Gabriele Stoll
Natural Crop Protection in the Tropics
Letting Information Come to Life
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Letting information come to life
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Letting information come to life
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Introduction
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Farmer-participatory research approaches
and methodologies in Natural Crop Protection
The central theme of this book is that
information in itself is dead until it is brought alive through
use. This became particularly obvious to me during the 6 years
I worked in Southeast Asia in both farmer-participatory
research and scientific research on plants with
insect-controlling properties. This chapter has been included
with the intention to contribute to bringing information alive.
The cases presented have been selected carefully. They are
hopefully inspiring examples of how information and local
knowledge can be combined to develop something innovative and
substantive in natural crop protection. It has been made clear
elsewhere in this book that the technical information presented
has to be verified and/or adapted to suit local conditions.
This chapter intends to provide suggestions on approaches and
methodologies for readers to engage in this.
Bringing information alive is key
but it needs both an enabling environment and a suitable
approach and methodology. One of the most important features of
this process is the removal of boundaries. The categories of
farmer, extensionist, and scientist are losing their sharp
edges. The relationships between them, too, are changing. Today
we see many crossovers, which are defined anew in each
situation and constellation, depending on the objective, the
actors and their negotiation with each other. The following
cases, using examples of components of farmer participatory
research and extension, present individual ways of bringing
this information alive in a manner that is locally appropriate.
Meir leads us into this chapter with her
analysis and conclusions on "Learning and Changing:
Helping Farmers Move to Natural Pest Control". She
examines in detail the processes that take place among farmers
and their attitudes towards natural crop protection and the
factors that determine adaptation and adoption.
Bentley's approach is based on the hypothesis that
farmers will be stimulated to innovate useful technology, based
on a synthesis of local knowledge and scientific explanations
and the identification of gaps in farmer knowledge and the
filling of these gaps. His experience derives from working for
many years with the ZAMORANO Training Centre in Honduras, where
courses on Natural Pest Control have been given with the
objective to inform and to trigger innovation.
AME in India, as reported by RAJ & SURESH,
attempts to systematically pick up farmer innovations and to
verify and fine-tune their effectiveness in a collaborative
effort between farmers, local NGOs, the Department of
Agriculture and research institutes.
Stoll points out, based on her experience of
working for three years in farmer experimentation with
insect-controlling plants in Thailand, that introducing
external ideas can well contribute to triggering innovations.
Once the farmers have understood the principles behind an
external idea, they adapt it within the setting of their local
knowledge and resource availability.
Page who works on the promotion of organic
cotton in Zimbabwe, considers it an exciting venture to bring
science to illiterate farmers and sees the real challenge in
transforming technical jargon and scientific procedure into a
series of simple pictures and experiments which allow farmers
to think in a deeper and more holistic way.
Rivera &
Retamozo present a Peruvian
experience, telling how an NGO designed research jointly with
farmers for the control of the potato moth in which farmers
took great responsibility for implementation. The resulting
interaction between the farmers, the NGO and research
institutes was perceived as constructive. However, it was also
observed that the available research tools are inappropriate
for illiterate farmers.
The contribution of Förster of the
German GTZ is a bit different insofar as it describes the
development process of setting up a small-scale neem processing
facility. This experience from Kenya has been consciously
included in order to also encourage this pathway by showing how
it can be done, thus moving this under-explored approach to
natural crop protection more into the realm of the possible.
Kimani,
Mihindo & Williamson report
about a research partnership approach from Kenya involving
farmers, NGOs and local & international research
institutions, about joint experiments and their observation
that a lot of potential lies in the partnership. Overcoming
individual and institutional limitations are key to success and
to creating synergistic effects and constructive contributions.
At the end of this chapter, an
overall summary and conclusion is attempted. This summary uses
both the contents of the case studies and the contents of the
survey "Non-Chemical Crop Protection and Needs for a
Farmer-Oriented Research".
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