 Mae'n fawr i'r fawr, i chi'n gweithio'r Fflaunau Dwyfodol. Mae'r ddweud i'r gymuned gyda'r Gweithredu Fflaunau. Mae'n ddweud i'n gweithio'r Fflaunau, byddwn i'r Gweithredu, byddwn i'r Dr Marcus Taylor, byddwn i'r Gweithredu Cynedig, byddwn i'r gweithredu Cynedig, byddwn i'r Gweithredu Cynedig. Mae'n gweithio'r Gweithredu Cynedig i'r Gweithredu Cynedig, byddwn i'r gymuned gyda'r gyda'r gyda'r gyda. Mae'n gweithio'r gyda'r gymuned gyda'r cymaint ac byddwn i'r gyfnodol. Mae'r gyda cymaint, yn ymdodol, sydd gennym ni'n gweithio arall o'r ffordd. Marcus yn ymigrannu ar gyfer y dyfodol o ddweud i'r ddeudol a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweudio Fflaunau, mae'n gofio ar gyfer y cyfnodol a'r ddweud, ymddangos o'r cyllidau agriacolau a gweithio, mae'r cyllidau cerddorol gyda cyflogau o'r cyllidau cerddorol a gweithio'r cyllidau cerddorol. Mae'n gyntaf o'r cyllidau agriacolau gyllidau o'r cyllidau cyflogau o'r cyllidau cyflogau. Rwy'n meddwl am ydych chi fod yn gweithio cynnyddol gan dw i'r parwyr i'w ddysgu syrfaeneth, profesor Kate Soper a dr Nithia Nattarargan. Kate erioed a profesor i dromodol yn Fflawni Llywodraeth Metropolitan University and was a visiting professor at Brighton University. She's published widely on environmental philosophy, aesthetics of nature, theory of needs and consumption and cultural theory. She's been a member of the editorial collectives of Radical Philosophy and New Left Review and a regular columnist for the US Journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. She's currently working on a book on alternative hedonism about the key role of changed consumption and the re-conceptualisation of prosperity and progress in meeting the challenges of climate change. Nithia is a postdoctoral research associate on the Blood Bricks project at Royal Holloway University of London. Her work there focuses on debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia and how they came to be debt-bonded through a trajectory of rural indebtedness in climate change affected villages across the Mekong Delta. She's also an ESRSC seed doctoral scholar based at SOAS, where her research centres on agrarian transition and environmental change among tobacco farmers and traders in Tamil Nadu, South India. Nithia's work cuts across the fields of human geography, development studies and agrarian political economy. So Marcus, who you can just see in the very top corner of the screen, will be talking for 45 to 50 minutes. Nithia and Kate will then comment for five to seven minutes each, after which we will open up the discussion to questions from the floor. If you're tweeting, please use the hashtags SOAS Dev Studies and ESRC. So over to Marcus then. Wonderful, thank you so much Jay. I'm wondering can everyone hear me okay? We can hear you perfectly, thank you. Oh, that's superb, and thank you so much. Thanks so much for Faizi, for organising Jay for introducing and Kate and Nithia. It's an absolute pleasure and an honour to have you a part of this panel. Thanks so much and thanks so much to SOAS for allowing me to enforce this technological challenge of doing the talk from distance. It would be absolutely wonderful to be there with you. Don't get me wrong, I would love to be in London right now visiting all of you, and particularly as I hear it's plus 20 degrees or something absolutely crazy of that nature. But that's the point. The reason that I'm doing this remotely is because I didn't feel comfortable taking a flight just to give a talk about climate change impacts and so forth. So thank you for your patience with the technology and I hope this is perhaps something of a template of how many more academic talks can be done in the future to allow people to connect over great distances without obviously the carbon emissions. So let's think of this as a climate friendly talk. OK, so what am I talking about today? I want to introduce you to some of the recent research I've been doing on agrarian change and environmental change in southern India. It's almost impossible to discuss agriculture and rural India these days without talking about agrarian crisis. This notion of crisis, of a countrysideing crisis really haunts many debates over India and people talk about the nature of crisis in Indian agriculture in a number of ways. To be clear, it is not agriculture itself that's in crisis. Indian agriculture still remains productive with the yields, etc. But rather the social components and environmental components of agriculture. You may be familiar with different kind of indices of social distress. There's been accounts of falling incomes, of poor nutrition, of escalating indebtedness among particularly the small holder and marginal farmer population of rural India. Perhaps most notably this gets shown in questions of farmer suicides. There has been a lot of media attention about farmer suicides across India, but particularly in the regions that I'm going to be talking about today. And these are farmers typically that have fallen into debt and most regrettably decide to end their own lives rather than face the social stigma of not being able to pay debts because their agriculture wasn't renumerative enough. At the same time, there's been an explosion of protests. The Modi government, the national government of India, has seen farmers protesting, walking, marching to Delhi, and some very dramatic protests in the capital and in other places to mark the fear of agriculture not providing livelihoods to people. And on top of that, there's growing question about the environmental basis for agriculture, particularly questions of water depletion, of soil erosion, and of course, the big one that we talk about, the overlays, much of these dynamics, which of course are climate change, manifest potentially in terms of droughts, erratic rains. So too much water, not enough water, water when you expect it, but then water when you don't expect it kind of questions. So the relationship of climate change is sort of overlying this. And this kind of comes to this idea of agricultural crisis. Now let's be clear. The Indian government, both nationally but also the regional state governments, introduced lots of programs to try and tackle simultaneously agricultural development, rural development more widely, and climate change adaptation or climate resilience. And I've been very fortunate to be able to look at three of these programs in conjunction with colleagues in India over the last four years. So particularly working with a colleague, Suhas Bhazme, who's based currently in Athee, the Ashoka Trust for Environment and Ecology in Bangalore. So what I want to do is talk through these case studies and use each one of them to open a bit of a different window on contemporary rural India, challenges of development, development projects, climate change adaptation, and so forth. And from each case study, I want to try and draw out one point from each. And then in the conclusion, I'll try and stick them together and talk a little bit of a more general level. So in terms of the three case studies, they are based around different parts of South India. I don't know if you can see the pointer on the map. No, you can't because I can't even see it on my own computer. Okay, but the three case study sites is firstly in Telangana, which is those two green, sorry, green. Yellow dots towards the top end of the map, Hyderabad, it's the capital city of Telangana State, and Dalatabad, which is the area where I've been doing some research on the system of rice intensification. Then after that, our research moved more to the south. You'll see Tumkaru and Mandir highlighted, and I'm going to talk about hybrid rice propagation in Mandir and climate resilient village projects in Tumkaru, and so those are going to be three case studies. What ties these case studies together and why I'm going to try and go through each is the fact that they're well firstly, they're all public projects, they're all government-driven initiatives, and they're government-driven initiatives to try and simultaneously address questions of rural development and environmental change. Particularly, we could say that something that captures, finds them all together, is this idea of climate smart agriculture, and this is a relatively new buzzword, a relatively new rubric which is being used, not just in India, but globally, to discuss the future of agriculture, of rural development, et cetera. These days, all international institutions are using this rubric to make claims about policies, to organise what they do. You'll see, just by these titles of recent publications here, we've got the future of food, shaping a climate smart global food system, that's a World Bank publication. But also the other document, we've got SEAT, Centre for International Tropical Agriculture, CISIA, the consortium group on international agricultural research, World Bank and so forth and so forth. All institutions are trying to get into this idea of climate smart agriculture, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation would be the same. The idea of climate smart agriculture is that to move to shift agricultural systems to new technologies and new techniques and cultivation practices that do sort of three things. The idea of promoting yields, increasing yields, simultaneously to embedding climate resilience within agricultural systems, so the ability to be able to deal with shocks and stresses from a change in climate, and alongside wherever possible, decreasing emissions from agriculture. Although to be fair, that third one ends up being less prominent than the other two when we're talking about developing world agriculture. And so this idea of climate smart agriculture, all the three aspects that I'm looking at, the three programmes, have been sort of put together under this rubric. The other rubric that they sort of touch upon is the one that's in the title of my talk, and that is the idea of a new green revolution in India. So 2016 marked 50 years from the idea of the initiation of the original green revolution in India. There was a lot of public talks and a lot of public conferences around what it means for to be 50 years. The farmer you see in the photo was one of the very first practitioners of green revolution technologies. IR8 was the rice variety that had been produced as a green revolution crop, and there he is 50 years later looking at... You can't see too well, but the board in front of him 50 years later is Subwanay, which is a flood tolerant rice variety that's been developed, etc. And this is still an active farmer, 50 years still using these more advanced rice varieties and technologies, etc. So in India climate smart is kind of hinged this idea of finding a new green revolution, one that can push yields forwards. And the idea that increasing yields will increase farm