Ethics in Agricultural Change: Questions and Proposals for Development Processes

Abstract

Ethical issues associated with agricultural change have been the subject of a large literature appraising and evaluating agricultural investment and development projects, the green revolution and the development and regulation of bio-technology. Paradoxically, however, formal systems of ethical analysis for considering agricultural change have received relatively little explicit attention, a notable exception being the Nuffield bioethics reports. This is an unfortunate gap as there are major ethical questions that development policy makers and practitioners, and wider society, need to address. Nevertheless, it is also true that development policy makers and practitioners, not to mention wider society, work in an environment where identifying and then executing the ethically appropriate actions must be done in a timely fashion. The usefulness of ethical analysis thus requires a clear understanding of when and where ethical considerations come into play in the decision making process. These issues need to be addressed, starting from the initial question of what the major ethical issues are in the development, dissemination and up take of technical change in agriculture. The first Ethics Paper in the FAO series was intended to address this question in a fashion that did not presuppose a great deal of formal training in ethical analysis. The identification of major ethical issues leads to questions about how these ethical issues should be considered and influence decisions about technical change, and who should be involved in such decisions, and how. Failure to explicitly address these questions means that political debates about agricultural change are easily bogged down in discussion at cross purposes, and the interests, rights, and values of different interest groups are treated inadequately and inconsistently. Policy processes then need to not only explicitly consider the ethical implications of particular policies, but also develop specific systems for addressing these issues and including them in normal processes of policy development, adoption and implementation.