What’s in a name?

What’s in a name?

Harrison George

06 June 2008

Alien Thoughts

“That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as much”


(William Shakesomething)

It all depends on what you call something.


Somebody white and Jewish, building on occupied territory in the West Bank, in violation of international law and just about any of the Arab-Israeli peace deals, is called a ‘settler’.


Somebody black and working class, whose grandparents were ‘invited’ to move from the Caribbean in the 1950’s to solve London Transport’s recruitment problems, can still be called an ‘immigrant’.


The choice of vocabulary sort of puts you in a certain frame of mind. In fact, that’s what this is called – framing.


So let us look carefully at a subtle shift in the names that have been used to describe agriculture in Thailand.


When the negative effects of the World Bank-inspired ‘modernization’ of Thai agriculture started to become apparent, there was already some non-government development work going on in rural areas.


The buzz word at the time was ‘sustainable development’. And people were beginning to see unsustainable consequences of a form of agriculture based on high levels of chemical inputs, targeted at the market (including the export market) rather than subsistence, and attempting as far as possible to simulate production practices that were better suited to a factory floor than a rice field.


Put brutally, Thai farmers were getting shafted. Growing rice was becoming one of the easiest ways of losing money in this country. It was felt that Thai agriculture needed to be ‘sustained’. Hence the term ‘sustainable agriculture’ was used to describe agriculture that was different from the one the government was pushing.


Note what the word ‘sustainable’ focussed on – the farmer and the farming environment of land, water, forest and seeds.


But the people behind sustainable agriculture, well-meaning souls all, were not agriculturalists themselves. So they needed to look around for what sustainable agriculture might actually look like. One source was found among the farmer ‘gurus’, individuals who had never bought the Department of Agriculture Extension’s ideas and who had either figured out their own system or kept alive traditional systems that ‘modern’ agriculture had jettisoned.


Another source of ideas came from overseas. Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution was translated into Thai and no-till agriculture attracted its adherents. Mollison was invited from Australia to peddle permaculture.


There wasn’t one form of sustainable agriculture’; there were many. So you started seeing the term ‘alternative agriculture’ gaining currency.


But note that the ‘frame’ is now not so much about the farmer, but about the method of production.


And as far as production methods were concerned, things went pretty well. Any Thai farmer who wanted to switch to alternative, sustainable agriculture had any number of working examples to go and see and copy. Many wanted to switch, but, for a variety of reasons perhaps debt being the most intractable, they couldn’t see how they could get off the chemical treadmill.


But where farmers were successful, they started looking for markets. And this meant they had to convince consumers that their produce was superior, so superior that it was worth paying a premium for. Efforts were also made to look for markets for their rice in European markets.


But ‘sustainable’ and ‘alternative’ weren’t understood in Europe. The word they were using, and had used all along, was ‘organic’.


And if you want to sell your stuff as ‘organic’, somebody has to certify you. Without this, the consumer has no way of knowing what’s fake and what’s not.


The farmers had little enough power all along. They had the government telling them and training them and, in the form of cheap credit, bribing them to use artificial pesticides and fertilizers and ‘improved’ varieties, something that the agro-chemical companies were happy to support. In the market they were normally price-takers, having to accept whatever the middleman offered when he came to buy at the farm-gate.


Now an extra agency was muscling in with the power to determine if a farmer could charge premium prices or not.


At this point, you should be able to see how use of the term ‘organic’ changes the frame. We’ve lost sight of the farmer and are no longer looking at the production method as much as the product itself.


For ‘organic’ agriculture, the concern is on the safety of what the consumer puts in his or her mouth. And to the average consumer, it’s not important whether this comes from a local smallholder, carefully nurturing the land and holding it in stewardship for generations to come; or from corporate-owned acres of polytunnels, worked by low-paid labour, possibly migrant, possibly illegal, on land that could be miles and miles away.


So the next time you look at the expanding shelves labelled ‘organic’ in your (corporate) supermarket, don’t kid yourself that your premium prices are necessarily benefiting the small farmer. You could once again just be lining the pockets of corporate shareholders.


Source :www.prachatai.com