The Emerging Politics of Deep-Sea Mining: From Exploration to Exploitation

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Deep ocean water

Written by Joshua Lemon, BA Geography and International Development Graduate 2023

*The views in the following article are the personal views of the author and are not an official position of the School.*

A jellyfish in the deep ocean

Enter the words “Deep Sea” into Google and the search will return responses concerning its depth, darkness and sense of the unknown beneath the certainties of the surface. There is a commonly held belief that more is known about deep space than the ocean floor (Childs, 2018) and the mystery that continues to surround this landscape also helps to muddy the waters of its politics.  Behind the mysteries of the sea bed, however, is an emerging socio-ecological conflict, as the Deep-Sea Mining (DSM) industry grows and various actors seek to claim its value. This calls for a deeper exploration of the political dynamics at play, shining a light on the competing narratives of DSM and how the conflict is evolving.

While the deep-sea may be a dark, uncharted space in the imagination of some, for others it represents a very real economic opportunity. For mining firms, such as The Metals Company (formerly DeepGreen), the deep-sea is a space in need of urgent development with its potential wealth now made accessible through the company’s technological advancements. In March 2023, The Metals Company joined delegates from across the globe at the 28th Annual Session of International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, to establish the regulatory framework through which commercial DSM in the Pacific may become a possibility. This meeting transpired after Nauru fired the starting gun on mining the deep-sea by triggering a two-year clause within the 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, giving the ISA until 9th July 2023 to formulate mining regulations.

For activists such as Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, from Hawaii, however, the deep-sea is not simply an economic opportunity, but an ecosystem with embedded spiritual significance. As he noted at the same meeting of the ISA in Kingston, “the ocean is our country and we come from the deepest depths of the seas”. His statement emphasised that the conference was deliberating over a space that already belongs to a people. Rather than a section of the map outside of national jurisdiction that requires international consensus to define and make open to business, it was a space with rights of its own. Activists such as Solomon, point to creation stories in which “coral polyps emerged from the deep-sea to inhabit the shorelines where Indigenous Hawaiians live today”. Thus, in cultural terms the deep-sea is not a distant, mysterious space. Rather it is a space from which ancestry and identity are drawn, factors which are not calculated by the machines that scour the seabed. The deep-sea has existed and is known by Pacific communities outside of the realm of extraction.

These two conflicting conceptions of the deep sea: as a new frontier for extraction or a living space, reflect a key conflict in how humans relate to the natural world. Mining narratives prioritise the economic value of these ecosystems, but in doing so subordinate, alienate and even criminalise other imaginaries of the sea. In other words, the deep sea now represents more than just the unexplored frontier, it raises questions over enclosure practices, power struggles and rights to shared commons. Deconstructing the deep sea in terms of its political and ecological constituents shows how the focus on the economic potential of DSM attempts to sever connections to nature and how statements such as the one from Kaho’ohalahala reflect more than just an attempt to push back on the plunder of the deep-sea but an alternative ontological understanding of our relationship to the planet.

Understanding the conflict over DSM thus offers us insights into the importance of, and opportunities for, alternative, localised and yet to be imagined ontologies. Rather than an inert resource to be claimed, the deep-sea is in a continual process of change and the growing resistance movement stands to redefine what the deep-sea is and reclaim the concept from the narrow conceptions mining companies propose. While this rise of activism suggests that the tide is turning on this conflict, understanding the shifting narratives means delving into the deep-sea as a concept itself.

Ocean water

Diving into the Deep

The deep-sea begins at a depth known as the ‘twilight zone’, where sunlight gradually fades. As a physical space it is incomprehensibly vast and largely unexplored, leading to its comparison with the TV show The Twilight Zone as a “dimension of imagination consisting of both substance and shadow”. Most cite its beginnings at a depth beneath 200 metres from the ocean surface, an area that constitutes 95% of the ocean volume (Hallgren and Hansson, 2021). Currently, only 0.0001% of this biome has been investigated to date and very little has been categorised (Danovaro et al., 2017). It is an area where photosynthesis can no longer occur and where researchers previously thought complex, biologic communities simply could not exist (it is claimed fewer than 10% of species have been discovered). These points emphasise the scale of the deep-sea and evoke what it is yet to be – and perhaps to who.

In physical, legal and ecological terms, then, the deep-sea represents the new or final frontier for discovery and perhaps imminently, extraction (Blanchard et al., 2023). In this regard, the future of the deep sea could be another example of an enclosure of ‘nature’ – an attempt to delineate, privatise and extract wealth from common resources – with the machines of mining companies working alongside scientists to map the ocean floor. In The Pacific Ocean, the ship, The Hidden Gem, for example, returned from an 8-week expedition commissioned by The Metals Company. This involved the deployment of a 90-ton machine that scoured the ocean floor, blasting sediment away to uncover black-rocks filled with polymetallic substances – nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese.  This signals the beginnings of the well-trodden trajectory of mining – from exploration to exploitation – in the backdrop of a mission to secure minerals for renewable energy (Childs, 2022).

In the international community, the deep-sea is represented simply as “The Area”. Exploration of its seabed is tightly controlled and since 2001 31 exploratory contracts have been issued by ISA – International Seabed Authority, which regulates mineral-related activities (Blanchard et al., 2023). Yet environmental damage has not been legally defined in this sphere and currently there exists no legal implication if DSM thresholds result in environmental disaster, which makes regulating this space very difficult (Cassotta and Goodsite, 2024). Within ocean governance, ‘The Area’ lies outside of national jurisdictions of Exclusive Economic Zones and thus the seabed and subsoil thereof belongs to the ‘common heritage of humankind’ (Deberdt and Billon, 2023), a point emphasised by mining proponents as a justification for extraction. For example, the mission statement of The Metals Company is “to build a carefully managed metal commons that will be used, recovered, and reused again and again”. Here, the company asserts that the pathway to unlocking the value of this commons for everyone is via the transfer of ownership from common to private, through commercial DSM.      

Mining is presented as the only fair and equitable system of resource management and stewardship, in response to this seascape entering the sphere of our global political economy. In institutional terms, the ISA stipulates that profits from resources extracted from the Area must be distributed across all signatory nations. For example, The Metals Company promises that the ‘real contribution of [its mining activities] will be when we start paying royalties’ to the sponsor nations. However, the degree to which ISA will oversee fair distribution of benefits of any economic activity in the area is not known (Blanchard et al., 2023). These ambitions from DSM actors represent efforts to construct a ‘deep sea community’ but underneath these mining regimes are powerful actors vying for control over the economic value the sea provides (Childs, 2019). These processes enclose the economic properties of the commons, via ISA contracts of exploration, which aim to quantify this heritage of humankind (Standing, 2022). Who and what will be included in this “deep-sea community” is yet to be decided, but mining interests are already drawing these political boundaries.

