At the heart of
CCA is ‘praxis’, or ‘doing social change’, for a lack of better terminology.
However in any given context, what kind of change we seek to make could differ
on the basis of what the community we engage in wants or lacks. The oppressive
conditions that CCA seeks to change, with the use of communication, are tied to
the neoliberal processes that believe in free-market economy. In Communicating Social Change Dutta (2011)
writes ‘The neoliberal logic is fundamentally an economic logic that operates
on the basis of the idea that opening up markets to competitions among global
corporations accompanied by minimum interventions by the state would ensure the
most efficient and effective political economic system’ (p.1). How then do
these neoliberal processes affect specific contexts is crucial in identifying
the change a CCA-practitioner aims for. Below I discuss the example of
agricultural crisis in India.
Kumar and Mittal
(2009) in their article ‘Role of Agricultural R&D Policy in Managing
Agrarian Crisis in India’ touch upon the investment in R&D in agriculture
sector. The authors give a broad overview of the potential technologies
developed by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and State
Agricultural Universities (SAUs), which include technology for crop improvement,
such as hybrid rice and quality protein maize, technologies for crop
management, such as integrated water management, integrated nutrient
management, and diversified farming; other technologies include those for
resource conservation, improved livestock methods, post-harvest processing etc.
This shows that there is a lot of money being pumped into agricultural
technology research. The authors then suggest that in fact technology is not a
constraint in managing agricultural crisis, but it is the ‘poor and partial
adoption on farmers’ fields due to various socio-economic and management
problems’ (p.127). They suggest that there is a need to refine these
technologies to make them area-specific. Secondly, there needs to be a ‘development
of appropriate infrastructure to manage problems such as yield gap, post-harvest
losses, depleting natural resources, changing climate, IPR issues, global
competitiveness etc.’ (p.127). Their analysis suggests that in effective
adoption of agricultural technologies, farmers need education and information
to get benefits, because in the regimes of trade liberalization and IPR, the
agriculture has become complex and knowledge intensive (p.128).
In this context
then, the larger goal of CCA would be to empower the small farmer and women in
the households caught in the agricultural crisis that are driving large number
of farmers to suicides. The disenfranchisement of the small farmer is evident
in the above discussion of R&D policy where the implementation of
technologies is completely divorced from local contexts. The technologies then
serve to further marginalize a small peasant who lacks any knowledge of
adopting the new technologies.
Drawing from this
example, I want to ask what change could a CCA project aim for in any
particular case, since each scenario is complex and has multiple facets of
oppression and therefore also numerous avenues for change?
References:
Dutta,
M. J. (2011). Communicating social change: Structure, culture, and agency.
Taylor & Francis.
Kumar,
S., & Mittal, R. (2009). Role of Agricultural R&D Policy in Managing
Agrarian Crisis in India. Agricultural Economics Research Review, 22(1),
121-128.