Part 2: Over-connected systems

So, based on the comments made by my stalwart followers on my previous blog post regarding the global system- inequality, lack of sufficient inter-disciplinarity and the difficulty of moving between multiple disciplines, I thought that a discussion on system over-connectedness was in order. This first came to me in a discussion with Mark Stafford-Smith at a GECAFS workshop where we were discussing the problems associated with socio-ecological systems modelling (or lack thereof). Ecological modelling, (e.g. climate modelling, population modelling etc...) although difficult and based on a variety of assumptions is a relatively established field because it is based on a set of physical parameters within which these systems function and the job of the modeller is merely to express these relationships mathematically and sometimes attach statistical probabilities to the likelihood of the result. We are, however, not accustomed to thinking of social systems in the same way. This is not necessarily because they are more complicated than ecological systems, but more because it requires a range of different experts in order to quantify many of the relationships that occur in social networks and it is always difficult to predict human decision-making processes upon which many of these systems are reliant.

The social system that we do model occur mainly in economics: e.g. the global financial and trade systems. These are, however, based upon a particular view of the world (for the more left-leaning of us, yes, I am referring to the neoliberal, capitalist agenda based on perfect markets etc.). This means that for those few models that do try to include both ecological and social systems (in particular models of the global food system under climate change), there is often only one view of the social world. Authors themselves have acknowledged this as problematic (Schmidhuber & Tubiello 2007), but nothing seems to have replaced this BLS model. With a system as complex as the food system, simple models based on the assumption that markets will clear and take care of distribution into the future under climate stresses on production when this evidently does not happen at the moment!

Applying systems theory to theses social and social-ecological systems further complicates things (of course!). Systems operate within set boundaries and under perturbations can respond in different ways. Either they are resilient enough (or the perturbation is insignificant enough) for them to to return to their 'stable state,' alternatively they adapt in order to operate within a new set of parameters or they go extinct entirely. This theory has been applied to ecological systems since the 1980s when it was first formulated, but recently the applicability of this body of theory to social systems has become questioned. The result has been the development of a 'network' approach. Recent work by Kali and Reyes discuss the connectedness of countries as an indicator of vulnerability to financial contagion depending on whether they were sufficiently integrated to be important nodes. The result is that well-connected countries can dampen the effects of a shock, but that when the shock originates from them, there is far more scope for spreading the effects of the shock than if it were to have occurred in a less well connected country. It can be argued that the current level of economic integration is a double-edged sword because the idea that 'when Australia sneezes, India catches the flu' holds true. There is capacity for dampening shocks under integration, but it also means that this over-reliance on the network for provision can mean that if there is a failure in one node, the whole system could be affected unless another node steps up to the plate. For example, a loss of production in one area of the world due to a shock (e.g. floods in India severely reducing rice production) could see the whole global food system affected and prices sky-rocketing. Ethical and moral arguments around 'fairness' abound in this sort of situation. Integration seems to be the best option for those countries that are vulnerable to shocks because the impacts can thereby be dampened, but will we continue to see this trend towards globalisation by the central node countries or a slow descent towards the 'fortress world' IPCC scenario? In which case we would seriously need to reconsider the assumptions upon which we base our models and try to incorporate the effects of international bodies like the UN, WTO and even international human rights organisations will have on these assumptions.

That is far too much mental effort for one day. Although probably slightly incoherent in parts, the main point of this entry is to highlight the difficulties of understanding socio-ecological systems in a quantifiable manner and how different bodies of theory can contribute towards building an understanding of this complexity. The effects of this on governance are crucial because it is virtually impossible to talk about the governance of a system that you can't even define or understand ab initio.

L

Part 1: Socio-ecological system complexity and the global food system:

ocrastino, procrastinare, procrastinavi, procrastinatus...

Having written absolutely nothing of use to my DPhil, I have decided that before I completely lose the ability to type coherently about my research subject (some would argue that I never actually had this ability in the first place) I am going to pull together all the mental struggles that I am currently going through into my blog with the hope that a- I will no longer be relying on scrappy pieces of paper to plot out my thoughts b- I may get some useful feedback from the awesome friends that continue to read my blog despite the average 4 month breaks between posts and c- I may even reach an epiphany with regards to what I am actually trying to do. It will also, more importantly, drag me away from BBC iPlayer, which is the DPhil productivity devil.

