Montpellier Panel Report 2012
S. Kritikos
The Montpellier Panel Report 2012
Growth with Resilience: Opportunities for African Agriculture
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/africanagriculturaldevelopment/themontpellierpanel/themontpellierpanelreport2012
An excerpt from page 11,
"Resilience, in the context of this report, is the capacity
of agricultural development to withstand or recover from
stresses and shocks and thus bounce back to the previous
level of growth. As Figure 4 shows, a lack of resilience may
be indicated by gradually declining agricultural
productivity but, equally, collapse may come suddenly and
without warning. Recovery may be fast, but more often is
slow or incomplete.
"A stress can be defined as a regular, sometimes continuous,
relatively small and predictable disturbance, for example
the effect of growing soil salinity or lack of rainfall or
indebtedness. Such stresses or chronic crises are directly
damaging but sometimes slowly culminate to cause a shock or
acute crisis.
"A shock is an irregular, relatively large and unpredictable
disturbance, such as is caused by a rare drought or flood or
a new pest outbreak, or when slow onset disasters pass their
tipping points and become extreme events.
"Many stresses and shocks are interlinked, for example,
energy and input price volatility, extreme weather events
and climate change, growing scarcity of natural resources
and poverty and inequality. Because the planet is becoming
more densely populated and increasingly urbanised, both
physical and social interactions are becoming more complex
and fast moving. As a consequence minor adverse events
become amplified and the threats to agricultural growth are
multiplying in frequency and scale."
Your mileage may vary, but personally I have started having doubts
about all this "systems language", elite, top-down, abstract and
delocalized way of approaching development.
Regards
S. (Sam) Kritikos