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In the days when combating hunger by raising agricultural
productivity was the sole mission of the Future Harvest centers
of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR), they had a clear strategy for spreading technical
innovations. International crop breeding programs developed
improved varieties of the major cereals, working in tandem
with national research programs across the developing world.
Together with appropriate crop management practices, these
varieties were disseminated on a huge scale, particularly
in more uniform and favorable environments, mainly through
national agricultural extension systems.
This “classical” technology transfer approach gave
extraordinary results, boosting food supplies, bringing down
the prices of key staples, and thus generating enormous economic
benefits for the developing world’s poor consumers. The
so-called Green Revolution also delivered large environmental
payoffs by making it less necessary to bring fragile, marginal
lands into food production.
At the same time, though, agricultural intensification put
pressure on the environment, as reflected in declining soil
fertility and contamination of water supplies through excessive
use of agrochemicals. Moreover, despite large gains in agricultural
productivity, hunger persisted in some regions and among the
producers of certain crops. Most disconcerting, though, rural
poverty proved highly recalcitrant throughout the tropics,
casting a long shadow on the great technological, economic,
and social achievements of the 20th century.
In response to those challenges, the Future Harvest centers
and many other organizations embarked in the 1990s on new
initiatives aimed at achieving what agricultural scientist
Gordon Conway called a “doubly green revolution.”
The idea was to create new waves of economic impact that would
reach into previously neglected corners of the tropics while
preserving the natural resources on which rural livelihoods
depend.
Though improved crop varieties have figured importantly in
those initiatives, the products of the new research have tended
to be less seed-based and more knowledge-intensive, consisting
of R&D methods, improved practices for natural resource
management (NRM), and so forth. Ten years or more into this
endeavor, it is reasonable for donors and others to ask whether
and how the more complex technologies can be spread as widely
as their more straightforward predecessors, generating impact
on the same order of magnitude.
This article addresses that question, drawing on a dozen
or so contributions by CIAT staff to the Center’s 2002
Annual Review on scaling up.
Continuing Commodity Challenges
Judging from some of those papers, serious challenges remain
in disseminating seed-based technologies, and for some crops
this task has proved less than straightforward.
Keeping rice competitive
Take the case of rice farmers in tropical America. Even though
improved varieties are now universally grown in the region’s
irrigated production areas, growers are hard pressed to remain
competitive in international markets. One reason is that rice
producers in North America benefit from large government subsidies,
placing farmers to the South (where protective policies have
been weakened) at a disadvantage.
Around the time this challenge began to emerge, traditional
funding for international rice research in tropical America
went into decline. The region’s main rice-growing countries
responded decisively, though, by forming, with CIAT support,
the Fund for Latin American and Caribbean Irrigated Rice (FLAR)
in 1995. This is an entirely new model for guiding and sustaining
international rice research, which currently has 10 country
members and receives funds from the private sector, producer
associations, and government agencies.
Drawing on the rice world’s top research talent, FLAR
has developed a whole new generation of superior rice lines
for member countries. These materials outyield check varieties
by as much as 20 percent, in addition to offering other valuable
traits (such as insect resistance and excellent milling quality),
which reduce farmers’ production costs or otherwise increase
their competitive edge.
More recently, the Fund has seized a major opportunity to
demonstrate that it can also scale out effectively knowledge-intensive
crop management practices, which will better enable farmers
to exploit the genetic potential of the improved varieties.
For this purpose FLAR has received a grant of nearly US$1
million from the United Nations’ Common Fund for Commodities
(CFC) for on-farm research and technology transfer in Venezuela
and southern Brazil.
Linking cassava to new markets
In the quite different case of cassava, the policy and economic
environment has also posed tough challenges for the development
and scaling out of new technology in tropical America.
The region’s cassava growers, in contrast with rice
farmers, have traditionally been slow to adopt improved varieties
and other innovations. In the past, declining demand for fresh
cassava used as food has depressed prices, giving farmers
little incentive to boost production. Thai farmers, in contrast,
who are linked to large export and industrial markets for
cassava, have adopted improved varieties almost universally.
In the hope of creating such links in tropical America, CIAT
embarked during the 1980s on a series of integrated cassava
projects, conducted in collaboration with public institutions
in Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador.
Under one such project in Colombia, small cassava drying
plants were set up to cater to animal feed industries. By
1993, 138 plants were operating, 101 of them run by small-farmer
cooperatives. An impact study estimated the economic benefits
at US$18.6 million over
8 years. New income from cassava processing accounted for
part of the impact. But it mainly resulted from adoption of
improved production technology, stimulated by growing market
demand for processed cassava. A key factor to success in scaling
up the new processing technology was close involvement of
farmers in adapting it to local conditions and in creating
processor associations.
