| On a Sunday morning near the end of
cassava harvest, the communal meeting hall at Thong Nhat village in northern Vietnam is
nearly packed with well-groomed farmers. Spared today from the backbreaking toil of
pulling starchy cassava roots from the ground, they’re busy instead making choices
that could mean real improvement in their families’ livelihoods. For the last 2
hours, the farmers have hurried from one on-farm experiment plot to another, observing
trial results printed neatly on paper signs and jotting down data on specially prepared
forms. Now it’s time for them to examine the results together and plan their next
steps.
Tran Ngoc Ngoan, a professor from Thai Nguyen University, stands at the podium opposite
a large white bust of Ho Chi Minh on a stage adorned with brightly colored banners bearing
communist party slogans. After a brief introduction to the meeting, Prof. Ngoan takes his
seat among the farmers, while extension officers begin compiling the experiment results on
a chalkboard.
The extensionists preside over a lively polling process, in which farmers comment on
the various options, ask questions, and finally vote through a show of hands for the
technologies they prefer.
National teams
Not many years ago, these farmers would most likely have been summoned to the meeting
hall to be told what they should plant, how, and where. But thanks to an innovative
project funded by Japan’s Nippon Foundation, they have an opportunity to test and
choose the technologies that best meet their needs.
Now well into its second phase (1999-2003), the project is disseminating sustainable
practices for cassava-based cropping systems as widely as possible. "The success of
this work," says Reinhardt Howeler, CIAT soil scientist and project coordinator,
"depends on national teams of researchers and extension officers working with farmer
leaders at numerous pilot sites."
Such teams have been formed with six organizations in Vietnam and five in Thailand. The
project also operates to a lesser extent in southern China and Indonesia. Researchers and
extensionists have been trained in participatory methods, allowing them to support farmer
research on a growing scale.
In Vietnam farmers at 21 pilot sites are conducting a total of 155 participatory
research trials. For Thailand the figure is 106 trials at 21 sites. "Building on
experience with participatory research in the project’s first phase" (1994-98),
Howeler notes, "our national partners are now employing farmer participatory
extension methods to achieve wide adoption of the practices farmers have selected."
"This is the only way farmers in our very diverse upland areas will adopt new
technologies," says Ngoan, who is Vietnam’s national coordinator for the
project.
Eye-opening experience
Clearly, there’s no lack of alternatives. Cassava research, Howeler explains, has
produced improved varieties as well as simple agronomic practices that effectively counter
soil erosion and declining soil fertility. But since the new practices require extra labor
and capital and may take land out of crop production, it’s vital that farmers be
directly involved in determining which options offer attractive benefits at acceptable
costs.
The participatory approach begins with farmer visits to demonstration plots at
experiment stations or to other villages where farmers have already conducted
participatory trials and adopted new technologies.
A farmer group from Nadee District of Thailand’s Prachinburi Province visited one
such village 2 years ago. Group members say they enjoyed being able to exchange ideas with
other farmers. It was an eye-opener for them to see how much progress was being made in a
village much like their own. After discussing what they’d seen, the visiting farmers
decided which options to test in their own fields, and extension officers then helped them
set up the trials.
Along the lower end of each experimental plot, there is a trench lined with plastic
sheeting. The trenches trap runoff water and eroded soil, which farmers collect and
measure at the middle and end of the growing season, calculating the soil loss per unit of
area. "Once farmers can actually see and measure soil erosion," notes Howeler,
"it ceases to be an abstract concept for them, and they feel motivated to do
something about it."
Building sustainable livelihoods
Much is at stake in these farmers’ search for ways to intensify cassava production
while protecting the soil. Grown mainly by small farmers in marginal upland areas, the
tropical American root crop has been transformed in Southeast Asia from a secondary staple
into an important raw material for starch production and animal feed, especially in
Thailand and Vietnam. The transformation is being driven now by a new generation of
high-yielding, high-starch varieties, developed through intensive collaborative between
CIAT and national programs, with strong financial support from the Japanese government.
Improved cassava production offers upland farmers a rare opportunity to boost their
incomes by catering to diverse markets. A major drawback, though, is that more or less
continuous cultivation of the crop on sloping soils leads to a sharp decline in soil
fertility and to serious erosion problems, undermining the sustainability of cassava-based
systems.
But experience in a growing number of rural communities demonstrates that this outcome
is by no means inevitable. Take the case of Tien Phong village in Vietnam’s northern
Thai Nguyen Province. Following a visit to demonstration plots at Thai Nguyen University
in the first year of the Nippon Foundation-funded project, a small group of farmers from
the village began testing new cassava production practices.
A year later they were cautiously optimistic about some of the new technologies. Over
time, though, their confidence in trial results grew, explains farmer group leader Ngo
Trung Kien. With new cassava varieties—now grown on 65 percent of the village’s
cassava area—farmers have nearly doubled their crop yields. Villagers mainly use
cassava as feed for pigs—their primary source of cash income. The number of pigs in
the village has increased, and the cost of feeding them has declined.
Higher incomes from pig production have visibly improved farmers’ livelihoods.
Kien, for example, has just sold the motorcycle he bought a few years ago and is about to
buy a newer one. At this and four other pilot sites in northern Vietnam, Howeler notes,
the adoption of improved technologies, including new cassava varieties, has raised gross
incomes by four to five times those reported in 1995 at the outset of the project.
Kien and dozens of other farmers have established hedgerows of Tephrosia candida in
their upland fields to check soil erosion. In addition to maintaining cassava productivity
over the long term, this spares them the trouble of digging out soil that has been washed
down from upland slopes into their lowland rice fields. The farmers are also applying a
combination of manure and chemical fertilizers to their cassava and are intercropping it
with peanuts—practices that increase their income while improving the soil. With more
pigs around, Kien mentions, farmers can now apply more manure to their rice, sweet potato,
and cassava, helping maintain reasonably good yields on the village´s poor sandy soils.
The new practices have spread among farmers at Tien Phong thanks to the efforts of the
group led by Kien. From just a handful of members in 1995, it has grown to include about
80 farmers today. Kien’s functions as group leader, he says, are "to organize
meetings during the growing season and at harvest for evaluating the results of
experiments and deciding what to do next."
Back at Thong Nhat village, the field day closes in a modest feast displaying local
cuisine and the farmers’ unstinting hospitality. With small cups of rice wine held
high, they offer toast after toast to one another and to the researchers who helped them
seize the power to choose.
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