Modernisation beyond Soviet and Western technocracy? Lessons from agrarian practice for future sustainable agricultural development across the Central-South Asian divide

Abstract

Central and South Asia have seen large-scale transformations of agricultural systems over the past century. In Soviet (and Chinese) Central Asia, collectivisation and the Marxist-Leninist-(Stalinist) ideal of commanding nature for Socialist/civilisational improvement have led to an intensified, highly mechanised system based on geographically specified monocultures (e.g. wheat in Northern Kazakhstan and cotton in the Aral Sea basin). Based on similar ideals of agricultural modernization, agrarian relations, land use patterns and knowledge across the Indian subcontinent have been heavily shaped by the ‘Green Revolution’ since the early 1970s.These rural social engineering attempts as being responsible for multiple social-ecological and socio-economic disasters across these regions: Large-scale (crop‑) land degradation, water scarcity, the increase of rural inequalities and dependencies, to mention but a few.

Going beyond this narrative of exploitation and inequality, the present paper asks instead how the legacies of agricultural modernisation in Central and South Asia can potentially contribute to present and future sustainable land use in and across these regions? It thus aims to make thematic and conceptual connections across in practice often hardly evident divides in developmentalist thought between Central and South Asia, both regions of which share particularly colonial and post-colonial histories.

The paper evaluates key characteristics of (post‑) Soviet, Chinese and ‘South Asian’ principles of agricultural modernisation based on empirical case studies in rural Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. From there, it seeks to identify and discuss aspects of modernisation in the respective cases that can be considered a ‘realist middle ground’ contributing to a more future-oriented sustainable trajectories for agricultural development in the respective regions: a) a tendency towards collective/cooperative farming, b) a scientific approach to resource use and cropping patterns, including a systematic monitoring of resources, c) the introduction of locally adapted, high-yield crop varieties and d) an extensive use of agricultural residues. The contribution also analyses, how these different aspects of modernisation converge and interfere with each other in the respective cases. Finally, the article discusses ways of sidelining the ‘modernisation trap’, meaning the fundamentally technocratic attitude towards natural resources and role of the state inherent to high-modernist thinking, while valorising on the concept’s potentially more contributive effects.