Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)
Many thanks for the opportunity to comment on this V0 draft. I have attached my personal comments regarding section 3.2.3 on local knowledge, and have pasted them below as well. I associate myself more generally with the submission "Comment by transdisciplinary team of scientists working in food and agriculture systems." In addition, I note with concern Marcia Ishii-Eiteman's comment among others that the comment process is weakened by the time and language constraints which prevent farmer and other agricultural movements in marginalized spaces of the globe. This unfortunately leads to the reality that, while the process claims to be participatory, it is still centrally administered (where the FAO is considered to be a "movement").
The report rightly includes discussion of “global” and “local” knowledge, also termed “indigenous” and “scientific” knowledge or in Scott’s important book Seeing Like a State, metis (practical knowledge) and techne (technical knowledge), in examining agroecology. Though the report introduces the section with straw-man caricatures of “science” and “tradition,” the authors then usefully supplement Robert Chambers’ classic work on rural development with more critical interdisciplinary work by Agrawal, Vandermeer and Perfecto, in arguing that “the notion that science and scientific knowledge are neutral and uninfluenced by human behaviour is not viable.” If the authors took these ideas as the epistemological bases for the approach to “local/global” knowledge and agroecology, this would create a strong statement on the complex and overlapping relations between “global” and “local” knowledge, the central role of power relations, the necessity of solidarity among people at multiple scales, and especially the need for equitable distribution of wealth and governance institutions accountable to social movements and civil society.
Agrawal (1995) argues that “The confusing rhetoric of indigenous vs. western knowledge, and the reliance on the politically and technically convenient method of ex situ conservation fail to address the underlying asymmetries of power and control that cement in place the oppression of indigenous or other marginalized social groups.” While Vandermeer and Perfecto seem to accept the dualism between “traditional knowledge” which is “profound but local” and “scientific knowledge” which is “general but superficial,” their vision is that these approaches are united by work between these two equally valuable pursuits and populations in order to come somehow to knowledge that is both “deep and general” (Vandermeer and Perfecto 2013, 86).
After the opening, however, the authors reference the latter two works only glancingly, disregarding in particular the power relations through which leaders of globalized corporate agri-business monopolize resources for agricultural production and associated production of “legitimate knowledge” that justify monopolization of authority by national governments whose leaders often are intimately invested (through debt and other instruments) in protecting interests of these multinational corporations. The authors explicitly categorize “local” knowledge as informal (the realm of farmers and activists), and “global” knowledge as formal (the realm of science, the state and the FAO). FAO administrators then implicitly become those responsible for combining “local” sites of “spontaneous” knowledge into planned systems of “organized” knowledge. This removal of contested politics (meaning that the FAO can be designated as a “movement” alongside Via Campesina for example) crystalizes divisions which in reality are often “more about politics than geography” (Forbes 1996, 31; see also Edelman 1996; Fisher 1997) and thus does not address what Chappell considers to be a key problem of food provision and hunger prevention: “Any analysis of hunger that refuses the issue of power is incapable of truly addressing the problem” (Chappell 2018).
Chappell, M. J. (2018) Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond. University of California Press.
Edelman, Marc (1996) Reconceptualizing and Reconstituting Peasant Struggles: A New Social Movement in Central America. Radical History Review 65, 26-47.
Fisher, William F (1997) Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices. Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 439-464.
Forbes, Ann Armbrecht (1996): Defining the "Local" in the Arun Controversy. Cultural Survival Quarterly, 20:3, 31-34.
Scott, James C (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve The Human Condition Have Failed. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Vandermeer, John & Ivette Perfecto (2013): Complex Traditions: IntersectingTheoretical Frameworks in Agroecological Research, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 37:1,76-89.
Many thanks for the opportunity to comment on this V0 draft. I have attached my personal comments regarding section 3.2.3 on local knowledge, and have pasted them below as well. I associate myself more generally with the submission "Comment by transdisciplinary team of scientists working in food and agriculture systems." In addition, I note with concern Marcia Ishii-Eiteman's comment among others that the comment process is weakened by the time and language constraints which prevent farmer and other agricultural movements in marginalized spaces of the globe. This unfortunately leads to the reality that, while the process claims to be participatory, it is still centrally administered (where the FAO is considered to be a "movement").
The report rightly includes discussion of “global” and “local” knowledge, also termed “indigenous” and “scientific” knowledge or in Scott’s important book Seeing Like a State, metis (practical knowledge) and techne (technical knowledge), in examining agroecology. Though the report introduces the section with straw-man caricatures of “science” and “tradition,” the authors then usefully supplement Robert Chambers’ classic work on rural development with more critical interdisciplinary work by Agrawal, Vandermeer and Perfecto, in arguing that “the notion that science and scientific knowledge are neutral and uninfluenced by human behaviour is not viable.” If the authors took these ideas as the epistemological bases for the approach to “local/global” knowledge and agroecology, this would create a strong statement on the complex and overlapping relations between “global” and “local” knowledge, the central role of power relations, the necessity of solidarity among people at multiple scales, and especially the need for equitable distribution of wealth and governance institutions accountable to social movements and civil society.
Agrawal (1995) argues that “The confusing rhetoric of indigenous vs. western knowledge, and the reliance on the politically and technically convenient method of ex situ conservation fail to address the underlying asymmetries of power and control that cement in place the oppression of indigenous or other marginalized social groups.” While Vandermeer and Perfecto seem to accept the dualism between “traditional knowledge” which is “profound but local” and “scientific knowledge” which is “general but superficial,” their vision is that these approaches are united by work between these two equally valuable pursuits and populations in order to come somehow to knowledge that is both “deep and general” (Vandermeer and Perfecto 2013, 86).
After the opening, however, the authors reference the latter two works only glancingly, disregarding in particular the power relations through which leaders of globalized corporate agri-business monopolize resources for agricultural production and associated production of “legitimate knowledge” that justify monopolization of authority by national governments whose leaders often are intimately invested (through debt and other instruments) in protecting interests of these multinational corporations. The authors explicitly categorize “local” knowledge as informal (the realm of farmers and activists), and “global” knowledge as formal (the realm of science, the state and the FAO). FAO administrators then implicitly become those responsible for combining “local” sites of “spontaneous” knowledge into planned systems of “organized” knowledge. This removal of contested politics (meaning that the FAO can be designated as a “movement” alongside Via Campesina for example) crystalizes divisions which in reality are often “more about politics than geography” (Forbes 1996, 31; see also Edelman 1996; Fisher 1997) and thus does not address what Chappell considers to be a key problem of food provision and hunger prevention: “Any analysis of hunger that refuses the issue of power is incapable of truly addressing the problem” (Chappell 2018).
Chappell, M. J. (2018) Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond. University of California Press.
Edelman, Marc (1996) Reconceptualizing and Reconstituting Peasant Struggles: A New Social Movement in Central America. Radical History Review 65, 26-47.
Fisher, William F (1997) Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices. Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 439-464.
Forbes, Ann Armbrecht (1996): Defining the "Local" in the Arun Controversy. Cultural Survival Quarterly, 20:3, 31-34.
Scott, James C (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve The Human Condition Have Failed. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Vandermeer, John & Ivette Perfecto (2013): Complex Traditions: IntersectingTheoretical Frameworks in Agroecological Research, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 37:1,76-89.