incomes, will address food security issues, will promote rural development, but at the same time the new green revolution must deal with the environmental strains upon agriculture. Massive water use and water wastage and problems to do with climate change and soil erosion. So what we're going to take a look at and as I talk through these projects, one of the key things that in this idea of both climate smart agriculture and finding a new green revolution, much of the drift of these programs have been focused on technologies, new agricultural technologies, as the way to pioneer more productive crops and more resilient crops, which can enable those triple golds of rural development, farmer incomes and increasing food security. And this of course is very typical. For example, in climate smart agriculture the idea of substituting older technologies for new ones as the way to achieve these kinds of ends really appeals to policy makers. Cos it simplifies the process of trying to intervene in rural India. The idea that simply getting farmers to adopt more modern, better, scientifically more advanced crops, inputs, cultivation techniques reduces the problems of rural India to a question of techniques. We can simply get farmers to substitute one set of practices with another and create the aims you want. And this is like manner from heaven for development projects because it creates a certain kind of simplicity to them. There's a clearly stated purpose to them, substitution of technology or practices, and the idea is that will mechanically lead to certain outcomes, which are beneficial and can be mapped. And within this we often see then that the idea that the problem primarily is farmers themselves. It's a question of getting new information and better technologies to farmers, but also either convincing them, persuading them, or just flat out coercing them to adopt the better technologies which are developed elsewhere. And this is of course long standing way of approaching agricultural development. It's still very much alive and well in rural India today. So what I'm going to show you is that why I find this approach to be quite problematic, and I'm going to show the three projects turn by turn and talk about why the many respects that they sort of failed to deliver the goals that they were supposedly set up to do. And particularly within that is because they silence key questions and key issues in rural India. They don't talk about questions of power. They don't talk about questions of rural hierarchy. They don't talk about questions of social relations. And these are really intimate aspects of rural India. It's virtually impossible to understand how new technologies work or fail to work without embracing these kind of complexities of power and hierarchy. But government programs really don't want to cross that train. The messy political train. And therefore they simplify in ways that I'm going to show you. So just very briefly my broader approach to understanding new agricultural technologies, agrarian change and so forth is rooted in political ecology. I don't know how familiar you would all be with a political ecology perspective but three main elements of it, very briefly this is not meant to be a theoretical talk we'll get to the empirics very quickly. But free basis, firstly basis in agrarian political economy in the words of sort of Henry Bernstein the idea of we need to understand who owns what, who does what who gets what and what they do with it in rural settings and you know that's the sort of template of thinking about rural power structures rural social relations in order to understand how new technologies are embedded or fail to embed. Particularly I'm interested in questions of access and control so who has access to certain productive resources or who has control over them and as you'll see in what I'm about to discuss big issues are obviously land who has access to control over land but also water, labour credit or credit and debt knowledge who has access to knowledge and how what networks shape the knowledge in rural society and common property resources those resources that might be common grazing lands access to forests and other aspects who has control over those or access to them. So that's just sort of the meat of agrarian political economy alongside that a second pillar of political ecology I find very useful for my own work is to focus on the politics of representation so if we want to to go beyond Bernstein's sort of who owns what and who does what this is a question of who defines what who identifies problems and therefore is able to say what kind of solutions they are who speaks for whom in rural society so this politics of representation of who can produce discourses around the issues for example climate smart agriculture is itself a discourse which represents the problems of rural India and other locations as an absence of the right kinds of technologies and the solutions that fall for that become about getting the technologies into rural areas now just quite simply many rural social movements would not accept that framing that discursive framing or that representation of the problems of rural India and so this question of who has power to define the debates is really important and that's a really important second pillar of political ecology for me and the third one is perhaps the most complex or controversial in some way and that is the question of how we understand the interaction between social dynamics and what we might call the environment or the ecological or the biophysical dynamics and very often in sort of standard agrarian political economy is very anthropocentric social categories are seen to be the causal ones class and commodities et cetera march out in the environment seems to be very static the environment the sort of what it seem to be as nature is seem to be a sort of static terrain in which humans play out their interactions and so I've sort of been influenced by some of the work coming out of act and network theory Latour and others to a certain measure there's a lot of problems with it but I'm really interested in understanding how biophysical processes are intermesh with social processes to create social environmental change et cetera in ways that there's no clear defining lines between what is social and what is natural and so forth and climate change really drives this process this issue home is climate change is neither social nor biophysical but it's both together in many ways right so I'm going to try and bring that out but when I look at questions of rice production which has been you know my work I'm interested in the interrelationships between everything between the seeds themselves plants microbes pests meteorological forces in terms of temperature rain et cetera flows of water which humans try to shape social patterns of seeding and weeding the divisions of labour and divisions of knowledge and communities forms of credit, land tenure marketing commodity chains and all of this going how they all come together so that some biophysical processes are really important how in the social ones and vice versa in ways that get really sort of messy so just keep that in the back of mind it helps to explain how I approach these issues I'm more than happy to elaborate on any of this later on but I really want to get to the empirical material which is the sort of part of the material so, on that sense where am I looking so the first project that was my colleague and I really looked at first is the system of rice intensification in Mahabugnagar district in Telangana and Telangana is India's new estate it was carved out from what was unified under the predation it's become its own thing and it's right there and if you look at the hand map in the heart of Peninsula India and Mahabugnagar is so on the left you can see the state of Telangana on the right you can see where Mahabugnagar district is and the villages that we looked at were in the north to write up the sort of central north tip of that we looked at about six villages and we looked at six villages where there had been a government program sorry actually first of all just to give you some detail so this region of central south India is a semi arid region there is the monsoon period and outside of the monsoon period it is pretty dry so a lot of agriculture and agriculture involves 60% of the working population revolves around water and particularly as you'll see with some of these photos you can see the sort of typically the landscape is very dry et cetera where there's access to water and that's often through bore wells digging down drilling a well into water that's underground I will come back to that where water can be combined with land and human labour you can get very fertile areas but overall this is seen as in Indian terms a backward region where there's lots of poverty a large small holder a large small holder a marginal land holder population et cetera where yields are not particularly high and where rice is farmed along with various forms of millets and various cash crops such as vegetables, tomatoes, maize and some lentils for domestic consumption so in this region one of the ideas was to bring in this technique called a system of rice intensification and this is a way of cultivated rice that was developed in Madagascar but has become really promoted among some circles because it's suggested it's a way of increasing yields and reducing water use with only a change in cultivation patterns so this doesn't need new inputs new technologies of material kind rather it just needs farmers to change the way they grow rice so what you see before you is a field planted in stream method and I'll just quickly highlight what the differences are so system of rice intensification involves farmers planting their seeds in a very patent fashion if you look at that field in the photograph you'll see it's very ordered with square quadrants in which their rice plants in each corner of the squares mapped out across the field it's very linear and very organized this is because contrary to typical rice production the idea is to leave a lot of spacing between individual rice plants the idea here is that you just want single rice plants well spaced so they grow incredible root structures it's notable that when the rice is planted in this field they always transplant from seedlings to very young ones about half the age of normal rice plantation under two weeks of age so that you get very vigorous growth in the early system and they can establish those roots the other difference and this is important for the climate change thing is that you use less water at the moment you can see the field is flooded but the idea is to use alternate wetting and drying so you flood the field and then you let it dry out you don't keep a permanently flooded field