Export Oriented Horticulture In Developing Countries

Author : Sohyun Park (Ph. D. in geography)
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (134 download)

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Download or read book Nationalized Seed and Globalized Land written by Sohyun Park (Ph. D. in geography) and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past three decades, the global trade of horticultural products has tripled in volume, along with a growing demand for fresh produce all year round and an emerging urban consumer class in the Global South. Such emergence of export-oriented horticulture has been accompanied by the reconfiguration of production systems, especially because it is inseparable from the adoption of new technology. New cultivation techniques such as plastic greenhouses have helped not only to increase yield (output per unit input of land) but also to meet market requirements in terms of quality and safety. Mainstream policymakers and economists have proposed to widen access to finance and education, which is believed to induce farmers' decisions on technology adoption, thereby linking smallholders to higher-value supply chains. In the same line of thought, land-change scientists have treated a link to the global market as an underlying cause of land changes with an assumption that globalization conditions land users' choices on land conversion or intensification independently from other conditions such as location and institutions. Unfortunately, diverse stories of horticulture tell us that transformations in the production system are neither determined by individual decision-making nor dictated by global forces. Rather, this dissertation argues that a new production system is emergent from complex interactions among several human and non-human actors occurring at different spatial scales. Using the telecoupling framework from land-change science combined with the commodity chain approach, the dissertation traces the process in which the uneven landscape of export-oriented intensive horticulture has emerged in the South Korean strawberry sector. The telecoupling framework provides a systematic methodology for assessing processes that economically and environmentally connect places to other places. The commodity chain approach allows linking dynamics that occurred in other stages of the commodity chain to changes manifested in the production stage. Thus, human-nature interactions in the realm of institutional governance, seed, production, and market are examined within the relational framework. The results demonstrate that the uneven landscape of strawberry production is not just because particular farmers somehow have more access to new technology or are incorporated into the global commodity chain, but rather it is the outcome of farmers' strategic behaviors utilizing both natural preconditions and public support, in the form of producers' association preventing others from access to the resources. These advantages in turn have been reshaped by complex interactions of entities encompassing the global seed regime, national agricultural policy, strawberry varieties, climate, and geographical location. In particular, evidence reveals that the uncooperativeness of the strawberry crop places limits on the global force towards the privatization of nature, and thus creates an opportunity for the state to nationalize strawberry varieties and for farmers to take advantage of new varieties free of royalties. Furthermore, research highlights that the specific ways in which institutional governance plays out in practice have been shaped by negotiations between the global neoliberal agenda, national bureaucratic institutions, and the smallholding-based farming system in Korea. Finally, the study suggests that the growth of export-oriented horticulture in the land-poor country implies risks of specializing in few higher-value crops while relying on imported staple items. The dissertation demonstrates that tracing such a process in which various actors interact, reconcile, and negotiate allows us to capture cumulative effects, thereby better understanding unexpected outcomes in agriculture under globalization. The findings highlight that the cultivation system coevolves with the knowledge system of seed development and market system, which is embedded in the institutional governance. They contribute to our understanding of global trade, agri-environmental policy, and the horticultural production system in the context of industrialized East Asia.