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• Berna, Mbale, Uganda
• Mr. Thinh, Thai Nguyen, Vietnam
• Maricruz, village of El Inca, Imbabura province, Ecuador
• Alirio Cabrera, Pescador, Cauca, Colombia
• Eulalio and Gerónima Gutiérrez, Yorito, Yoro, Honduras
• Eunice Changirwa, Kakamega, Western Province, Kenya
• Bui Van Tho, Dong Rang, Hoa Binh, Vietnam
• Marcelo Cabrera, Pucallpa, Ucayali, Peru

These people are among the many millions of rural families in the tropical world who lack what many of us take for granted—an adequate diet and livelihood as well as a glimmer of hope that things will get better. Though separated by culture and distance, they lead remarkably similar lives. One common thread is their dependence for food and income on a few, reliable staple crops. Another is their intimate bond with the land that sustains them.

Find out how each is benefiting from integrated research on agricultural production and land management, aimed at reducing hunger and poverty, while reversing the destruction of natural resources.

Berna, Mbale, Uganda

Berna is one of about a dozen members of the Makhai women's group of bean seed producers at Mbale in eastern Uganda. Beans provide these women, their families, and millions of other Africans with an inexpensive source of protein, carbohydrates, and other dietary essentials. Increasingly, the crop is also becoming an important source of cash income, especially for women, who produce most of Africa's beans. Many farmers in this part of Uganda are producing the crop for export to urban markets across the nearby border with Kenya.

In recent years the bean program of Uganda's National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) has developed and released new varieties that offer these farmers higher bean yields, multiple-disease resistance, and seed types with special market appeal. In this task NARO has benefited from the Eastern and Central Africa Bean Research Network (ECABREN), whose activities are supported by the Canadian, Swiss, and US governments.

But limited supplies of high-quality seed are slowing the spread of the new varieties. One strategy for reducing this obstacle is to establish small-scale associations of bean seed producers. With help from local NGOs members learn business skills as well as the extra steps needed to produce seed of good quality for sale to their neighbors. Berna has been an active participant in this experiment with small agroenterprise.

Mr. Thinh, Thai Nguyen, Vietnam

Mr. Thinh lives and farms in Vietnam's northern Thai Nguyen province. Land in his village is scarce, and cropping is very intensive. The typical farm size is only about three-quarters of a hectare. About a fifth of that is suitable for home gardening and cultivation of irrigated rice. The rest is sown to upland crops, such as maize, cassava, and peanut, mostly on steep slopes with sandy soils that are highly susceptible to erosion.

In search of ways to intensify agricultural production without degrading the soil, Mr. Thinh and other farmers in the village are conducting experiments, with the help of researchers from the nearby Bac Thai Agroforestry College under a project funded by the Nippon Foundation. Some of the trials compare improved cassava varieties with the traditional cultivars, while others compare various alternatives for controlling erosion in upland fields. "Live" barriers made of vetiver grass and Tephrosia, a leguminous shrub, are proving effective for controlling erosion, and clippings from the legume serve as a "green manure" to maintain soil fertility.

Many farmers are adopting the new cassava varieties, which were developed with support from the Japanese government. Though some of their cassava production is destined for human consumption and starch processing, most is incorporated into pig feed. The higher yielding, high-starch varieties enable farmers to fatten their animals and get them to market more quickly, thus increasing incomes. Demand for pork is increasing, as larger incomes enable consumers to buy more meat. Pigs are also farmers' major source of manure, which is vital for maintaining soil fertility.

Maricruz, village of El Inca, Imbabura province, Ecuador

Maricruz lives with her family in the village of El Inca near the town of Pimampiro in Ecuador's northern Imbabura province. At the time the accompanying photo was taken, Maricruz was 6 years old. Using animal traction, her father and other farmers in the community cultivate beans, maize, potato, and wheat on sloping soils under irrigation. One of Maricruz's jobs is to walk behind her father, as he plows the potato field, collecting in a bucket the small tubers that were left behind at harvest.

The patchwork-quilt appearance of these Andean hillsides suggests heavy pressure on the land. In fact, the farmers of El Inca are becoming more and more concerned about soil erosion. Its consequences are evident from the exposed patches of rocky subsoil that dot the stunningly beautiful landscape. Through adept management of an intricate system of irrigation channels, farmers try to reduce the problem, but they clearly need new approaches to control erosion more effectively.

