Topic 2: How does the perspective of the developing world differ from the developed world in terms of WEHAB priorities and preferences for contrasting development models?

A difference between northern and southern development patterns which I didn't see too strongly addressed is the problem of how reforestation can actually take place in temperate vs. tropic regions. In New England (Eastern US, and much of Europe), the default state is forested - leave a patch of land alone for 20 years, and you'll get a mixed deciduous forest. This isn't necessarily true in the tropics.

Even in the north, where forests have only a handful of tree species, it is incredibly difficult and perhaps impossible to re-create an old growth forest. Invasive or tramp species often dominate, and native species often go extinct. A good example is the case of white pines in New England - though they exist in very old forests, it is incredibly difficult to get them to re-grow in deforested strands.

Historical records from paleolimnology show that much of the tropics are happy to end up either as forest or savanna - an abandoned lot is unlikely to turn into a climax forest even to the extent that happens in New England. Since many tropical forests are made up of hundreds of species of trees, it is probably impossible to re-build such an ecosystem on human time scales. Re-forestation certainly happens in the tropics, but in an even more simplified and altered state than in northern forests.

Some degree of human management is almost certainly required to re-grow functioning ecosystems from deforested tropical landscapes. The article on coffee farming in Mexico is particularly interesting in this respect - suggesting agro/eco systems seems both relevant and ultimately necessary.

The Perfecto and Vandermeer paper does a good job of addressing the issue of differing approaches by the developing and developed world toward the relationship between agriculture and conservation.  While the developed world trends toward large-scale commercial agricultural production, the developing world largely contains small, owner-operated farms.  Because of the nuanced knowledge of local ecosystems that owners of smaller farms have, these two agricultural practices tend to have similar productivity.  The paper thus argued that capturing this type of agriculture is key in developing an accurate and fully usable model.

That the paper argues for the focus on smaller, localized processes perhaps speaks to the larger differences between the perspectives of the developed and developing worlds.  While the developed world is grounded in commercialized and large-scale processes, the developing world is grounded in more localized processes.  Because the developing world has subsisted on this approach is a strong indicator that their preferences for development models may tend toward those that acknowledge and incorporate small-scale processes.

I am wondering, however, if anyone can speak more to this idea, and elaborate on developing world perspectives, of which I know too little to speak with much authority on this matter.

One other important difference is the existence of forest dwellers in many parts of the developing world, whose livelihoods depend on the forest in its current state. Both models considered in the paper seem to implicitly consider two kinds of people: urban residents who consume food and rural farmers who produce (and consume) it. How would a third category of people, whose lives will be directly disrupted by forest transition, fit into these frameworks?

For example, a few years ago I met a Shuar village in the Ecuadorian Amazon Basin. The people there depended directly on the forest for food (mainly through hunting and fishing), shelter, medicine and cultural/spiritual traditions. (This is perhaps an extreme example, but at the time of my visit, they had actually armed themselves against an expected encroachment on their forest, demonstrating the urgency of conservation from their perspective.)

Both humanitarian concern and political conflict arising from disrupted livelihoods of forest dwellers may further complicate the application of a forest transition model in the developing world.

This is a great question.

It would be naive to discount the differences between the developed and developing worlds (and heterogeneity within both), but I think that it would also be a mistake to ignore the relevance of Perfecto and Vandermeer's assertion to the developed world. 

Industrial agriculture in the global north has created huge swaths of 'rural' largely absent of 'nature'. Intensively applied chemicals and technologies have more or less successfully supplanted the 'ecosystem services' that might have traditionally encouraged farmers to maintain a more symbiotic relationship with nature. Every once in a while nature may hit back - the current concerns around the significant decline in bee populations being one example - but for the most part planners and farmers alike seem to bifurcate rural environments into nature and agriculture with little thought.

This bifurcation is not, however, inherent to the system. It is a path chosen based on the dominance of industrial agriculture. Furthermore, some agroecological systems (and the farmers practicing them) are consciously rejecting this paradigm in favor of a return to a more holistic relationship with nature. In no place is this more clear than Massachusetts, which is going through a renaissance with the revitalization of many of the small farms that originally went through the 'forest transition model'. Massachusetts now leads the nation on various indicators (e.g. farm gate sales) that reflect the rich collection of small producers raising livestock, growing apples and so on in ecologically sustainable ways. 'Community Supported Agriculture' schemes and farmer's markets are exploding in popularity.

This is not to suggest that anything even approaching a broad shift back to small-scale and more ecologically sensitive farming is upon us. These are certainly very much niche operations serving a small percent of the population only some of the time. A variety of powerful factors - including our expectation of very cheap food, expensive labor, a powerful ag-industrial lobby, and the subsidies they fight hard to maintain - work against such a shift. Still, I think it is useful to recognize that the potential is there, and that some systems are capable of, and do in practice, fit within the kind of agroecological mix that Perfecto and Vandermeer talk about. 

On a somewhat different note: I was pleased to read about small-scale agroecological systems actually being more productive per hectare than large-scale systems. If one thinks about it, this is logical. While positive that this is generally true, I don't think that efficiency per hectare has to be the gold standard against which we measure success. I think you could make a strong case for the fact that, when it comes to some forms of agriculture - like raising beef cattle - extensive agriculture (grazing cattle on vast swaths of marginal land) is much better than raising them intensively on feed lots. In fact, pastured livestock often have very important symbiotic relationships with the natural ecosystems they are a part of, from yaks in Tibet to sheep on the Hungarian plains.

Just as a follow up on Todd’s comment: I very much liked to core of the paper and think it has an important message for the book. However, the policy implications are in my view unnecessarily presented in black and white way.

If we look at agricultural sector restructuring in other industrialized countries, we see a veritable paradigm shift over the past two decades in countries like Switzerland or Austria which is increasingly spreading to other parts of Europe. Agricultural subsidies have shifted from a quantity base (leading to huge overproduction in milk, butter, wine, aso in the 70ies) to environmentally based criteria. Most of the state support is today tied to minimum requirements of farming practice adopting organic or at least ecologically sensitive production principles. Mass producing farms are more and more exposed to pressures from the EU market. This has led (and was at the same time supported by) an increasing population of organic farmers, an increasingly strong engagement of wholesale retailers in organic products marketing (going up to market shares of 25% in milk for instance), a mobilization against genetically modified crops, aso. On the ecological side, regions with sensitive ecosystems (mostly up in the Alps) have experienced a stabilization of medium sized farms adopting more environmentally sensitive production processes. We therefore saw a sort of “convergent model” but at the same time with a huge modernization push of the smallholder farmers engaging in localized marketing, lots of product innovations, agro-tourism and so on.

Therefore, I guess the overall argument of a corresponding book chapter could be considerable strengthened if the policy implications were put in a more nuanced way. It should envision transition processes that invite broader actors segments than only traditional smallholder farms vs. agroindustrial giants.