Category: Policy

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Technology is not enough, part 2

Policy makers should give as much emphasis to incentives and affordability of modern inputs as to their efforts to ensure availability of technologies. Non-technical issues are just as important. The wider innovation system, encompassing technology delivery, marketing, and wider institutional and policy issues — most notably land — must be looked at more comprehensively, if productivity boosts in grain staples is to create the wider growth effects in the economy, with advantages for poorer and richer farmers alike.

This time from Ethiopia.

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Technology is not enough

Greater investment in improving agricultural technology certainly needs to be part of the solution to meet the rising demand for food. But if spatially connective infrastructure (roads and bridges in particular) and complementary services such as agricultural extension are ignored, these findings from Bangladesh suggest that few farmers in lagging but potentially productive regions will benefit, thwarting the goal of raising agricultural productivity.

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Nature with a capital N

The Prince of Wales is at it again. In The Times he writes about our need to reconnect with Nature.

You may believe that I have some reactionary obsession with returning to a kind of mock medieval, forelock-tugging past. All I am saying is that we simply cannot contend with the global environmental crises we face by relying on clever technological “fixes” on their own.

His enemy is Modernism. His answer is Harmony. “In denying the invisible ‘grammar of harmony’ we create cacophony and dissonance.”

Complexity is key to life. The diversity that made up this complexity was bulldozed in the pursuit of simplicity and convenience, creating an appeal that continues to fuel the conspicuous consumption and throwaway societies we see everywhere.

Not a Darwinistic struggle but a community effort, then: “Biology shows that (…) life seeks balance. Every organism works together to produce a harmonic whole.” Well, I try.