Maricruz's neighbor, don Alfonso Mosquera, and other farmers in the community have begun a vigorous campaign to preserve their soil. Toward this end don Alfonso has constructed contour ditches lined with fruit trees, with help from Ecuador's National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIAP). The ditches take up space that could be planted to crops, but they keep the soil from being washed away in heavy rains. In this and other work, INIAP receives valuable support from PROFRIZA, a Swiss-funded network of bean research programs in the Andean region.

Alirio Cabrera, Pescador, Cauca, Colombia

The Problem

Two years ago, Colombian farmer Alirio Cabrera decided to sell his hillside farm and move the family to Ibagué, a city about 400 kilometers away from their home in the watershed of the Cabuyal River in Cauca department. He had no friends in Ibagué and no guarantee of finding a steady job there. "But we just couldn't make a living on the farm," he says.

Under better circumstances Alirio would never have tilled this hillside land in the first place and instead would occupy a more profitable corner of the fertile river valley below. But the rapid growth of urban centers has reduced the amount of land available there, and most of what remains is concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few.

With that option closed to them, Alirio and other small-scale farmers have little choice but to cultivate fragile hillside land. Their two most important crops are coffee and cassava, followed by maize, beans, and various fruit and vegetable crops. Since most of the cultivated land is steeply sloping, erosion is a serious problem. Many growers stave off its immediate effects by applying manure. They are also careful to plow across the slopes. Even so, traditional practices are often inadequate to prevent a steady decline in soil quality.

Soil erosion destroys production potential, and together with deforestation around springs and along riverbanks (which increases the threat of flash floods downstream), it reduces the supply of water available locally and in the valley beyond.

Solutions That Cross Frontiers

Alirio has found a way out of his predicament, and it was much closer to home than an unfamiliar city. Help came through the Interinstitutional Consortium for Sustainable Agriculture in Hillsides (CIPASLA), an alliance of 16 organizations, including CIAT, which is supported by several Colombian institutions, by the Danish International Development Assistance (Danida), and by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

Members of the consortium used to work separately, but now they are united in a common cause with the inhabitants of the Cabuyal watershed. Through a combination of improved technology and collective action, CIPASLA is enabling the community to raise its standards of living and safeguard its natural resources. Each organization contributes to these ends in a different way, conducting research and training or providing technical assistance and credit to diversify agriculture and thus create new sources of income. To meet their end of the bargain, rural people experiment with new technologies and join in collective action to protect forests and mountain springs.

Under these terms Cabrera and other farmers have decided to give farm life another chance. Some inhabitants of the higher and more ecologically fragile part of the watershed have increased their incomes by adopting high-yielding, disease-resistant climbing beans. At the same time, they have entered into negotiated agreements aimed at reducing the negative effects of land clearing by burning. Other farmers have adopted improved pastures to intensify milk production in response to the demand created by new local agroenterprises that process milk into cheese and other products. Still others have created a niche for themselves in local markets for tropical fruits, vegetables, and aromatic herbs.

With help from the Corporation for Interdisciplinary Studies and Technical Assistance (CETEC), a nongovernment organization, Cabrera and his family now supplement their income from cassava, maize, and bean production by raising pigs, fish, chickens, and rabbits and by keeping a vegetable garden. They also sell eggs and homemade ices and fruit drinks. In the new spirit of social responsibility, they have fenced off a portion of their property with barbwire to protect native vegetation around a spring that supplies water to neighbors downstream.

Not long ago someone offered to buy Cabrera's farm. "But we're not selling," he says. We want to make a decent living on our own land."

To derive strategies and tools from this experience that can be extrapolated to other hillside environments, CIAT is conducting research on the CIPASLA model with support from Danida. Through this work we have identified key functions that make watershed management associations effective, and we have tested and refined various methods that enable such groups to perform those functions better.

Eulalio and Gerónima Gutiérrez, Yorito, Yoro, Honduras

High in the watershed of the Tascalapa River, Eulalio Gutiérrez and his wife Gerónima near the end of life’s long and weary journey. With help from their children, the couple grow coffee, sugarcane, maize, and beans on steep hillsides, in addition to keeping a few pigs and other animals. Their wooden storage shed is full of maize, still in the husk and stacked in neat rows almost to the ceiling.

