Agriculture and Social Science – The Missing Links at PrioNet 2009

Last week, I attended a conference in Edmonton hosted by PrioNet Canada. PrioNet was established in response to the socio-economic fallout and the potential human health implications of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or Mad Cow crisis in 2003. The organization has evolved substantially since then. Attendees at the conference included academics, politicians, bureaucrats, students, and one farmer (as far as I could tell). The majority of the delegates were Scientists working to uncover the mystery of the Prion or the protein that is believed to be the cause of BSE and other related diseases including Chronic Wasting Disease, Scrapie and the human variant of BSE: Creutzfelt Jacob Disease. A very small minority of attendees was researching the socio-economic impacts and the ongoing evolution of the farm community/industry.

I presented an academic poster at this conference. For those of you who aren’t familiar with academic posters, you can think of it as a glorified science fair – a visual way to present your research. My poster design and message was a bit of an experiment this year and a move away from the more quantitative and text-heavy posters in the two previous PrioNet years. I attempted to draw viewers in with a provocative title (Adaptation: The Missing Link in Prion Research?) and send some very clear messages with very little text. The basic messages that I intended to send were:

1. We need to incorporate adaptation (how farms and other actors in the livestock industry change their behavior in response to crisis) into BSE risk management and assessment
2. Increase public funding (including within PrioNet) for community-level adaptation efforts and research
3. Locate BSE within the broader context (globalization, rural decline, etc.)
4. Shift from single scale (e.g. industry or government) to attempt to understand the relationships between multiple scales

I had a few excellent conversations with some of the Scientists but most of the feedback, and one of the judges in particular, was “where are the metrics” or, in other words, “where is the quantitative research?” There was clearly a general lack of understanding of or even tolerance for qualitative research. I have generally found that PrioNet has had difficulty in integrating the ‘social sciences’ with the biophysical sciences and much more thought needs to be taken around the differences between how experimental research is different from the very diverse social sciences including community-based, anthropological and studies using grounded theory. These traditions are often based on fundamentally different assumptions than positivist social and natural sciences and, to be effective, must not be forced to fit within the positivist framework. More practically (and ethically) speaking, developing trust based relationships with communities takes time and true commitment. Forcing research with communities into our timelines (as scientists/researchers) can  compromise the quality of the research but more worrying can in some circumstances put a community at risk. There are times when crisis situations require that decisions be made under high pressure and tight timelines. In these circumstances, a faster pace of research may be required to inform immediate management decisions (at all scales). This should not replace longer term, in-depth studies of the circumstances that caused the crisis, of the solutions that are/were available and the implications of these short-term decisions on the long term sustainability ofcommunities, industries and more broadly, society.

At a very rough estimate, the cohort of “social scientists” in PrioNet has shrunk from approximately 20% of the attendees at the conference in 2006 to less than 10% this year. I have a feeling that the social scientists who did attend this year will have a hard time justifying the time to come to next year’s conference. The conference featured almost 100 posters and gives a pretty good picture of the type of research being funded within Prionet. About 8 posters could be categorized as “social science”. A much smaller percentage of these were exploring the farm level and industry level implications of BSE in Canada. Is it not strange that a research institution set up to address societal issues that primarily impacted farm families and the agricultural industry has little, if any, research underway that is exploring the impacts, but more importantly, the ways that farmers have adapted and persevered in the aftermath of the BSE crisis. Also missing is an effort to understand the structural issues that might inhibit a farm’s ability to adapt and leave them vulnerable to future stressors. For example, we should be looking at export dependency, corporate concentration in the food industry, government risk management programs, etc. and developing/facilitating strategies to adress these issues. Most farmers that I interact with consider these to be some of the most important issues facing the agriculture industry.

Perhaps PrioNet is too focused on the Prion. BSE was clearly a symptom of a much more complex set of socio-material-political issues that are clearly not being adequately explored within this organization. Perhaps these problems not being addressed because they are too far removed from Prion diseases. Yet, those interested in the biophysical and molecular dimensions of the disease, are starting to make links to other neuro-degenerative diseases and growing their research both horizontally and vertically. Without a doubt, these links should be explored and have the potential to address some troubling diseases (e.g. Alzheimer’s). However, the socio-economics and the notion of farm and industry adaptation also needs to be broadened out beyond BSE. At last year’s conference, there was a clear consensus in many of the social science presentations that the BSE crisis could not be isolated one single stressor – reductionist social science just wasn’t going to cut it. Unfortunately, at this year’s conference, instead of exploring the questions raised by the initial round of research, it appears that we have closed the book on the socio-economic impact and responses to the BSE crisis. Perhaps this was an aberration, an oversight and a gap that will be addressed next year. I hope so.

Click Here to download brochure regarding the poster presented above.