UC Santa Cruz

While malnutrition has been recognized as a persisting social problem since the emergence of modern nutrition science, in recent years, the international agricultural development field has made efforts to tackle malnutrition through a range of potentially conflicting innovations, commonly known as nutrition-sensitive agriculture. Yet, development agencies’ practice of cataloging solutions has not resolved the internal contentions within agricultural development, nor has it acted as an effective way of tackling malnutrition. Draw on Foucault’s discussion on problematization and STS scholars’ theorizing of problem-solution coupling, this research studies five coexisting agrifood project for addressing malnutrition in the Philippines to grappling with the complexity beneath the coexistence of agrifood solutions. How and why do particular agrifood solutions coexist? And how do these coexisting solutions attempt to address malnutrition collectively? These five projects are: 1) The Golden Rice Project, aiming to develop a new type of genetically modified rice for Vitamin A deficiency and carried out by the International Rice Research Institute; 2) The Iron-Premix Rice Project, focusing on developing technologies to mix rice with iron during the post-harvest processing and researched by the Philippine National Food and Nutrition Research Institute; 3) The Moringa Industry Development Initiative, advocating to institutionalize governmental support for the production of moringa-supplemented products and facilitated by the Moringaling Philippines Foundation Inc.; 4) The government-backed BeRICEponsible Campaign, promoting brown rice consumption nationally and executed by the Philippine Rice Research Institute; 5) The School-plus-Home Gardening Project, utilizing school gardens to supplement the pre-existing school feeding program and devised by a coalition of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), University of Philippines Los Baños, Department of Education, and six public schools in Laguna Province. I approach these five solutions from three aspects: the history of problem-solution dynamics, the configuration of each solution, and the shared infrastructure underlying all the solutions. In Chapter Two, I point out that the coexistence of multiple agrifood innovations as solutions to malnutrition is not merely a contemporary phenomenon but has existed throughout history. I developed the concept of problem-solution constellation to demonstrate how different agricultural approaches associated with the five projects in my research have reappeared in history multiple times as solutions to malnutrition. In Chapter Three, I switch from a longitudinal to a horizontal view and center on the contemporary status of these five projects. I analyze how each agrifood project configured an assemblage that rendered technoscience situated. For the Iron-Premix Rice Project, I argue that the kernel-shaped iron-premix is the key element that brings together the assemblage. In Chapter Four, I highlight three infrastructures embedded in the configuration of all the assemblages. The first is the epistemic infrastructure, which concerns how malnutrition is perceived and understood. The second is the research infrastructure, including public research centers, universities, and international development agencies or research institutes. The third is the mobilization infrastructure, mainly referring to the meetings of development actors. The problem-solution analytical framework speaks to the practical-critical divide in the scholarly literature on multiple fronts. For practical scholars, the problem-solution constellation analysis highlights the limit of comparative analysis of solutions based on an individualist methodology. For critical scholars, the findings in this research helped steer critical analysis away from focusing on the most contentious technology only and help situate the contentious solution in relation to other coexisting solutions and the targeted problem.