Unravelling the narratives of DSM shows how processes of resource ‘making’ in the commons occur under the banner of green transitions, and how the simplification of human-nature relations enable this. These processes are attempting to narrow down a plurality of views and conceptions of the deep sea in geopolitical, ecological and ontological senses. This occurs in part due to the globalising political economy of land control (Peluso and Lund, 2011), or ocean governance, and the specific patterns of capital and ideas from the mining industry that frame the debate around its economic potential. Beneath this expansion into the sea, then, there exists hidden violence, dispossession and ‘othering’ as the possible imagined and yet to be imagined futures of the deep-sea are slowly squeezed out by the supposed riches of the plunder found therein. These processes stem from the logic of extraction but are more accurately reflected as a specific worldview, or ontology.

From Extraction to Extractivism

Ocean water with the moon visible in the sky

Extraction is the physical process involving the search for, capture and export of useful minerals and resources in large volumes, often involving both social and environmental dispossession (Gago and Mezzadra, 2017). Extractivism, however, is a specific worldview in which the reproduction of nature and its resources are not considered. It is a self-reinforcing, destructive, organising concept involving the subjugation, depletion and lack of reproduction of relations and resources (Chagnon et al., 2022). It is the process by which resources become valued both economically and politically, with the only end point being economic returns from an exhausted landscape.

In this regard, extractivism is the product and extension of capitalism and processes of capital accumulation in which the continual search for profit manifests with the discovery of new frontiers of resource-rich areas (Ye et al., 2019). Here, extractivism is not concerned with the reproduction of nature, rather it uncovers pockets of wealth that can be repackaged and exploited until complete depletion (Ye et al., 2019). It embodies the society-nature nexus in which nature is conceptualised as an inert, exploitable object that society may profit from (Laastad, 2019). This involves the separation of minerals from nature and their subsequent transformation into commodities in the form of consumable products. Thus, the cycle and the search for new sources of wealth is a continual one.

The latest manifestation is the development of DSM. This nascent industry is framed as a facilitator to achieve the transition to renewable energy, supposedly distinct from the chequered history of terrestrial mining. As the global response to climate change appears to be the switch to low-carbon energy sources, the DSM industry points out this will involve the intensification of traditional mining and therefore exacerbate social and ecological injustice (Lèbre, et. al., 2023). Whilst the reasoning of this point in itself can be contested, given the possibilities of investing in recycling or more radically constructing a society with lower energy demands on the environment, DSM nonetheless is capitalising on this sentiment. This dilemma between the energy-extractive nexus is, in the same breath, solved by proponents of DSM, who suggest environmental damage will be less than terrestrial mining (ibid.). As Gerard Barron insists:

“Extracting battery metals like nickel and cobalt from terrestrial mines is facing many challenges, and the environmental, CO2 and social costs are simply too high. Seafloor polymetallic nodules contain more than enough base metals that the world needs to get to a clean energy economy, and they require no blasting, drilling or digging. Indeed, our life cycle sustainability analysis shows that, with regards to NMC batteries with copper connectors for electric vehicles, ocean nodules generate at least 75% less CO2 when compared to producing these metals from land ores”.

By benchmarking DSM against traditional mining practices, mining companies are able to reduce their perceived ecological footprint (Childs, 2019). However, the benefits of reshuffling the global supply chain of these minerals will be undermined if DSM does not replace terrestrial mines. Instead, extraction would extend and intensify in both these frontiers. The result will be replacing or adding one type of harm for another in new geographies. For example, in a recent investigation, Greenpeace has uncovered deals between DSM company DeepGreen and Swizz, terrestrial mining conglomerate Glencore, in which 50% of the copper and nickel mined in the Nauru-sponsored zone is pledged to the multinational. This questions the extent to which DSM actors differ from their terrestrial counterparts and further undermines notions of a universal, deep-sea community. The socio-ecological implications associated with an extractivist logic are critical to grasp, as despite claims from Deep-Sea mining proponents, extraction in whatever frontier will impact the relationship of society and nature. But this is not the only strategy mining regimes employ in their efforts to secure this future.    

Putting the Deep-Sea to Work for Sustainable Futures

The Metals Company mobilises a specific view of nature, where minerals are “made to do work” for society (Childs, 2019:2). As CEO Gerard Barron neatly encapsulates, the minerals found on the ocean floor are “a battery in a rock”. These nodules contain four critical minerals required to facilitate the transition to renewable energy. By positioning the physical properties of the ocean in-line with efforts to secure renewable technology, miners have sparked the possible expansion of mining and kick-started a new resource race to the ocean floor. These narratives obscure the true impact on the environment and society, with the environmental degradation associated with mining evermore hidden behind a continual emphasis on the drive for a clean, green and now ‘blue’ growth economy.

Strategies thus include efforts to engineer and exacerbate the urgency of the climate crisis and neatly square the procurement of natural resources as the necessary ingredient to secure a sustainable future. Here mining companies propose further extraction in new frontiers, to unlock the potential of undiscovered nature and its resources to fuel a clean energy transition. This crisis narrative currently justifies the depletion of terrestrial mines and is extending the demand for minerals needed for the energy transition to the deep-sea (Jouffray et al., 2020). As Barron, CEO of The Metals Company, asserts “We don’t have a spare decade to sit around”, framing oceans as the final frontier to conquer on the quest towards a circular economy. In this narrative mining corporations mobilise the resources in the ocean – ‘critical minerals’ – in order to posit them as essential for the progression towards a renewable, electrified economy (Childs, 2019).

Understanding that extractivism is not merely a physical value adding process but also a set of specific practices aimed to manufacture consent, mitigate dissent and lessen perceived environmental damage is crucial to unpack how extractive industries garner legitimacy for their activities. In the context of DSM, the (meta)physical properties of the sea are dispossessed from the sea itself and claimed by proponents of blue growth as part of a suite of strategies to integrate economic growth with sustainable development practices (Childs 2019). Manufacturing these narratives involves a restructuring of the environmental and social landscapes of the ocean seabed, which until recently had been technologically inaccessible (Schmidt and Rivera, 2020). Carefully selected language that manufactures urgent demand for these critical minerals, serves to formulate a ‘natural licence to operate’, thus bypassing any social contestation or need for social licence (Childs, 2019).

Mining companies draw upon well-rehearsed strategies of ‘corporate counterinsurgency’ – both “soft” and “hard” –  that aim to shape and govern the environment in which their activities take place, making the process of extraction smoother (Childs, 2019). Here the ‘corporate counterinsurgency toolbox’ deploys language to pacify any possible resistance to the mining activity. In the case of DSM, miners visualise the process of extraction as merely “lifting polymetallic nodules to the surface, taking them to shore, and processing them with near-zero solid waste, no tailings or deforestation, and with careful attention not to harm the integrity of the deep-ocean ecosystem”. Replacing terminology such as “machine” for “collector”, “extract” for “lift”, and explaining how any “sediment” or “waste” will “settle down within a few hundred metres”. All echo a subversive effort to garner sympathy for mining activities that have supposedly evolved past the known impacts of terrestrial mining (The Conversation, 2021).  

