Westminster Food and Nutrition Forum last week on the thorny topic of food security, innovation and safety. The speakers and audience were mainly on the science/policy interface, (a very different epistemic community from last week’s EU aid gabfest, but the powerpoints were just as bad). Most of the discussion concerned the UK, rather than international issues, but there were messages of relevance to a development wonk. In particular, everyone stressed the need to move beyond ‘pure’ research focussed on technological fixes for food production, and adopt more participatory, holistic and inter-disciplinary approaches. But they acknowledged that in reality, the academic incentives all point in the other direction – status (and research funding) stems from citations in prestigious journals, not impact on the real world; research funding pushes people towards single discipline approaches, because interdisciplinary work takes much longer (building all that trust, learning each other’s academic languages and mindsets) and so is more expensive; the push to link up universities and the private sector means less research being made publicly available. I discussed the ‘technology as magic bullet v double-edged sword’ dichotomy that is always present, though often implicitly, in NGO thinking. I started off with a positive example (h/t Steve Jennings): access to reliable, appropriate seasonal weather forecasts (with support to farmers on how to use the information) has been shown in various countries to increase agricultural production by 10-20% without any other intervention. This is because it provides information that allows farmers to make better decisions. As climate change makes traditional knowledge of the weather less useful, that impact is only likely to increase. For an example from Mali, see here, and hop to page 59. Lessons from this?: Technology doesn’t have to be ‘new’ to make a big difference – mobile phones or old-school radios can do the trick ‘Good’ technology empowers poor people and reduces inequality


A good point that technology isn’t always the hard stuff—also critically includes access to information and the kinds of partnerships that allow information like weather forecasting to travel from private sector to small scale producers.
I think Lawrence Haddad gets this year’s award for best one-liner. What he is referring to with “billion bottoms” is the dangers of companies just viewing poor people as consumers.
Are technical artefacts inherently good or bad, or does it come down to good and bad governance, or good and bad usage?
A question that has been troubling philosophers of technology for quite some time now and the verdict is not out yet (as one would expect with philosophers).
I think Langdon Winner’s seminal essay “Do Artefacts have Politics?” is an excellent place to start reading up on this topic.
Technologies always embody the social relations of their production. A central challenge of development, therefore, is finding (or constructing) technologies which are appropriate for the social, economic, and environmental conditions under which they will be deployed.