The history of the rice gene pool in Suriname: circulations of rice and people from the eighteenth century until late twentieth century

Alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, plant species travelled from Africa to the Americas and back. This article examines the emerging rice gene pool in Suriname due to the global circulation of people, plants and goods. We distinguish three phases of circulation, marked by two major transitions. Rice was brought to the Americas by European colonizers, mostly as food on board slave ships. In Suriname rice started off as a crop grown only by Maroon communities in the forests of the Suriname interior. For these runaway slaves cultivating several types of rice for diverse purposes played an important role in restoring some of their African culture. Rice was an anti-commodity that acted as a signal of protest against the slave-based plantation economy. After the end of slavery, contract labourers recruited from British India and the Dutch Indies also brought rice to Suriname. These groups grew rice as a commodity for internal and global markets. This formed the basis of a second transition, turning rice into an object of scientific research. The last phase of science-driven circulation of rice connected the late-colonial period with the global Green Revolution.El comercio transatlantico de esclavos tuvo como consecuencia la transferencia de numerosas especies vegetales. Este artículo se centra en la aparición de un acervo genético del arroz en Surinam, como consecuencia del tráfico de personas, plantas y mercancías. Hemos dividido la historia de la circulación global del arroz en tres etapas, separadas por dos etapas transicionales. El arroz llegó a América de la mano de los colonizadores, que lo empleaban como alimento, especialmente a bordo de los navíos que transportaban los esclavos. En Surinam no existían plantaciones de arroz, pero este cultivo pronto fue adoptado por grupos cimarrones formados por esclavos huidos hacia los bosques del interior de Surinam. El arroz parece haber jugado un papel fundamental para estos grupos, al permitirles restablecer algunos aspectos de su cultura africana ancestral, incluyendo el cultivo de distintas variedades de arroz. Como un símbolo de protesta contra las plantaciones con esclavos, el arroz cimarrón fue una antimercancía. Con el fin de la esclavitud llegaron a Surinam nuevos colectivos de trabajadores reclutados en las Indias británicas y holandesas. Estos grupos cultivaron arroz como una mercancía de primer orden. El artículo describe esta segunda transición, que convirtió este cereal en un objeto para la ciencia. Esta circulación de orientación científica conecta el período final colonial con la Revolución Verd

It's not the market, stupid: On the importance of non-market economies in sustainability transitions

It has been widely assumed that market mechanisms are central in incentivizing the development of sustainable innovations and that market formation is critical for the diffusion of innovations. We challenge the centrality of markets in understanding and promoting the development and diffusion of sustainable innovations using the case of the System of Rice Intensification. This innovation for sustainable rice cultivation was developed and diffused without relying on market mechanisms yet has been adopted by millions of farmers worldwide. To further our understanding of economic mechanisms beyond markets, we revisit Polanyi's distinction between markets, reciprocity, redistribution, and subsistence. This distinction helps to situate markets in a broader economic context and helps to understand how mechanisms for market exchange intersect with other types of economies in ways that can either positively or negatively affect sustainability

It's Not the Market, Stupid: On the Importance of Non-market Economies in Sustainability Transitions

It has been widely assumed that market mechanisms are central in incentivizing the development of sustainable innovations and that market formation is critical for the diffusion of innovations. We challenge the centrality of markets in understanding and promoting the development and diffusion of sustainable innovations using the case of the System of Rice Intensification. This innovation for sustainable rice cultivation was developed and diffused without relying on market mechanisms yet has been adopted by millions of farmers worldwide. To further our understanding of economic mechanisms beyond markets, we revisit Polanyi's distinction between markets, reciprocity, redistribution, and subsistence. This distinction helps to situate markets in a broader economic context and helps to understand how mechanisms for market exchange intersect with other types of economies in ways that can either positively or negatively affect sustainability

Vulnerability assessments as a political creation : Tsunami management in Portugal

