AKST Evolutions over Time: Thematic Narratives 87
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high-value crops Allaire, 1996.This has enabled large sur- pluses of a narrow range of basic grains and protein foods
to be generated, traded and also moved relatively quickly to meet emergency and humanitarian needs. It has eased hun-
ger and reduced poverty as well as kept food prices stable and low relative to other prices and allowed investment in
other economic sectors FAO, 2004. However, the ecologi- cal and cultural context of farming is always and necessarily
“situated” and cannot—unlike functions such as water use or carbon trading—be physically exchanged Berkes and
Folke, 1998; Hubert et al., 2000; Steffen et al., 2004; Lal et al., 2005; Pretty, 2005. Advances especially in the eco-
logical sciences and socioeconomic research as well as driv- ers originating in civil society movements 2.2, 2.3 have
mobilized science, knowledge and technology in support of approaches appreciative of place-speciic, multidimensional
and multifunctional opportunities Agarwal et al., 1979; Byerlee, 1992; Symes and Jansen, 1994; Gilbert, 1995; de
Boef, 2000; Fresco, 2002. Examples include Cohn et al., 2006, trading arrangements connecting those willing to
pay for speciic ecological values and those who manage the resources that are valued Knight, 2007, urban councils
using rate levies to pay farmers for the maintenance of sur- rounding recreational green space or for ecosystem services
such as spreading lood water on their ields; hydroelectric companies such as Brazil-Iguacú paying farmers to practice
conservation tillage to avoid silting behind the dams and improve communal water supplies; farmers’ markets; and
community-supported agriculture. An embedded activity. The resulting lows of products and
services are embedded in a web of institutional arrange- ments and relationships at varying scales, such as farmers’
organizations, industrial districts, commodity chains, ter- roirs, production areas, natural resource management ar-
eas, ethnic territories, administrative divisions, nations and global trading networks. Farmers are simultaneously mem-
bers of a variety of institutions and relationships that frame their opportunities and constraints, offering incentives and
penalties that are sometimes contradictory; farmers require strategic ability to select and interpret the relevant informa-
tion constituted in these institutions and relationships Chif- foleau and Dreyfus, 2004. The various ways of organizing
science, knowledge and technology over the last sixty years have taken different approaches to farmers’ strategic roles
see 2.1.2. A collective activity. Farmers are not wholly independent
entrepreneurs; their livelihoods critically depend on rela- tionships that govern access to resources. With asymmetri-
cal social relations, access is not equitably or evenly dis- tributed. Individuals, groups and communities attempt to
cope with inequalities by developing relational skills and capacity for collective action that help them to protect or
enhance their access to and use of resources Barbier and Lémery, 2000; the form that collective action takes changes
over time and place and between genders. As commercial actors such as supermarkets have become dominant in food
and farming systems, many farmers have transformed their production-oriented organizations into market-oriented
organizations. actions are judged by current values or by those of only one
set of actors. The drivers are assessed at three levels—local, regional, global. The assessments are further elaborated
2.3 in order to provide depth and detail in terms of three thematic narratives—1 genetic resources management; 2
pest management; 3 food system management.
2.1.1 The specificity of agriculture as an activity At the beginning of the period under assessment, policy
makers and other knowledge actors around the world had vividly in mind the fact that food is a basic necessity of life
and that its supply and distribution is vulnerable to a range of disruptions that cannot always be well controlled. Only
for those for whom food is reliably abundant can food be treated as an industrial good subject to the laws of elastic-
ity of price. The special characteristics of farming as a hu- man activity for supplying a basic necessity of life and as
the cultural context of existence for a still large if declining proportion of the world’s people are central to meaningful
historical assessment of AKST.