Corporate strategies are thus employed to manufacture demand (emphasising the challenge of climate change) and supply (deep-sea metals and minerals as a solution) and squarely place the necessity of DSM to develop these extractive frontiers. Crucially, strategies such as these mask blatant extraction under the narrative of building a ‘metals commons’. This serves two means. Firstly, it deflects the attention away from the failure and lack of reproduction of these minerals or the marine ecology that depend on them in the deep sea. Secondly, it denies the agency of marine life that live on and within the ocean floor, some of which depend on these nodules (Stratmann et al., 2021). Studies into the potential cascading impacts of nodule removal point to the weakening of the food-web integrity across ocean strata (ibid.). As Ojeda et al writes, extractivism involves a regime in which value is captured from nature with the absence of reproduction (Odeja et al., 2022:2). In this sense, metaphysical properties of the deep sea are reduced to the usefulness of polymetallic nodules, in which ownership (beyond individual states) is enclosed by miners who tout notions of ‘humankind’, dispossessing the ocean from nature and the local communities. In this sense, the oceanic commons is being stolen from communities and transferred to the private sphere under the guise of the metal commons (Standings, 2022). 

A Metal Commons for Whom?

The DSM narrative shifts attention away from its environmental impact by rebranding this new form of extractivism, hiding practices of extraction behind a collective struggle toward securing a renewable economy. Yet this struggle is a monopolising and exclusionary one, in which the supposed truth is that if we allow miners to unlock this last and latest deposit of mineral wealth it will be the last – but will it? Crucially, it occurs alongside efforts to reproduce the otherness of the ocean, further widening the gap between society and nature. In a collection of essays from 1913, Marcel Proust writes of the alien nature in the deep-sea and a “myriad of protozoa we cannot see” (Worden and McRose, 2009: 1). By distancing the ocean from the observer in writings the deep-sea has remained alien in the mind. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich argues that modern oceanographers recycle this “otherness of the ocean” mindset, which warps our stewardship of it – or lack thereof (Worden and McRose, 2009: 1). DSM proponents are drawing from an ontology that cements the separation between wider society and the deep-sea, and are occupying these gaps with extractivist ontologies.  

The construction and emphasis upon the metal commons, from the mining industry, posits crucial questions of sovereignty and ownership. Of the current 16 mining contracts awarded to explore the Pacific’s CCZ, 8 of them are owned by four entities, including The Metals Company. This exemplifies the conflict between whose version of nature counts, where mining companies are able to manufacture a codified, exploitable nature, free from society, which is pitted with urgent messages to secure a renewable energy transition. The appropriation, repackaging and representation of the deep-sea from communities with historical ecological connections within debates and institutions supposedly established for the protection of these commons is concerning.

Ultimately though, the lack of territory and stateless characteristics of the deep sea is both a blessing and a curse in this conflict. This is because mining companies must contend with the need for a ‘social licence to operate’ and deal with the consequent resistance from social actors (Childs, 2019). For this reason, the ability of mining companies to influence the construction of deep-sea narratives enables them to legitimise the necessity for extraction and minimise social tensions. Alongside this mining conception is the growing struggle from activists who are reclaiming the stateless-nature of the deep-sea. The emergent backlash, in the form of environmental activism, from different sectors, governments, activists – both individual and collective – calls for an international moratorium on DSM. A tweet from Costa Rica’s representative to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) highlights the growing concern over the current resource race towards the bottom of the deep sea in the Pacific. “Mining the seabed cannot be rushed [because] of the economic interests of a few”.

In a recent protest, climate activists such as Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, Maui waterman Archie Kalepa, and cultural practitioner Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu demonstrated on the shores to vocalise against the industry’s activities and the presence of The Metal Company’s research vessel, The Hidden Gem. This activism resulted in the ship promptly changing course, perhaps echoing the change in discourse in policy and the reclaiming or restructuring of the deep-sea, reflected in the decision by the EU Parliament in February 2024, to enter a global movement calling for a moratorium on DSM.  

The growth of the grassroots resistance against DSM is also growing. Organisations such as Greenpeace have taken their protests to geographies closer to the deep sea in efforts to both confront exploratory mining missions and reclaim the ownership and connection of oceanic peoples of the Pacific. The battle is far from over however, and these efforts are increasingly being criminalised by mining companies who mobilise language to construct a landscape in which the only violence and illegality is performed by those genuinely invested in protecting the deep-sea. In the case of Greenpeace, The Metals Company filed an injunction in court against an “illegal” protest to occupy its research ships. The CEO, “respecting Greenpeace’s right to protest” is more concerned with his efforts to collect “important scientific data”. More overtly, the company recently accused Greenpeace of being “anti-science”.

As the conflicts over the deep sea and commercial DSM continue, it is crucial to re-imagine, remember and accommodate, alternative conceptions of this landscape that exist outside of the viewpoint of extractivism. While mining companies have found new, subversive ways in which to mask the typical impacts of extraction behind projects of blue growth, any truly sustainable relationship with the deep sea will rely on a deeper understanding of the needs and interests of the marine life and local communities. More broadly – and as with so many of our environmental challenges – it points to a need to revisiting and re-imagining our connections with the planet. Only by acknowledging a plurality of ontologies of the deep sea will this seascape be truly protected for the common heritage of all humankind and nature too.  

This blog was written as part of the third-year International Development module ‘Political Ecology and Environmental Justice’

Reference List

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Corn supremacy: the power of the Mexican maize crop

Posted on by Maria Andreou — No Comments ↓

Writes Sussex alumna Maddie Hunt, (BA Geography and International Development 2023)

*The views in the following article are the personal views of the author and are not an official position of the School.*

If someone asked you ‘how much corn do you eat’? you would probably be racking your brain trying to remember the last time you cracked open a tin of sweetcorn. Or maybe you mind would go straight to popcorn at the cinema, or even the tacos you had last time it was Mexican night. Your first thought probably wouldn’t be the High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) found in a whole host of sugary snacks and highly processed food items. HFCS is a derivative of corn starch which comes from the maize crop, and is a popular sugar alternative, particularly in the U.S where Americans are consuming it in larger quantities than ever before. Corn is present in US diets in ways that people aren’t even aware of – fruit juices, condiments, ice cream, breakfast cereals, crackers, and breads. While palm oil may be a more common ingredient in ultra-processed foods in the UK, there is much we can learn from how these processed and pre-packaged items take staple crops and turn them into something different altogether.

