Associate Professor at Wageningen University. Harro studies the practices by which communities in rural areas, forge social and political empowerment in maintaining and improving a healthy interaction with their living environment. Inspired by scholarship addressing (de)colonization, knowledge-from-below and grassroots innovation, his work combines historical analysis and field studies on how farming communities and other grassroots actors respond to changes initiated by science-based technologies. A recurrent theme in his work is to challenge common perceptions about farmers as technology adopters and users. Grassroots actors are foremost producers and co-producers of technology, a perspective that opens-up a more in-depth view on knowledge production and technology as an outcome of body-tool-environment interactions. Earlier work focused on farmer seed selection and rice cultivation practices in four West-African countries and the introduction of the System of Rice Intensification in India. Ongoing research projects cover rice farming of maroon communities in Suriname, soil fertility management in Northern Ghana and community responses to challenges at the intersection of health, food and environment induced by climate change.

Profesor asociado en la Universidad de Wageningen. Su trabajo combina análisis históricos y estudios de campo que buscan explicar cómo las comunidades agrícolas responden a los cambios iniciados por tecnologías basadas en la ciencia. Algunos trabajos anteriores del profesor Maat se centran en la selección de semillas y las prácticas de cultivo de arroz de los agricultores en cuatro países de África occidental y la introducción del Sistema de Intensificación del Arroz en la India. Actualmente investiga el cultivo de arroz en comunidades cimarronas de Surinam, la gestión de la fertilidad del suelo en el norte de Ghana y las respuestas comunitarias a los desafíos inducido por el cambio climático en temas como la salud, la alimentación y el medio ambiente.

Maat, Harro. 2001. Science Cultivating Practice: A History of Agricultural Science in the Netherlands and Its Colonies, 1863-1986. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-017-2954-3?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=google_books&utm_campaign=3_pier05_buy_print&utm_content=en_08082017

Maat, Harro. 2011. The history and future of agricultural experiments. In Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 57, 187-195.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1016/j.njas.2010.11.001?needAccess=true&role=button

Maat, Harro, and Tinde Van Andel. 2018. The history of the rice gene pool in Suriname: circulations of rice and people from the eighteenth century until late twentieth century. En Historia Agraria, 75, 69-91.

https://historiaagraria.com/FILE/articulos/RHA75_Maat-van_Andel.pdf