Hi Mike, Not sure if the comment about Burkina Faso was directed this way but anyway...
I wasn't looking specifically at subsistence agriculture (or commercial agriculture) but my strong impression would be that yes, Burkina is largely subsistence farming with a fair degree of local resilience but very much subject to exogenous factors like climate change (there has been ruinous flooding in many parts of west and central Africa in the last few months. What I have been looking at is a (fairly) new approach to overall agri-sector planning/development which I think is quite heartening and bodes reasonably well for the future. The approach is a fairly simple and obvious one but quite startling in the context in which it is being introduced (throughout sub-Saharan Africa... The process known as CAADP www.caadp.org is one that deliberately (and through requirement) includes the range of stakeholders involved in agricultural development at the national level and most specifically the grassroots (small holders/subsistence) farmers mostly through representative organizations. The process is heartening in that it introduces a reality component into the overall planning (and not incidentally into donor funding/support) and a degree of integration/duplication avoidance that is slowly but it seems surely having an effect through increasing investment in local infrastructure, better deployment of agr inputs (fertilizer etc.) and better adapting policies to local etc. requirements (import/export tariffs/taxes etc.). One issue that lurks in the background is that of commercialization which is an underlying goal for most of the stakeholders but has very considerable risks for the small holders--it remains to be seen how this will be resolved in various places and whether the overall process can survive the associated tensions and conflicts. M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 11:42 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Central bank money machines fail to spur global economy Lawry wrote: > [John Warfield's "A Science of Generic Design"] came out at a time > when a dozen first-rate books appeared linking design to societal > change. Many of the them were based on cybernetics, systems analysis, > and the still-faltering but ever fascinating fields of chaos and > complexity. Names (sp?) like: Abrahamson, von Forrester, Miller, > Aikens, Kaufmann, Bateson, Beer, Fuller, etc. etc. Another paper relevant to "complex systems": http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf with commentarty here: http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/10/we-are-now-one-year-and-counting-from- global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say--2 and here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425019/the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price -of-food/ I don't see much in the PDF reflecting application of complexity theory, general systems theory or the like, though. From the PDF: We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These observations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012-2013. This looks like a fairly straightforward model based on plotting from past data. The problem with "complex" systems is that thresholds, inflection points, trends etc. roughly predictable from past data can be egregiously misleading. Complex systems exhibit (something like) thresholds that are intrinsically unpredictable, un-identifiable, because of the nature of complex systems [1] and such thresholds are represent sudden transitions to whole new regions of the phase space representing the system. Interesting paper, though. Their predictions seem clear enough and well supported by events. The real-politik jousters for global dominance of energy resources and finance should be paying attention to it. "Looking for work" may come down to looking for a gun (or some rocks or just a pointy stick) if you and everybody for 50 miles around you is weak with hunger. BTW, I think Burkina Faso was absent from the list of countries, given in that PDF, where food riots had occurred. Is that country perhaps still largely feeding itself with local and subsistence farming rather than with imports from global agribiz? - Mike [1] Viz. a very large number of elements or variables with an exponentially larger number of connections between them. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