Corn, otherwise known as maize (Zea mays), is currently grown in greater volume than any other crop in history. In 2018 the production of maize was over 1,140 million tonnes, followed by rice (782 million) and wheat (734 million) (Dai, Ma and Song, 2021). Maize today is a staple food for more than 1.2 billion people and meets a third of calorie needs in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the United States is the world’s largest corn producer and consumer, planting an average of 90 million acres of corn each year. Over half of this is used as livestock feed or turned into ethanol, while the rest is processed into sweeteners, corn oil, and industrial alcohols,. With the help of biotechnology introduced in the 20th century, farmers were able to produce a maize crop that was high yielding and more starchy, but lower quality in terms of taste and nutritional value. In other words, perfect for producing corn syrup, low-cost animal feed, and fuel. However, corn was not always utilized in this way, and the story of its domestication and subsequent domination in our food system is one of livelihood struggle, silenced voices, and neoliberal politics. To understand the ubiquity of modern maize and its cultural significance, we need to start at the roots. Where did maize come from? How was it commercialised? And why was this evolution so detrimental to the people that started farming it in the first place?

Where it all began: the start of maize

There is a general consensus that maize originated in central Mexico about 7000 years ago (Ranum, Peña-Rosas and Garcia-Casal, 2014), and from what archaeologists understand, it was consumed in a variety of different ways across South America. In fact, according to a study by the Museum of Natural History in Washington, ancient Peruvians were consuming maize as popcorn around 6,700 years ago. Although the exact location is uncertain, maize cobs dating back to 5000 BCE were discovered in the Tehuacán Valley in the southeastern end of Puebla, prompting the region to be termed the ‘cradle of corn’ (Fitting, 2010). It has been suggested that there are several other locations where original maize domestication could have occured, and this continues to be debated as genetic research evolves. Nevertheless, we have strong archaeological evidence to suggest that maize is indeed from Mexico (Ranum et al. 2014).

The evolution of crops: maize on www.b4fa.org
via Flickr

Since its discovery all those years ago, maize has undergone a dramatic transformation. Through centuries of domestication humans have turned corn into a crop that barely resembles its ancestor to make it more suitable for industrial food production. According to the USDA, maize started out as a wild grass called teosinte, a plant that differed from modern maize in many ways. Visually, it would have been quite different to the corn grown today – more bushy, more branches, and the seeds stacked on top of each other surrounded by a hard fruit case, making it difficult to harvest. Over thousands of years, by systematically cultivating the plants with the most desirable traits, Native Americans transformed maize into a viable food source (Ranum et al. 2014). Seed size was an important trait targeted in this domestication because it provided indigenous people with enough calories to feed them for an extended period of time, meaning they wouldn’t have to move locations as frequently (Ranum et al. 2014). Maize was spread by tribes in Central America to other regions of Latin America, the Caribbean and then up north to the US and Canada. In addition, maize was taken to areas of Asia and Africa by traders, and to Europe by European explorers (Ranum, et al. 2014). Due to its ability to adapt to different climates, altitudes, and day lengths, maize successfully spread across the world. In doing so, it crossed with other wild and cultivated varieties, eventually giving birth to locally adapted varieties known as landraces, relied on by communities for thousands of years.

Maize had become a dietary staple for many people in parts of Central and South America by about 3000 years ago, and was on the path towards high productivity (Blake, 2015).Fast forward a few thousand years, through a long process of artificial selection of desirable traits and cross breeding of landraces, we now rely on a handful of hybrid varieties of maize which have consistent kernels and high yields. The domestication of maize to suit the needs of mass production may seem like something to be celebrated, but this success in terms of yield, has come at a cost.

Adios Mexican maize, howdy American corn!

Thanks to the advances in high-yield crops, a staggering 99% of corn grown in the US today is from hybrid seeds. These trends, however, stretch beyond the country’s borders. Since the 1930s, Mexico has lost 80% of its maize varieties, leaving us with a fragile genetic base buttressing our entire food system. The industrialisation of maize production, facilitated by agricultural trade liberation, has a major part to play in this genetic diversity loss. Research shows that the use of local landraces has been decreasing in recent decades, specifically in areas where there has been a shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture (Keleman, 2010).

Small-scale farming in Mexico has been hugely impacted by neo-liberal economic policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, universally known as NAFTA, implemented in 1994. This trilateral trade agreement had a momentous socio-economic impact on rural Mexico, particularly affecting the livelihoods of maize farmers (Wise, 2007). NAFTA was the catalyst for financial struggles felt by millions of Mexico’s small-scale maize producers and many were forced to abandon their farms completely due to economic pressure from rising imports of US corn (Wise, 2007). Under regulations designed to boost economic growth, import restrictions on maize were scrapped and full trade liberalisation took place, resulting in US corn imports three times greater than they were pre-NAFTA. Subsequently, corn prices dropped by almost half and rural migration rates were drastically on the rise (Wise, 2007). Agricultural liberalization under NAFTA also made it more difficult for small-scale farmers to adapt to periods of environmental or market change, meaning that genetic diversity conservation projects run by communities were unlikely to be fruitful. The inflated rates of rural poverty due to failure of neoliberal policies to protect small-scale farmers and the loss of genetically diverse maize varieties are two of the most significant problems that post-NAFTA Mexico must face, and both are intimately linked.

When industrially produced US corn waltzed into the Mexican maize market, not only were livelihoods under threat, but so was the genetic heritage of maize. This was not only because rural farmers were forced to produce maize as a commodity for export, but because locally adapted landrace varieties, which have taken thousands of years of evolution, were contaminated by genetically modified US corn (Wilson, 2012). The cross-pollination of imported US transgenic corn with local landraces has the potential to seriously damage the region’s agro-biodiversity, according to anthropologist Elizabeth Fitting, who writes extensively about what she terms the ‘neoliberal corn regime’ (Fitting, 2010). This regime, in bulldozing rural farming and replacing it with industrialised agricultural methods has created losses that are environmental, economic, and cultural.

Corny diets and neoliberal nutrition

Photo credit: Xochiquetzal Fonseca/CIMMYT via Flickr
Maize diversity | Maize ears from CIMMYT’s collection, showi… | Flickr

The deterioration of traditional farming, and genetic diversity of maize were not the only consequences of the commercialisation of farming in Mexico. Modern-day maize production threatens to deepen food insecurity and worsen nutritional outcomes for the communities that cultivate maize, as well as the wider population who consume products made with the nutritionally inferior US corn. The birthplace of the maize crop has witnessed a long process of domestication, contamination of GMOs, loss of traditional landraces and an overall loss of species diversity. This brings us to the corn we know today – yellow, high yielding, large kernelled, and perfect for processing. Corn in the 21st century seems to be merely a commodity, but this is not the case for many parts of Meso-America. For many indigenous groups, the maize plant represents the origin of life, (Keleman, Hellin and Bellon, 2009) and is still an essential part of the Mexican diet for both rural and urban consumers alike, particularly the poor (Bellon and Hellin, 2011). Tortillas are one of the most common ways that corn is eaten in Mexico today, but now the consumption of tortillas is hitting a record low, mainly due to the convenience and lower prices of processed, pre-packaged foods. The diminishing demand for tortillas represents a shift facilitated by globalisation away from traditional diets towards fast foods.