Vulnerability assessments are a cornerstone of contemporary disaster research. This paper shows how research procedures and the presentation of results of vulnerability assessments are politically filtered. Using data from a study of tsunami risk assessment in Portugal, the paper demonstrates that approaches, measurement instruments, and research procedures for evaluating vulnerability are influenced by institutional preferences, lines of communication, or lack thereof, between stakeholder groups, and available technical expertise. The institutional setting and the pattern of stakeholder interactions form a filter, resulting in a particular conceptualisation of vulnerability, affecting its operationalisation via existing methods and technologies and its institutional embedding. The Portuguese case reveals a conceptualisation that is aligned with perceptions prevalent in national government bureaucracies and the exclusion of local stakeholders owing to selected methodologies and assessment procedures. The decisions taken by actors involved in these areas affect how vulnerability is assessed, and ultimately which vulnerability reduction policies will be recommended in the appraisal.</p

Is Participation Rooted in Colonialism? Agricultural Innovation Systems and Participation in the Netherlands Indies

Participation is connected to technology through the notion of innovation systems. To make the connection work, it is argued, the focus has to shift from a framing of participation in terms of democratic entitlement to a framing in terms of the settlement of issues (i.e. politics from below), The innovation system is an appropriate notion to see where issues are likely to lock on to processes of technological change. Drawing on material from colonial history (the Netherlands Indies) it is shown that much of the (seemingly) technical discussions about the organisation of research and extension, as well as concrete technical alternatives, were attempts to respond to growing economic uncertainty and social unrest among the rural population

Engaging communities as partners in health crisis response: a realist-informed scoping review for research and policy

Background: Health is increasingly affected by multiple types of crises. Community engagement is recognised as being a critical element in successful crisis response, and a number of conceptual frameworks and global guideline documents have been produced. However, little is known about the usefulness of such documents and whether they contain sufficient information to guide effective community engagement in crisis response. We undertake a scoping review to examine the usefulness of conceptual literature and official guidelines on community engagement in crisis response using a realist-informed analysis [exploring contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes(CMOs)]. Specifically, we assess the extent to which sufficient detail is provided on specific health crisis contexts, the range of mechanisms (actions) that are developed and employed to engage communities in crisis response and the outcomes achieved. We also consider the extent of analysis of interactions between the mechanisms and contexts which can explain whether successful outcomes are achieved or not. Scope and findings: We retained 30 documents from a total of 10,780 initially identified. Our analysis found that available evidence on context, mechanism and outcomes on community engagement in crisis response, or some of their elements, was promising, but few documents provided details on all three and even fewer were able to show evidence of the interactions between these categories, thus leaving gaps in understanding how to successfully engage communities in crisis response to secure impactful outcomes. There is evidence that involving community members in all the steps of response increases community resilience and helps to build trust. Consistent communication with the communities in time of crisis is the key for effective responses and helps to improve health indicators by avoiding preventable deaths. Conclusions: Our analysis confirms the complexity of successful community engagement and the need for strategies that help to deal with this complexity to achieve good health outcomes. Further primary research is needed to answer questions of how and why specific mechanisms, in particular contexts, can lead to positive outcomes, including what works and what does not work and how to measure these processes

Agriculture and food production

New perspectives on the history of agriculture and development challenge images of an agricultural past in which a lack of advanced agricultural inputs and machinery is equated with food shortages and stagnation. Such new perspectives, the introduction section explains, imply that agriculture and food production developed in ways that cut across geographical scales and linear progressions over time. The next section underlines the value of such perspectives by showing that histories of ancient forms of agriculture have immediate relevance for current development issues. The chapter then addresses three starting points for historical exploration, starting with the plantation that, underneath a stable image of wealth accumulation by metropolitan owners, shows a diverse and varied picture of crop cultivation and processing practices. The next starting point is the government, operating in stringent global constellations of power and international markets, within which specific national policies for agriculture and food security emerge. The last starting point is the small farm, showing persistence over time by defying definition and resisting control through diversity and flexibility, numerical dominance, and capacity to survive in remote and marginal conditions