The State of Food and Agriculture

Massive displacements of people due to political violence and oppression and
the sight-on television and in newspapers-of refugees as a miserable “sea
of humanity” have come to seem more and more common. If these
displacements, and media representations of them, appear familiar, so too
does the range of humanitarian interventions that is routinely activated by the
movement of people. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the forms
typically taken by humanitarian interventions that focus on refugees as their
object of knowledge, assistance, and management, and to trace the effects of
these forms of intervention at several different levels.

Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization

1. The argument 2. Ethnic cleansing in former times 3. Two versions of 'we, the people' 4. Genocidal democracies in the New World 5. Armenia, I: into the danger zone 6. Armenia, II: genocide 7. Nazis, I: radicalization 8. Nazis, II: fifteen hundred perpetrators 9. Nazis, III: genocidal careers 10. Germany's allies and auxiliaries 11. Communist cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot 12. Yugoslavia, I: into the danger zone 13. Yugoslavia, II: murderous cleansing 14. Rwanda, I: into the danger zone 15. Rwanda, II: genocide 16. Counterfactual cases: India and Indonesia 17. Combating ethnic cleansing in the world today.

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The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries

Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson have dramatically challenged the tendency of economists to confine their empirical search for the causes of economic growth to the recent past. They argue that the kind of institutions established by European colonialists, either protecting private property or extracting rents, resulted in the poorer parts of the pre-colonial world becoming some of the richest economies of today; while transforming some of the more prosperous parts of the non-European world of 1500 into the poorest economies today. This view has been further elaborated for Africa by Nunn, with reference to slave trading. Drawing on African and comparative economic historiography, the present paper endorses the importance of examining growth theories against long-term history: revealing relationships that recur because the situations are similar, as well as because of path dependence as such. But it also argues that the causal relationships involved are more differentiated than is recognised in AJR's formulations. By compressing different historical periods and paths, the 'reversal' thesis over-simplifies the causation. Relatively low labour productivity was a premise of the external slave trades; though the latter greatly reinforced the relative poverty of many Sub-Saharan economies. Again, it is important to distinguish settler and non-settler economies within colonial Africa itself. In the latter case it was in the interests of colonial regimes to support, rather than simply extract from, African economic enterprise. Finally, economic rent and economic growth have often been joint products, including in pre-colonial and colonial Africa; the kinds of institutions that favoured economic growth in certain historical contexts were not necessarily optimal for that purpose in others. AJR have done much to bring development economics and economic history together. The next step is a more flexible conceptual framework, and a more complex explanation.

The ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis and the compression of history: Perspectives from African and comparative economic history

Apres avoir rappele l’importance, pour mener une action efficace de developpement a l’echelle regionale, de comprendre la dynamique du systeme agraire et la diversite des exploitations agricoles, les auteurs s’attachent a preciser leur conception du concept de systeme de production. Ils montrent ensuite comment, a l’echelle de la petite region, l’etude du paysage et le recours a l’histoire permettent de reperer les mecanismes de la differenciation et, par la, d’identifier clairement les systemes de production agricole en presence. Ils expliquent enfin pourquoi l’analyse microeconomique des systemes de production ne peut pas etre menee a bien a partir des seuls resultats comptables et comment elle doit etre repensee en partant du fonctionnement technique des systemes.

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Fonctionnement et performances économiques des systèmes de production agricole : une démarche à l’échelle régionale

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01374272/document

The systeme agraire concept in francophone peasant studies

Wetlands are highly dynamic and productive systems that have been under increased pressure from changes in land use and water management strategies. In Eastern Africa, wetlands provide resources at multiple spatial and temporal levels through farming, fishing, livestock ownership and a host of other ecosystem services that sustain the local economy and individual livelihoods. As part of a broader effort to describe future development scenarios for East African coastal wetlands, this qualitative study focuses on understanding the processes by which river water depletion has affected local food production systems in Kenya's Tana River Delta over the past 50 years, and how this situation has impacted residents’ livelihoods and well-being. Interviews performed in six villages among various ethnic groups, geographical locations and resource profiles indicated that the agro-ecological production systems formerly in place were adapted to the river's dynamic flooding patterns. As these flooding patterns changed, the local population diversified and abandoned or adopted various farming, fishing and livestock-rearing techniques. Despite these efforts, the decrease in water availability affected each subcomponent of the production systems under study, which led to their collapse in the 1990s. Water depletion negatively impacted local human well-being through the loss of food security. The current study provides a detailed account of the dynamics of agro-ecological production systems facing the effects of river water depletion in a wetland-associated environment in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Floods and livelihoods: The impact of changing water resources on wetland agro-ecological production systems in the Tana River Delta, Kenya

La region des Grands Lacs: un lourd passe, un present dramatique, un avenir des plus sombres / Andre Guichaoua

Les crises politiques au Burundi et au Rwanda (1993-1994) : analyses, faits et documents

Cet article se propose de montrer comment, a partir des premices posees par Rene Dumont, cette approche de l’agriculture s’est peu a peu consolidee, precisee et construite, pour finalement constituer une discipline scientifique a part entiere, avec ses methodes et ses concepts propres. Surtout portee par des agronomes, l’agriculture comparee s’appuie sur les methodes et resultats de l’agronomie mais integre egalement les resultats de disciplines appartenant aux sciences sociales, comme l’histoire et la geographie agraires ainsi que l’economie rurale. Par les trois niveaux d’analyse qu’elle privilegie, celui de la parcelle ou du troupeau, niveau d’observation des pratiques, celui de l’unite de production, niveau d’integration des differents systemes de culture et systemes d’elevage, et celui de la region ou du pays, niveau pertinent d’application du concept de systeme agraire, l’agriculture comparee invite aux changements d’echelle autant qu’a une demarche comparatiste visant a rendre intelligibles les transformations de l’agriculture dans le monde.

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Hubert Cochet

Papers

Fonctionnement et performances économiques des systèmes de production agricole : une démarche à l’échelle régionale

The systeme agraire concept in francophone peasant studies

Floods and livelihoods: The impact of changing water resources on wetland agro-ecological production systems in the Tana River Delta, Kenya

Les crises politiques au Burundi et au Rwanda (1993-1994) : analyses, faits et documents

L'agriculture comparée: une discipline de synthèse