Rafael Mier is the founder of an activist non-profit organisation called Organización de Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana, which aims to educate people in Mexico about tortillas and indigenous corn species. He believes that Mexico is in a corn crisis and hopes to raise awareness about the dwindling maize diversity, informing people that the country’s heirloom corn varieties are heading towards extinction10. Another organisation known as IXIM (meaning corn in the indigenous Mayan language of Tzeltal) is working to build resilience in the southern state of Chiapas by encouraging farmers to become more self-reliant rather than buying imported products. Through helping local farmers find buyers for their harvests, IXIM are facilitating the growth of indigenous corn species and thereby increasing the availability of diverse species of corn for the whole community10. Not only is corn less diverse and lower in nutritional value, but people are also generally consuming less of it due to the uptake of highly processed convenience foods, which are steering people away from traditional dishes. This is having adverse impacts on health outcomes in Mexico, and a 2017 study based in south American found that two thirds of the population of Mexico are either overweight or obese. Nutrition experts are mainly pointing towards high fructose corn syrup as the culprit of these changes, especially regarding increases of chronic diseases such as diabetes. A study found that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a 20% increased rate of type 2 diabetes (Goran, Ulijaszek and Ventura, 2013). 

It has been assumed that supposed rise in income associated with commercial production would contribute to improved levels of nutrition amongst rural families, but this has not necessarily been the case. A study of rural families in Tabasco assessed how the transformation from smallholder farming to modern commercial agriculture impacted the nutritional status of children (Dewey, 1981). This study was based in the Chontalpa area, which has seen a significant change in farming practices away from traditional farming, associated with self-sufficiency, towards growing crops for export, which is associated with higher reliance on store-bought foods. Kathryn Dewey (1981) highlights that when food is produced for home consumption, the goal of the grower is to cultivate diversity to ensure a varied and nutritious diet, whereas when production is solely for an exchange value, the cash received may be insufficient to support a diet of adequate nutrition. Overall, the study (which uses a nutritional survey of 149 rural families) finds that the nutritional status of preschool children is negatively associated with lower crop diversity and increased dependence on purchased foods (Dewey, 1981). As with so many shifting diets across the world, this highlights the risks of relying on highly processed, store-bought food products and the benefit of consuming a diversity of foods, based on local production. While Mexico provides a similar cautionary tale, it also points to potential alternatives. 

The fight back

©2015-2024 Quadraro

In resistance to the poor conditions created by NAFTA, and more generally in opposition to globalisation and the rise of neoliberalism, an indigenous armed organisation called The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was formed. The struggle for indigenous autonomy is deep rooted in Mexico’s history, but in 1994 the EZLN declared war on the Mexican government to end segregation and oppression of indigenous communities. The EZLN is predominantly made up of people from diverse indigenous communities in Chiapas, a southern Mexican state. In terms of natural resources, Chiapas is one of the wealthiest states in Mexico, but the indigenous population of over 1.1 million suffer some of the highest levels of marginalisation in the country. Over 50% of the indigenous population of Chiapas report having no income at all, according to International Service for Peace, and 42% make less than $5 per day. The state’s economic crisis is considered to have been the most severe during the period from 1970 to 2000, a period which saw the demise of the plantation economy due to declining commodity prices and soaring cost of inputs (Washbrook, 2007). Since Mexico’s transition from a state-led to a market-orientated economy towards the end of the 20th century, social movements such as the Zapatista uprising have empowered civil society and given a sense of hope to Indigenous communities who have suffered social injustice for so long.

The Zapatistas provided a blueprint for rejecting the imposition of neoliberal markets, methods and diets, and indigenous rights were yet again put to the forefront in 2002 when a broad coalition of Mexican environmentalists, indigenous rights groups and campesinos (peasants) established the ‘In Defence of Maize’, campaign (Wilson, 2012). In Defence of Maize recognises that the debate is not merely an argument concerned with the risks associated with yield and agricultural (bio)technology, but one which is innately tied to the cultural significance of traditional farming, the consequences of neoliberal trade policies, and the dismissal of indigenous knowledge (McAfee, 2008). By challenging the delegitimisation of traditional and agroecological methods in national debates, the campaign brings much needed attention to rural social movements calling for ecologically informed farming practices and places their demands before capital.  

Despite significant losses in maize varieties – not all diversity has been lost. There are still many traditional landraces found in Latin America, and gene banks such as the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) near Mexico City hold thousands of samples of traditional maize. Importantly, it is the small-scale producers in Mexico who are largely responsible for the maintenance of maize diversity, cultivating over 40 distinct landraces and supporting the country’s agro-biodiversity (Wise, 2007). In situ conservation of genetic diversity is also vital for crops to evolve and adapt to changing climatic conditions and new diseases, which is not possible in germplasm banks (Dyer et al., 2014). The Mexican government now requires the political will to support maize farmers and protect vital agricultural biodiversity by building polices based on values that already exist in traditional farming (Wise, 2007).

Corn today, gone tomorrow

Regardless of how it is being consumed, maize is a vital source of life. Humanity now relies on only three plant species for 50% of its calories, maize being one of them. Over time we have indulged in more than 6,000 plant species to satisfy our hunger, but transformation of agriculture has led to the dominance of a tiny fraction of these plants, and the extinction of many others, leading to a uniformity in our diets that is unprecedented.

We can observe this lack of diversity in more than just the grains we grow. Homogeneity is the norm in what we eat – half of the world’s cheeses are produced with enzymes manufactured by a single company, and global pork production is based on the genetics of a single pig. The globalisation of food production has thus given us the paradox of choice; it seems as though we are eating a higher variety of foods than ever before. After all, we can eat whatever we want whenever we want. But the reality is that all over the world, our diets have become unified, and we are all consuming the same foods, from the same genetic base. This dependence on such few plant species puts humans in a very precarious position – in 1970 a disease called Southern Corn Leaf Blight wiped out 15% of maize crops in the US and southern Canada, with overall losses estimated at 1 billion US dollars. This outbreak was the result of the exposure of a widely grown hybrid maize variety (which had a vulnerable common genetic background) to an infectious pathogen in environmentally favourable conditions (Bruns, 2017). This was a disastrous epidemic for North American agriculture, but an important lesson regarding crop species diversity. It is imperative to grow more than just a single hybrid variety of corn if we want to prevent a maize apocalypse. Plant diversity helps spread the risk of disease because certain varieties are resilient to certain pathogens, meaning we are able to preserve at least a portion of our essential food source if another outbreak were to occur. The same goes for our two other life-supporting grains wheat and rice; both of which were whittled down to a few varieties during their process of ‘modernization’ to meet our calorie demands.