you don't keep a completely flooded rice cultivation and the idea here is to let the air get to the soil and this is meant to prove a much healthier biome for the rice the paddy plants and the microorganisms in the soil and the oxygen etc create a much healthier to allow for vigorous growth and this the idea is yes you've got less rice plants in your field but they tend to be much bigger with much more grain on them and because you've used less water less water the other aspect of this is that you weed this field with a mechanical weeder I'll come back to that in a second so this has seemed to be a really interesting new technique promoted in order to try and increase rice yields it involves a major shift in how people grow rice it goes against traditional practises but the idea is that this can actually boost yields and save waters making it a climate smart technology and on this basis the government of Andara Pradesh then once it became independent Telangana launched programs to try and get this embedded in villages so we're looking at some of the villages where this program had run about five years previously and the program involved getting the villages together creating committees to promote this method training from university agricultural extension officers subsidies in terms of fertiliser to try and get people to do it and to build up a real pattern in villages using this alternative method so in that respect Sri is meant to achieve great things and when we got to the villages about a year after the program had ended we were hoping to find the presence of Sri in fields but we could not because we looked at all the areas and we talked to the farmers etc and virtually no one was using system rice intensification or Sri and this confused us and our first thing was perhaps it doesn't work there are some agronomists that claim Sri is a bit of smoke and mirrors it doesn't deliver the results that it suggested but talking to farmers this was not the case every farmer that we talked to that had practised it meaning in town promoting it said yeah we got better yield somewhere between 5% and 15% increases and we use less water but we still don't use it now so this became our question why this failed and there's a number of reasons for this and they have little to do with culture of farmers not being able to accept new methods etc which was one of the official lines taken in this on the contrary there's much more to do with what we could call the agrarian political economy so first thing transplanting you'll see here that this is a field planted not in stream method because we couldn't find it I'd love to show you the only time I saw three in a field was in the university test fields I could find no evidence of it in these villages despite major resources being pumped in over the previous four years so one of the questions is labour that's by the government at all but you will remember that with shree you plant younger seedlings so the seedlings you've seen being planted here are four weeks old that's typical shree you have to do it at a very specific time 12 to 14 days and so the first thing we noticed is that shree might be a more productive system but it's much more detailed much more finely choreographed system of cultivating rice and this is what cause problems for farmers because in order to have a much more finely tuned choreography of cultivation you need control not just over your own field but over water over labour over access to credit and other things so in terms of labour in order to get people into your field at the precise moment that shree says that you need to transplant your seedlings it's really it's really a problem you have two days to do it to drive maximum results and yet transplanting is taken under rural India primarily by female transplantation labour groups some farmers had no problem getting these labourers in their fields at the time they wanted and this tended to be farmers with greater land who could offer the groups like several days of consistent work which they found very valuable or farmers that had other aspects of social prestige and social power within the area for example one of the interviews we did was a sort of more affluent farmer that also ran an input store in the centre of the village and we're sitting there interviewing and he said yeah no problem getting labourers whenever we need it and it became very clear why whilst we're sitting there interviewing him because we kept getting interrupted by people coming to store and asking him for advice about which chemicals fertilisers, pesticides to use and then asking him to purchase them on credit so quite simply in the rural power structure this was a very powerful person labour groups knew the potential of their husbands and their households needed this guy for credit, for inputs, for advice for knowledge etc so his fields would be the first dealt with so when it came time for transplanting he had no problem on the flipside of it those small and marginal farmers the needed labourers they were at the bottom of the pekin order and they would get into bidding wars to try and bring in labourers at a time of relative labour shortage given that many women were preferring to go and try and work in factories migrating to cities rather than to work in the fields and so one of the things that we noticed this was a social question this was a labour question about who did work for whom and who had the power to make sure people were in the fields doing the labour now in normal rice cultivation this doesn't matter because you can transplant your rice any time around it being one month old but with SRI being a really choreographed system and you need to try and do it between a certain amount of time this caused a lot of problems so many farmers just realised that there would be very late planting and this certainly had an effect on their yields farmers that could get the labourers into the fields had the most benefits from SRI farmers that couldn't control labour in that way suffered and their yields were far less equally another aspect of the labour thing when it comes together with gender when you weed normally in rural India, weeding again it's a very gendered division of labour and it's handed out to female labour groups as we're seeing in the previous however under SRI method because you don't flood the field the weed problem is more significant flooding the field suppresses weeds so you're meant to actually weed with a mechanical weeder which you can see here this gentleman is showing in the field it's a very rudimentary mechanical weeder it's meant to turn up the soil that's meant to help aerate the soil and kill the weeds but the thing we noticed immediately you know what we can't be bothered to do SRI even though it works by giving us a bit more yield because of this weeder system is terrible and they said it's really hard work and depending here you can see a gentleman with darker soil that very tough soil to move the red soils you'll see in other photos are a bit easier etc but they complained that it was too onerous a task what really they were meaning was that the balance of labour had passed from women weeding to men and so it was about gender divisions of labour here and they were actually hand weeding is a very onerous task too the men weren't complaining about that because the women were doing it but SRI changed the balance of it and because it seemed to be using a technology a mechanical weeder that was seen to be men's work men had to do this and they frankly didn't want to do it so there's a strongly gendered aspect in there the third aspect that we looked about is access to water now SRI uses less water wonderful climate change here with questions of water scarcity the trouble is that SRI's system you need water at very specific times and to get water you needed one of these what I'm showing you here is a photograph of a drilling rig because water is basically the monsoons come and that's great for the fields while the rain's there but after that period most people are trying to draw water from underground the rock formations catch a water in pools underground little underground lakes and you get these guys to come drill down it's very expensive and it's quite risky because you're not sure if you're going to hit one of the underground lakes or not because they're fragmented between the rock formations etc and then you can attach a ball well and pump water out and cultivate your rice so SRI's system requires less water but it requires it at very precise moments and this made farmers very nervous because these ball wells have been increasingly dug all over the landscape and farmers are quickly exploiting them out of water within them and if your neighbouring farmer can drill deeper than you into the same underground aquifer they can get that water and if your well doesn't go down as far you'll run out quickly and they'll keep pumping and that leads to this if you see in this photo here this is a failed ball well in the sense that you'll see that the crop is green to a certain area and then it goes yellow and it's dying and that's because the water is no longer coming out in sufficient amount to irrigate the field so why farmers were worried about SRI using SRI was because they felt if their ball well failed then when their field had been dried out they would lose the crop and the older flooded system of growing rice you still had several inches of water in the field at any time so if your ball well failed there's still a chance for rain to come in the next few days and refill the aquifers and so forth so it's a risk avoidance thing they were worried about SRI because it created them very dependent on the ball wells which they couldn't rely on particularly as neighbouring farms were digging down into the same aquifers so there's a risk avoidance aspect so here we found a main point to draw out of this is not a question of whether a new technology works or not we found that SRI worked in its explicit goals of increasing yield and using less water but for whom it works and why and we found that whilst more affluent farmers who were able to control labour who perhaps had better deeper ball wells and were able to employ other people to do the heavy work of pushing the wheeler were perfectly happy with SRI and they continued to use it the small and marginal farmers that SRI was most meant to benefit found that they wouldn't do it and they even said yes it gives us more yield yes it gives us less water but those questions of access and control mean that we can't use this new technology or we won't use it so that's the first key point there with one little case study so I'm going to move on to a second case study to draw out some other aspects of it but let's keep those questions of access and control in mind right so the second project