So here goes, part 1: socio-ecological system complexity and the global food system: globalising trends in the agri-business sector

The global food system is a complex beast, not least because it is an amalgamated entity that incorporates the world trade and finance systems on one hand and environmental systems and the natural resource base on which agriculture is dependent on the other. This doesn't even consider the socio-political and legal aspects of food itself as essential for human life and its concomitant understanding as a human right. The multiple bodies constructed around food; its production, transformation, distribution, consumption and regulation, further emphasises that we are not dealing with a simple linear relationship as is conceptualised in the conventional value chain understanding of the food system as one of production through to consumption, but rather with a network, consisting of feedbacks and nonlinear relationships defined by concentrations of power and resources across different scales. This evolution of the food system from simple, traditional practices to a globalised super-system complicates its governance, which has been developed and implemented for the earlier version of a linear, less complicated system. On top of this existential complexity, further challenges are presented by the global environmental change that is currently being expressed in the Earth's system: from climate change through to natural resource depletion and pollution, these changes require action or their mismanagement could spell planetary doom in the long-term.

As researchers, we are increasingly becoming aware of the problems that we face in trying to conceptualise this complexity in a manageable, yet still relevant manner. Breaking out of paradigms is not easy: the food security discourse is a prime example of how embedded ontologies and practices inform question formulation and thus how research is conducted without regard for alternatives that may be more relevant for the issue at stake. Deep-rooted disciplinary approaches can also be problematic as they very often to not encapsulate the whole picture, especially when the whole picture is itself distorted by complexity and even those who realise this are often not equipped with the necessary skills for dealing in-depth with these sorts of conundrums. Climate change modellers, economists, soil scientists and development specialists all have relevant contributions to make to food system studies, but often find it difficult to bring their expertise together in a meaningful way. Usually left completely out of this conversation are those that are shaping the system as we speak- the individual smallholder farmers and entrepreneurs, large agri-business multinationals, retailers, commercial farmers and wholesalers, and all of the other private sector actors that actually form part of this complex beast. Although research involving these actors is undertaken by the business and finance guys, their is very little inter-disciplinary networking and, what's more, the private sector very often does not turn to academia to solve its problems, but rather to the famed management consultants of this world who are then supposed to act as the problem solvers in this complicated equation to which nobody really has the 'right' answer: correctness being relative as always.

It is from this basis that my DPhil dilemma is developing. As I have kind of gone on a bit of a random rant rather than actually saying anything of substantive interest in this, I promise a future post with more specifics and maybe even some interesting concrete examples as I have always begged from my debaters when adjudicating.

Until then,

watch this space

(or not- your call :-)

L

A path well travelled: cocaine threats

o seemingly unrelated articles appeared in The Guardian and the New York Times this March; linking them was the infamous ‘champagne drug’ known as cocaine. The resulting story is that of a commodity chain that intertwines four continents; a network that connects ostensibly disparate lives, where one thread could originate from a tribe in Colombia and end with a fisherman in Guinea Bissau. The cocaine trade is a well-known phenomenon that for a Western audience sparks almost romanticised visions of Johnny Depp in ‘Blow’ or Kate Moss as the comeback cover girl. The legend that is Pablo Escobar and his Medellín cartel similarly detaches us from the realities of this diffuse network. The notion that political instability in West Africa could be associated with rebel groups in South America would appear to be farfetched if not ludicrous and yet recent events make the links that bind these two areas of the globe very much apparent.

On March 2^nd 2009, the president of Guinea-Bissau, João Bernando Vieira, was assassinated in an event that focussed attention on the precarious political stability of the West African region. Very soon references to the recent UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime) report on drug trafficking as a major security threat for West Africa were making their way into the media and a story that once centred around an Andean producer and US or European consumer became that much more complex. Anecdotal stories of bags of cocaine awash on beaches and Porsches parked outside nightclubs in the capital city of a country sitting at 171 in the human development index, illustrate the impact of a commodity trade whose total European wholesale value is greater than the GDP of four countries through which it transits.

