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Agricultural Knowledge and Technology in Latin America and the Caribbean: Plausible Scenarios for Sustainable Development | 113
Key Messages 2. These scenarios present different challenges that require complex adjustments in order to ensure the successful performance of AKST systems and productive systems. The scenarios show us that in the real world of Latin America and the Caribbean, it is not feasible to think in terms of simple technological solutions or global solutions to respond to the growing complexity and vulnerability of these systems. 3. In most of the scenarios, the AKST systems have favorable social and environmental repercussions for society as a whole. Science generates innovation and helps improve competitiveness and production efficiency, and the quality of the products in terms of safety, diversity, bromatological quality, and nutritional value for all social groups (including the most vulnerable ones, depending on the scenario), and reduces the impact of agricultural activities on the environment. 4. The existence of trade barriers of different types would increase the cost of agricultural activity and threaten the sustainability of small farms, and it would create specific demand for AKST systems. The scenarios assume different types of barriers, which would expand over time, as a result of difficulties stemming from various factors—environmental, economic, and biological—even in the scenarios depicting a highly integrated and economically open world (GO and TG). These barriers, which could lead to the loss of important markets and a reduced capacity for economic insertion on markets suitable for small-scale agricultural producers, would be eliminated with good policies and management capacity. The barriers would in turn generate demand for AKST systems to create mechanisms and protocols that would allow for adequate compliance with international laws and rules pertaining primarily to the most vulnerable productive systems. 5. The scenarios assume institutional changes of varying intensity in the region. In some scenarios, the changes would accompany the current development model, which shows trends towards greater stability and consistency among social development, environmental, food, innovation, and biosafety policies, and greater capacity to manage these policies (except for Order from Strength). But deepseated institutional changes—such as changes in the paradigms of agriculture itself, and consequently in the AKST system and in the expansion of power of various interest groups—would be required to introduce and implement successfully the Adapting Mosaic. |
6. Losses in productivity of productive systems in response
to variations n the contextual factors vary in
the different scenarios. Rising peratures, the manifestation
of extreme weather events, and an increase in diseases,
ests, and contamination of foods are contextual factors
that have a fferential mpact on production systems in
the different scenarios. More specifically,the eatest losses
would occur in scenarios that emphasize trade or the ones
that redict a limited capacity to prevent and eliminate or
reduce epidemics (the case of Order from Strength). 9. Traditional knowledge would be increasingly valued and incorporated into certain scenarios (AM, TG). Barriers, pests, diseases, and climate change would create needs for solutions using local knowledge, and its integration would be facilitated by institutional changes in these scenarios. In the other scenarios (GO, OS, and Life as it is), the integration of traditional knowledge would occur only occasionally, due to commercial interests and defective institutional structural arrangements. 10. In some of the scenarios (GO, OS, Life as it is) advances in formal knowledge and technological development linked to productive chains would remain in the hands of large transnational corporations. In other words, many countries in the region could lose the capacity to independently generate knowledge, which is the most important factor of development in the contemporary world. |
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