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| Title: | The social realities of technology transfer: smallholder farmers' encounter with a new rice variety |
| Author: | Bornstein, Daniel |
| Year: | 2015 |
| Periodical: | African Geographical Review (ISSN 1937-6812) |
| Volume: | 34 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 8-12 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Gambia |
| Subjects: | rice seeds agricultural technology small farms |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/19376812.2014.912139 |
| Abstract: | Within the narrative for an African Green Revolution, the continent is often portrayed as the final frontier of global agriculture, the one place where new agricultural technologies have yet to take hold. In West African rice-consuming nations, this technological enthusiasm has revolved around the potential for the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) variety to enable food self-sufficiency. What makes the variety unique is that Asian-based traits for high yield were combined with adaptability to African agro-ecological contexts. As NERICA has been rolled out to African smallholders, the response from the more critical perspectives has been to associate NERICA with a broader assault on small-scale farming. This commentary - based on fieldwork in The Gambia in 2012 - draws upon the seed selling and saving practices embodied by smallholder NERICA growers to interrogate portrayals that cast smallholder farmers as passive victims exploited by dissemination of new agricultural technologies. These observations do not correspond with narratives portraying NERICA as a pernicious threat to smallholder autonomy. In The Gambia's NERICA seed system, farmers retain some degree of sovereignty over the re-planting and selling their seeds. Bibliogr., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
