Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of Imposed Innovation for the Wellbeing of Rural Smallholders

Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of Imposed Innovation for the Wellbeing of Rural Smallholders
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DOI:
10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.10.008
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发表时间:
2016-02-01
期刊:
影响因子:
6.9
通讯作者:
Sikor, Thomas
Sikor, Thomas
中科院分区:
经济学1区
文献类型:
--
作者:
Dawson, Neil;Martin, Adrian;Sikor, Thomas

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绿色革命政策再次被用于推动撒哈拉以南非洲的农业增长和减少贫困。然而,自1960年代和1970年代有充分记录的成功使南亚及其他地区的小农受益以来,情况发生了变化。我们认为,在当代的限制下,通过这些政策改善小农生活的机制尚不清楚,政策的理由和管理农业创新的手段对扶贫的影响至关重要。批判性地分析卢旺达的绿色革命的政策和影响,从当地的角度来看,混合的方法,多层面的福祉的方法适用于农村地区在卢旺达西部山区。在这里,马尔萨斯的政策框架被用来证明强加的,而不是“诱导创新”。这些政策涉及对农村农民的重大转变,从支持生计和当地贸易的传统多文化制度转变为采用现代种子品种、投入和信贷,以便专门生产适销作物,增加产量和收入。虽然在提高产量方面的政策被认为是成功的,而且在同一时期,按常规衡量的贫困率也有所下降,但人们发现,这种趋势与当地的经验很不一致。分类结果显示,只有相对富裕的少数人能够坚持强制性现代化,政策似乎加剧了贫困农村居民的无土地和不平等。对大多数家庭的负面影响是显而易见的,因为维持生计的做法被打乱,贫困加剧,当地的知识、贸易和劳动系统受到损害,土地保有权的保障和自主权受到限制。为了减轻影响,我们建议创造性的扶贫形式的土地保有权和合作(没有一个排除改善投入的可用性,市场联系,和基础设施)可能会为农村人民带来积极的成果,重要的是在卢旺达,为那些谁在最近几年成为无地。我们的结论是,在撒哈拉以南非洲推动绿色革命的政策不应全部被视为扶贫政策,甚至不应被视为类似类型的政策,而应成为严格影响评估的主题。这种评估不仅应基于一致、客观的指标,还应注意对土地保有权、农业做法和社会差异人群福祉的局部影响。(C)2015作者由爱思唯尔有限公司出版。这是一篇开放获取的文章,使用CC BY许可证(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)。
Green Revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. However conditions have changed since the well-documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefitted smallholders in southern Asia and beyond. We argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial for pro-poor impacts. To critically analyze Rwanda's Green Revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective, a mixed methods, multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western Rwanda. Here Malthusian policy framing has been used to justify imposed rather than "induced innovation". The policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties, inputs, and credit in order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income. Although policies have been deemed successful in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period, such trends were found to be quite incongruous with local experiences. Disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants. Negative impacts were evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted, poverty exacerbated, local systems of knowledge, trade, and labor were impaired, and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed. In order to mitigate the effects we recommend that inventive pro-poor forms of tenure and cooperation (none of which preclude improvements to input availability, market linkages, and infrastructure) may provide positive outcomes for rural people, and importantly in Rwanda, for those who have become landless in recent years. We conclude that policies promoting a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa should not all be considered to be pro-poor or even to be of a similar type, but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment. Such assessment should be based not only on consistent, objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure, agricultural practices, and the wellbeing of socially differentiated people. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).