The future of food is uncertain, but one thing we can say for sure is that there is no future of Mexico without maize. There are people fighting to protect and preserve the heritage of maize and remind us of the cultural power the crop holds in Mexican society. Organisations such as Organización de Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana and IXIM are doing vital work to raise awareness of the threat to corn species diversity and provide support to local farmers. The promotion of landrace corn varieties is a step in the right direction towards securing the future of Mexican maize and giving power back to the indigenous communities whose voices have been silenced and cultivation practices disregarded. The battle is far from over, and it remains pertinent to ask: will we further transform our food system to protect crop species diversity and sustain human life on earth, or will we eat ourselves to extinction? Either way, maize remains a large piece of the food system puzzle, and maybe you will think about its story the next time you are at a barbeque and someone offers you a corn on the cob.  

This blog was written as part of the third-year International Development module ‘Political Ecology and Environmental Justice’.

References

Bellon, M.R. and Hellin, J. (2011) ‘Planting Hybrids, Keeping Landraces: Agricultural Modernization and Tradition Among Small-Scale Maize Farmers in Chiapas, Mexico’, World Development, 39(8), pp. 1434–1443. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2010.12.010.

Blake, M. (2015) ‘The Archaeology of Maize’, in Maize for the Gods. 1st edn. University of California Press (Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Corn), pp. 17–36. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv1xxzkr.6 (Accessed: 6 April 2023).

Bruns, H.A. (2017) ‘Southern Corn Leaf Blight: A Story Worth Retelling’, Agronomy Journal, 109(4), pp. 1218–1224. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2134/agronj2017.01.0006.

Carro-Ripalda, S. and Astier, M. (2014) ‘Silenced voices, vital arguments: smallholder farmers in the Mexican GM maize controversy’, Agriculture and Human Values, 31(4), pp. 655–663. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9533-3.

Dai, D., Ma, Z. and Song, R. (2021) ‘Maize kernel development’, Molecular Breeding, 41(1), p. 2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-020-01195-9.

Dewey, K.G. (1981) ‘Nutritional consequences of the transformation from subsistence to commercial agriculture in Tabasco, Mexico’, Human Ecology, 9(2), pp. 151–187. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00889132.

Dyer, G.A. et al. (2014) ‘Genetic erosion in maize’s center of origin’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(39), pp. 14094–14099. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1407033111.

Fitting, E. (2010) The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Goran, M.I., Ulijaszek, S.J. and Ventura, E.E. (2013) ‘High fructose corn syrup and diabetes prevalence: A global perspective’, Global Public Health, 8(1), pp. 55–64. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2012.736257.

Keleman, A. (2010) ‘Institutional support and in situ conservation in Mexico: biases against small-scale maize farmers in post-NAFTA agricultural policy’, Agriculture and Human Values, 27(1), pp. 13–28. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9192-y.

Keleman, A., Hellin, J. and Bellon, M.R. (2009) ‘Maize diversity, rural development policy, and farmers’ practices: lessons from Chiapas, Mexico’, The Geographical Journal, 175(1), pp. 52–70. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00314.x.

McAfee, K. (2008) ‘Beyond techno-science: Transgenic maize in the fight over Mexico’s future’, Geoforum, 39(1), pp. 148–160. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.06.002.

Ranum, P., Peña-Rosas, J.P. and Garcia-Casal, M.N. (2014) ‘Global maize production, utilization, and consumption’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1312(1), pp. 105–112. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12396.

Washbrook, S. (2007) Rural Chiapas Ten Years after the Zapatista Uprising. Oxford: Routledge.

Wengronowitz, R.J. (2013) ‘Elizabeth Fitting: The struggle for maize: campesinos, workers, and transgenic corn in the Mexican countryside’, Agriculture and Human Values, 30(3), pp. 483–484. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9454-6.

Wilson, A.B. (2012) ‘Elizabeth Fitting: The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside’, Human Ecology, 40(2), pp. 331–333. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9467-6.

Wise, T.A. (2007) ‘Policy Space for Mexican Maize:Protecting Agro-biodiversity by Promoting Rural Livelihoods’, GDAE Working Papers [Preprint]. Available at: https://ideas.repec.org//p/dae/daepap/07-01.html (Accessed: 7 April 2023).

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Boosting financial flows to poor countries for sustainable development

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writes Sunit Bagree, Research Associate in International Development in the School of Global Studies

*The views in the following article are the personal views of the author and are not an official position of the School.*

Mia Amor Mottley (centre left), Prime Minister of Barbados and Co-Chair of the Sustainable Development Goals Advocates group, speaks during a “fireside chat” during the 2023 SDG Summit. Source – © UN Photo

In September, the United Nations (UN) adopted a Political Declaration reaffirming world leaders’ commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and promising to accelerate action to achieve them. While the Declaration acknowledges that poor countries need huge investment to meet the SDGs, it is rather vague on where this money is going to come from.

Foreign aid has a role to play – despite specific flaws and structural problems afflicting the global aid system. But action in other areas could have even bigger positive impacts on financing sustainable development in poor countries. This blog post discusses three such areas: Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), debt and tax.

First, poor countries need to be supported through SDRs. SDRs are an international reserve asset created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF); they can be exchanged for freely usable hard currencies. In 2021, the IMF issued SDRs worth $650 billion. The G20, which has received the vast majority of these SDRs, has pledged to channel $100 billion of them to poor countries. Yet this amount is far too small considering the social, economic and environmental challenges facing poor countries.

Earlier this year, Japan pledged to channel 40% (instead of 20%) of its SDRs to poor countries, making it the global leader amongst major economies. But even 40% is too low, considering SDRs are relatively unimportant to the economies of G20 countries. G20 countries should channel at least 50% of their allocations to poor countries now, and potentially an even greater proportion in the future. Moreover, SDRs should be issued annually, and the allocation and channelling systems require improvements to make them more equitable and efficient.

Second, it is critical that poor countries are not hampered by debt. In 2020, the G20 agreed a Common Framework (CF) to support poor countries with debt relief and restructuring, so that they could maintain essential spending. Yet, as an inquiry conducted by the UK Parliament’s International Development Committee highlights, the CF is not working in practice. In part, this is due to its opaque, bureaucratic processes and lack of alignment with the SDGs and human rights. But it is also due to the lack of a real enforcement mechanism, which allows many private sector lenders to refuse to participate. It is unsurprising, therefore, that poor countries with the highest public debt payments have reduced public spending by 3% on average (in real terms) since 2019.

More broadly, the global debt system must be transformed. For example, greater transparency among both debtors and creditors would expose illegal and odious (i.e. to oppressive or kleptocratic regimes) loans, which should be cancelled. Similarly, the creation of a UN sovereign debt restructuring mechanism that mandates the participation of private sector lenders would be game-changing. Of course, debt justice also requires that rich countries fulfil their climate adaptation and mitigation financing pledges through grants rather than loans, and pay their fair share of climate debt.

Third, poor countries must be empowered through progressive tax measures. In 2021, the richest and most influential countries agreed an Inclusive Framework (IF) for taxing large multinational corporations. However, the IF’s effective minimum tax rate is shockingly low at 15%. An independent international commission has argued for a 25% rate – still a conservative figure by historical standards and thus best seen as an absolute minimum starting point. In addition, the IF is riddled with exclusions and contradictions, and also lacks an impartial arbitration mechanism.

