Anthony Bebbington, “Modernization from below: An Alternative Indigenous Development?” Economic Geography 69, no. 3 (July 1993), 274-292.

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• 274 – “This paper compares conceptions of ‘indigenous agriculture’ and alternative agricultural development as used by academics with approaches to agricultural development taken by Indian federations and the NGOs and churches working with them in highland Ecuador.”
• “Moving away from traditional practices, the Indian federations have promoted the use of Green Revolution technologies as part of a strategy they still conceive as ‘indigenous’ because of its overall objective to sustain a material base that will offset out-migration, a problem perceived as a far more serious threat to indigenous identity than any incorporation of new technology.”
• “The federations’ approach points to a more profound conception of indigenous agricultural development as a strategy implemented and controlled by Indian organizations and oriented toward a refashioning of the cultural and political landscape of highland Ecuador.”
• “We should therefore understand farmers and their organization as ‘situated’ in socioeconomic, political, and cultural structures that both enable and constrain as they construct their resource management strategies. A viable indigenous agricultural development must address the social relationships underlying such structural constraints.”
• “Distinctions abound between traditional and modern, agroecological and external input technologies, indigenous and Green Revolution agriculture, with normative distinctions paralleling the terminological: indigenous is good and Green Revolution bad, traditional technology is desirable and modern technology is to be distrusted.”

 

• 275 – “. . . in this paper I argue that alternative development needs neither to be purely ‘indigenous’ nor wholly agroecological, and that in many cases such options may not be viable. In some cases, these ‘alternative’ agendas do not reflect the perspectives of peasants and their local organization as they compose their own strategies of agricultural and rural development.”

 

• “It implies that, while those who talk about ITK often have a stereotyped and static vision of this knowledge, the rural poor who possess it pursue strategies in which they rework, update, and change their knowledge within the often prejudicial environments in which they fashion their livelihoods. ITK is a dynamic response to changing contexts constructed through farmers’ practices as situated agents: agents because they are actively engaged in the generation, acquisition, and classification of knowledge; and situated agents because this engagement occurs in cultural, economic, agroecological, and sociopolitical contexts that are products of local and nonlocal processes, and that influence how and why farmers manage resources in particular ways.”
• 276 – “. . . much ‘alternative’ writing is based on the belief that the transfer of northern technologies to the south creates unemployment and landlessness, entrenches the power of professional elites who monopolize knowledge, and encourages unrealistic and unsustainable life-style aspirations.”
• “A large literature demonstrates the ways in which Green Revolution technologies have aggravated the poverty of the rural poor, undermined food security, damaged the biophysical environment, and eroded local cultures.”
• “Because agrarian modernization has had negative impacts in some cases does not, however, mean that this will always be so, nor does it mean that the tactics and technology of modernization cannot contribute to ‘another’ rural development.”

 

• “The implication is that we should treat generalized diagnoses of agrarian crisis with care. We also must be careful before accepting generalized remedies. An alternative in one context may not be the appropriate alternative for another. Academic understanding of alternatives may be neither appropriate nor congruent with that of rural people.”

 

• 277 – “The farmer first approach has also constructed a conception of indigenous agriculture that is homogenized, static, and easily taken out of socioeconomic, political, and cultural context. Merely by naming something called ‘ITK,’ this literature creates the sense that a body of knowledge exists in a coherent form.”
• “Some political economic formulations may have had excessively deterministic overtones, but they at least kept the impact of wider social, political, and economic processes on farm resource management at the forefront of our analysis. They also countered the populist and technological fix arguments with claims that the origins of the crisis of peasant agriculture are to be found in land tenure relations, market dependencies, the organization of the economy, the structure of the state, and the social relations of technological production. The implication is that if underlying causes of rural poverty are not addressed, promoting ITK will not get us very far — and that it may not even be an appropriate response.”
• 288 – “In the Current political economic and agroecological context, productive strategies based on nonmodernized technologies do not appear to be viable means of ensuring this objective. Ethnic identity will be grounded in other social, cultural, and linguistic practices and not in traditional technology.”
• 289 – “For an agrarian development strategy to be indigenous depends less on the technological content of that strategy than on its social control and objectives. The objective in Chimborazo is to sustain livelihoods to allow the survival of other social practices that continue to mark these people as indigenous.”