Alongside the economic implications of cocaine’s West African doorway into Europe, marked by suspiciously high levels of foreign direct investment over the last couple of years, the political ramifications are similarly dire. Unlike the hierarchical structure of drug cartels in Colombia, West African trafficking seems to be more of an entrepreneurial venture spanning a network of thousands in the region linked to counterparts working from European. As cocaine trafficking is the most lucrative economic alternative next to oil extraction, the UNODC argues that it is the most rational choice as an income generating strategy particularly for demobilised forces and guerrilla armies, relicts of the many conflicts that the region has suffered. Given that much regional political stability rests on a knife-edge, the sudden injection of vast sums of cash and its concomitant power into this melting pot could have disastrous security repercussions. Moreover, the new black economy is so large and unstructured that it would enable multiple groups to develop into threats, creating pressure points between as well as within national borders. Bolstered by high levels of corruption, little or no rule of law and poor institutional capacity and resources to deal with such an eventuality, West African countries, many of which are already referred to as prime examples of ‘failed states,’ cannot even begin to deal with such a burden.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, many Latin American countries seem to be faring little better despite decades of interventionist policies, particularly from the US. Coca eradication initiatives such as those under Plan Colombia that provide aid, mainly in the form of military assistance, have largely failed in their objective, and unintentionally shifted coca plantations into national reserves. As chemical aspersions cannot be carried out there, the government resorts to manual eradication, which involves facing landmines buried in the fields precisely to discourage this practice. On top of this are the allegations of drug cartel links to guerrilla groups. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have long been rumoured to finance themselves through this lucrative trade and now this hydra has reared another ugly head in Peru. On March 17^th 2009, the New York Times published an article entitled ‘Fueled by Coca: Peru’s Rebel War Reignites’ which described army attacks on coca farmers and other civilians in remote Andean villages under the guise of combating a resurgent guerrilla group allegedly financed by cocaine. Although some dismiss this scaremongering as a tactic to divert attention away from issues like the financial crisis to the terrorist ghost that is always lurking just below the surface of Peruvian society, the stark reality is that the ensuing violence is not fabricated. Civilians, and in particular coca farmers, have been caught in the brutal crossfire between the military and the new ‘Shining Path’ rebels who are alleged to have reinvented themselves after their apparent demise in 2000 along similar lines to Colombia’s FARC- as a cocaine enterprise. Where does this leave the coca farmers seeking out an existence by cultivating a traditional crop that is one of the few plants which can grow on the slopes of the Andes without exorbitant inputs?

Back in Europe, from the 11^th - 13^th March 2009, the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs met at UNODC headquarters in Vienna to review the effectiveness of drug control. Here, Bolivian president and former coca farmer Evo Morales campaigned for the removal of the coca leaf from the same list as cocaine in the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Coca is a sacred plant amongst Andean people with a multitude of uses other than the narcotic effect of its one alkaloid, cocaine. In July 2008 on the reserve of Cerro Tijeras in Colombia, a coca festival was held to showcase the gastronomic delights derived from this insignificant looking leaf. All of the products, from wine to cakes, consisted of the coca leaf as a whole entity without first having the cocaine alkaloid extracted through a variety of dubious methods involving substances like gasoline and potassium permanganate. If such licit uses for this plant do exist, then cocaine’s power as a commodity is immense if it can create connections between theUS military, South American guerrilla groups, African warlords, British rock stars and European crack addicts.

The flurry of concerns that arise with the politicisation of the cocaine commodity chain cannot be ignored, but the insistence on centring hitherto unsuccessful response efforts on coca production is failing those for whom this is fast becoming a life-or-death issue. The deadly cocaine web is ever-expanding and trapping more and more with the attractive gains that it has to afford those in its commodity chain whether they are Peruvian coca farmers or entrepreneurial fishermen from Guinea Bissau. Certain realities must be faced and with them a re-examination of perceptions and priorities must be undertaken before this web engulfs more victims.