Publications /  Annual Report 1998

"Farmers are not just the beneficiaries of research, but able, and often indispensable, partners."

In Java, an eight-member research team is developing methods for integrated management of sweetpotato, a vitally important crop that has received little research attention in Indonesia. The team is also designing curricula and educational materials for farmer field schools (FFS), where the new methods are being taught, tested, and refined.

In the hills of Nepal, root crop experts are studying ways for communities to unite to manage bacterial wilt of potato, a devastating disease that severely threatens family food security. A major challenge has been to get small farmers to coordinate crop rotation and quarantine procedures to control the spread of the pathogen.

Farmer field schools are a family experience. In this FFS in San Miguel, Cajamarca, a young girl learns how to identify insects that could pose a threat to potato harvests.

In northern Peru, where late blight often wipes out potato crops, dozens of investigators are conducting multi-season studies of late blight resistance in promising potato varieties under a wide range of cultural, climatic, and environmental conditions. Both their findings and their research methods will be incorporated into pilot FFS in six countries beginning in 1999.

In central and southern Peru, conservation specialists are planting hundreds of traditional potato and other root and tuber crop varieties as part of an effort to maintain the region’s agricultural biodiversity. The initiative seeks to complement ex situ (genebank) conservation by subjecting traditional varieties to normal evolutionary pressures.

In each case, the researchers are not scientists, but farmers, whose participation in the research process is not only hastening the adoption of new technologies, but also helping ensure that those technologies are appropriate to real-world needs and conditions.

Sweetpotato ICM
In CIP’s Indonesia sweetpotato integrated crop management (ICM) research program, two carefully-selected farmer consultants from each of four separate sites are working closely with experts from CIP, a partner NGO, a national research institute, and the national integrated pest management (IPM) program. Their involvement in every phase of project design, implementation, and evaluation has helped them and fellow farmers increase their yields, reduce their costs, cut back on chemicals, and improve their understanding of ecological and biological systems.

It has also enhanced their problem-solving and decision-making capacity. During the first season, the experiments they ran were relatively simple—testing sweetpotato breeding lines for disease resistance, for instance, and evaluating yields based on different doses of urea. By the second season, however, the farmers were designing and conducting sophisticated experiments on such questions as multi-fertilizer management and the relative effectiveness of a range of cultural practices.

Both their findings and their methods are being channeled to other farmers through season-long FFS. By the end of 1998, more than 80 farmers, extensionists, and development workers from 13 provinces had been trained to become FFS facilitators, and 161 farmers had participated in sweetpotato ICM field schools. The impact of these field schools—yield increase, external input reduction, and enhanced farmer competence to adapt and implement the ICM technology—triggered the interest of Indonesia’s Directorate of Food Crops Production, which has designed a national FFS program to train 12,000 farmers in 13 provinces. Program participants will be taught by CIP-trained ICM FFS facilitators.

Participation is at the heart of the FFS approach. The field schools are based not on a traditional one-way information transfer, but on the results of the farmers’ own research. Throughout the growing season, farmers conduct experiments and gather data, using their findings to adjust their crop management strategies. Some of the farmers who have been through the field school experience have come together on their own initiative to rent land on which to run further experiments on issues of interest to them.

UPWARD in Asia
Much of CIP’s participatory research experience has come through its sponsorship of Users’ Perspectives With Agricultural Research and Development (UPWARD), an Asian network that unites scientists, extensionists, and local government and NGO workers with farm families, traders, processors, and consumers. The network, established in 1990 and funded by the government of the Netherlands, is coordinated from an office in Los Baños, Philippines.

UPWARD has implemented about 50 root crop research-and-development projects in six Asian countries, with topics including integrated crop management, community-based genetic resources conservation, and added-value processing and marketing.

A recent evaluation of the participatory aspects of these projects showed that user involvement frequently amplifies the impact of research. For example, participatory needs assessment can lead researchers away from scientifically attractive research topics that are only marginally relevant to end-users. A project in the Philippines, for instance, focused on the improvement of urban and rural homegardens, which were found to play a large role in family food security, despite their traditionally low priority for agricultural scientists and their relatively low esteem among the very families they support.

In other cases, careful attention to the real needs of would-be beneficiaries can change users’ understanding of their own priorities. In Nepal, for instance, potato growing communities facing serious bacterial wilt infestation decided to set aside immediate food production goals in favor of longer-term benefits through integrated disease management.

Participation was also found to be critical in cases such as the expansion of potato cultivation in Zhejiang Province of eastern China, where farmers are extremely particular about the agronomic and table qualities of their cultivars. There, farmers’ involvement in the evaluation of genetically improved potatoes has been a crucial factor in the adoption of new varieties in one of the poorest parts of the country (see Diversifying Diets in China, p. 15).

Late Blight FFS
Farmer participation has recently become a key component of CIP’s late blight research. In 1997 and 1998, CIP social scientists conducted baseline surveys of farmer knowledge and practices in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Uganda. At the same time, four pilot FFS were launched by CIP and the NGO CARE in San Miguel in northern Peru. In 1998, nine more field schools were established at other sites with CARE and other partners, while two in San Miguel were extended for a second season. With funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), additional pilot FFS will be established in 1999–2001 in Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Ethiopia, Peru, and Uganda.

Farmer participants in CIP base-line studies working a community plot in Chimborazo, Ecuador.

The late blight field schools serve a multiple purpose: to educate farmers about integrated disease management, to hasten the evaluation and deployment of resistant potato varieties, to give farmers analytical tools with which to tackle future problems, and to generate data for scientists studying everything from the genetics of resistance to late blight epidemiology.

This last benefit can be extremely important. Field experiments are costly and often critically limited by constraints of time and space. In conventional research, hypotheses are frequently tested on the basis of data collected from two sites over two growing seasons. With farmers conducting research on their own fields, however, the volume of available data rises enormously. In the case of late blight, this allows scientists to assess with much more accuracy the stability of disease resistance and yields of promising breeding lines and varieties. This improved understanding is particularly useful in mountain areas, where climatic, cultural, and environmental factors vary significantly from place to place.

The quality of the data generated by farmers can be surprisingly high. CIP’s late blight team compared research results from six field experiments conducted by Peru’s national agricultural research program with those from four field experiments conducted by farmers as part of their field school activities. The scientists found that the farmer-generated data was equally good or better than that of the research professionals.

No Simple Formula
Farmer participation is necessarily different from place to place and from objective to objective, and its success depends on a wide range of factors. A study conducted by PROINPA, the Bolivian national potato program, described how social scientists employed a number of participatory methods to involve Bolivian farmers in the selection of potato clones provided by CIP and the Colombian national potato program. Largely because of a lack of coordination between the social scientists and potato breeders, the farmers’ contribution was found to be limited, although the breeders did become more aware of farmers’ priorities and opinions when selecting varieties for release.

The UPWARD study, while highly positive about the benefits of participatory research, noted several challenges and potential trouble spots. Among those are difficult choices about who and how many people to include in a particular project, the need for participatory methods that respect cultural and linguistic diversity, the importance of a shared understanding of project goals between scientists and non-scientists, and the need to assess the impact of participation in terms of the different interests of those involved. In some cases, the study found, end-users are most effective as consultants, while in other cases they might be best employed as project designers or research managers. There is, in short, no simple formula for participatory research and development.

Given the complexity of highland ecosystems, however, and the increasing recognition of the importance of tailoring technical solutions to the specific environmental and economic needs of small-scale growers, more CIP scientists are experimenting with participatory approaches. In the process, they are learning that farmers are not just the beneficiaries of research, but able—and often indispensable—partners.