To sow small plots of annual crops and provide pasture for their cattle, Eulalio and Gerónima have followed the traditional practice of burning and clearing forest. This way of life seemed to do little harm to the land, as long as they, several other mestizo families, and a small indigenous community were the only inhabitants of this part of the watershed.

But things have changed, as the community has swelled with the arrival of new settlers. Nowadays, people burn and cut down trees a la loca ("like crazy"), Eulalio complains. Eroded slopes and plumes of smoke rising from the forest in almost every direction suggest that what he says is true.

Eulalio and Gerónima are not the only ones worried about the current course of events in this watershed. Just recently, hundreds of people in Yorito, one of two townships in this area of Yoro department, participated in a march to protest the burning. Although the land has shown remarkable resilience under new pressures, these people fear that its productive potential as well as local water supplies will be permanently ruined if the remaining forest is destroyed.

Solutions That Cross Frontiers

Several years ago CIAT expanded its research in hillsides, with funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), to include several watersheds that form a continuum from northern Honduras down into Nicaragua. One of these is the watershed of the Tascalapa River.

Inhabitants of the area who marched in Yorito recently made a pretty compelling case against land clearing by burning. But their arguments will have little force as long as poverty reigns in the community and most farmers simply cannot afford the luxury of conservation. That is why the same group which staged the march—the Local Committee for Sustainable Development in the Watershed of the Tascalapa River (CLODEST)—has also begun to explore new options for raising agricultural productivity and improving land management. The committee includes some 20 local government and nongovernment organizations, and it receives technical and institutional support from CIAT and from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA).

Within this stronger institutional framework, efforts are now underway to evaluate and introduce improved pastures and to identify opportunities for establishing new agroenterprises. Farmers here and elsewhere also have access to bean varieties made available through the longstanding Regional Bean Program for Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean (PROFRIJOL), which is supported by SDC.

One important step toward sustainable agriculture in the community is to integrate forage and other legumes, such as Mucuna, into current systems. A valuable complement to improved seed of beans, maize, grass pastures, and other crops, legumes can help increase crop and livestock production, while maintaining soil fertility and reducing erosion. CIAT scientists are assembling genetic diversity, together with agronomic and agroclimatic data, that will enable local organizations here and elsewhere in the region to better target the introduction of leguminous species.

To create lasting institutional arrangements for farmer participation in this and other research, the Center is also helping establish Committees for Local Agricultural Research (CIALs) in Yoro and other departments of the country with support from the Kellogg Foundation.

How can we tell if the significant collective effort being brought to bear on this and other rural communities in Honduras will be effective in reducing poverty and environmental degradation? CIAT specialists in geographic information systems are convinced that new information tools can greatly increase the chances of success by improving the design and targeting of a whole range of development interventions—from agricultural technology to government policy.

In a project financed by SDC and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), they are developing land use databases and models that help examine the possible consequences of alternative paths in land management. With maps and other information generated with these tools, national and local organizations in Honduras will have the means of making more informed decisions.

Whether life and the land do improve in Yorito should be reflected, not just in official statistics and expert opinions, but in the well-being of rural people, as they themselves perceive it. To make this possible, our scientists are developing a well-being index in Honduras with support from Danida and IDB. The resulting poverty profiles, together with land use databases, will provide a comprehensive package that helps target and measure the impact of agricultural research and development.

Eunice Changirwa, Kakamega, Western Province, Kenya

The Problem

Until recently, Eunice Changirwa never thought she would see another bean crop in her half-hectare field. She and most other farmers in this village near Kakamega in western Kenya practically lost their local bean races, when crops mysteriously began to turn yellow and fail season after season. "I had to stop growing beans," she says. "Any seed I planted was just wasted, it didn't produce anything."

After that, beans became a rare treat in her household. "Once in a while, I would buy beans in the market from other parts of the country, but they were expensive," she recalls. In the absence of this vital protein source, the family's diet was reduced to a monotonous dependence on maize and banana, their main starchy staples. It also hurt to lose the income from sales of surplus bean production. In fact, Eunice's finances still have not recovered from the blow. Only recently, her daughter had to drop out of school, because the family could not come up with the fees.

Kenyan scientists determined that beans had succumbed to a complex of diseases referred to collectively as "root rots." Serious outbreaks occur mainly in areas, like western Kenya, where high population density makes land extremely scarce, forcing farmers to exhaust the soil through ever more intensive cultivation of small plots.