The second half of the 1990s saw major changes in national
policy, which put the drying plants in dire straits. Reductions
in government spending meant the end of public sector support.
And more open markets led to massive importation of cheap
grain for feed, driving down the price of dried cassava chips.
Despite these shocks, 56 of the drying plants, 43 belonging
to small-farmer cooperatives, survived into the new century.
At that point further shifts in policies and economics opened
the way to a new model for cassava development. Devaluation
of the Colombian peso made massive grain imports more expensive,
arousing interest in cassava as a cheap, partial substitute
in animal feeds.
In hot pursuit of that interest, private and public sector
organizations in Colombia and several other countries formed
the Latin American and Caribbean Consortium to Support Cassava
Research and Development (CLAYUCA), along the lines of FLAR.
The model promises to be an especially potent mechanism for
scaling up recent technical and organizational innovations,
and for that reason it is being studied closely by the cassava
sectors in West and East Africa as well as Southeast Asia.
A key feature of the consortium is that it spreads responsibility
for technology development and dissemination—as well
as the costs—among private businesses, public agencies,
and farmer groups.
An unusually complex commodity
Tropical forages are another crop for which scaling up improved
technology has posed special challenges. Though many farmers
in tropical America have taken up superior grasses (especially
Brachiaria spp.), adoption of improved forages has generally
been slow there as well as in Southeast Asia, despite intensive
research over the last several decades.
During the mid-1990s, forage agronomists working in Southeast
Asia suggested that the main reason for this was a lack of
farmer involvement in the evaluation and introduction of a
wide range of promising species. To disseminate improved germplasm
of such a complex commodity on a large scale, they argued,
requires that local extension agents and farmers become quite
knowledgeable, through dialog and direct experience, about
forage species’ different uses and management requirements
in the region’s diverse farming systems and environments.
Based on those insights, the Forages for Smallholders Project
(FSP) was launched during 1995 in seven Southeast Asian countries.
Intensive networking among national partners and participatory
evaluation of forages with farmers are central features of
the project. The project recently completed its second phase
with funding from the Asian Development Bank (ADB); a first
phase was financed by the Australian Agency for International
Development (AusAID).
By the end of the first phase, about 40 species and varieties
had been adopted by some 1,750 farmers at 19 research sites,
far exceeding original expectations. Based on those results,
the project’s second phase was designed explicitly to
scale out research results, and the scaling out strategy appears
to have worked well, with some 5,000 farm families now benefiting
from improved forage systems. What are the main elements that
account for its success?
Prominent among them is active participation of farmers in
the research from an early stage, with strong support from
national scientists and development professionals, well trained
in participatory methods. These specialists mostly work with
organized farmer groups and with “champion” farmers,
who are especially successful in forage evaluation. Once such
individuals come forward, they can help “spark”
forage innovation in other villages through “cross-visits.”
Learning to Manage Complex Systems
Apparently, farmer participatory methods are essential for
scaling out a relatively complex seed-based technology like
improved forages. But can they also be effective in the even
more knowledge-intensive business of integrated pest, disease,
and natural resource management?
The battle against crop pests
A case from Tanzania suggests that such methods do enable
small farmers to develop the necessary knowledge and practices
for integrated pest management, or IPM. This work began in
the northern Hai District, where researchers and extension
agents engaged farmers in a learning process to build a knowledge
base for dealing with bean foliage beetles—the main pest
of local bean crops.
To extend the learning process, national crop researchers,
development officers, and NGOs encouraged the formation of
dozens of farmer groups. The groups tested and adopted a wide
range of new and traditional technologies, including various
botanical pesticides and crop management practices. They also
proved effective for sharing the lessons learned through field
days, popular theatre, songs, and other activities at local
schools and places of worship. Printed extension materials
and radio programs in Swahili were also useful.
Through a 3-year project funded by the UK’s Department
for International Development (DFID), CIAT is building on
that experience to scale up dissemination and adoption of
IPM technologies in Malawi, Kenya, and other areas of Tanzania.
Another case, involving whiteflies in El Salvador’s
Valley of Zapotitán, also underscores the importance
of farmer innovation in developing and spreading pest management
practices. But it also illustrates dramatically why farmers,
even well-organized ones, still need reliable technical support,
a lesson that is implicit in the Tanzania case as well.
Over the last 2 decades, in El Salvador and many other parts
of Mesoamerica, many farmers have switched from almost total
reliance on staples like maize and beans to mixed systems
including production of higher value horticultural crops,
such as tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and the like. This shift
took place at the same time that government austerity measures
resulted in radical downsizing of national agricultural research
and extension services. In the absence of free technical service,
many farmers turned to agrochemical companies for help in
controlling pests on their horticultural crops.
The outcome was widespread indiscriminate use of highly toxic
pesticides, which meant the eventual end to export markets.
