (۲۰۰۹, p.685). As exemplified in the abovementioned quotes, where crop species or genetic modi- fication is not specified, it is also the rule rather than the exception for crop biology to be blackboxed in these discussions.

Crop technology has an important role to play in raising the productivity of agriculture in Africa today; however, for this to occur it must be appropriate for African farmers’ practices and contexts (Scoones and Thompson, 2011). This requires a clear understanding ofthe function of any new crop technology per se and how the technology is co-shaped by its host crop, its end users and their contexts. This paper draws on literature, ideas and concepts from the field of social shaping of technology (SST) (Sørensen and Williams, 2002; Williams and Edge, 1996) and the concept of biological embeddedness (Russell, 2008) to critically explore the extent to which the term ‘scale neutral’ assists or hinders us in drawing lessons from the Asian GR when analysing the role of new crop technologies for African smallholders today.

Section 2 describes how SST in combination with the concept of biological embeddedness and farming systems research (FSR) is used here to analyse the social and biological influence at different scales on the interaction between new crop technology and smallholders. Section 3 draws on some of the influential literature on the Asian GR to describe how the concept‘scale neutral’ was introduced to explain smallholder adoption of new crop technology during the Asian GR, while highlighting the acknowledged limitations of the term ‘scale neutral’ for describing what was going on. It goes on to point out factors shown to be important for the empirically observed scale neutrality. Section 4 discusses the re-appearance of the term ‘scale neutral’ in contemporary discussions on agricultural development in Africa and discusses the differences between the contemporary situation in Africa and the situation in Asia during the GR. Itis highlighted how the increasingly privatised agricultural development regime,African land use characteristics and crop biology negatively affectthe possibility for crop technology to work in a scale-neutral manner in Africa today. Section 5 focuses specifically on the framing of GM crops as scale-neutral in recent agricultural development debates. The talk of GMcrops as scaleneutral is placed are moved between organisms from the same species, but these are not discussed here. 4 After the academic references to scale neutral in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Feder, 1980; Feder and Umali 1993), the concept seems to have been fairly dormant until it reappeared in literature discussing crop technology in the 2000s (Mosley, 2002; Hazell et al., 2010; Wiggins et al., 2010; Collier and Dercon, 2014). With some time lag in relation to societal events, which is in the nature of academic work,this follows the general trend of the shifting centrality of agriculture in development policy over time. In sharp contrast to the attention given to crop technology during the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s (and appearing in the academic literature up until the early 1990s), the role of agriculture in rural development was largely ignored throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s in the global development community (McMichael, 2009; Scoones and Thompson, 2011). This trend shifted at the start of the millennium (Andersson Djurfeldt, 2013), which can be seen in reports such as the publication Agriculture at the Crossroads: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge (Kiers et al., 2008) commissioned by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO), andthe factthattheWorld Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (World Bank, 2007), was the first world development report in 25 years to be devote d to agriculture (McMichael, 2009). in perspective by studying the empirical record on GM crops and smallholders today. This section shows how GM crops, rather than being scale neutral, can be usefully understood as a continuation and reinforcement of an established crop technological trajectory that started with hybrid technology. Conclusions are presented in Section 6.