The Rural Voice, 1990-01, Page 37But as someone noted at the con-
ference, technology is a carrier of
cultural domination, and many of the
technological advances delivered to
farmers (and for the most part willing-
ly received) in the latter part of this
century have diminished the autonomy
of the farm and its steward, and have
eroded rural culture and communities.
As political scientists J. Nef and J.
Vanderkop have noted, "The "envir-
onmental impact" of a technology is
not only upon the physical environ-
ment. Culture is the most seriously
affected yet the least studied."
But "culture," and the cultural
values of rural Canada, are difficult
to assess, to measure. Paul Thompson
of the Texas A & M University's De-
partment of Philosophy and Depart-
ment of Agricultural Economics,
stated the problem clearly:
"It should come as no surprise
that economists have not been able to
identify the unique value of the family
farming system, since its form of
value is utterly foreign to the econ-
omist's sketch of human nature."
Thompson suggested that the
work of Wendell Berry be considered
in coming to terms with the question
of value and the family farm. He
characterized Berry's philosophical
approach as the "new traditionalism"
or "communitarianism," and contrast-
ed it, roughly speaking, with the in-
dividualism that is ingrained in our
philosophical assumptions.
Baird Callicott, professor of
philosophy and natural resources at
the University of Wisconsin, grappled
with the same question, but from a
different perspective.
Modern agriculture, Callicott said,
fails both the test of science and the
test of the older view of nature as
sacred. It fails the test of science, he
said, because it fails to be sustainable;
it causes a loss of genetic diversity,
cyclic crop failures, and the disruption
of rural patterns. It treats animals as
"automata." And it is sending centur-
ies of accumulated agricultural
knowledge into oblivion.
He described a "waxing organic
paradigm" for farming which attends
to the relationship between the inter-
dependent parts of a farm as an ecol-
ogical system. And he predicted a
"post-modern agricultural paradigm
AGRICULTURE AND FOOD WORKSHOP
RESULTS
THREE QUESTIONS
1. Should agriculture be considered a social service rather than an industry?
2. How can the decision processes on the use and transfer of agricultural
technology best reflect the participation of small-scale stakeholders?
3. How can we ensure that all stakeholders affected by agricultural policies
are sufficiently informed?
THREE RECOMMENDATIONS
1. The organization of agriculture should be such that resources should be
widely held and decision-making widely dispersed.
2. Evaluation of a new technology must include centrally a consideration of
indigenous technologies, including sociocultural and ecological contexts.
3. The creators of agricultural technology have a moral obligation to engage
in dialogue with the community that desires and will be affected by those
technologies. Channels to facilitate or reinforce this must be created.
shift" to a new scientific view which
takes into account the latest percep-
tions in the science of biology. A
farm, he said, is more than a mechan-
ical manipulation of its parts. And the
sum of its parts is, like cultural values,
too intricate and complex — too val-
uable — to measure. It is as much
quality as quantity.
natural processes and limits rather
than to mechanical or economic mod-
els" (The Unsettling of America).
More questions than answers were
generated by the workshop, which
also included discussions of risk
assessment and pesticide use, biotech-
nology, food quality and consumer
education, and technology transfer to
"It should come as no surprise that economists have not
been able to identify the unique value of the family farming
system, since its form of value is utterly foreign to the
economist's sketch of human nature."
If that sounds rather academic,
Wendell Berry said it simply: agri-
culture "has been reduced to fit first
the views of a piecemeal "science"
and then the purposes of corporate
commerce," Berry wrote. Agricultural
specialists, he added, "simplified their
understanding of energy and began to
treat current, living, biological energy
as if it were a store of energy extract-
able by machinery. At that point the
living part of technology began to be
overpowered by the mechanical."
"If agriculture is founded upon life,
upon the use of living energy to serve
human life, and if its primary purpose
must therefore be to preserve the in-
tegrity of the life cycle, then agricul-
tural technology must be bound under
the rule of lift. It must conform to
the Third World. But the theme was
clear: we need to resist the "technol-
ogical imperative" which puts the
ethical questions last and the tech-
nology first. A more human order is,
first, moral discussion, second, the
.political process, and third, the tech-
nological means and implementation.
Or, as the representative from the
Mennonite Central Committee noted,
the general goal is not to stop agri-
cultural researchers from "plowing a
new furrow," but to ensure that what
is produced by the tillage and the
seeding will be of greater benefit to
the stakeholders involved — particu-
larly those "small-scale" stakeholders
who are often the most affected by
technological change, and often the
most easily disregarded.OLG
JANUARY 1990 35