Reciprocal Technologies

* PhD Thesis: Reciprocal Technologies. By Eugenio Tisselli. Plymouth University, 2016.

URL = http://ojovoz.net (project documentation)

Summary

Eugenio Tisselli:

"Industrial agricultural systems have compromised local, regional, and even planetary ecosystems, and have largely denied the voices and collaborative practices of small-scale farmers by increasingly pushing them towards different forms of marginalization. This book seeks to explore this critical issue, and its main premise is that reinforcing the reciprocal exchange of voice in small-scale farming communities can become a strategy to increase their recognition and resilience in face of these challenges. By merging grounded research in rural communities in Tanzania and Mexico with a unique transdisciplinary approach that combines technology studies, critical theory, agroecology, and socially engaged art, the author explores how the critical transformation of technologies for voicing out may contribute to the activation of such a strategy. Reciprocal Technologies offers practical as well as theoretical insights on how information and communications technologies affect rural farmers and their communities, and argues that these technologies need to be ethically transformed in order to resist the hegemony of self-interested competition, commodification and social exclusion."

Excerpts

Chapter Four

Introductory Note

Eugenio Tisseli:

"The following text is an excerpt of the fourth chapter of my PhD thesis. The ideas expressed here were also included in a scientific article (co-authored with Angelika Hilbeck) pending publication. In this text, I analyze the potential risks that e-agriculture may pose to small-scale farmers from a value-based perspective. E-agriculture may be briefly described as an emerging field in which information and communications technologies, particularly mobile phones, are applied to improve the livelihoods of farmers. A significant number of development programs are exploiting the potential benefits that e-agriculture may offer farmers, such as timely information about the weather and market prices for crops. However, in the following paragraphs I propose an analysis of the potential risks that these programs may pose to the communal, non-monetized agricultural practices and forms of exchange and organization that persist in many small-scale farming communities.

Text

Can e-agriculture compromise learning processes?

The industrialization of agriculture can be considered as a gradual and progressive process of invalidation of the culture, values, and knowledge of communities of small-scale farmers worldwide. Many small-scale farming communities possess complex forms of traditional agricultural knowledge, yet the rapidly shifting conditions of markets, climate, and other factors raise the need for a continued learning of new practices and techniques. However, continuous learning can be compromised by the solutionist vision of many e-agriculture initiatives, which seek to achieve quick results in order to bypass slower, more complex processes. Learning takes time and, in rural contexts, involves careful observation and a deep understanding of the local ecology, as well as the management of multiple interactions between farming communities and local institutions. Learning also requires communities to agree on a clear vision of what their future should look like, so that they can enhance their capacities to build it together.

The importance of learning has been recognized and applied to methodologies in different agricultural contexts, such as farmer participatory research (Ashby, 1990) or the learning approach in agroecosystems management (Lightfoot et al., 2001). However, these forms of learning are costly and involve gradual iterations that may prevent the emergence of the type of quick, tangible results often demanded by project funders (Lightfoot et al., 2011). As a consequence, the solutionist mindset of many e-agriculture initiatives tend to be favored by public and private institutions as a way to achieve quick goals while circumventing the potentially slow and expensive creation of opportunities for in-depth learning. Although a number of e-agriculture services, particularly those based on radio and video, can valuably contribute to the creation of such opportunities, this is not generally the case for those based on mobile platforms. Services such as iCow, for instance, actually leapfrog basic learning about cattle keeping by delivering automated instructions that farmers must follow in order to properly tend their cows. As reflected in impact studies, iCow has effectively helped its users to raise the milk production of their cows. But at what cost? Rather than encouraging farmers to establish a deep and sensible understanding of their cows through learning and observation, they are prompted to execute simple commands sent as SMS messages. But what happens when the service is suspended? What will farmers be left with? Other mobile-based e-agriculture initiatives tend to reproduce this pattern. Thus, by leapfrogging the process of learning and considering farmers as passive recipients of information, the solutionist values and practices that largely prevail in e-agriculture may ultimately compromise the capacity of farmers to become meaningfully engaged in reciprocal learning processes.