that we looked at was in a mangyr district in Karnataka which is the state if you look on the map on the left the large state in the south west and then if you look at the map on the right that shows Karnataka state and it shows you where Mandir is and Mandir is quite different from Mahabuknagar because Mandir is right next to the Calvary river and there's an integrated irrigation system of canals and so forth built out of this Calvary river which was set up by British colonial authorities in the 20s, 30s etc and still functions today so this is quite different agroecological zone because of the canal so whilst climate change and climatic variability is still having a major impact on here and I'll try and come to it there's generally been a sense of more available water within certain regions and we came to this region particularly look at different kind of agriculture technology and that's the technology of hybrid rice seed so on the one hand whilst Mandir is known as the sugarcane capital of India, you'll see the farmer on the left with his huge amount of harvest of sugarcane it actually produces more rice more cropped area goes to rice on the right hand side there you'll see rice seedlings there in the little field ready for transplanting as soon as the rain comes we're there just expecting them on soon I think that's me in the background trying not to fall into the paddy field so this is this is an area of rice rice cultivation one of the bread baskets of southern India and we're particularly interested in hybrid rice so hybrid rice is a technology which has been heralded by Indian policy makers to be the new cutting edge in raising yields they're very worried that older green revolution rice technologies etc the rate of growth of yields has kind of flattened out stagnated and they're interested in hybrid rice now hybrid rice is where you take two varieties of rice and you specifically choose them to have the properties you want in terms of both yield but also size, disease resistance pest resistance suitability to local ecological conditions and you breed them together and it's what's called the heterosis effect I'm not sure if you're familiar with this where the first generation seed of any two parents has what's called hybrid vigor for one generation you get this real boost of growth of yield etc and it only lasts for a single generation now creating hybrid rice is really difficult because rice is a self-pollinating plant so you can't just leave these two plants together in a field, turn off the lights and let them get on with it because they'll tend to self-pollinate what you have to do is a really intricate process of pushing the plants together of creating grip bringing a third line in which you've created sterile etc it's really technically a very sophisticated project and it's done in university and in private sector laboratories there are a lot of forms of hybrid rice and the idea is that hybrid rice you have to buy a new set each year so it encourages the commercialisation of agriculture but it will give you a 15% plus yield advantage over the best standard high yielding varieties so this is the idea that hybrid rice could push forward the yield frontier in Indian rice agriculture and the particular variety we're looking at was this one, KRH4 Karnataka Rice Hybrid number 4 produced in the university agricultural system in Mandia, this is a regional agricultural research centre set up by the British colonial authorities and is going strong since and this was one that was specifically meant to work well in the irrigated South Indian agro environment and in many respects it is a remarkable technological accomplishment it passes national tests for yield for disease resistance etc really well there should be a strong yield advantage over the best comparators that are being used in the fields of Mandia at present here's the agricultural university where it was produced etc and the scientists in this university had really strong expectations for this hybrid rice so we went and again we time our visit about four years after it was first promoted, trialled etc the university had distributed it into fields, they'd offered training they'd offered massive subsidies for farmers to take it in about six villages again they'd enlist local prestige farmers affluent elite farmers to demonstrate it and become part of the training programme etc and they'd got the media in to give a lot of attention and they said this could lead to a new white revolution and I presume they mean white in the sense of mountains of polished rice grain in the fields etc but once again we get to the villages where this was trialled four years later and we can find very scanty presence of not just this KRH4 but other competing hybrid rice produced by private sector and so forth so if there's a pattern emerging here, if any of you guys develop an agricultural technology simply do not get me to come and look at it because I'm like the kiss of death for this stuff right I go into the fields and whatever it was it just doesn't exist anymore when I get there and then it changes the research to question why not and this is a complex question but it has much to do with the social composition of rural India changing social composition of social class polarisation etc so if you note this table I'm putting up here it shows you how many farms are what kind of size so you'll see that the most farms are marginal they're around 2.5 acres and that's the vast majority of small holders have really small farms and then there's very few larger land holders in it but they do exist etc and they hold a fair amount of land as you can look on the percentage land but this is really a territory dominated by marginal and small farmers and the question that comes up despite the best of intentions of the agricultural scientists really believe they had truly created a remarkable new variety of rice they were creating a solution hybrid rice to a question that farmers weren't asking that is that hybrid rice tends to be a more expensive rice you pay more and it tends to be more input expensive this is sorry input intensive that is that it's a rice specifically designed to rapatiously draw nutrients from the soil so it requires lots of fertilisation in an input intensive system to be able to create all that rice grain at the other side so it's specifically designed to draw up nutrients from the soil so you have to have an intensive fertilizer regime and this was on the one hand high risk high reward kind of agriculture and it was just discernibly what most smaller marginal farmers were not looking for they're worried that one if you have to buy more inputs at the start of the season that means you need more credit which means you're going to higher debt and most debts in this region are completely informal to people like the store keeper that I was talking about previously to village landowners merchants etc maybe from microfinance and maybe if you have land as collateral from a bank but for most of them not so you're going into debt at the beginning of season and let's just be clear the weather despite the climate situation we got there in the third year of drought the drought has been intense okay and irrigation waters are not making their way down the canals as they once used to so even those that thought they had irrigation on tap are not finding them so there's one there's this sort of agroecological risks of if you use the fertilisers wrongly this degrades the soil and ruins your soil for the next couple of years so there's a lot of risk of poor cultivation practices there's a credit risk you've invest so much if the rains don't come and then your rice doesn't grow you've invested more so you lose more and also farmers devote a substantial amount of their rice production for home subsistence consumption and they just don't like hybrid rice they just don't like the taste they say it's crap so this is a bit of a problem right because then they didn't give them the flexibility to either sell it or consume it as they needed and they needed that flexibility so when we were sort of talking to farmers and this is one of the original sites where it was really promoted where the university went to ask that photo in the top right was this sort of celebration of the first year of KRH4 being grown in this village Cathedodi et cetera and we went there four years after and all the farmers that had been part of the trials et cetera weren't using it and what they had done which was very interesting was either return to standard rice varieties which they had good ways of selling to local markets et cetera or they had moved in completely the other direction and they had gone what you might call more acroecological forms of farming and this was low input farming and they were doing this for a significant reason not because it produced great bountful yields it was very difficult to do but because of less risk if you went into less inputs at the beginning of the year less chance of taking on debt et cetera and this is because households were diversifying their portfolios substantially their livelihoods et cetera for this class of farmers it was about having kids working in factories or in the cities and agriculture forming one part of a more subsistence orientated practice with some surplus marketed et cetera but mainly providing food for a household which was growing doing its income from other means hybrid rice did not appeal to these in another village Caiffanna Halley which was closer to the river and therefore better irrigation we found two different classes of farmers using it more affluent farmers saw it as worthwhile having high risk high reward strategy because they once again exercised more control over both the ecological and social environment to minimize the risks and they were well clued into agricultural extension networks to get knowledge from the university et cetera and they're done reasonably well with hybrid rice they say hey it takes a ton of fertilizer but we've creased yields so this is not surprising we've seen many cases that like more elite farmers are the first wave of doctors and new technologies et cetera but what did surprise us was the other social class using this high risk strategy were the ones that intuitively we felt were the least able to do it and this was landless farmers these were guys that were they were all men they were renting land and they had gone into significant debt in order to rent land from absentee landlords to buy the inputs et cetera and their precision was so precarious that just growing standard rice didn't seem like it would make enough money to be able to repay their debts at the end of the year so they were gambling it all on the high risk high reward potentiality of hybrid rice but there were ironically those least able to shoulder that