10 Sustainable Agriculture and Food
length insensitive, so could be extended to farmers at a wide range of latitudes; and
that were producers of more grain at the expense of straw. They were also much
more nitrogen-responsive than traditional varieties. These modern varieties were
distributed to farmers together with inputs, including inorganic fertilizers, pesti-
cides, machinery, credit and water regulation. These technical innovations were
then implemented in the best favoured agroclimatic regions and for those classes
of farmers with the best expectations of and means for realizing the potential yield
increases.
Conway draws attention to the limitations of the green revolution – its impact
on the poor has been less than expected, it has not reduced natural resource degra-
dation, its geographic impact has been localized, and there are signs of diminishing
returns. In particular, the green revolution missed many agricultural systems which,
until recently, represent a largely forgotten agriculture. These tend to be located in
the drylands, wetlands, uplands, savannas, swamps, near-deserts, mountains and
hills, and forests. Farming systems in these areas are complex and diverse, agricul-
tural yields are low, and rural livelihoods are often dependent on wild resources as
well as agricultural produce. They are remote from markets and infrastructure;
they are located on fragile or problem soils; and less likely to be visited by agricul-
tural scientists and extension workers or studied in research institutions. The poor-
est countries tend to have higher proportions of these agricultural systems.
James Scott’s book Seeing Like a State deploys the Greek term metis to describe
‘forms of knowledge embedded in local experience’. Metis is normally translated as
meaning ‘cunning’ or ‘cunning intelligence’, but Scott says this fails to do justice
to a range of practical skills and acquired intelligence represented by the term. He
contrasts such metis with the ‘more general, abstract knowledge displayed by the
state and its technical agencies’ by describing villagization in Tanzania and Ethio-
pia, Soviet collectivization, the emergence of high-modernist cities and the wide-
spread standardization of agriculture. Failures come when metis is designed out, as
the state rarely makes the kinds of necessary daily adjustments required for the
effective working of systems. Metis, he says, is ‘plastic, local and divergent... It is in
fact the idiosyncrasies of metis, its contextualities, and its fragmentation that make
it so permeable, so open to new ideas’.
This particular chapter explores the Soviet collectivization project, and shows
how high modernism was implemented by thinking big. Nearly everything was
planned on a monumental scale – from cities, buildings, construction projects and
collectivization of agriculture through rationalization and industrialization. Many
of these ideas were imported from the US by Russian agronomists and engineers
in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the resulting projects were enormous. One
Sovkhoz collective farm established 1600km south of Moscow cropped 150,000
hectares of solely wheat culture – and was later found to be an abject failure. The
state prosecuted a ‘war’ against the peasantry in the period of 1930–1934 in order
to liquidate the kulaks (peasant farmers) and enforce collectivization. The ensuing
famine resulted in a death toll of at least 3–4 million people, and possibly as many
as 20 million.