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- Convenors:
-
Frank Uekötter
(Ruhr University Bochum)
Jo Klanovicz (Universidade Estadual do Centro Oeste do Paraná (Unicentro))
Frank Zelko (University of Hawaii at Manoa)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Landscapes of Cultivation and Consumption
- Location:
- Room 16
- Sessions:
- Monday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore the stakeholders, driving forces, the conducive factors and the modes of crisis management that underpin modernity’s global love affair with monoculture.
Long Abstract:
In the twenty-first century, the lion’s share of our food and a good part of our non-food resources comes from places where one plant reigns supreme. The environmental consequences are evident around the globe: monocultures deplete soils, breed pests and diseases, and consume more energy and other inputs than sustainable. Many scholars have highlighted the evils of plantation-style agriculture, and this panel seeks to take the next step: if the problems of monoculture are evident around the globe, what are the forces that allow this trend to persist against all odds? Who are the stakeholders that push for production regimes that hinge on one single commodity? What are encouraging or enabling factors that provide flank protection for the rise of new agricultural systems? And what are the forces that have allowed so many monocultures to survive so many crises: is this due to innovative businessmen, or clever scientists that improvise solutions, or state authorities that help with regulations and subsidies? Emphatically global in scope, the panel will feature a diverse set of case studies from around the world that explore these overarching questions. Prospective topics include soybeans, almonds, and pork production (in Brazil, California, and Germany, respectively). The goal is to identify common patterns and recurring actors and mindsets in the quest for a conceptual framework that allows to understand modernity’s love affair with monoculture. In doing so, the panel seeks to contribute to a new, environmentally sensitive world history of agriculture from the ground up.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 19 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the history of an international potato gene bank, this paper explores how scientists and institutions have managed the risk of disease introduction that arises from the search for new sources of genetic resistance needed to sustain vulnerable monocultures.
Paper long abstract:
Critical takes on industrial monoculture often note the increased susceptibility of homogenized farm fields to diseases and pests. Those who breed commodity crops engage in a near-continuous defensive labor in which they must seek genetic sources of resistance to rusts, viruses, and insects to incorporate into the breeding pools that will be the seeds of future harvests. Since the early twentieth century, farmers' varieties and especially the wild relatives of crops have been heralded as important sources of genetic disease- and pest-resistance and for this reason, among others, have been sought out in agricultural bioprospecting missions and placed in gene banks where they can be made available to breeders in sites far removed from their natural habitat. Yet the transit of seeds and other plant materials across lands and oceans brings risks, and none greater than the risk of introducing new pests and diseases that will in turn threaten vulnerable monoculture. In this paper, I explore the history of efforts to manage the risk of disease introduction that arises from the search for new sources of disease resistance needed to sustain monocultures through a study of one of the world’s key potato gene banks, the Commonwealth Potato Collection. I show that managing monocultures is also about managing crop diversity and that crop diversity has been understood as a source of both security and risk in twentieth and twenty-first century industrial agriculture.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the switch from hay to silage as the dominant form of winter feed for livestock in 1960s Ireland as a deeper transformation in its energetic, economic, and ecological dynamics.
Paper long abstract:
In the second half of the 20th century a silage-making revolution took hold of Irish livestock agriculture. In 1958 only two per cent of farmers made silage, hay being the dominant form of winter feed for livestock, but by the 1990s silage represented over two thirds of all winter forage made in Ireland. This switch from hay to silage was enabled by a network of intensive practices: high animal stocking rates, ryegrass dominated swards, and nitrogen fertiliser, which profoundly altered the energetic, economic, and ecological dynamics of Irish agriculture. This paper discusses the role of European market integration and fossil energy in prompting this transition and details its impacts on farmer livelihoods and landscape-level biodiversity.
Paper short abstract:
An examination of environmental justice protests against commercial cattle feeding. This piece employs historical methods to identify how the rise of monoculture practices within the U.S. Great Plains depended on disproportionate and contested circulations of waste, toxins, and labor.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United Black Coalition of Lubbock, Texas engaged in a series of protests against the expansion of commercial cattle feedlots disproportionately sited in their neighborhood. Throughout their campaigns, Coalition leaders consistently drew on the excessive dust and noxious odors created by these facilities in an effort to unite Lubbock’s Black community and address longstanding issues of environmental inequity within their city. In doing so, they brought attention to how processes unfolding in urban space were key to facilitating the integration of two emergent systems of industrial agriculture, irrigated grain farming and large scale cattle ranching. While much attention has been paid to the ways in which the Southern Plains of the United States was remade from a barren and unstable landscape into the center of U.S. beef production during the mid-20th century, the perspective of working class communities who navigated such transitions have been under examined. In this paper, I propose that foregrounding such perspectives illuminates how networks of urban expertise and power were key to facilitating and incentivizing farmers and ranchers' transition to mechanized systems of production. In turn, I argue that underlying the formation of this monocrop landscape was a complex and dynamic circulation of waste, chemicals, and labor. For the Coalition, the smells emanating from the feedlots were a daily reminder of their unequal role in the region’s emerging agriculture economy, and their organizing sought to expose these toxic entanglements.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the history of eucalyptus plantations in India and asks if the persistence of monocultures is akin to Thomas Hughes’ “technological momentum” or if it is the result of more active choices. It shall reflect on what this history can tell us about the global history of monocultures.
Paper long abstract:
Agriculture is the context in which most monocultures are studied. However some monocultures operate at the intersection of forestry and agriculture to provide a wide range of forest products. In this paper, I shall explore the history of eucalyptus plantations in India which have acquired increasing importance for a wide range of industries including pulp, paper and plywood. In broad outline, the story begins with colonial experiments, moving on to clear-felling of natural forests for eucalyptus plantation in the 1960s, World Bank-funded “social forestry” in the 1970s, more direct involvement of the paper industry in eucalyptus cultivation in the 1990s and tree plantation driven by climate-mitigation concerns in the present day.
The environmental consequences of eucalyptus are well-known to the general public as well as to policymakers, while the socio-economic impacts have been well-explored by scholars. Why then has eucalyptus seemingly only become more important (and appropriated even larger acreages) over the decades?
Answering this question necessitates exploring others: how are monocultures initiated, how do they develop momentum, what debates must they contend with and how are they shaped by opposition? Is the persistence of monocultures due to reasons akin to Thomas Hughes’ rubric of “technological momentum” or is it the result of more active policy choices by governments, farmers and international agencies? Exploring these questions, I shall reflect upon what the history of eucalyptus in postcolonial India can tell us about the global history of monocultures and about the history of postwar development in the Global South.