risk and least able to control the factors about it so this was you know this was interesting to see that there's a class that was so polarised off the bottom margin that they were the ones adopting this sort of agricultural technology which you would assume there would be the last to do it because of the risk involved but they felt they had no choice but to do this so this second point that comes out of this research is that new agricultural technologies both reflect and help shape active processes of social polarisation of class fragmentation where we're getting a certain class where agriculture is not so much about the yield but it's about minimising risks a return of a sort of peasantry mentality within that vis-a-vis a more affluent elite farmers that are trying these new technologies and then at the bottom another class of farmers that can't afford to take risks but they can't afford not to take the risks so agricultural technologies really get intermixed with these kinds of trends of social polarisation I can't actually see my computer's clock at the moment so I have no idea how I'm doing for time but I'm going to quickly whip through one last case study and try and wrap up so I'm guessing I'm probably getting fairly close to being done if you could wrap up in about 5 minutes if that's possible certainly, absolutely so thanks for your patience here so the last study that we did and I'll make this really brief this was in Tunkordol district in Karnataka it's a hilly region so it looks quite different from the others and we focused here on a new project by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research which was a big institution set up to promote green revolution technologies and they wanted to create 100 model villages for climate resilience and these were meant to be beacons they were all over the country beacons of the best technologies etc to be used to promote climate resilience again it's technological centred it is a focussed on new technologies as the solution to climate problems so this region looks different it's a hilly area there's lots of mountainous hilly areas all the villages on this side of the village of Naginahali which is one of these 100 climate villages wanted to talk about was the lepids getting pushed out of the hills and eating their livestock etc extremely dry, extremely arid once again but what this climate resilience project had done, it had done three things firstly it had tried to distribute new types of seeds and practices amongst the people particularly our idea of drought resistant seeds for millet production and the practices of intercropping so you'd grow millet along with lentils along with millet lentils etc and then maybe some flowers and stuff all in the same field so this kind of idea of diversifying agriculture etc notably as I'll very briefly point on many farmers had said hey we're already doing this for generations the agricultural experts said well they were doing it but we've perfected it etc and there's sort of a bit of an argument that's going on but distributing drought resistant seeds was part of this but the other side of it was a focus on watershed development and over one side of the village there had been thousands upon thousands of rupees divested into shaping the flows of water off the mountain sides and trying to create storage ponds and so forth new water courses, some concrete poured lots of digging etc and this had been moderately successful true it only affected one side of the village and the villages over the other side the west side which I showed previously were not part of this so it was geographically specific it cost a ton of money so how replicable this model village is going to be was very much under doubt this was very much a showcase village and a showcase for externalise as much as the people within it and it did create a new dynamic of who controlled water if you were lucky enough that the new channels of water flowed through your fields and you could invest the money into pipe technologies into creating drainage ponds etc you had control over water which you could then sell to neighbours etc just by the kind of geographical accident where your fields were and of course if you own more land more chance that the water is going to run for it at some point so it created new dynamics of water ownership and water control but it was broadly seen as quite positive and allowing rice farmers to continue producing rice where they are worried that they wouldn't be able to without this and the third aspect was agroforestry and this is kind of mix cropping you'll see this sign here says mango trees mixed hardwood tree species and ground nuts or often ragi millets on the ground under these trees and this was amazing success in ecological terms a lot of wasteland had been turned over to agroforestry initiatives and in many respects my colleague and I were really impressed by this until we realised the degree to which the benefits of this side of the programme had been captured by a small handful of farmers and when we realised the extent of the leak capture of this programme our jaws dropped it was stunning as one of the leading families who had set them up as the gatekeepers for this climate resilience village they had managed to get the entirety of their lands redeveloped as agroforestry wonderful ecological success people coming from South Africa to purchase Indian gooseberry and look at the technology etc but they had literally had thousands of trees planted on their land and monopolised the processing side of things etc this was accumulation by climate change resilience an amazing shifting of accumulation of social polarization with the village because they had been able to grab these aspects of it so an interesting situation in which climate resilience as in diversified agriculture was captured by very few people as part of accumulation strategy and it really made me think about resilience and I'll end with this last aspect if we went back to the west side of the village and I talked with some of the farmers over here and I tried to express the idea of resilience which is a big buzz word to them and they said for us resilience isn't about the threat of climate change so much we do these things of diversifying our different lentils etc resilience for us is about moderating about mediating our relationship with the market mediating our relationship with up and down of prices and particularly avoiding becoming indebted and so for them climate resilience was not so much about droughts changing water etc climate change expressed itself most dramatically to them in relations of debt and the fact that they might become indebted to the same families that were gained off of this aspect so this is my final point here I would argue provocative that climate change is manifested most explicitly not through drought, not through changing thermal stress and crops etc but people find it most tangibly through relations of debt and this is precisely kind of idea that just does not show up in official representations of what climate change is about climate change adaptation in these Indian areas is all about new technologies to deal with drought to deal with changing water flows etc but the heart of the matter for most small holders was questions about debt and their relationships with informal lenders, money lenders and so forth and the relationship with the market and this was entirely a different idea of resilience which really ran counter to official projections of new grain revolution of market orientated farmers were using extremely technologically sophisticated crops and so forth it was far more guarded about not wanting to become the victim of debt so I'll leave it there, I probably overshot my time, thank you so much for your patience and thank you very much for allowing me to talk to you virtually I hope this was okay thank you very much Marcus, thank you so much for a really interesting and thought provoking talk we're now going to go to our two discussants, Kate Soper and Nithya Nattarajan who are going to talk for five to seven minutes each so I will hand over to Nithya first hello okay, thank you so much Marcus for that incredibly interesting talk, I don't know if you can see but you have quite a full room here in one of Sawas's larger lecture theatres, Sawas not being a huge university in itself but really really interesting talk that's dragged us all here on a very sunny afternoon so thank you for that I guess I just wanted to ask a set of smaller provocations, questions however you want to phrase them linked to three different aspects of your talk very briefly, the first is around your theoretical framing and the second and third are really to ask you a bit more of we've heard this incredibly strong and interesting critique but what would you sort of advocate I guess would be the second aspect so asking about firstly your theoretical framing you mentioned at the start that you have this particular rendering of political ecology which brings together agrarian political economy and Latour which you did say was the more kind of actual of the different bits so I just wanted to ask you about that and how you can sort of square them being together in a framing so thinking about how both critical agrarian political economy so Henry Bernstein would understand nature and how Bruno Latour understands nature Bernstein's understanding seems to be as you yourself said a bit more inert maybe we could use the term realist coming from I guess a more orthodox Marxist position saying nature is not an active kind of intention having agent in the process of social change rather it's the social aspect that makes or has an impact on nature and then squaring that with Latour who does very much flirt with the idea that nature or natural elements can make social relations and I wondered where you sat if you could talk a bit more about your understanding of that and then the second question is really so your critique of the different technologies is really convincing and interesting and I just wonder thinking about the way that you've talked about I guess I'd use the term and maybe used earlier fetishisation so the idea that the Indian Government has taken these technologies to be a kind of panacea and that is a problem as you say and they have social they're rooted in kind of social relations which are found to be the things that hinder them from working but I guess I would like to know more about whether you think that means all technology or any technology is just necessarily not something we on the left as progressive should ever advocate are there social relations in which technology could be a kind of positive force or would you say that the entire notion of technology or kind of yield increasing agriculture is something that we shouldn't think about because