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Sustainable
Rural Development
This research is part of a broader effort to assess the ways in which global agricultural markets fail to fully value the environment and the contributions of small-scale producers. Global economic integration contributes to downward pressure on commodity prices for peasant producers previously protected or disconnected from the global market. Market-based definitions of efficiency, defined simply as “yield” by industrial agriculture, leave positive and negative externalities that are exacerbated in the integration process. Traditional producers see little or no value in the marketplace for their social and environmental contributions. In the global marketplace, these positive externalities meet the North’s negative externalities from industrialized agriculture, including the large uncovered costs of deforestation, unsustainable water use, and excessive use of agrochemicals. The result has been referred to as the globalization of market failure.
There is growing awareness in the policy arena that the Washington Consensus on trade and development has failed developing countries in agriculture, leading them to abandon their own food-producing sectors (generally dominated by smallholders) on the assumption that their comparative advantages lie in export agriculture and that they can trade for all the food they need on the global market. The food crisis has shattered those assumptions. GDAE’s research focuses on three areas:
- Revaluing Peasant Production – This project seeks to identify ways in which the positive externalities of small-scale Mexican production can be recognized, either through the marketplace (e.g., in Fair Trade markets) or through government policies. Research has focused on Mexico's largest export crop, coffee, and its largest domestic food crop, maize.
- Promise and Perils of Agricultural Liberalization – The GDAE-sponsored Working Group project on globalization and agriculture in Latin America highlighted both the limited promise of export agriculture and the high costs to small-scale farmers and food security. GDAE is building on that work with targeted outreach and policy work in Latin America as well as further research on better agricultural policies for the region.
- Agricultural Expansion and Climate Change in the Amazon Basin – GDAE is assessing the socio-economic and environmental consequences of trade-led agricultural expansion – particularly soybean cultivation – in the Amazon, led by GDAE Senior Research Fellow María del Carmen Vera-Díaz. The research will allow governments, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations to anticipate the threats posed by the rapid expansion of agro-export production to the local environment and communities and to global climate change.
Key Publications:
"Policy Space for Mexican Maize: Protecting Agro-biodiversity by Promoting Rural Livelihoods," by Timothy A.
Wise, GDAE Working Paper No. 07-01, February, 2007.
"Revaluing
Peasant Coffee Production: Organic and Fair Trade Markets
in Mexico," by Muriel Calo and Timothy
A. Wise, October 2005.
Confronting
Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance
in Mexico, Timothy A. Wise, Hilda
Salazar, and Laura Carlsen (eds.), Kumarian Press and
Editorial Miguel Angel Porrua, 2003. (Published in Spanish
as Enfrentando la Globalizacion: Respuestas Sociales
a la Integracion Economica de Mexico, Laura Carlsen,
Tim Wise, and Hilda Salazar, eds., Editorial Miguel
Angel Porrua, 2003.)
The Promise and the Perils of Agricultural Trade Liberalization: Lessons from Latin America, by Mamerto Pérez, Sergio Schlesinger, and Timothy A. Wise, with the Working Group on Development and Environment in the Americas.
“The Limited Promise of Agricultural Trade Liberalization,” Timothy A. Wise, Working Group Discussion Paper DP19, July 2008
See other globalization publications
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