On heretics and God’s blanket salesmen: contested claims for Conservation Agriculture and the politics of its promotion in African smallholder farming

Abstract

Conservation agriculture (CA) has captured the imagination of an impressive array of organisations including the FAO, DFID, the EU, international research and development organisations (CIMMYT, CIRAD, ICRAF and ICRISAT) and numerous NGOs. Defined by FAO (2008a) as having three essential components – (1) zero or minimal soil disturbance, (2) a permanent soil cover provided by a growing crop or a mulch of organic residues, and (3) crop rotation – CA is now promoted widely to smallholder farmers in sub–Saharan Africa. Next to international agricultural research and policy institutes, faith–based organisations, international donors and NGOs have been at the forefront in such promotional efforts. Often building on the – Judeo-Christian notion of environmental stewardship, which follows from the belief that it is the responsibility of man to look after the Earth (Passmore 1974), some of these organisations equate CA to ‘farming God’s way’. This chapter investigates the development of this conglomerate of faith–based, science–based and policy organizations as a distinct epistemic community. Following Haas (1992), an epistemic community is understood as a network of professionals with recognized expertise in a particular domain, who help decision–makers to define problems, identify policy solutions and assess policy outcomes. An epistemic community thus pushes a particular policy enterprise, excluding or silencing alternative policy options and expertise. We illuminate how CA became a policy success sanctioned by religion, despite earlier agronomic research suggesting the value of other options, evidence of dis–adoption and contestation over the suitability of particular CA technologies. The focus is on this epistemic community’s particular institutional manifestation and its related agronomic narrative. As illustrated by the opening quotes the agronomic narrative around CA stresses sustainability and the universal applicability of its three main principles. Sometimes adopting a idiosyncratic definition of sustainability – which disregards