Tuesday, October 17, 2006

CASI Fall 2006 Study

on 'India in Transition' is out:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/casi/publications/DBI/IIT_F2006.pdf
The title " India's Second green Revolution? The Sociopolitical Implications of Corporate-Led Agricultural Growth" and the author is Jeffrey Witsoe. Jeffrey Witsoe has a Ph.D. in Social Anthrpology and has earlier written about caste politics in Bihar.
James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few" has a discussion on how farmers select seeds on pages 61-62 and refers to a study by Kaivan Munshi about the different ways farmers in India chose wheat and rice seeds http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Kaivan_Munshi/jde.pdf
I have not read these completely but all of them look interesting.

2 comments:

Tabula Rasa said...

i picked up the wisdom of crowds last year. the cover was more interesting than the book -- i cannot recall details but do remember that i felt it was quite superficial (and written more like a page-turner than an analytical work). of course, your mileage may vary.

gaddeswarup said...

Thanks. I have not read it yet; I am still around page 62. I did not realize that there have been academic studies of how farmers choose seeds when new seeds and technologies arrive.