It also gave rise to pesticide resistance in whiteflies, which
began devastating beans as well as the main horticultural
crops.
Fortunately, the CIAT-coordinated Tropical Whitefly Project
of the CGIAR’s Systemwide IPM Program has shown the way
out of this downward spiral. With funding from DFID, the project
has demonstrated convincingly that the combination of sound
technical assistance and farmer innovation, backed up by integrated,
multidisciplinary research, can lead to large-scale development
of economically attractive mixed-cropping systems, with environmentally
friendly pest management.
Natural resource management
Is that same combination of farmer empowerment and organizational
commitment also adequate for curbing widespread destruction
of soil and other natural resources in the tropics?
CIAT scientists working to improve NRM in hillside watersheds
suggest that it is, based on experience at reference sites
in Colombia, Honduras, and Nicaragua. At all these sites,
local farmer associations and other institutions have proved
decisive for successful collective management of natural resources.
A key mechanism by which this has been achieved is a network
of community experimental farms, called “supermarkets
of technology options for hillsides.” These provide focal
points for the collaborative research of various organizations,
for organizing farmer participation in technology development
and evaluation, and for promoting successful technologies
around the sites and beyond.
Continuous visits to those sites by farmers, NGO staff, university
professors, government ministry officials, and others are
one means by which innovations are being scaled up and out.
Another involves training for hundreds of rural development
professionals in the use of a set of tools developed by CIAT,
with which rural communities can generate knowledge on which
to base decisions about NRM.
The work of CIAT’s Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility
(TSBF) Institute in Africa similarly indicates that community-based
experimentation is an effective way to scale out complex technologies—specifically
for integrated soil fertility management (ISFM)—around
pilot sites. To spread the general principles involved in
ISFM more widely, the Institute has relied on the African
Network for Soil Biology and Fertility (Afnet), which links
numerous experimental sites in
16 countries.
Those are by no means simple processes, however, and in order
for scaling out to succeed, farmers and researchers must overcome
several obstacles. One is the inherent difficulty in tailoring
knowledge about generic management principles (as opposed
to specific practices) to diverse local conditions. Is this
knowledge widely applicable or suited only to specific niches?
Is it as relevant to female as male members of rural households?
The pitfalls are numerous, and to get round them requires
careful planning as well as effective monitoring and evaluation.
Participatory Research:
From Margin to Mainstream
Farmer participation is an eye-catching common thread connecting
these diverse cases of scaling out complex technologies. But
if it is indeed so critical for success, then how can the
Future Harvest centers scale up, or “mainstream,”
farmer participatory research?
Empirical impact studies
Evidently, some progress has already been made toward that
end. According to a survey conducted in 2000 by the CIAT-coordinated
Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (PRGA) Program
of the CGIAR, the international centers supported by the CG
reported a total of 144 projects involving participatory research,
with a combined budget of US$65 million.
Claims about the effectiveness of participatory approaches,
however, rest mainly on a mass of anecdotal evidence. Few
studies of impact are to be found in the literature. Clearly,
if these approaches are to persist and spread, institutional
decision makers must have reliable evidence indicating which
approaches work and why and what impacts they can expect.
In an effort to provide such evidence, PRGA and CIAT economists
have conducted empirical impact studies, in collaboration
with many partners, dealing with the contribution of farmer
participatory methods to scaling out agricultural and NRM
technologies. There are different types of participatory methods.
And their impact depends in part on the kind of farmer-researcher
relationship they involve and on the stage of research at
which this relationship begins.
Participatory barley and rice breeding, for example, carried
out at a rather late stage, were still shown to complement
conventional research, resulting in high farmer adoption of
new varieties. In another project, though, focusing on integrated
sweet potato management, farmers participated in the entire
process, resulting not only in more relevant technologies
but in improved human capacity and organizational skills.
Changing institutional culture
Another part of PRGA’s effort to mainstream participatory
research consists of studies highlighting obstacles to its
institutionalization in the Future Harvest centers. Covering
three centers, the studies have given mixed results.
On the one hand, fairly wide use of participatory methods
has resulted in the development of more appropriate technologies,
which farmers have adopted more readily. But, on the other,
the effectiveness of those methods is limited by the persistence
of a supply-driven, “pipeline” approach to technology
development and transfer. That approach was ideally suited
to the Green Revolution. But if the centers are now to achieve
a doubly green revolution, they must undergo a profound cultural
shift toward a more demand-driven, interactive model.
Linking Research to Development
Such a transformation will require, among other things, that
the Future Harvest centers adopt new styles of working with
a wide range of development partners at the community level.
Only then can they translate participatory research into participatory
development, generating economic and social benefits on a
large scale.
Learning alliances
One promising approach for reaching that goal proposes “learning
alliances” between centers and development partners,
particularly large international NGOs. A central purpose of
these alliances is to channel the more complex products of
collaborative, participatory research into current or proposed
development initiatives, with a view to achieving widespread
adoption.
