Sprouting Reads #7: Greg Meyers' Friendly Call to Arms to Agribusiness
Syngenta's CIO Greg Meyers writes an impassioned plea to 'compete where it matters & collaborate where we can in the agtech arms race'. Is it really possible?
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the seventh edition of Sprouting Reads!
You can check out the previous editions here.
Sprouting Reads #1: Amitabh Kant's Agritech Oped, Jain Irrigation's Recast Plan & India's Edible Oil Problem.
Sprouting Reads #2: TCA Ranganathan's Opinion on Farms and Cities
Sprouting Reads #3: Jagadeesh Sunkad on Farmers' Share of Consumers' Price
Sprouting Reads #4: Zack Fuss on Breaking Down the Food Ecosystem.
Sprouting Reads #5: Agritech Venture Capital Dilemma -Rhishi Pethe's Interview with Sarah Mock
Sprouting Reads #6: Water, Wars and the Future- The Story of Water Cooperatives in South India
About Sprouting Reads
If you've ever grown food in your kitchen garden like me, sooner than later, you would realize the importance of letting seeds germinate. As much as I would like to include sprouting as an essential process for the raw foods that my body loves to experiment with, I am keen to see how this mindful practice could be adapted for the food that my mind consumes.
You see, comprehension is as much biological as digestion is.
And so, once in a while, I want to look at one or two articles closely and chew over them. I may or may not have a long-form narrative take on it, but I want to meditate slowly on them so that those among you who are deeply thinking about agriculture could ruminate on them as slowly as wise cows do. Who knows? Perhaps, you may end up seeing them differently.
Greg Meyers’ Call to Arms to Agribusiness
Prologue
Sometimes I wish this newsletter gets updated in real-time, whenever life throws up new experiences, tossing along unpleasant but new data into the cauldron that changes my perceptions about how I understand agriculture and agribusiness.
It helps that I write this newsletter in a digital medium, which mirrors (in more or less ways) the fluid nature of human perceptions. Can you imagine how awkward it must feel if, god forbid, you have the misfortune of reading your calcified ignorance in printed word?
Bless those souls who discovered the Internet! You know where this is going, don’t you? ??
Thanks to Carlota Perez and her fascinating book “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital”, I’ve recently discovered how hopelessly naive I have been in my understanding of the role of capital while we live in an age of exponential technological transformations.
If you want to see my polished ignorance in full glory, you can read the fifth edition of sprouting reads in which I critically examined the role of venture capital in agriculture.
Here is the cardinal error in my understanding — I failed to distinguish between Financial Capital (equity and debt owned by investors) and Production Capital (Factories, Agricultural equipment, operational processes, and all those things you expect financial capital to activate in the real world bound by the laws of physics).
These terms which I’ve highlighted come from the work of Carlota Perez, who studies the last 240 years of technological development starting from the Industrial Revolution in 1771, ending all the way up to the information revolution which started in 1971, and discovers a recurring pattern.
Let’s not forget that history rhymes and innovations come in waves. Crests explode, ahem, exuberantly in their irrational glory, while the troughs quietly prepare the ground for the next wave.
How do we make sense of this pattern in context with agritech? So here’s the deal.
Instead of giving you a full download of the complete pattern as she explains in her insightful but dense book, I am going to cover the broad strokes and adapt them for our agritech context. My intent in doing so is to build a framework to provide a hopefully meaningful commentary to Greg’s timely and insightful article.
Understanding the Pattern of Technological Revolutions
Every technological revolution goes through two phases, the Installation phase, where technology comes to the market, and the deployment phase, where the technology is broadly adopted and becomes the default norm. And in between these two phases, there is an inevitable transition period - which is marked by extreme income inequality and political unrest.
This story is only for subscribers. To read the paywalled story further, click on the link below, and sign up. Consider subscribing if you wish to join the community.