Can e-agriculture contribute to erode reciprocal practices?

What is at stake in small-scale agriculture is not only the capacity to acquire new knowledge, but also the very nature of that knowledge. This has to do with the question of what purposes may learning serve. Can learning reinforce reciprocal practices that can support the production of a commons or, on the other hand, contribute to the establishment and dissemination of a merely utilitarian and competitive view of agriculture?

A significant number of e-agriculture initiatives favor the delivery of market-ready, productivity-oriented information to individual farmers. Thus, willingly or unwillingly, the model of information and knowledge transfer of such initiatives can contribute to the disintegration of reciprocal values, in which agricultural production tends to address mutual benefits, rather than individual profits. A consequence of such disintegration is the potential risk of intensifying the process by which small-scale farmers are pulled towards monetized models of labor and production that are beyond their control, and which can compromise their local forms of social and economic organization in ways that may be unwanted.

As farmers are compelled to enter deregulated global markets, for example through the export of cash crops, they can become increasingly vulnerable to spiralling forms of economic dependency. Technologies introduced by the successive agricultural revolutions, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified seeds, or mobile phones, have incrementally introduced forms of dependency which were previously unknown. In the case of mobile phones, farmers find themselves facing a new or increased need for electricity, devices, and, more significantly, access to mobile networks. The regular payments required to access such networks can potentially become a serious burden for farmers in the long run. If small-scale farmers become dependent on information delivered through mobile phones, they will likely be constrained to find ways of continuously paying associated costs. Mobile dependency can be understood as a closed loop: farmers are served with information specially tailored to boost their productivity and access to markets so that they may become reliable clients of all sorts of products, including mobile information delivery.

In hybrid social scenarios, where reciprocal economies coexist with monetized ones, raising their income through increased productivity is certainly a legitimate goal for small-scale farmers. But does e-agriculture offer a sustainable model for achieving that goal? A report commissioned by the World Bank suggests that the poorer Kenyans are already overspending on mobile costs and even making monetary sacrifices that include foregoing food and transport (World Bank, 2012b). The report states that "these substitutions were largely undertaken in order to strengthen the longer-term asset accumulation of micro-enterprises" (World Bank, 2012b, p.39), meaning that access to mobile communications, including e-agriculture services and applications, is increasingly seen by small-scale farmers as a way to improve their future income opportunities. However, those future opportunities, which may or may not materialize, already imply compromising basic subsistence in the present. Such a scenario should be sufficient to bring the model of the small-scale farmer as a mobile-driven entrepreneur into question.

Monetized loops and individual spirals of dependency marginalize reciprocal practices and exchanges even further by invalidating alternative economic models, such as sharing or producing a commons. The loop of which e-agriculture initiatives are part of has a strong tendency to individualize economic actors, detaching them from the possibility of more communal forms. Although small-scale farming communities may be considered as hybrid contexts in which different forms of economic exchange coexist, their members tend to be more collaborators than competitors. In a collaborative community, knowledge and information are needed not by individuals but rather by the community as a whole to make collective decisions.

Michael Gurstein, who proposed the notion of community informatics, argued that in such communal contexts, the conventionally and technologically prescribed mode of one-to-one communications offered by mobile phones can potentially disrupt the very basis of communal life (Gurstein, 2012). Providing access to information on an individual level, as most mobile-driven e-agriculture initiatives do, may indeed empower individuals. Yet, as Gurstein claimed, it is not clear how individual empowerment may result in communal benefits, since it is most likely that this process would impede collaboration by introducing or reinforcing individual competition (Gurstein, 2012).

Can the model offered by e-agriculture affect the political agency of small-scale farmers?