More broadly, as with debt, the global tax system requires a complete overhaul. A UN tax convention could create legally binding obligations ensuring that tax measures promote the SDGs and human rights. As well enshrining a fair effective minimum corporate tax rate without exceptions, such measures would include tackling tax dodging through increasing transparency, cracking down on secrecy jurisdictions and tax havens, and investing in tax, customs and financial crime agencies in poor countries. Tax justice also demands international cooperation in relation to significant wealth taxes, a comprehensive global financial transaction tax and an ambitious climate damages tax – each of these measures individually could raise hundreds of billions of dollars globally.

There is not a lack of money to support equitable and sustainable investments in poor countries in line with the SDGs. However, despite the recent UN Political Declaration, genuine political will very much seems to be lacking.

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Re-discovering and mapping the British Library of Development Studies Legacy Collection through global metadata space and time

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writes Leverhulme Fellow Alice Corble

*The views in the following article are the personal views of the author and are not an official position of the School.*

This blog post summaries and reflects on collaborative work between three members of University of Sussex Library staff who have different roles in different but intersecting library teams: Danny Millum, Collection Development Librarian in the Collections team; Tim Graves, Systems Librarian in the Digital Discovery team; and myself, Alice Corble, Teaching and Learning Supervisor and RLUK-AHRC Research Fellow in the Student Experience team[1].

What joined us together through this collaboration is a shared enthusiasm for improving and diversifying discoverability and usage of library collections via innovative approaches to mapping, visualizing and analysing collections data. The British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection is the perfect vehicle for these converging interests, with particular relevance for my research focus on postcolonial landscapes of library learning and collection development. We came together in a pilot project to explore innovative ways of digitally mapping BLDS catalogue metadata, in order to experiment with alternative catalogue discovery tools that would inform and expand user experience, as well as to highlight the geopolitical distinctiveness of this unique collection.

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

Being explorers ourselves in a new university, explorers with ample maps of other universities but with none of our own, we wanted to make our students into explorers also, to encourage them to find relations between subjects where we did not see them ourselves, and to dispute some of our own conceptions. Given the huge changes which are taking place both in the formulation of new knowledge and in the world of action where the knowledge is being applied, we did not want to be confined to our own original territory even though the boundaries within it were being knocked down. We recognized that we would also have to move into outer space. The main interest was in planning not for present change but for future change. There are likely to be immense rearrangements in the map of learning during the next fifty years…  

(Asa Briggs, 196

The University of Sussex (UoS) Library houses the BLDS Legacy Collection via a partnership with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). This vast and diverse collection charts global knowledge landscapes of international development politics, policies, ideas, movements, and actions, which emerged in the aftermath of the British Empire. Sourced and developed by IDS Librarians and Fellows between the mid-1960s and early-2000s, this re-developed historical collection comprises 250,000 items in 56 languages, from 150 countries.

The type of material includes government reports, censuses, newsletters, journals, books, pamphlets and other ephemera. The subject areas include all aspects of development studies, most notably economics, population and family planning, education, and health. It provides an unparalleled resource for better understanding the global postcolonial history of development.

Following the closure of the IDS Library in 2017 due to funding cuts, and a period of uncertainty and dormancy for the collection, in 2019 a £400,000 Wellcome Trust grant was awarded jointly to the UoS Library and IDS to improve its accessibility, with the aim being to create an invaluable and enduring research resource for a new generation of scholars. Thanks to the meticulous work of Caroline Marchant-Wallis, Danny Millum and colleagues over the past 3 years, the material has been preserved and catalogued, and is now being promoted and accessed. It has a dedicated website and can be browsed by theme or country via the University of Sussex Primo Library discovery platform. 

The value of the BLDS Legacy Collection lies in both the breadth and scope of its contents, and the fact that the collection primarily derives from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the Global Majority, where limited funds and digital infrastructure, conflict, and/or environmental disasters have often led to substantial archival destruction. Amidst current concerns to decolonise both development studies and librarianship, the collection contains a wealth of research data latent with potential to (re)generate and diversify global knowledge connections. I’m interested in what kind of (de)colonial stories this data might tell.

Here’s a video clip of Danny talking about the collection and our metadata mapping pilot project, part of a lightning talk that he, Tim and I delivered for the CILIP Metadata Discovery Group annual conference earlier this month.

University of Sussex Librarian Danny Millum on the BLDS Legacy Collection and mapping its metadata

Sussex and IDS and their libraries were developed in the early 1960s at significant historical juncture of geopolitical change, with the forces of international development and decolonisation being shaped by neo-colonial logics of nation-building and knowledge-building. As the quote that opens this blog post illustrates, a key lens for my research is the vision of University of Sussex’s founding father Professor Asa Briggs to ‘draw a new map of learning’ via interdisciplinary schools of study and degree programmes, reflecting shifting geopolitical landscapes of knowledge and nationhood in a the rapidly changing global context of the Cold War and development agendas around decolonisation of Commonwealth nations.

Archival documents from early 1960s working party committee meetings on the establishment of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex clearly show how the “key to the success of the institution” was the development of its library collections, which were developed via close relationships with the Colonial Office Library and Ministry of Overseas Development, with ”ancillary libraries available material for the study of development administration on a world-wide scale.” As one committee member argued, the need for this was urgent since “…if action is not taken promptly, Britain will no longer hold its position as a centre where there is available material for the study of development administration on a world-wide scale.”[ii]  

The earliest records in the BLDS Legacy collection are from the 1860s, a century before IDS was established, which demonstrates the legacy connections with the former Colonial Office libraries and government administrations in the British colonies. The collection really explodes in size and types of documentation in the second half of the 20th century, with many items from liberation groups and organisations, highlighting the material culture and epistemic tensions of anti-colonial struggles and decolonial development.

Covers from the bulletins of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America : publications. Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Available at University of Sussex Library BLDS Legacy Collection.

I want to find out why and how these collections were acquired across these time periods and geographic regions, who used these documents, and for what purposes, throughout the institutional evolution of IDS and Sussex. Interactive maps are a really helpful and dynamic way of informing these research questions and connections as I interview IDS and Sussex alumni. My research methods are very qualitative, so I turned to colleagues like Tim and Danny to ask for help in exploring the more quantitative aspects of collections data. When I discovered they were experimenting with visual mapping prototypes to visualise BLDS Legacy collection, this was music to my ears and we began collaborating on how to develop these tools, with me being the person to ask lots of pertinent questions about why and how the collections data is configured the way it is.

Our collaborative BLDS metadata mapping experiments were spearheaded by the ingenuity of our interdisciplinary colleague Dr Ben Jackson, Research Fellow in Digital Humanities and the Library, whose expertise in Heritage Informatics and big data mapping enabled him to generate an alternative to the traditional library catalogue digital interface. Ben created a prototype interactive world map visualising all the catalogued items in the BLDS Legacy Collection based on the catalogue metadata fields for publication date and country of origin.

