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New seeds and poor people
378
Book rev#ws
a consequence of the breadth of the approach, and the extent of material available. Most contributions unashamedly concentrate on particular interests and often advance certain viewpoints. That is a real part of any discussion of broad topics, and is not without value. Despite such concentration, most, but not quite all, of the information available would have received mention somewhere in the volume. This makes it a very effective starting point for any serious and comprehensive study of pastures in Southern Australia. Pasture production annually contributes over $10 billion to the Australian economy, and is especially critical to export incomes. It thus deserves support for research and education far above the grudging allocations budgeted by political parties. Some of the results of past support are described in this volume, and they are impressive. They provide grounds for policies which look kindly on research and education, if only because of the money they have earned. The quality of paper, print and graphics make this a technically classy publication. It is rather hefty to lug around in a briefcase for reading on a journey. This is unavoidable, but perhaps publication in two volumes would have been worthwhile. It certainly deserves to be read by all serious students of pasture production, whether in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, or Australia.
Fred Morley
New Seeds and Poor People. By M. Lipton and R. Longhurst, Unwin Hyman, London, 1989. 471 pp. ISBN 0 04 445 327-2. Price: £35 (boards); £17.95 (paperback). This is a long and rather 'heavy' book about a very important subject. The authors agree that the semi-dwarf wheats and rices of the so-called Green Revolution had enormous socioeconomic impacts, mostly in Asia and America, much less in Africa; they agree that these impacts were broadly beneficial to the rural poor but believe that some distributional effects that favoured the larger farmers occurred and were undesirable; they recognize that there was a large genotype-environment interaction (GE) component in the technical success of the 'modern varieties' (here MV, HYV in much other literature) but believe that the right MVs alone can at least do something; they insist that the deep social need is for high-yielding, reliable varieties and technologies that demand labour-intensive methods of production, this because employment and purchasing power are at least as important as gross food supply for a poor population that is predominantly (and
Book reviews
379
increasingly) landless; and they see plant breeding as the key technology in pursuing these objectives. The authors are economists and the book was heavy going for this noneconomist reviewer; I suspect it might be heavyish even for professionals who just happen not to be well up on the latest stuff on Neo-Classical, Keynesian and Walrasian General Equilibria (GE), for example. (Unhappily, 'GE' means different things to different people, plant breeders and economists, for instance.) But the authors have done a great deal of reading and thinking and have got a lot nearer to understanding what agricultural research is really all about than have most economists; also, they are enthusiasts for their material, they write well and the book is well-made, well annotated and well indexed. It is quite the best and most thoughtful work that I have seen on this subject, which I take to be one of the key issues of our time, perhaps the key issue. The authors are concerned to prescribe as well as describe: to prescribe what research (both national and international) should do. Essentially, they say, it should generate robust new varieties with stable disease resistances, should concentrate on sheer food yield ignoring virtually all 'quality' factors, should ignore (indeed discourage) herbicide and machinery research that might tend to have labour-displacing effects, should ignore 'gimmick research' (such as soybeans and wheats in the wrong places and high lysine maize) and it should, at the most general level, do anything possible to promote the feeding, employment and welfare of the poor (both rural and urban but perhaps less often poor farmers than is commonly assumed). No reasonable person could disagree with much of this list (though I personally have some doubts about the strictures on herbicides and machinery). More generally, I think it is a pity that the authors didn't bring some of their knowledge to bear on two (related) subjects which might possibly be as important as improving staple food crops that are already there. Many tropical lands are already desperately stressed by overpopulation and therefore over-cropping (and the problem worsens). Permanent, intensive annual cropping (on the rich temperate pattern, the fatal Euro-American fallacy) is probably just impossible in most of the tropics, whatever the inputs employed. But perennials have the potential for indefinite stability and some of them (for example sugar-cane) rotate beautifully with food crops. Many productive perennials, with both food and cash aspects, have not yet even been generally distributed and no-one (but no-one) is charged with systematic thinking on the subject. I hold it as self-evident, that long-term-stable systems will have to have a core of perennial cropping elements. The annual-crop preoccupations of the CGIAR system and of the authors of this book have, unfortunately, excluded the subject from these pages. The related point also (mostly)
380
Book reviews
concerns perennials, namely, export cash crops. Cash (enough of it anyway) is as good as food any day and there are very many examples of such plants as sugar-cane, bananas, cocoa, coffee, tea, rubber and oil palm making decent incomes for smallholders, as well as having favourable technological spin-off effects. I would like to have read Lipton and Longhurst on the subject, including what they might have to say about the methods by which politicians, markets and producers in rich temperate countries could be bullied and/or shamed into benign action. The Commonwealth Sugar Agreement used to work pretty well; is a modern descendant of it inconceivable?
