Birgit Müller: Farmers, Development and the Temptation of Nitrogen for Sustainable Farming in Nicaragua

Farmers, Development and the Temptation of Nitrogen for Sustainable Farming in Nicaragua Birgit Müller (EHESS) As part of Doktoand/innenkolloquium Hybrid Organizer : Stephanie Schütze The Northern and Southern hemispheres use different amounts of energy. Southern farmers use much less energy to produce their crops, and many of the industrial crops produced with large amounts of fossil energy in the South are exported to the North. As Hornborg (2001) has shown, energy use constitutes one of the most extreme measures of global inequality. It may sound hypocritical, then, if NGOs from the Northern Hemisphere incite Nicaraguan farmers to pursue organic farming, foregoing the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced with fossil resources. In this lecture I analyze how the different agricultural development discourses in Nicaragua and the programs and projects attached to them play out in the actual practice of farming. What kinds of interventions take place in their name? To what strategies do they give rise? Farmers confronted with these different development logics take different decisions; I show to what extent their decisions are linked to global policy making and historical configurations. I also show that, in spite of the overwhelming financial power of certain development projects, a certain EigenSinn (Lüdtke 1997) prevails.