The agronomist is content to have his job. He spends an inordinate amount of time shuffling through papers, signing them or making sure they have the proper signatures (all 10 of them), and the rest of his time is spent visiting communities to work on a disintegrated mess of what counts for municipal development: tourism projects in community A, pesticide trials in community B, meetings with the director of NGO x, etc.
The agronomist, as part of a natural survival mechanism that he has developed over the years, keeps his cards close to his chest. He is quick to offer the opinions and explanations of others, and will only offer his own when questioned directly in the company of people whom he trusts and/or are relatively unimportant. For he knows that his position is precarious, that political situations can change, quite literally, overnight, and he hasn’t managed to hold onto his job for so many years, under so many different mayors, by speaking his mind.
When he is cajoled into speaking his mind, he points out the deficiencies in a world-view that places exports on the pedestal of economic progress, even in the face of hard data that shows the foolhardy nature of promoting exports before local demand has been adequately met.
He notes that small-holder farmers aren’t necessarily in need of strategies that maximize their access to foreign markets, whatever the cost, but instead require diversification strategies that will make them more resilient to the biological, social, and economic fluctuations that they are exposed to everyday.
He laments a system that forces himself and his fellow technicians to work within the framework of poorly planned projects designed by elite economists who are completely detached from the realities of poverty and rural livelihoods. His technical know-how is forced into the box of neoliberal ideology, hijacked by it, forced to think and move and calculate in a way that he knows, and openly admits, is contrary to the natural and cultural cycles of a rural economy.
And without even realizing it, he has made a compelling argument: he has denounced the entire development-aid system completely, he has exposed it as broken and defunct, desperately in need of innovative models that can actually achieve the difficult task of marrying a socio-ecological system to a market economy.