N. W. Simmonds
Development of Farming Systems, Evaluation of the Five-year Period 1980-84. Edited by J. C. Zadoks. Pudoc, Wageningen, 1989.90 pp. ISBN 90220-0969-6. Price: Dfl 50-00. The results of the first 5 years of this farm development project are reviewed. Three adjoining farm systems on the NE Polder are compared: Current and Integrated (lower inputs) each on 17 ha and Organic on 22 ha. The former two have the same intensive arable cropping system, while the organic (biodynamic farming) has a dairy herd of 20 cows and half the farm in grass/clover, with fodder and cash crops on the rest, the clover and manure supplying most of the plant nutrients for crops. There are 12 chapters covering the aims, description production, nutrient supply and soil fertility, disease pest and weed control, economic results, consumer quality of produce, and including discussions on the research methodology, the needs of the agricultural extension service and the opportunities for alternative farming systems. This is an essential publication for anyone interested in farming systems or in organic farming. It reveals the problems of research and the high cost of development work on farm systems. Even after the great commitment of resources and manpower, the results here only apply to three selected regimes from an infinite number that could be chosen, and restricted to one site and soil. There is also the long term nature of the project--the establishment of a dairy herd and introduction of rotation grass/clover swards covering half the farm which would be expected to increase organic matter over a long period of time. The development part of the project must include changes in technology or cropping to maximise the efficiency of the system by reducing costs and increasing the value of the products. Thus, much depends on the human management factor.
Book rev#ws
a consequence of the breadth of the approach, and the extent of material available. Most contributions unashamedly concentrate on particular interests and often advance certain viewpoints. That is a real part of any discussion of broad topics, and is not without value. Despite such concentration, most, but not quite all, of the information available would have received mention somewhere in the volume. This makes it a very effective starting point for any serious and comprehensive study of pastures in Southern Australia. Pasture production annually contributes over $10 billion to the Australian economy, and is especially critical to export incomes. It thus deserves support for research and education far above the grudging allocations budgeted by political parties. Some of the results of past support are described in this volume, and they are impressive. They provide grounds for policies which look kindly on research and education, if only because of the money they have earned. The quality of paper, print and graphics make this a technically classy publication. It is rather hefty to lug around in a briefcase for reading on a journey. This is unavoidable, but perhaps publication in two volumes would have been worthwhile. It certainly deserves to be read by all serious students of pasture production, whether in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, or Australia.