I'm thinking specifically of for example Bernstein's critique of food sovereignty literature where he kind of says I don't want to be a farmer I live in a city I'm quite happy not being a farmer and so if we can't all grow our own food someone needs to grow food for us and so the idea of yield being higher in itself but that's necessarily a bad thing it would be good to hear more on that and then the third issue is asking a bit more about the kind of social relations that you talked about in relation to what I think is probably the biggest and you touched on it strongly in the third case the biggest social relation that structures in Indian village which is caste to what extent are these technologies being hindered by caste so to what extent would a progressive agenda just say you know what we just need to address caste or gender as relations of inequality and that will allow where does the kind of solution or progressive agenda for thinking ahead lie more in the social relations and less in rejecting the technology or perhaps as a space in the middle yeah I'll leave it there thank you again thank you very much Nithya I'll now hand over to Kate thank you for a very interesting and as far as I'm concerned very informative because I can only offer very general comments having no expert knowledge at all about India and the promotion of the new green evolution there first I though I wanted to just comment on your conclusion from your case studies that we need to be closely attuned to who has power to represent rural India including how key problems are identified and solutions post and I absolutely agree in the most general sense that the issues of power and representation are key to resolving issues of climate change and I sought your account of this really beautifully illustrated the invocation of social and natural factors in confounding simplistic technological aspirations I also thought it was very interesting the role played by class and gender and conventions of what cancers male or female work in determining the obstacles to new technologies I suppose my main question here and I think it's an echo area is what the reaction to this might or ideally should be which as it were do we argue needs to be adjusted or both is it the social relations need to be adjusted to the technology or the technology to the social relations or are we thinking here in terms of some possible dialectical unity of transformation and how in any case might that be achieved but one thing that does seem clear is that technology is not in itself enough it can't achieve the kind of political changes essential to promoting more eco-benign cultural management and I got from your paper a sense that you did want to promote these that it's not simply a straightforward anti-technology argument that you're developing on the other hand in some cases technology as you reveal is clearly a factor in creating the climate conditions the unpredictable water supply heavy use of fertilisers and so on with the smooth adoption of new technical measures and there's even a suggestion here that technology perpetuates some of the class or gender relations that disdain on its own impact I have in mind what you say about the perception of technology as a male affair but against that it's also the case that some of the social relations getting in the way of the new green deal are not themselves very emancipated so we've got a kind of nexus here of tensions in which social problems get in the way of possibly progressive environmental technologies and vice versa and the issues how do we actually unlock that and for me there's definitely a parallel of some kind so it's very far from exact in trusting to technology more generally to solve the problems of climate change including in the more developed world and that's been a theme of my own work on western consumption where I focused on the need to challenge consumers and technically driven conceptions of progress and the good life as a condition of creating a relay of freshers for greater global justice and critical here I've argued is the representation of what I've called an alternative politics of prosperity one that challenges the growth economy and the pretensions of the eco modernisers to create a sustainable future through purely technical fixes so it would be interesting to sort of hear Marcus what you felt about the possible parallels or contrasts here I mean I think the approach I'm arguing for here can be aligned in some ways with earlier and more traditional even if you like romantic antipathies to the modern but I think it also needs to reject the furotanical and socially conservative aspects of traditional cultures of resistance to modernity so in a sense I'm sort of talking here about a perspective that would endorse a form of modernisation and its representation that severed the link between progress and economic expansion while opposing the cultural aggression and social conservatism that have tended to go together with economic backwardness Lastly, just a word I too want to kind of raise I think the nature versus the social issue and I just wanted to comment briefly on what's been said in the paper about the presumptions of anthropocentric causality especially your point that there are no clear lines to be drawn here between the social and the natural and that in recognising that the invocation here, the complexity of it you advise us to as you put it I think to be bolder within our analytic frameworks well I mean I agree that there is that kind of nexus as it were this interaction but I think I think my position would be that being bold within our analytic frameworks means insisting against some tendencies in recent theory to collapse the nature culture culture social bannerers that even as we recognise the extent to which nature conceived as material properties and processes is constitutive of the social as you say we need also actually to maintain an analytic distinction between nature and society so I just want in a sense along those lines to add a note of qualification to your claim that there are no clear lines to be drawn between the social and the natural and I suppose in addition there I would agree that with what's been said already I think that we can recognise that objects can have extensive formative influence on humans and that they generate their own consequences but that I think is very different from imputing anything comparable to human powers of agency so in that sense I would want to dispute the wisdom of those who in recent times positioned themselves as friends of nature precisely by denying the subject object and nature culture distinctions and I rather agree with Alf Hornbaw when he says that the most problematic implication of attempts to dissolve the subject object or nature social distinctions is not the fetishistic attribution of agency on living entities but the withdrawal of responsibility and accountability from human subjects so I just I think maybe there isn't any implication of that kind in what you're saying Marcus but I would quite like that to be clarified for sure thank you very much both Mithia and Kate Marcus what I think we'll do now is go to the floor for some questions and then we can hand over to you to respond to those and also to anything you want to respond to from Mithia and Kate is that okay? That's great just to note that I'm afraid dear audience I cannot see you at all so forgive me if you could perhaps introduce who you are just so I can't see you but at least I can hear who you are that would be wonderful Great and we have a microphone for the audience members as well Hi Marcus thank you for that that was great my name is Robert I'm from Keynes in the Department of Global Health so I'm wondering about your characterization of debt so we've been looking at some things in Malawi and also Ethiopia and debt isn't always cash debts can also be things like side selling it can be things so we've seen farmers that will take contract farm farming deals and then end up actually not going through with those deals where they have guaranteed buyers although they've already received the seed beforehand because they've found better deals so they've kind of been negotiating the other ways and moving around their capital strategically to do that so have you seen debts happening in other ways in more of an emerging market than we might be seeing in sub-Saharan Africa Good question Thank you for an interesting talk Marcus and I really enjoyed your case studies My name is Arine Perutia I'm at the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University where I co-lead the risk and resilience research theme so some of what you're saying is actually very pertinent to questions and tensions we've been exploring around enabling climate resilience and understanding how to scale up climate resilience and our own work as human geographers and political ecologists interested in deconstructing more benefits, why and some of the more perverse impacts of some of these technologies that I really like to your phrase about accumulation by climate change resilience that's exactly the kind of thing that we're wary of but then my question is and this may not be something you can answer definitively but I struggle with this a lot which is what is one to do one's instincts as political ecologists are very much towards deconstruction and unpacking but then one's instinct to someone who is very concerned about climate resilience is to look for what works why does it work how can we make it work more and better so yeah I'll just leave that with you and if you have anything that might illuminate that that would be very helpful to here, thanks Hi Marcus, I'm Jens Lager from SOAS in Journal or Grand Change and it's a pleasure to hear your talk and of course also to have read your paper on which it's based in Journal or Grand Change 191 but two one common question and one question it strikes me that the social processes that you're looking at are age old in India and one aspect of the first green revolution that Terry Byers pointed out was that the first green revolution was maybe scale neutral but it wasn't resource neutral and it seems to me that that is really what we're seeing with the SRI as well but does that mean that one simply has to accept that as long as government of India will not put in place systems to support small farmers to cope with a peak in labor input and water and so on that to introduce these kind of technologies does mean speeding up person differentiation and there is a trade off that if we want technologies that can do these things then the trade off is person differentiation so that's the common question but relating to that is also what is there always a trade off between technologies that are more environmentally sound but also produce a higher output and labor input