Dr.Balaji: Dr.Balasubramanian, colleagues, I want to thank the organizers for this opportunity. I am not famous in this town and I am never going to be. I was never famous in my own organization but I have still not been able to figure out why I have been brought here. I blame it on Shiv Vishvanathan. Now my fear is that the organizers and the audience have to put up with me for about 10 minutes. I am going to take a very simplistic view because I work for an international organization and however much I try to shake it off, I do represent…

I am going to speak about the knowledge societies and the uncertain future from a food and agriculture perspective. That makes for a simpleton’s view – number one. Number two, I represent and however much I try to avoid, I tend to speak as a member of an international organization which means we can articulate only extremely simple simplistic view. Because by definition, we are not supposed to say that democracy is an acceptable one because our member states do not say so. Secondly, GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) debates…we don’t believe in them…that does not mean I don’t believe in them…I mean these are some of the premises around which I am constructing this stuff.

In the vision of uncertainties it is not knowledge society that tops my list. It is the food and agriculture agenda that tops my list because this is an endemic problem but spoken about or taken note of only when very deep crisis like what happened in 2007 in wheat matters occurred. However as people assume that food is only a South problem that affects only the South part of the world I mean it does affect some other countries – but not some countries that really matter – we take it as a seriously closed issue which I think is no longer true.
 
The other is a much bigger problem climate change once again, it is to the credit of the way the intellectual discourse is organized that it took a politician to break a deadlock on this issue like Al Gore – but for him I think climate change was already finished and consented the back burner and the credit goes to a number of countries particularly North America, United States, to India of course, to China, to the Gulf Cooperation Council members for ensuring that this debate never took off for almost 20 years to a serious level. Once again it took a politician to break the deadlock. This is a very-very serious issue that contributes to uncertainty in the future. The last one, in the name of knowledge society, what we witness, what we see, at least in peninsular India and some parts of sub-Saharan Africa where I work, is in the name of creation a lot of what looks like destruction is going about. This was also a point that a number of people raised in the debates yesterday.

Ok, so now, from my view, how do I look at knowledge society? Once again, as I said I am a simpleton and in my view there are hundreds of characteristics but I select just two for the purpose of this discussion. One is co-creation of value. I mean not just content, co-creation of value and communities of practice. Open source is a very-very good example. It is contributing to quite a lot of value even critics or writers such as Tom Friedman accept that. There is a lot of value emerging from co-creation and communities of practice in a way that we could not even conceive of 10 years back. The other is the very pervasive use of digital technology not confined to what we understand to be computing a lot of digital technology goes into lifestyle – you all know how cell phones have influenced the life style of 80% of even the population of India. However the food and agriculture is still not in this space - that is my contention. Whether it is institutionalized food and agriculture or alternatives in agriculture, neither of them is there in this particular space.

There are gaps which are widening – we all know there is a digital divide, there is a rich-poor divide and color streaks our good colleague Calestous Juma always speaks of the genetic divide – the GMO debate. But a much bigger divide that we see today which now threatens the subsistence of many people particularly the farmers is that the “expert-practitioner” divide is increasing. Experts mostly are institutionalized and the practitioners are mostly non-institutionalized and this gap is widening in the entire global South not just limited to India. The conventional paradigm (once again going back to agriculture knowledge sharing) has been the so called Extension Program which 120 years back evolved in the United States, was deemed as success because United States solved its food problem and produced bountiful surpluses and therefore it was then brought to other parts of the world as a panacea…like India accepted it in 1950s thanks to Alfred Mayer, Ford Foundation and a number of others. Now this is in a state of serious inadequacy or it is in my contention outdated as well and its both. And we therefore very badly or very urgently are in need of a new paradigm that brings agriculture a closer to knowledge society the processes of which you call democratization. And that requires us to understand very closely how the old processes were constructed. A lot of assumptions went in and they are still not questioned. There were a lot of legitimacy protocols. Civil service played a big role in the way a lot of agro-technology was brought into the developing world and the legitimacy that they brought in has never been questioned.

Their ideas of reaching out – you know when Robert Chambers wrote this book “Farmers First” I know many people said that what’ this guy talking about? We are also working for farmers. For us, farmers are not first, it is first and last. What is Rob Chambers talking about – there were lots of debates that went around. These were all very top establishment scientists. They believed they were reaching out as well.
 
Now there is a test bed for a number of these ideas. As you know India, (as Shiv mentioned), the kind of paradigms that India could contribute in knowledge society leave aside agriculture… I will take another case…there is ICT in development and since late 90s India has started a number of them and by 2006 according to good friend Kenneth Keniston, it turns out that India was still leading the entire development world. Because developing world was the only one to have so many projects - close to 144 projects in existence, thousands of tele centres all over India and this success inspired world’s two premier societies IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) to have a series of ICTD (International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development) conferences that have been continuing since 2005.
Lots of research, lots of methodology in fact as Shiv would call it an epistemology is coming up. Even here if you look at food and agriculture its presence is thin. I would say less than 5% of the papers presented in these conferences and studies even relate to them. And in action agriculture by the community here is reduced to nothing more than a series of questions and answers in a clinical style and they also look at it primarily as a tool for marketing and prices. They are not able to analyze the interactions any more that epistemology in ICTD seems to be limiting the epistemology in agriculture and generally speaking it’s more on connectivity and less on content and comprehension.

Therefore, we are looking at how do we make a knowledge society of farmers? The reason why I am using the word farmer and not agriculturist is because Begum Matia Chowdhury, when she became a Minister of Agriculture in Bangladesh, looked at two very thick volumes of Plans that the Department of Agriculture had made and pointed out that these two volumes running to nearly 1000 pages did not have the word farmer even once. In other words it is possible in a modern paradigm – science based agriculture today to write about agriculture without using the word farmers. Now fundamentally we believe that needs to change. The attitude needs to change. My former boss M.S.Swaminathan, when he took over and was asked to form a National Commission on Agriculture, he named it as National Farmers’ Commission because he felt that the definitional issue must be addressed.
 
And Extension again a definition is primarily oriented towards production of goods and it might not be compatible often for farmer in terms of living with dignity. We need to focus on these issues because only then can they participate as equals in a knowledge society. So in the end what I believe is that there is a lot of scope for creating a science-agriculture society type of program covering multiple institutions, multiple paradigms, and actors like the way STS was built very successfully in the US in several institutions and spread to rest of the world. Thank you very much.