376 Modern Agricultural Reforms
such as too much degradation. Rational solutions are proposed, and technologies
known to work in a research station or other controlled environments are passed
to rural people and farmers. The concern is thus to intervene so as to encourage
rural people to change their practices.
Towards coercion with technologies
Central to this process of modernization is the assumption that technologies are
universal, and so are independent of social context. New technologies are assumed
to be better than those from the past, and so to represent ‘progress’. Such a process
is usually depicted as linear, with the new and modern displacing the old and ‘tra-
ditional’. This iconography is powerful in many disciplines, and usually implies
that what has gone before is not as good as what we have now.
The assumption of the universality of technologies has inevitably led to greater
standardization. As farmers have been made to comply ‘in their own best interests’,
they have done so only by completely changing their own livelihoods, and simpli-
fying their practices to incorporate new technologies. External institutions have
acted as if they alone know best.
Such universality of approach or technology leads to homogenization of envir-
onments. Where farmers used to grow tens of crop varieties, now they might only
grow one or two. Where they used to use a range of biological and physical meas-
ures to control soil erosion, now they might only have terraces. Where they used
to rely on wild plants and animals for food, medicine and fuel, now they might
only rely on markets for these products. Modernization has brought with it the
steady erosion of cultural and biological diversity.
This notion is not new. Modernity has sought to sweep away the confusion of
diverse local practices and pluralistic functions accumulated over the ages, so as to
establish a new order. This order is supposed to bring freedom from the constraints
of history, and liberty in the new technologies and practices. This is captured in
one of the slogans of the modernist architect, Le Corbusier, who said ‘by order,
bring about freedom’.
Throughout recent history, institutions concerned with encouraging soil and
water conservation have had all the components of modernity. Farmers have been
first encouraged, then later coerced, into adopting technologies that are known to
work. When these farmers fail to maintain or others spontaneously to adopt these
measures, then interventions have shifted to the remoulding of local social and
economic environments to suit the technologies.
The contrast with what is required for more sustainable management of nat-
ural resources is crucial. Called by some postmodernism (coming after, or contrast-
ing with, modernism), it favours heterogeneity, difference and human capacity as
liberating forces. What postmodern traditions have in common is the rejection of
‘meta-narratives’, or large-scale plans, technologies or theoretical interpretations
that purport to have universal application. The central theme is that all groups
have a right to speak and act for themselves and their communities, in their own