As partners in learning, the development agencies can do
much more than act as an extension service, however. They
can also closely monitor the adoption and adaptation of new
tools and methods at numerous locations, thus providing valuable
feedback to research. The result should be a long-term partnership
that improves the effectiveness of both scientists and development
professionals through a shared process of institutional learning
and change. Forming high-quality partnerships of this sort
is by no means easy but rather requires detailed negotiation
to reconcile divergent values and develop a common language.
Over the last year or so, CIAT has entered into several learning
alliances—with CARE International in Nicaragua and Catholic
Relief Services (CRS) in East Africa, for example. The focal
point of these partnerships is CIAT’s territorial approach
to rural enterprise development, which was devised through
several years of collaborative research at a half dozen reference
sites. With this approach local stakeholder groups learn to
identify market opportunities and analyze production-to-market
chains, with the aim of capturing more of the value added
to key products. The result is a more market-oriented, competitive
agriculture that boosts farmer incomes.
Experience so far suggests that there is strong interest
among development partners in learning alliances. Within just
a year, CIAT’s territorial approach for agroenterprise
development has been scaled up from 1 to 10 municipalities
in Nicaragua and from three to nine African countries.
Rural planning
Another approach to provide researchers with a means of catalyzing
development centers on rural planning. Directed mainly at
municipal governments and other local, territorial organizations,
this approach complements the learning alliances described
above. Whereas the latter try to compensate for weak national
institutions through strong links with NGOs, rural planning
acknowledges the continuing importance of those institutions
and seeks ways to make them more relevant to rural innovation.
In rural planning the various stakeholders in a given territory’s
development define a desirable future and specific means by
which their collective vision can be made a reality. Compared
with a problem-solving focus, this approach offers researchers
distinct advantages and opportunities. Rather than rushing
to stem a crisis, they can reflect more calmly on community
needs with a wide range of actors, using a cross-sectoral
systems approach, and then help define appropriate actions,
based on careful consideration of multiple options. Because
planning reaches across different levels of administration,
it also gives researchers a chance to deal at an early stage
with policy obstacles to local innovation.
CIAT began developing a systematic approach to rural planning
during the late 1990s under its longstanding research alliance
with Colombia’s Ministry of Agriculture. Initially, Center
scientists used geographical information systems (GIS), including
soil maps and satellite images, to help the municipal government
of Puerto López in the country’s Eastern Plains
define land uses that offer new economic opportunities while
reducing threats to natural resources. Later, researchers
incorporated the use of GIS-based decision-support tools into
a vision-based planning approach involving close consultation
with local communities. The results generated a large demand
for training in Colombia, where
185 government officials have been trained so far, and the
collaboration has been expanded to Ecuador and Brazil.
ICTs and scaling up
Information is an important input for planning, as it is for
all the approaches described here. But information is also
a key output of those activities, which can be widely shared
through effective communications strategies. Based on the
extraordinary development in recent years of modern information
and communications technologies, or ICTs, are there ways in
which we can improve information and knowledge sharing, and
thus achieve unprecedented efficiency in spreading technical
and social innovations in rural areas?
A good place to seek answers is in the research institutions,
including the Future Harvest centers, whose job is to generate
information and knowledge and disseminate it to the public.
The World Wide Web offers us exciting new opportunities to
increase the speed and reduce the cost of publishing research
results and of interacting with research clients and collaborators.
In addition, it has enabled the libraries of our institutions
to develop more efficient services, and it has required that
they assume valuable new roles—for example, in facilitating
access to licensed resources and in providing guidance on
matters of copyright and electronic publishing permissions.
As a result of such initiatives, the supply of potentially
useful information is rapidly improving. But this raises questions
about the demand side of the equation. How quickly are local
researchers, development professionals, and innovative farmers
gaining access to electronic sources of information? And as
they do, is a more abundant supply of information necessarily
translating into the development of knowledge, leading to
effective action?
The problem of ICT access is gradually being resolved through
the proliferation of privately run Internet cafes and other
telecommunications services as well as socially progressive
connectivity programs implemented by governments and NGOs
in rural areas. Moreover, some local organizations are finding
creative ways to reach the more isolated rural households
by linking the use of ICTs with conventional communications
media (such as community radio) and more traditional modes
of information exchange.
Nonetheless, better access to ICTs provides no guarantee
that rural people will use them to seek and obtain new technology.
Training and follow-up support will be needed to build computer
literacy, foment a local culture of knowledge and information
discovery, and create relevant local content. That, in turn,
will require much the same combination of farmer empowerment
and organizational commitment that is central to most of the
strategies presented in this article.
Thus, there are no shortcuts to scaling up—only a winding
pathway of learning and change.
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