The resulting digital atlas displays the density of BLDS Legacy records associated with any one place in the world at any given historical point on the collection timeline. The interface also documents the number of records that have no geographic location data associated with them on the catalogue, which can read as forms of archival absence, an important concept in decolonial information studies [iii]

Armed with Ben’s coding formulas, Tim developed the maps from 2D atlas visualisations to 3D globes. Along the way, he encountered some puzzling issues that highlight colonial epistemic legacies hidden within the ways in which the collection metadata has been catalogued over time. Here’s Tim demonstrating this in his segment of the lightning talk video.

Tim’s 3D visualisation displays publications from countries like towering stacks, offering an instant understanding of data distribution across global territories. Tim’s visual exploration faced challenges due to inconsistencies in ‘MARC’ data. For instance, differences in country of publication naming conventions, like Rhodesia’s old name versus its present-day Zimbabwe, became problematic. This inconsistency complicates search functionalities, presenting a puzzle Tim believes might be solved with linked data in the future.

My first impressions of these metadata mapping visualisations underlines for me the importance of understanding not just the quantity but also the quality and origins of these collections items. The way the content is catalogued, through the Eurocentric prism of Library of Congress classification system and MARC21 bibliographic metadata coding, must be critically examined.

The original BLDS collection under the management of former IDS Librarians, did not use these Eurocentric ‘universal’ cataloguing and classification systems, but rather a bespoke catalogue that was tailored to the uniqueness of the collection and the needs of its users. This system of knowledge organization may also be subject to decolonial critique, however we can only speculate on this, as this institutional memory was lost when the library closed and the librarians were made redundant.

Here’s a clip from my segment of our conference lightning talk, in which I reflect on these epistemic (in)justice conundrums.

Alice Corble presenting on the postcolonial epistemic conundrums of the BLDS metadata mapping.

To add to my conclusion in this video, I will end this blog post on this thought: mapping collections is by no means an exact science; it is an experiment populated with the ghosts of imperial territories and dominions of knowledge building. On this we can gain wisdom from the most enigmatic of librarian-storytellers, Jorge Luis Borges [2]:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.


Jorge Luis Borges, 1946


  • Claudius Ptolemy’s world map

Notes

[1] My Library teaching and fellowship roles at UoS Library will end on 30th September, and on 1st October I will commence a three year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Sussex School of Global Studies.

[2] This one-paragraph short-story by Borges titled On Exactitude in Science, published in 1946, is credited fictionally as a quotation from “Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658″.

References

[i] Ashley Glassburn Falzetti, ‘Archival Absence: The Burden of History’, Settler Colonial Studies, 5.2 (2015), 128–44; Pamela VanHaitsma, ‘Between Archival Absence and Information Abundance: Reconstructing Sallie Holley’s Abolitionist Rhetoric through Digital Surrogates and Metadata’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106.1 (2020), 25–47; Archival Silences: Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives, ed. by Michael S. Moss and David Thomas (London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021).

[ii] ‘Memorandum on possible procedure for developing and exploiting Afro-Asian library materials in the University of Sussex.’ M.H. Rogers, Subject Librarian, 8 June 1965. (University of Sussex Collection SxUOS1/1/3/5/11/13, The Keep).
[iii] In David Daiches, The Idea of a New University: An Experiment in Sussex (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), p. 66.

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What is a mountain?

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writes IDS Doctoral Researcher and Tutor Ru–Yu Lin

*The views in the following article are the personal views of the author and are not an official position of the School.*

When people ask me what my research focuses on, my answer tends to deliver a romanticised version of reality, since I conducted part of my research in the Easter Himalayas.

The Himalayan Mountain system ranges across Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, and Pakistan. My research focuses on the area between Tibet and Assam. Himalaya means ‘abode of the snow’ however, the snow reduction in this area has been an alarming issue in the past three decades.

Photo by Mamun Srizon on Unsplash

I have worked in a very small village during my fieldwork, using anthropological methods with a development studies kind of twist. The village, including the neighboring three natural settlements, has no more than 2000 registered residents, and half of the population is constantly on seasonal migration. Migrants have two arrays of setting out and returning: moving along with experienced highland cattle or moving down to the lowlands, to study or work. Resource–wise, their intentions and aspirations are not hugely different. But the process of shifting the destinations could tell us more about the most important driver of social and economic change in two generations. That is the further integration with the nation–state and capitalist market. The courses of the epistemological change of the small–scattered human settlement in the Himalayan region are quite similar.

These people used to perceive the environment entirely as part of a belief system about life. In this system, every entity has a name, and there is no general concept of nature or culture.

My research question was written in alignment with the language that includes terms like nature and culture. Thus, my first assignment was on how to find the common ground between these two worldviews.

When I tried to figure out their rule of categorization by the wording, and interpret the unspoken parts, I engaged with the speakers, followed the landscape, and pronounced everything’s name with owe. By calling them by their name, I was introducing myself to the entities I was calling. For example, the waterbody and watercourse have myths and Godlike guardians attached to them, and some words describe the fertility of the soil or the origin of rain – abstract and philosophical information. I feel that these words, along with the experience of living close to my researched community for a while, turned me into a ‘worker of knowledge.

This worldview that I was presented to, adapted to the idea of property right after the total environment became the territory of modern states. The locals never considered controlling the living environment, and land trade, and pricing the access to resources, were completely unknown to them. The identity of the people my research is conducted on, was included in the protective bill that constitutionally allows the identity holder to practise a significant level of autonomy under the name of customary laws.

Perhaps reciprocally, they submit some mountainous land to the hydropower dam and military administration to contribute to national security. Engaging in this power dynamic, I was faced with the choices to position the mountain system and highland dwellers in several scenarios: perception shapes the environment, actor–network embeddedness, and assemblage of co–making of the landscape.

Photo by Sanjay Hona on Unsplash

This raises academically–interesting questions like evaluating how land–holding statuses affect the integral health of the natural environment or resource management. On the other hand, with the fame of the world’s highest top on earth, mountaineering has grown to become an absurd extreme sport which created paid jobs for mountain dwellers, as well as intolerable trash being left to continuously disturb the ecosystem. The reduction of snow permits more months in a year to operate these businesses, yet, the singly thriving dependence on commercial climbing has considerably weakened the community’s food security and sovereignty.

What is a mountain? What is the specificity of the mountain system concerning development? Mountains are often perceived as hard objects to conquer, they are borderline between nations, sacred homes of gods, and are often represented as mysterious wasteland.

Mountains are rarely considered with the histories of the people living on them; similarly, the uncertainty around mountains cannot be fully bound by human laws. Nevertheless, that uncertainty exists and is likely to exist longer than the minds that try to comprehend it.

Photo by Jason Hogan on Unsplash
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