Solutions That Cross Frontiers

Scientists refused to accept the apparent victory of root rots over bean production in western Kenya. One of them, Reuben Otsyula, a plant breeder with the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), obtained a grant for research on the disease through a regional bean network supported by CIAT and financed by the governments of Canada, Switzerland, and the USA.

His search for a genetic remedy eventually took Otsyula to Rwanda, where he joined scientists from other countries for a traveling workshop organized by the network in 1993. "I was really impressed with farmers' widespread adoption of high-yielding, root-rot resistant climbing beans in highland areas similar to ours in western Kenya," Otsyula says. Introduced in Rwanda from Latin America during the 1980s, the new varieties showed marked advantages over local climbers. Otsyula arranged to import the best climbing and bush varieties from Rwanda into Kenya, where he soon began testing them with farmers.

At about that time, Otsyula attended a field day organized by Patrick Nekesa of the Association for Better Land Husbandry (ABLH). A nongovernment organization supported by the British government, ABLH seeks solutions to the problem of declining soil fertility in Kakamega through better management of green manures and other sources of organic material. By enabling farmers to derive more income from the land they already occupy, the organization hopes to relieve pressure on the area's remaining tropical forest.

KARI and CIAT scientists worked with Nekesa to develop and promote an integrated method of root rot control that includes resistant varieties, planting on raised beds, and incorporation of organic material into the soil. "Without new opportunities to produce, farmers have no motive to adopt better soil management practices," Nekesa says. "That's why high-yielding climbing beans were the right technology at the right place and at the right time." By 1997 more than a thousand farmers around Kakamega were growing the new varieties.

Bui Van Tho, Dong Rang, Hoa Binh, Vietnam

The Problem

To support a family of five on a half hectare of good land is difficult enough. But when most of the land lies on an erosion-prone slope, the task becomes almost unimaginable.

Yet, that is precisely what Bui Van Tho and other farmers must do in the village of Dong Rang in Vietnam's northern Hoa Binh province. They belong to an ethnic minority group, the Muong, who live mainly in marginal upland areas.

Each of the 92 families in this village has been allotted about one-fifth of a hectare of flat, irrigated land for growing rice. This is generally sufficient to keep them fed but not always. Whatever else the farmers can provide for their families comes from the production of cassava, taro, peanuts, and sugarcane on steep slopes. Cassava growers sell about half of their production to starch processors in a village about 30 kilometers away. They feed the rest to pigs, which are one of the farmers' best means of earning and saving cash.

A few years ago, Tho and his neighbor saw signs of trouble on their hillside plots. "We realized that production was going down, but we weren't sure why and didn't know what to do," he says. But now, as a result of participatory experiments, these farmers can see that the culprit is soil erosion.

Solutions That Cross Frontiers

Bui Van Tho and nine other farmers in this upland village are developing solutions to their erosion problem with technical help from Vietnam's National Institute for Soils and Fertilizers. Their work is part of a project coordinated by CIAT in four Southeast Asian countries, with funding from Japan's Nippon Foundation. The project is improving the ability of national institutions to employ farmer participatory methods in adapting new production and resource management technology to diverse situations.

At Dong Rang the farmer experimenters have established different types of barriers across the slopes, using plants such as vetiver grass and Tephrosia, a leguminous shrub. Just below each experimental plot, they have dug a trench and lined it with plastic to gauge the amount of sediment washed away by rain. The farmers have also tested high-yielding, high-starch cassava varieties, which CIAT and Thai scientists developed (with funding from the Japanese government) through hybridization of Latin American and local germplasm. The new varieties are now being further developed and promoted in northern Vietnam by the Bac Thai Agroforestry College.

Based on trial results, Tho has decided to extend the vetiver grass or Tephrosia barriers next season. Over time terraces will form behind them, providing further protection against erosion. Though the barriers occupy land that could be devoted to crop production, Tho and other farmers expect that the increased yields of the new varieties, which boost their income from pig production and cassava sales, will more than compensate for the loss.

Marcelo Cabrera, Pucallpa, Ucayali, Peru

The Problem

The village of Calleria, home to 513 of the Shipibo people in Peru's tropical rainforest, is aptly named after the winding river that shapes every aspect of community life. The seasonal rise and fall of the Calleria's waters—which flow into the Ucayali River, a tributary of the Amazon—determine when the Shipibo can fish or hunt and when they can clear small patches of forest along the river to plant cassava, rice, beans, and maize.