As argued here, the model offered by many e-agriculture initiatives tends to reproduce solutionist practices and values. Solutionism bypasses the complexities of political negotiation and misses the fact that the how of politics is as important as its what, and that the former often shapes the latter (Morozov, 2014). Morozov claimed that solutionism weakens the people's ability to question the how of politics through algorithmic regulation, a sort of automated technocracy that finally breeds a political regime where technological corporations "call all the shots" (Morozov, 2014). The transformation of all human activity, including politics, into a process of profit-making, result in an all-encompassing commodification in which, as Raj Patel eloquently put it, everything has a price but nothing has a value (Patel, 2010). However, an additional effect of generalized commodification is the limiting of collective political agency, as communities are fragmented into molecularized, competing individuals for whom collective negotiation about a commons is no longer relevant or even possible. The prevailing models in e-agriculture present a high risk of limiting political agency, as they tend to delegitimize and erode reciprocal practices, implement solutionist schemes and strategies, and ultimately outsource government tasks and responsibilities into the hands of private corporations which, in turn, are "crowdsourced" to farmers. Crowdsourcing has been defined as "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people" (Howe, 2006). In social contexts with high levels of Internet access, crowdsourcing has thrived thanks to a docile yet interactive online culture designed to participate in the reproduction of existent power dynamics, such as the social networks of Web 2.0 (Tewksbury, 2012). Thus, crowdsourcing does not operate through coercion, but rather by an individual internalization of the responsibilities that traditionally rested in the hands of public or private institutions. A number of e-agriculture initiatives have favored such a form of individualization, in which each isolated yet digitally connected small-scale farmer is the sole person responsible for the quality of his or her own livelihood. In other words, small-scale farmers are left to their own devices.

Conclusions

Despite the largely critical outlook I have adopted here, I believe that e-agriculture can play a positive role in the future of agriculture. If carefully contextualized, information and communications technologies can play an important part in helping to shift the paradigm of agriculture towards more sustainable and resilient practices. In order to achieve such a shift in e-agriculture, I propose the following considerations:

- If e-agriculture places less emphasis on increasing agricultural productivity or participating in monetized markets, and more on strengthening the social networks of small-scale farmers, it may enhance different forms of collaboration and ultimately help them to weave social safety nets on which to fall back when challenges arise.

- If the top-down, expert-based contents delivered by most e-agriculture platforms were to be combined with those generated by farmers, fairer models of agricultural learning might be achieved. Particularly, if farmers can share and exchange locally held information and knowledge, more equitable forms of cross-community interaction could be propitiated.

- When e-agriculture strategies encourage the contextualized appropriation and transformative usage of technologies, the values embedded in those technologies might be shifted from the default individualizing effects towards more reciprocal ones. By encouraging a shared access to those technologies, for example, or by distributing their correlative costs, e-agriculture initiatives might reinforce reciprocal practices that can result in an increased sustainability and resilience of small-scale farming communities."

Reference

Ashby, J., 1990. "Small Farmers' Participation in the Design of Technologies", in Altieri, M., Hecht, S. (eds.), 1990. "Agroecology and Small Farm Development", CRC Press, Boca Raton, USA.

Gurstein, M., 2000. "Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies", Idea Group Publishing, London, UK.

Howe, J., 2006. "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", Wired Magazine, issue 14, n. 06, June 2006.

Lightfoot, C., Fernandez, M., Noble, R., Ramírez, R., Groot, A., Fernandez-Baca, E., Shao, F., Muro, G., Okelabo, S., Mugenyi, A., Bekalo, I., Rianga, A., Obare, L., 2001. "A Learning Approach to Community Agroecosystem Management", in Flora, C. (ed.), 2001. "Interactions Between Agroecosystems and Rural Communities", CRC Press, Boca Raton, USA.

Morozov, E., 2014. "The rise of data and the death of politics", The Observer, The Guardian, July 20th 2014.

Patel, R., 2010. "Cuando nada vale nada", Los libros del lince, Barcelona, Spain.

Tewksbury, D., 2012. "Crowdsourcing and Homeland Security", Surveillance and Society, vol. 10, n. 3/4 (2012), pp. 249-262.

World Bank, 2012b. "Mobile Usage at the Base of the Pyramid in Kenya", The World Bank, InfoDev, Washington DC, USA.