Category: Policy

Women who have worked in the fields are more valuable than women who have worked as housemaids. Brendan Koerner reports on a study of bride prices in Tanzania which shows that “child labor in agricultural activities is significantly associated with better outcomes in terms of family wealth”. Koerner goes on to ask whether “if bride prices were abolished, would families be less inclined to put their daughters to work in the fields? That would seem to be a long-term good for a nation looking to decrease its reliance on farming.”

My question: why would Tanzania want to decrease its reliance on farming? Wouldn’t it actually like to improve its farming?

Answers on a postcard (whatever that is) please.

Don has kindly sent us a quote from that paper about the Thai government rethinking agricultural sustainability that Jeremy nibbled earlier today. He suggests it might be more interesting than Jeremy made it out to be.

The Department of Agricultural Extension (DOAE), created under the MOAC with assistance by the World Bank, played a direct role for disseminating Green Revolution innovations, including new high-yielding varieties, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and associated labor-saving machineries, in every subdistrict through the staff stationed in the district center… Yet, except for Central Thailand, where rice yields have risen considerably with developed irrigation systems, the widespread adoption of Green Revolution technologies has resulted in stagnating market prices and yields throughout most areas of the country (Pasuk and Baker, 1995), persisting poverty of small-scale farmers in many rain-fed areas (Apichai, 1997), recurrent pest resistance and resurgence to pests (Sathorn, 2000), health hazards related to farmers’ inefficient use of pesticides (Nipon, Ruhs and Sumana, 1998), among others. Furthermore, a rapid expansion of export cash crop cultivation in the uplands of the North and Northeast, promoted by the MOAC during the 1970, with crops such as maize, cassava, kenaf, and cotton, resulted in rapid deforestation and massive displacement of the poor from the paddy tracts as dependent labor on agribusinesses with no secure titles to land (Pasuk and Baker, 1995).

May well be worth chasing down after all, behind its paywall.

An email from Douglas Woodward of the Green Party in Canada draws our attention to a resolution on Genetic Conservation and Biodiversity, adopted at the Green Party’s convention in February 2009. The preamble to the resolution makes clear the importance of conservation for agriculture:

WHEREAS the conservation of habitat, species and genetically diverse local populations is required not only for the preservation of wild nature but for the survival of agriculture, the possiblity of the domestication of new crops, and the preservation of our food supply,

It then goes on to call for comprehensive collections of crop plant and domestic animal diversity, “especially for low-input systems of farming suited to a resource-frugal future”. This is now part of the Green Party’s policy for Canada.

Does any other political party offer anything similar?