The Calleria also ties the destiny of the Shipibo to that of Pucallpa, a rapidly growing city about 100 kilometers up the Ucayali. In recent years logging companies there have paid this and other indigenous communities for the right to cut timber on their land. The city also provides an expanding market for Shipibo crafts and for their small surplus of fish and other agricultural products.

A road that links Pucallpa to the Andean highlands determines the pattern of life around the city. Built some 50 years ago, the road has brought a steady stream of colonists, who have cleared the forest along dirt roads branching out from the highway. One man who followed that route is Marcelo Cabrera. Originally from Cajamarca in northern Peru, he came to Pucallpa in 1968 in search of something better than a minimum wage job in Lima. Like most other colonists, he cleared forest to plant the same annual crops grown by the Shipibo, especially rice and maize. Then, in the mid-1980s he obtained seed of improved pastures and began to diversify into livestock production. Other colonists have opted for permanent crops, such as oil palm and fruit trees.

All these developments have come at a cost. A more sedentary life, based increasingly on a cash economy, has forced the Shipibo to place more pressure on the forest and to depend less on their wealth of knowledge about its hundreds of useful tree and other plant species. The rapid expansion of agriculture around Pucallpa places tremendous pressure on this biodiversity, while extensive burning in the dry season releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, adding to the threat of global climate change.

Solutions That Cross Frontiers

What happens to the forests here ultimately depends on the value that people assign to this immense natural resource. One CIAT study in the Pucallpa area has suggested that, contrary to conventional wisdom, small farmers practicing slash-and-burn at the forest margins do appreciate the need to preserve its biodiversity. But, as shown by another of our studies, clearing and pasture establishment increase land values, giving these same farmers a powerful financial incentive to clear more forest.

The problem is a lack of production alternatives and policy incentives that enable farmers to put their appreciation of biodiversity into practice. In a wide-ranging search for options, CIAT is working closely with various local and international organizations that belong to the Consortium for the Sustainable Development of Ucayali (CODESU). For example, we are engaged in a study with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF)—coordinator of the global Alternatives to Slash and Burn project—that documents indigenous knowledge about hundreds of useful forest species. In addition to preserving part of the Shipibo people’s cultural heritage, this research will generate information that should help integrate valuable species into improved cropping systems.

Scientists from CIAT and the Veterinary Institute for Research in the Tropics and Highlands (IVITA) are already seeking to incorporate agroforestry species into improved grass-legume pastures. Through the Tropileche project, these organizations are demonstrating the ability of such systems to intensify the production of livestock for meat and milk, while preserving important tree species. The project receives funds from IDB and through the CGIAR's Systemwide Livestock Program, which is coordinated by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

Marcelo Cabrera is one of the most active participants in Tropileche at Pucallpa. Although he suffered setbacks during the Shining Path guerilla's reign of terror, his livestock operation is thriving now, and the new grass-legume combinations are increasing his production of meat and milk.

Local organizations are pursuing other paths of development as well, including the production of permanent crops, such as oil palm and a native fruit referred to locally as camu-camu. IDRC's Food Links Initiative is exploring further opportunities for small farmers to break into national and export markets. In support of this effort, CIAT and CODESU scientists are gathering inventories of crops that farmers can grow, particularly species that are native to the Amazon and show strong market potential.

The development of new livestock production and agroforestry systems as well as the promotion of permanent crops are vital steps for enabling farm families around Pucallpa to fulfill the hopes that brought them to the forest margins. Because these systems are relatively stable, durable, and intensive, they also have potential for reducing pressure on the forest. But in order to accomplish this purpose, rather than create yet another incentive to clear more forest, new production systems must form part of an integrated research program that explicitly addresses the conservation imperatives of the Ucayali region. A new initiative that will help us do this involves the development of an integrated conceptual framework for research on tropical agroecosystems. The project is being funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and carried out by the University of Guelph and CIAT.

A key concern of our land management research around Pucallpa is government policy, since it directly affects the pace of deforestation and the viability of alternatives to slash and burn. To provide information that helps policy makers examine the issues and options, Center scientists are using participatory methods to determine the forces that account for current patterns of land use, and they are measuring the impact of land use on biodiversity and carbon emissions. With that information government officials, like the farmers around Pucallpa, will have a menu of options for putting their perceptions of the value of natural resources into practice.