so does it always mean that peasant households have to work harder or at least in peaks in order to produce more if they are not simply going for GMO seats etc because then does that mean that peasants will have to in a sense bear the burden for introducing these kind of of new technologies and in particular in India women female members of the households will have to bear the burden great okay as there seem to be no more questions at the moment perhaps we can hand over to you Marcus to respond and then we can take another round after that okay thank you so much great questions I feel like I should log off take an hour to a couple of days think about it let you enjoy your sunshine and come back but I'm not allowed to do that so let me take a running jump at some of these questions just to be clear I constantly beat myself up having not better answers to the what is to be done question so I'll try and answer it the best I can and etc but it's a bit of a tough one right so it's hard there and just by the way that you guys have got lovely weather there if you are here it's like minus 15 outside you're lucky where you are right at the moment climate change or not that's cool okay political ecology and thank you so much Nifia and Kate for pushing me on this act of necrote theory on this Laturian influence in my work I get this a lot so let me be clear I certainly don't intend in any way to try and create this kind of levelling out of playing fields just that basically that non-human actants in Latours language have agency in the same way that humans do to try and flatten out the social field in this respect to be clear I think it's really important to understand that humans are the predominant environment makers out there right we are constantly producing and reproducing and shifting and transforming our environments but we do so in relation to energies, processes, etc that are not our own so for example if we think about system rise intensification it's really important to understand that we need to analyse these processes in a way that looks at human agency to try and reshape water flows to try and reshape the way that microbes work in the soil with the roots of the rice, etc and to be really open to that field of relationships to understand the relationships of debt in a village are being shaped as it were by this broader field of relationships involving microbes, involving fertiliser, etc and so it's more a sort of heuristic device for me to when I approach a case study on an issue to really keep an open mind to what is causing what in what kind of relational field but I would never doubt that kind of what we call social element even though it is not it's social and natural simultaneously is the leading force in what is recreating reproducing both the human and the biophysical landscape absolutely so I'm not interested in this sort of flattening out of everything that kind of lets humans off the hook for the stuff we're doing but rather it's a device by which to really look at case studies in more focused detail to try and pick up on elements that sometimes are missed out as really important determining forces if we're to focus just on the social relations of debt commodities, etc without sort of knitting those in to those biophysical processes and so forth and I think we should be open to that and that's what I mean in terms of boldness because very often that divide can often just fall on the side of social scientists versus natural scientists where I think we need to be open to the kind of work that really tries to pick up on that and it allows much more nuanced detail between different case studies because for example with that system a rice intensification thing it really mattered what kind of soil that you were like pushing your weeder on to the effect so to create a general thing about shifting gender relations because of the shift of technology actually in some areas where the soil was really red soil chaka this is kind of soil which is really dry it's easy to push and that just wasn't a factor there so we needed to be really sort of tuned into that and to my perspective it makes it much easier to get into those dynamics if you open yourself to them explicitly at the start but so that's where I come to that from I'm certainly I don't read the litorian stuff that goes farther than that so Kate I hope I can rest give you some peace of mind on that but I do feel that it's useful in opening our mind to other approaches to thinking about what we need to ask and what we need to look for if we're doing field work and so forth nifia's point about the fetishisation of technology is yield a bad thing etc I'm really open I'm not trying to suggest that the technologies are bad or good in and of themselves at all technologies serve certain purposes and they serve certain people's purposes by the way that they're embedded in particular social relations and so forth so I would never want to foreclose my mind that some of these technologies cannot be useful in fact they all of them were very useful to certain people in certain social groups etc extremely useful but unless we start to think how they're socially situated then you know we want to avoid any kind of blanket a priori characterisation them as good as bad personally I think the system of rice intensification should have a seriously good role to play in rural India and there's parts of rural India where this has gone is much more prevalent than Mahabhugnagar and I didn't bring it up in the lecture but also I was looking at the same thing in Karnataka in fact I went to Karnataka to look again at system of rice intensification but when I found very few people using it there again but this hybrid rice thing I thought was a bit different so we need to understand now the debates over the system of rice intensification tend to get very polarised between one group of agronomists who say it works, it's brilliant and another group of economists that say it's voodoo it doesn't work there's better best practice in other things they're doing and it just comes down to this question of the idea does system of rice intensification work and this is just the wrong way to think about it the direction of the work I'm doing and this applies for the hybrid rice and the agroforest and so forth is who does it work for and why and only when asking those kind of questions and getting away the blanket idea and the agronomists are terrible for this apologies to any agronomists in the audience but I'm just sort of saying it works so just roll it out but no it's far more nuanced etc is there a way to create a space for hybrid rice to raise yields etc I find that less likely because of the way the fact that yield that kind of yield increase from using it isn't work while for small holder farmers these are the extra potential to be indebted and the higher risks involved so for me if we're looking at technologies for small holders etc we should be thinking about different kinds of rice varieties and does agricultural science have a role to play in that absolutely but when agricultural scientists just avoid asking the question of who can use this thing that's when we get into trouble that we see with hybrid rice and they create a mirage of a success story because they need funding and they need to create a success because partially they needed to get this hybrid rice commercialised at the other end and they want to sell it to the private sector and that's become an important point of their job is to demonstrate success by the commercialisation of a new technology at the research site so they actually went all out to create a sort of mirage of successful uptake and adoption in the fields and they went to great let's do this and so when we get there and there's no one using it and we're like well hold on we've had all the accounts that everyone's using this so they're under huge pressures in a much more corporate research structure even though they're in the public sector selling the intellectual property to the private sector is seen as the mark of success this is, I do this longer thing of hybrid rice now it's in a paper that's coming out in journal of peasant studies very shortly it should be up online you can see the full paper on my research gate site I got that slide up somewhere but yeah so this is an interesting dynamic so they were pushed to create a success out of this even though it wasn't the answer to what people were looking shree is much more potential within this and the other thing you know the agro forestry and the questions of intercropping and so forth I think these are absolutely necessary it's horrendous when they were captured to the degree they were in the village because at that point I was looking around thinking hey this is some pretty innovative stuff and some of the farmers were saying yes we already do the intercropping of millets, lentils maes and other aspects and I think scientists had a role in improving the way they were doing it but the scientists were laying claim as if they'd found this and discovered it and then and it was like trying to sell it back to the people that actually did but a better dialogue around that those kind of processes technologies the new seeds this kind of drought resistant seeds or shorter germination most farmers said these are good technologies a technology help development university system yes good technology etc and it aimed for something that people are actually cultivating agaragi millet so yes those technologies were good but they were aimed appropriately but the more dramatic things of the sort of technology the cut in edge often were for showcase for outside visitors more than people and so those social relations around it made it very inappropriate so it's that kind of thing I mean climate smart agriculture I've been very critical of it I wrote another paper just critiquing it because it evacuates the discourse of all these kind of questions of hierarchy power social inequality and just looks at technologies as if they're outside of social context so sure we can all agree that we'd love increased yields better climate resilience whatever we quite mean by that which is another question and less emissions can I sign up to that 100% I don't think anyone and no one would want to pretend that they didn't agree with that right but how we get there and by whom those political questions that discourse tries to isolate them and push them out and that leads to bad policy in my opinion and so we need to be guarded about these kind of technologies and so forth the question about caste it was it was hard for myself to get people to open up about caste in a way they love talking about agriculture technology farmers just love to tell me what they did in the great detail and I was so interested etc and I could get through to the sort of finance