The control of transboundary plant diseases and the problem of the public good: Lessons from Fusarium wilt in banana

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Kees Jansen and Jaye de la Cruz.

The paper “The control of transboundary plant diseases and the problem of the public good” in NJAS (open access; https://doi.org/10.1080/27685241.2023.2261402) reviews the debate on the public good and builds on the sociological and political critiques of economistic positions in this debate. It discusses public good elements in transboundary disease control taking Fusarium wilt as an instructive case.

Abstract
Many plant diseases and pests cannot be controlled on-farm as they spread from one field or region to another. This opens up a series of interconnected social, political, and economic questions besides the common technical questions about the spread, impact and management of the disease or pest. A new genotype of the soil-born fungus Fusarium, called Tropical Race 4, is extremely virulent, widely destroying banana crops destined for domestic and international markets, and spreading rapidly in Southeast Asia and recently to other countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. It threatens both staple food production and the export of bananas. The international research and policy-making communities on bananas have been alarmed and are calling for concerted action to control this disease. This paper supports the idea that Fusarium wilt control has to be regarded as a public good but also finds that the public good is being conceptualized in divergent ways. It raises the question as to what gaps exist in the current understanding of providing that public good. The paper identifies a set of key problems, including the problem of anticipation by governments, a neglect of histories of political economic oppositions in the banana sector, the strictures of sovereignty-thinking in multilateral responses, and the aversion that neo-liberal models of governance develop to the public good.

Read more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/27685241.2023.2261402

Navigating a scoping review

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Dozens of hours selecting and organizing literature like a robot. Going back and forth to check decisions I made to include or exclude papers, because I need to confess: I am a human being with mood swings and doubts – not a robot.

Being confronted with essential, but difficult questions concerning the content, goal and scope of my research. How to define the kind of food aid initiatives I focus on? How does the national and cultural context shape my research? Which other national contexts could be relevant, why those and others not?

Cursing the choice I made to take dignity as the main concept in my PhD research. A concept that is studied in many fields without one clear definition, that doesn´t have a general meaning applicable to various situations, and which reveals contradictions in itself (as an objective and subjective phenomenon, public and private or inalienable and something that can be destroyed).

These are just a few of the challenges I faced while conducting my scoping review. As part of my PhD project about the dignity of recipients in divers food aid contexts in Europe, I investigated what is known in scientific literature about ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated and protected in diverse contexts of third sector food aid in high-income countries.

Don’t worry! This blogpost will not be an elegy about my journey of conducting a literature review. On the contrary, conducting a scoping review as part of my PhD research was a very rewarding experience for me, sparking new energy for my research. Join me as I share how the challenges described above actually gave me joy and rewarded me.

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The desire to stay

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The Dutch nitrogen crisis has emphatically illuminated the gap between “Randstad” and “Randland”. But exactly how wide is the gap? Is there merely a struggle for money, production and nature? A story about the pain of the disappearing ‘home’.

Bettina Bock was asked by Sociologie Magazine to write an essay about farmers and rural dwellers in the context of their early 2023 issue on ‘conflict’. Together with Jolien Klok they employed the concept of restanza to reflect on current rural discontent in the Netherlands. Unfortunately it’s only available in Dutch, click here to read the essay.

Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal by Dawn Cheong et al.

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Dawn Cheong is PhD-candidate at the Rural Sociology Group (dawn.cheong@wur.nl) . Her first paper has just been published open access in ‘Agriculture and Human Values‘:
Cheong, D.D., Bock, B. & Roep, D. (2023) Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10502-x.

Abstract
Conventional gender analysis of development policy does not adequately explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Our research analyses the gender discourses embedded in agricultural and rural development policies in Myanmar and Nepal. We find that both countries focus on increasing women’s participation in development activities as a core gender equality policy objective. This creates a binary categorisation of participating versus non-participating women and identifies women as responsible for improving their position. At the same time, gender (in)equality is defined exclusively as a women’s concern. Such discourses, as constitutive practices, produce specific knowledge about rural women and new subjectivities that prescribe and govern them solely as subjects of development. Our research suggests that such a limited discursive practice invisiblises gendered power relations and structural and institutional issues, ultimately slowing progress towards gender equality. We demonstrate the importance of studying policy as discourse, beyond the effectiveness of policies or mainstreaming tools, and call for empirical evidence on the impact of these discourses on women’s subjectivities and lived experiences.