Cultivating through Crises: Empowering African Small-Holders through Histories of Creative Emergency Response (CCEASH)

ccash旨在采用史学方法，以展示肯尼亚Elgeyo-Marakwet县（EMC）的小农如何在危机时期进行创新和应对。最近，东非各地的沙漠蝗灾激增，加上洪水和干旱，给当地生计带来了前所未有的紧迫威胁，庄稼歉收和被毁，再加上与大流行病有关的全球市场链崩溃，引起了人们对粮食短缺和经济崩溃迫在眉睫的担忧。为了应对这些危机，肯尼亚农业部呼吁农民和其他利益相关者迅速加强生产（http://www.kilimo.go.ke/covid-19/）.Dominant发展叙事含蓄地表明，非洲小农极易受到新危机的影响，因为他们缺乏应对多重新压力的适应能力。几十年来，人们一直认为，提高非洲农业生产力和恢复力的解决方案不是来自当地农民，而是来自全球北方专家和机构的知识、实践、技能和技术投入的转移。这种方法最近反映在呼吁一场新的非洲绿色革命中，该革命旨在通过集约化和工业化进程扩大农业生产。然而，越来越多的证据表明，这些耕作方法本质上是不可持续的，造成了约24%的温室气体排放、33%的全球土壤退化和60%的全球陆地生物多样性丧失（UNEP 2016）。有证据表明，蝗灾与极端气候密切相关，但残酷的现实是，现有的农业框架助长了这种气候条件的驱动因素，同时不断侵蚀关键的生态系统服务，而这些生态系统服务本来可以提供至关重要的抵御后果的能力。因此，很明显，“现代化”范式未能为许多小农带来生态福祉和可持续繁荣，这表明需要替代框架。后殖民理论强调了这一点，它展示了发展框架如何嵌入殖民地的进步本体论，而这些进步本体论只会边缘化土著知识/声音，并未能建立适当的当地精心设计的回应。从这一后殖民批判开始，我们试图挑战非洲小农缺乏应对危机能力的假设，而是培养农民主导的对应急反应的理解，并探索建立应对未来危机的复原力的生产潜力。我们的工作以独特的历史视角为前提，将农民视为创新的推动者，而不是抵制变革的被动个体。事实上，在EMC，我们现有的肯尼亚公民科学团队记录了自我定义的“数字农民”如何通过多样化的农业实践来创新地应对危机，以提高农场的复原力，同时通过数字平台加强知识共享和市场准入的亲属网络。农民正在通过新旧之间的适应性相互作用作出反应，这与非洲农业系统长期以来多样化和高度适应性的更深层次的时间观点产生共鸣。因此，这种独特的人文视角的价值在于它能够模糊现代与传统之间的二分法，在当地实践中保留创新和适应，并为设计优先考虑农民主体的新农村生计提供切入点。我们的研究将批判性地重新分析现有数据，将当前危机置于失败的历史危机和发展干预措施的背景下，实时建立农民危机应对的经验记录，并利用这些数据共同设计政策，重新集中宝贵的农民知识和经验。

CCEASH aims to adopt a historiographical approach in order to demonstrate how smallholder farmers in Elgeyo-Marakwet County (EMC), Kenya, innovate and respond in times of crisis. The recent surge in desert locust swarms, allied to flooding and drought, across East Africa present an unprecedented urgent threat to local livelihoods, where failed harvests and crop destruction, coupled with pandemic-related collapse of global market chains, has raised concerns surrounding food shortages and impending economic collapse. In response to these crises, the Kenyan Ministry for Agriculture has called upon farmers and other stakeholders to rapidly intensify production (http://www.kilimo.go.ke/covid-19/).Dominant development narratives implicitly suggest that African smallholder farmers are highly vulnerable to new crises as they lack the adaptive capabilities to navigate multiple emerging pressures. For decades it has been argued that solutions for improving agricultural productivity and resilience in Africa stem not from indigenous farmers, but rather the transfer of knowledge, practice, skills, and technological inputs from specialists and institutions in the Global North. This approach is most recently reflected in calls for a new African Green Revolution that aims to scale up agricultural production through processes of intensification and industrialisation. Yet an increasing body of evidence highlights how these methods of farming are inherently unsustainable, contributing to approximately 24% of greenhouse gas emissions, 33% of global soil degradation and 60% of global terrestrial biodiversity loss (UNEP 2016). With evidence suggesting that locust outbreaks are intimately linked to climate extremes, it is a cruel reality that extant agricultural frameworks have fuelled the drivers of such climatic conditions whilst conterminously eroding key ecosystem services that may otherwise provide crucial resilience to the consequences. It is thus clear that 'modernising' paradigms have failed to deliver ecological wellbeing and sustainable prosperity for many smallholder farmers, suggesting that alternative frameworks are required. Postcolonial theory underscores this point through its demonstration of how development frameworks are embedded in colonial ontologies of progress that only serve to marginalise indigenous knowledges/voices and fail to build appropriate locally crafted responses. Beginning with this postcolonial critique, we seek to challenge the assumption that African smallholder farmers lack the capacity to deal with crisis, and instead to cultivate farmer-led understandings of emergency response and explore productive potentials for building resilience to future crises. Our work is premised with a unique historical perspective that views farmers as agents of innovation rather than passive individuals resistant to change. Indeed, in EMC our existing Kenyan Citizen Science team record how self-defined 'digital farmers' are innovatively responding to crisis by diversifying agricultural practices to improve on-farm resilience, whilst simultaneously intensifying kinship networks alongside digital platforms for knowledge sharing and market access. Farmers are responding through an adaptive interplay between the old and new, resonating with the deeper temporal perspective that African farming systems have long been diverse and highly adaptive. The value of this unique humanities perspective thus lies in its ability to blur dichotomies between modernity and tradition, resituate innovation and adaptation in local practice, and offer entry points for designing new rural livelihoods that prioritise farmer agency. Our research will critically reanalyse existing data to situate the current crises in the context of failed historical crisis and development interventions, build an empirical record of farmers' crisis responses in real time, and use these to co-design policy that re-centres invaluable famer knowledge and experience.