and land ownership and so forth caste was very difficult for myself a research like myself to get into I would note and so I didn't talk about it too much. One aspect comes up in the system of rice identification is about knowledge and knowledge flowing through networks of agricultural extension offices down to farmers and I did see evidence there were caste dimensions to that because those kind of social networks through which knowledge flows people were excluded and there was definitely some aspects of caste within that I couldn't quite say with precision I wanted to but I do on it in the three paper in the hybrid rice there was less caste dimensions to those villages it was more homogenous in terms of other backward caste composition and certainly again in the village where the climate agriculture techniques were appropriated there was a class difference to who got what sure you can have the drought resilient seeds those went certainly to people of all caste but some of those most lucrative cumulative aspects were definitely taken by not high caste we're talking middle sort of other backward caste here rather than Dalit schedule tribe and so forth so there's a strong caste dimension I could only scratch the surface of that I understand that other research would be much better decision to get to that it's definitely there but it you know the class vis-a-vis land holdings vis-a-vis access to water control it really comes together in that sort of class caste and gender aspect that makes it hard to pick a part because they're so integral so it should be a bigger part of the research I've done but I wasn't able to become more definitive about it Marcus I know you haven't had the chance to answer everything yet but we'd love to get the chance to get in a couple more questions and then hand back to you more time thank you hi hello good morning good evening not morning everyone Marcus thank you very much for a very interesting talk my name is Lydia Cabral I'm a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies Sussex and I'm currently starting to look comparatively at the history of the green revolutions in India, China and Brazil so I'm interested in the way that the more recent experience relates to that early chapter of this long green revolution history so my question is around the higher level politics of science and technology production and what purpose these government programs really serve to those that are driving them so how is this different today from that earlier stage of the green revolution in terms of those higher level politics that are behind these government led-on programs thank you yeah my name is Richard Vokes I'm a sort of somebody retired development economist almost certainly the oldest person here having done my research on green revolution in the mid 70s and what I found and therefore following that last comment quite interesting first of all I'm interested that many of the things that you've raised have indeed were very much present obviously in the first green revolution and it reminded me of some of the studies on the resistance to IR8, IR5 and so on when they came in I should say that I work mainly on southeast Asia for the green revolution but also in the context of India and looking at the three case studies in the areas where you were working the first and the last one didn't seem to be areas that were very well suited to rise anyway and obviously the last one they were anyway traditionally the farmers were intercropping and so on but the first area I also wonder to what extent part of the problem is again the government pushing rice, pushing tube well irrigation which is again generally the farmers don't have to pay for electricity so this whole problem of mining of the aquifers throughout India is a very major issue and that in fact a much bigger change is required in terms of the kind of cropping systems Yes Are there any final burning questions? Hello Professor Marcus I'm Boris Kaidu from Tokyo University Japan and also I've come from Indonesia as a development country so my question is you said that technology not only useful not only main important things but in terms of agriculture especially in Indonesia my country the big problem is not the big problem how to make the productive for the production and also in my country Indonesia government the first thing is push for the new technology and then how do you think about this case is it that we have to push the new technology or provide the financial or access the market good to the farmer Thank you so much Okay so I think that's it for questions if we can hand back to you Marcus and I'm so sorry to request that you respond and wrap up within five minutes because it's such an interesting discussion but back to you please Okay thank you so much I can't quite get to everything obviously I'll just try and pluck out a few key things and thank you so much all of you for your wonderful questions and patience and by all means write me we can take this stuff up or if you're a graduate student and want to come and do a MA PhD here in Canada write me as well I'll plug queens Productivity I think productivity is one of the words that we need to deconstruct more than we do productive of what and it often just comes back to the question of yields but we can think of agriculture as productive of all sorts of things is productive of landscapes productive of environments productive of livelihoods and if we try to rethink productivity I think that opens up a greater field thinking about the relationship between technology farmers etc what is it we're trying to produce and obviously you know the idea of negative externalities doesn't really encompass the fullness of what productivity if we open it up can do can do right so that's one of the questions about are we trying to create productive livelihoods that allow people that want to to continue living and functioning in rural areas particularly as the urban migration to the cities India has a massive jobs problem so what is going on here many younger people say they want to go to the city to leave agriculture it's better to work in factories etc and so forth so this creates a whole problem about what agriculture is meant to do now in terms of different sort of visions of where it's going rural India I see plenty of these and different social movements pushing in different directions including some which embrace the high level attempt to make Indian agriculture more modern so the idea of what's this doing at a high level you know the Modi government said we need to double farmer incomes so you know there's a huge high level politics about this in green revolution it used to be the Maltusian spectra of starvation now the high level politics is around farmer suicide rural distress etc so there's this program to double farmer incomes but the means that they're using to do it are pretty much the ones I'm outlined here and there's a lot of emphasis on upgrading of technology market linkages etc and this kind of thing one wonders whether you know whether it's whether we can think about things such as what people grow so the question about rice right I mean the idea that they're growing rice in Mahabug Nagar and and in Tumkur you know it didn't used to be grown I mean Millet was the staple crop rice is relatively a new entrant into it and it's a water intensive crop so absolutely thinking about climate smart well you can say we can grow climate smart technologies to grow rice but if growing rice is stupid then you're climate stupid technology right so putting it into that bigger picture of who's growing what for what purposes is really critical within this there are lots of social movements out there pushing different versions of agroecology for which to come back to Kate's point are anti-modern and to come also back to Jens's point I've met a number of sort of organic farming they won't call it that actually they hate that term if you know this palakar sort of natural farming motive and this is kind of wrapped up in a bit of sort of indigenous idea of indigenous Indian techniques of farming etc it's quite reactionary there's certainly an emphasis that people just have to work harder and these lazy people using these tractors and doing this they're not true farmers etc and they're not being true to Indian farming whereas there are other movements are far more progressive in terms of the agroecology that really look at the social dimensions and look at diversified agriculture and that idea of resilience in a much more holistic ecological and social framework and they're very interesting and they're collecting traditional types of rice not just to preserve them for what they are but because that they do different things in an ecosystem and serve different aspects of productivity productive of livelihoods, productive of resilience to different pests different weather etc so I can certainly see those movements in there and government tends to do this dance while on one hand is saying we'll promote zero budget natural farming and the other hand is promoting hybrid rice etc and it's trying to serve all these different social movements and consistencies at the same time just to be clear the zero budget natural farming is really difficult many farmers come into it and think I can just pull back chemicals out of the soil but it takes the soil numerous years to really recover so they get really low yields for a couple of years before it sort of bounce back plus there's a scale thing and I think this is where one area if we want to think of resilience at a landscape level we have left too much to individual farmers because if you try and do zero budget natural farming in one field you don't get the synergies of a landscape being farmed according to more agroecological things really small plots in amongst the sea of chemical agriculture you're not going to get the kind of relationships between crop, microbes beneficial insect species etc so scale is a huge issue scale is a huge issue very lastly because I've got to be quiet is the question of debt and what do we mean by debt and I was definitely insinuating it in more of financial terms but clearly debt can mean more in terms of social obligation and we do see that in terms of you take this debt from me but yes you sell the rice back to me or you work in my fields that kind of coerced labour etc which niffio would be far better to speak about than that but we definitely see debt credit and debt in social and financial terms interlaced in complex and new forms of dependency from that I'm going to stop now I'm really sorry if I didn't touch on some of your questions but thank you so much for this thank you thank you so much Marcus for a brilliant talk in a really interesting discussion afterwards and I'd also like to thank niffio and Kate so much for their contributions