Corn supremacy: the power of the Mexican maize crop

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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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Seeds of change: agroecology in the UK and Mexico

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writes International Relations student Maozya Murray

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

Las Cañadas, an agroecological cooperative nestled deep in the misty cloud forests of Veracruz, Mexico, is showing how agroecology can provide a valuable axis around which to organise more ecologically and socially just forms of living and producing. 

Reviving the Territory  

In the Biointensive Food Garden, Paco had spent the last sixteen years; breathing new life into the soil using a method called ‘double digging‘, that improves the structure of the earth by loosening it, so plants can grow and absorb nutrients properly. One morning, he pulled two handfuls of dirt from the ground, a quiet proudness peeling the corners of his mouth into a grin. His right palm held a sandy–coloured dust, not dissimilar in quality to the chalky soil of the South Downs – a rich, dark earth; full of nutrients. ‘Here, everything we take from the soil is returned’, he explained.

The cooperative, which produces around 70% of the food needed to feed its twenty–five partners, uses an eco–technology called dry toilets, that allows them to return the nutrients in human–waste back to the soil. This technique, known as ‘terra preta’ or ’Amazonian Dark Earths’, replicates nature’s recycling system, that is capable of reconstituting 100% of the waste material in an ecosystem. 

A cyclical approach to the management of territories is at the heart of agroecology – a principle that is clearly reflected in the design of the production systems, here in Las Cañadas. Walking on the stony pathway that winds and climbs through the 305 acres of subtropical rainforest that are home to the community, it can be hard to imagine how all the modules are interconnected.  Yet, to the partners and workers at the cooperative this is second nature.  

In the early hours, when the cloud clusters hang low in the valleys, metal canisters of milk are driven over to the kitchen to be turned into cheese. Later, the whey, separated from the cheese, is fed to the sheep that graze the pastures amongst the Macadamia trees. After harvest season, the nuts will be toasted with sugar or mixed into spicy salsas, providing delicious food for the partners. This circular system of food production and land management is replenishing and enhancing the health of the territory and those who live in it. 

Working with Nature 

Producing in more circular and regenerative forms is also having a profound effect on the way people relate to their work. Knowing that none of what they produce is wasted, makes the partners proud and joyful. Learning to make queso chihuahua in the kitchen one afternoon, Aleta was careful to remind us to save the whey.  ‘Cheese is milk frozen in time’ she said, ‘it remains there only momentarily before returning to the earth through our digestive systems – there is no waste here’. The importance of her work to the wider ecosystem that sustains life in the community, allows Aleta to find meaning in every stage of the production process. To her, milk was a live organism that transformed into different states, forms and shapes; working with cheese is an honour for Aleta.  

The agroecological management of food and land systems transformed the way people interacted with the ‘natural’ world. By placing the recreation of life and the regeneration of nature at the centre of production, Las Cañadas is demonstrating that agroecology can help to reverse alienation from work, and bridge the human/nature dichotomy that justifies the extraction and exploitation of the environment. 

Shifting Social Relations  

Back in 2006, the idea had been to focus on ecological and social justice through the cooperative structure, with the hope that it would naturally bring about solidarity and community. Today, those changes begun to occur. At a political level, Las Cañadas is organised democratically, with partners voting in people’s assemblies to make decisions relating to the project. Everyone is paid equally and, in theory, there is no distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘bosses.’

The shift in social relations is a time–consuming process, but one that can have a profound effect on the way people interact with their work, and with each other.

‘I like not having a boss, it enables me, who knows the garden most intimately, to have a say in its trajectory’, says Bernado, as he rests on a hoe beneath the shade of a pear tree; brief respite from the blistering afternoon sun. ‘I work better when I don’t have someone watching over my shoulder all the time.’

For some, the cooperative simply offers better working conditions, and for others, the project felt inherently political, part of the broader transition away from the socially and ecologically exploitative relations that characterise capitalism.  

Despite differing feelings and opinions around what it meant to be a socio cooperativista, the focus on ecological and social justice shifted social relations. The interdependence of the modules and a shared commitment to agroecological food and land systems, fostered acts of solidarity and mutual aid between the partners. 

Although many of them worked alone, or in groups of two and three, each specialised in their own production system. There were many tasks that had to be done collectively. For example, on harvest day; or if there was a large area of grass that needed to be cleared. Engaging in communal work or lending a hand when needed , played a central role in building community identity and promoting non–monetary forms of exchange. The shared ownership of resources compounded these effects. 

The Movement  

I left Las Cañadas on a sunny day in late August. As the community disappeared in the rear–view mirror, it was easy to feel like the project had been a dream – impossible to enact in the ‘real’ world. But Las Cañadas does not exist in isolation. Rural peoples, communities and social movements around the world, are increasingly using agroecology as a tool to fight for environmental and social justice in the face of climate catastrophe. In the UK, agroecology is employed by movements such as the Land Workers Alliance, to fight for more sustainable farming and land–management systems. The movement is doing important work to bring questions of land redistribution and socioeconomic justice back into public debate – a dimension that has been significantly neglected by the ‘green’ agenda.

At the international level, anti–capitalist social movement  La Via Campesina, is uniting small–scale producers, migrant workers, indigenous communities, rural women, and others facing the violence of neoliberal agricultural policies, to fight for agrarian change. Representatives of the organisation sit in international policy spaces such as the UN, and have won important battles regarding the spread of agroecology and the protection of peasant and rural community rights. 

At a time when the entangled social and ecological crisis are in urgent need of radical solutions, agroecology, and the communities and movements bringing it to life, are demonstrating that more socially and environmentally sustainable ways of living and producing, are possible.  

The research for this photo essay was funded by the Nicola Anderson Memorial Bursary. A very special thank you to the Nicola Anderson family whose genuine interest in, and excitement for, the project, made it a reality.

 *Pseudonyms are used throughout the blog to de–identify participants involved in the research* 

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