Four Horsemen of the Global Economic System

Agriculture in South Asia faces the spectre of the four modern day apocalyptic horsemen of the global economic system — hunger, climate change, trade competition and knowledge exclusion. In July’s LINK LOOK Andy Hall and Rasheed Sulaiman V. argued that South Asia — a region that is home to half the world’s poor — is vulnerable to these challenges because of weaknesses in current patterns of agricultural innovation capacity. They also, however, argued that many of the capacity building blocks are already in place and that a few relatively simple institutional changes could unleash powerful creative forces capable of converting these harbingers of doom — Hunger, Climate Change, Trade Competition and Knowledge Exclusion — into poverty-reducing opportunities.

How well placed is agricultural research to tackle the looming crisis in South Asia? Not very well, according to Andy and Rasheed. And this is not necessarily because South Asian countries lack scientific capacity; in fact, it’s quite the opposite in India with its highly-developed agricultural science tradition. Numerous examples point to the fact that the problem lies in — among other things — the low priority given to research on sustainable agriculture; the lack of scientific validation and support of farmers’ own innovations; and the moribund and outdated agricultural extension services.
The great paradox of South Asia is not so much that it has scientific capabilities and cannot make science count for development, but rather that it has such a rich experience of innovations in research and technology practice that its public research organisations could learn from, but don’t. Andy and Rasheed discuss what they think needs to be undertaken to tackle the looming crisis (see http://www.innovationstudies.org/linklook/200807.html). What do you think? Please comment below.

New Global Alliances: The End of Development Assistance

To coincide with the high level forum on aid effectiveness in Accra in the first week of September, the August issue of the LINK News Bulletin focused on science and technology and development assistance. LINK co-ordinators Andy Hall and Jeroen Dijkman reflected on the implication of a global knowledge economy and the way it calls into question the notion of donor and recipient countries. With knowledge emerging as the currency of an innovation-driven global economy, new patterns of international interdependencies are starting to emerge that make terms such as ‘developed’ and ‘developing country’ and ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ look increasingly irrelevant. Does this mean it is time to radically rethink development assistance and the way it deals with agricultural science and technology? Can these emerging global knowledge alliances be harnessed for poverty reduction? Can national self interests replace the altruism of development assistance? Or do we risk even further dividing a world of haves and have nots into a world of knows and know nots?

Andy and Jeroen argue that the nature of modern innovation — with its emphasis on co-creation of ideas, products and services — means that global strategies to acquire knowledge need to be collaborative rather than extractive. Bilateral development assistance would be a much more powerful tool if it were more closely aligned with the development objectives of the donor country. This would allow relationships to move from patronage to partnership and thus take advantage of the incentives inherent to the emerging regime of global interdependencies. Development assistance should focus on helping developing countries make the transition to a global knowledge pool, and, in the process, ease them into new forms of global knowledge alliances.

The effectiveness of development assistance is an issue of much debate and disagreement. However, most would agree that, at best, it has had mixed results. LINK would love to get your take on what needs to be done to change the status quo. Please do leave your comments below.