This paper analyses a biotechnology-focused project which aims to promote the development and adoption of tissue culture bananas by small-scale farmers in Kenya. The paper highlights the generation of several important narratives that are used to justify the development and dissemination of this technology. First, a disaster narrative, a series of claims regarding rural livelihoods and banana production in Kenya, is generated. This creates a political and technical space for the creation of a new science that can solve these problems. Finally a series of claims regarding the efficacy of the technology in alleviating poverty are made. The project wields these various constructs to create a particular projection of rural Kenya and banana production, deploying data, statistics, economics and ‘facts’ in order to continually redefine the project as a success. The project can, through a process of defining its own boundaries and limits, justify a technology-led solution to a complex and nuanced set of problems – the biological subsuming the political. The project thus succeeds as a generator of discourses as much as a generator of technologies.
Weather risk is a serious issue in the African small farm sector that will further increase due to climate change. Farmers typically react by using low amounts of agricultural inputs. Low input use can help to minimize financial loss in...
Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of...
Classical innovation adoption models implicitly assume homogenous information flow across farmers, which is often not realistic. As a result, selection bias in adoption parameters may occur. We focus on tissue culture (TC) banana technology that was introduced in Kenya more...
Many developing countries are experiencing a rapid expansion of supermarkets. New supermarket procurement systems could affect farming patterns and wider rural development. While previous studies have analyzed farm productivity and income effects, possible employment effects have received much less attention....
Background
Smallholder farmers in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to climate shocks but often lack access to agricultural insurance. Weather index insurance (WII) could reduce some of the problems associated with traditional, indemnity-based insurance programs, but uptake has been lower...
