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Growing Affinities (July 2002)

Barriers That Permit Progress
Making soil conservation pay in Colombia

His farm, "La Camelia," is perched on a steep slope leading down to the Cabuyal River in the community of Caldono in Colombia’s Cauca Department. Despite its difficult topography, Don José is proud of the farm, because it shows no signs of soil erosion, its soils require no chemical fertilizers, and, by maintaining a constant output of diverse agricultural products over the years, it has enabled him to raise his six children.

Lessons from experience

"Working this hillside was tough," he recalls, as he points out his coffee, banana, citrus, and vegetables. But then in a bid to make the land more manageable, he began establishing "live barriers," or dense hedgerows of perennial plants, sown across the slopes to minimize soil loss in heavy rains. Don José has established 25 barriers of sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum), each 120 meters long. In addition to protecting the soil from erosion, they improve soil fertility, as fallen sugarcane leaves and other crop residues trapped by the barriers are gradually incorporated into the soil.

In addition, the barriers provide a source of food for his family and feed for his livestock. For some time now, he has also been manufacturing panela (brown sugar) for sale in the local market. He uses the bagasse (or part of the sugarcane left after the juice has been extracted) as fuel, making it unnecessary for the family to fell trees for firewood. Don José soon plans to buy a motor for his small panela processing operation and to form a processing association with his neighbors. This will enable them to increase their volume of panela production and raise incomes.

Panela consists of blocks of dark-brown, unrefined sugar derived from sugarcane juice and used to prepare beverages, cakes, and cookies. Colombia is the world’s third largest producer of panela and ranks first in consumption per capita.

Agricultural scientists and technicians in many institutions, including CIAT, are actively seeking ways to apply lessons from the experience of farmers like Don José on a much larger scale in Cauca and in hillsides throughout the tropics. Worldwide, these environments cover about 13 million square kilometers and are home to some 525 million farmers, many of whom live in absolute poverty.

The search for incentives

A key challenge for researchers is to find ways in which simple technologies that protect fragile soils can also generate economic benefits in the short term, so farmers will have a stronger incentive to adopt them. In a novel effort to meet this challenge, CIAT specialists in soils, participatory research approaches, and rural agroenterprise development are combining their expertise. One example of their new integrated approach is recent work in Colombia aimed at making live barriers more profitable.

"To promote the adoption of a live barrier, we need to help farmers find alternative uses for the barrier species as well as different approaches to processing that increase farmers profits," says Juliana Andrea Rizo of CIAT’s Agroenterprise Development Project.

Toward this end she has been working with farmers in Caldono to develop a simple tool for evaluating different alternatives in sugarcane processing. This effort grew out of previous work by Elías Claros of CIAT’s Participatory Approaches Project, who evaluated the management of live barriers with farmers in the microwatershed of the Cabuyal River. Sugarcane was the barrier species that most farmers preferred.

Even so, while clearly appreciating the effectiveness of sugarcane barriers in halting soil erosion, farmers in Caldono have been slow to adopt the practice. The main obstacle is that returns from the sugarcane do not always outweigh the costs of hedgerow establishment and management.

This problem, in turn, is related to many farmers’ commercial arrangements with local agroindustries (known as trapiches) that process sugarcane into panela. Ordinarily, farmers must deliver the harvested cane to the trapiche, and since this is a quite bulky product, its transport can be costly and difficult. In exchange for their sugarcane, farmers receive only half of the panela produced. The other half goes to the trapiche, together with the bagasse, which is used as fuel for processing.

Farmer-run agroenterprises

To help farmers find a way out of this trap, Rizo prepared financial models to analyze different alternatives for sugarcane processing in terms of their advantages and disadvantages for farmers. In this work she used a method developed by CIAT marketing specialist Carlos Ostertag and described in the manual Identifying and Assessing Market Opportunities for Small Rural Producers.

The results suggest that the farmers’ best bet is to form their own sugarcane processing enterprises. Some farmers, like Don José, already have small trapiches, which they operate by hand. But these agroenterprises could generate greater social benefits if they were run by farmer groups. And the processing could no doubt be made more efficient and profitable if these groups had the capacity to conduct their own problem-solving research as well as access to information and other support services.

CIAT and various partner organizations are already developing and testing approaches for forming such groups in Cauca and other parts of Latin America. The big task ahead is to form alliances among local organizations that are committed to replicating the experience of people like José Balcué and supporting the development of farmer-operated agroenterprises. He and thousands of other hillside farmers are eager to test new alternatives for keeping alive the land that provides a livelihood for them and their families.

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