Fred Morley
New Seeds and Poor People. By M. Lipton and R. Longhurst, Unwin Hyman, London, 1989. 471 pp. ISBN 0 04 445 327-2. Price: £35 (boards); £17.95 (paperback). This is a long and rather 'heavy' book about a very important subject. The authors agree that the semi-dwarf wheats and rices of the so-called Green Revolution had enormous socioeconomic impacts, mostly in Asia and America, much less in Africa; they agree that these impacts were broadly beneficial to the rural poor but believe that some distributional effects that favoured the larger farmers occurred and were undesirable; they recognize that there was a large genotype-environment interaction (GE) component in the technical success of the 'modern varieties' (here MV, HYV in much other literature) but believe that the right MVs alone can at least do something; they insist that the deep social need is for high-yielding, reliable varieties and technologies that demand labour-intensive methods of production, this because employment and purchasing power are at least as important as gross food supply for a poor population that is predominantly (and
Book reviews
379
increasingly) landless; and they see plant breeding as the key technology in pursuing these objectives. The authors are economists and the book was heavy going for this noneconomist reviewer; I suspect it might be heavyish even for professionals who just happen not to be well up on the latest stuff on Neo-Classical, Keynesian and Walrasian General Equilibria (GE), for example. (Unhappily, 'GE' means different things to different people, plant breeders and economists, for instance.) But the authors have done a great deal of reading and thinking and have got a lot nearer to understanding what agricultural research is really all about than have most economists; also, they are enthusiasts for their material, they write well and the book is well-made, well annotated and well indexed. It is quite the best and most thoughtful work that I have seen on this subject, which I take to be one of the key issues of our time, perhaps the key issue. The authors are concerned to prescribe as well as describe: to prescribe what research (both national and international) should do. Essentially, they say, it should generate robust new varieties with stable disease resistances, should concentrate on sheer food yield ignoring virtually all 'quality' factors, should ignore (indeed discourage) herbicide and machinery research that might tend to have labour-displacing effects, should ignore 'gimmick research' (such as soybeans and wheats in the wrong places and high lysine maize) and it should, at the most general level, do anything possible to promote the feeding, employment and welfare of the poor (both rural and urban but perhaps less often poor farmers than is commonly assumed). No reasonable person could disagree with much of this list (though I personally have some doubts about the strictures on herbicides and machinery). More generally, I think it is a pity that the authors didn't bring some of their knowledge to bear on two (related) subjects which might possibly be as important as improving staple food crops that are already there. Many tropical lands are already desperately stressed by overpopulation and therefore over-cropping (and the problem worsens). Permanent, intensive annual cropping (on the rich temperate pattern, the fatal Euro-American fallacy) is probably just impossible in most of the tropics, whatever the inputs employed. But perennials have the potential for indefinite stability and some of them (for example sugar-cane) rotate beautifully with food crops. Many productive perennials, with both food and cash aspects, have not yet even been generally distributed and no-one (but no-one) is charged with systematic thinking on the subject. I hold it as self-evident, that long-term-stable systems will have to have a core of perennial cropping elements. The annual-crop preoccupations of the CGIAR system and of the authors of this book have, unfortunately, excluded the subject from these pages. The related point also (mostly)
380
Book reviews
concerns perennials, namely, export cash crops. Cash (enough of it anyway) is as good as food any day and there are very many examples of such plants as sugar-cane, bananas, cocoa, coffee, tea, rubber and oil palm making decent incomes for smallholders, as well as having favourable technological spin-off effects. I would like to have read Lipton and Longhurst on the subject, including what they might have to say about the methods by which politicians, markets and producers in rich temperate countries could be bullied and/or shamed into benign action. The Commonwealth Sugar Agreement used to work pretty well; is a modern descendant of it inconceivable?
N. W. Simmonds
Development of Farming Systems, Evaluation of the Five-year Period 1980-84. Edited by J. C. Zadoks. Pudoc, Wageningen, 1989.90 pp. ISBN 90220-0969-6. Price: Dfl 50-00. The results of the first 5 years of this farm development project are reviewed. Three adjoining farm systems on the NE Polder are compared: Current and Integrated (lower inputs) each on 17 ha and Organic on 22 ha. The former two have the same intensive arable cropping system, while the organic (biodynamic farming) has a dairy herd of 20 cows and half the farm in grass/clover, with fodder and cash crops on the rest, the clover and manure supplying most of the plant nutrients for crops. There are 12 chapters covering the aims, description production, nutrient supply and soil fertility, disease pest and weed control, economic results, consumer quality of produce, and including discussions on the research methodology, the needs of the agricultural extension service and the opportunities for alternative farming systems. This is an essential publication for anyone interested in farming systems or in organic farming. It reveals the problems of research and the high cost of development work on farm systems. Even after the great commitment of resources and manpower, the results here only apply to three selected regimes from an infinite number that could be chosen, and restricted to one site and soil. There is also the long term nature of the project--the establishment of a dairy herd and introduction of rotation grass/clover swards covering half the farm which would be expected to increase organic matter over a long period of time. The development part of the project must include changes in technology or cropping to maximise the efficiency of the system by reducing costs and increasing the value of the products. Thus, much depends on the human management factor.