"The situation is better now than when we were cultivating coffee," says Don
Carlos Daza, a 60-year-old Colombian farmer from the Andean highlands of southern
Colombia. He’s talking about a local mini-boom in the cultivation of maize that
he’s witnessed over the past few years. It has improved the diet of neighboring farm
families and put more pesos in their pockets. At the same time, they’ve learned a lot
about farming methods that don’t damage the environment.Don Carlos is one of the
main actors responsible for the change. His long experience as a farmer in this fragile
mountain ecosystem 1,500 meters above sea level is certainly one ingredient in the local
maize bonanza. But his real contribution came as a researcher and agricultural
communicator — even though he’s never been to university or had a job in a
laboratory.
Today the farmer and father of 10 is having tea on his farmhouse veranda with three
visitors from the nearby International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Puffing
slowly on a cigarette, Don Carlos recounts how the 114 farm families in the rural
districts (called veredas) of Pedregal and San Bosco are climbing out of a discouraging
cycle of poverty to become more self-sufficient than ever before.
The source of their success has largely been their own community-based research on
maize, especially the selection of varieties that grow well in this area. With their
community’s blessing, three farmers from San Bosco formed a "local agricultural
research committee" in 1990 (see box). Don Carlos joined the team in 1992 as a
communicator and extensionist.
Known by the Spanish acronym CIAL, the committee is one of 56 such farmer-research
teams now operating in Colombia’s Cauca department under an umbrella corporation
known as CORFOCIAL. In some instances, technical advice is supplied by CORFOCIAL experts,
in others by municipal extension agencies called UMATAs, or by agronomists working with
NGOs. More than a dozen other CIALs work with Colombia’s national agricultural
research organization, CORPOICA. And recently, the idea has been picked up and adapted by
groups in several other Latin American countries.
The idea that farmers should participate in research is, of course, not new. Conscious
of it or not, farmers have been doing "research" for millennia. They select for
desirable plant traits by saving seed, year after year, from genetically superior plants.
And in recent decades, national and international agricultural agencies have come to
accept that strong farmer input into formal research is critical to achieving relevant
results. In practice, this has taken the form of consultations with farmers and their
participation in crop variety trials run by researchers and extensionists.
Unfortunately, publicly funded research and extension agencies in many developing
countries have simply not delivered the goods to farmers. One reason is that they often
don’t have enough funding, staff or organizational capacity to design the multitude
of highly site-specific technical solutions needed by millions of small-scale farmers.
Such producers often live in complex, diverse and risk-prone environments — like
those found in the mountains of Colombia’s Cauca department. They grow many different
crops, at different altitudes, under varying soil and climatic conditions.
Ships in the Night
Where research agencies do come up with potentially useful farming technologies, like
improved crop varieties and crop management practices, farmer adoption rates are often
very low. The reasons vary. If a new technology is too generic, farmers may be unwilling
to risk trying it out for fear that it may be totally unsuited to their farming
environment. In which case, they would lose their shirts.
More often, poor adoption rates reflect a communications chasm between farmers and
researchers. In many countries, poor farmers are not organized and thus lack formal
channels for expressing their needs and ideas to scientists. When new technologies do
become available, the farmers feel no personal connection to them or sense of ownership.
Or, they simply never hear about them.
Meanwhile, there is often a parallel "folk" system of agricultural
experimentation led by innovative farmers. But it’s usually disconnected from the
benefits of mainstream science. The two systems — one at the grass roots based on
traditional knowledge, the other at the government level based on modern research methods
and sophisticated equipment — are like ships silently slipping past each other on a
foggy night.
What’s novel about the CIAL approach is the belief — by its main proponent
and architect, CIAT — that farmers should not only participate in adaptive research
but also control the agenda and conduct experiments. The rationale can be boiled down to
four basic ideas.
First, farmers have a wealth of traditional knowledge and insight into local
agriculture that can help rather than hinder mainstream scientific research. It’s
just a matter of knowing how to tap it. Unfortunately, this resource is all too often
ignored or even denigrated. Second, technology adoption rates go up when farmers, like Don
Carlos, feel a genuine sense of ownership of results. Third, strong local participation in
research creates a "demand-pull" on the supply of agricultural innovations from
public agencies, thus swelling the flow of technological options open to farmers. Last,
doing research this way is cheaper. It makes better use of the time of high-paid
government scientists, technicians, and extensionists.
Thanks to consistent financial backing from the U.S.-based Kellogg Foundation, CIAT was
able to put this CIAL rationale into practice and experiment with it on a large scale over
several years.
Beginning in 1990, CIAT worked with communities to set up five CIALs. It trained their
member farmers in crop-variety testing methods and management skills like budgeting and
community organization. Then, in an attempt to make CIAL formation self-sustaining, CIAT
began teaching NGOs, municipal agencies, and other intermediate groups to themselves train
agronomists in how to set up CIALs and provide technical support. Based on feedback from
various quarters, CIAT then fine-tuned its extensive collection of CIAL training
handbooks.
Over three phases of the project, the number of CIALs grew — from five to 18, and
then to 46. By 1993, farmer-researchers from a number of experienced CIALs began to be
trained as paraprofessionals to support new CIALs.
Does the CIAL Approach Work?
An evaluation of the CIAL experiment by CIAT revealed clear benefits to this approach
to research. The quality and usefulness of the farmer-led research was high. In an
analysis of 273 experimental plots set up by CIALs, the technical data from 75 percent
were statistically analyzable by trained scientists and capable of being interpreted by
farmers. For 15 percent, the results weren’t statistically analyzable, but they were
still meaningful to the farmers. For the remaining plots, the experiments were "lost
to analysis" for various reasons.
As for impact on the community, a rapid appraisal by CIAT showed that three-quarters of
the participating communities recognized the value of their CIALs’ work —
benefits such as new seed, new farming practices, and better technical information.
Furthermore, the CIALs seem to have had a measure of success in creating demand-pull,
that is, influencing government and NGO programs. For example, some agencies are now
willing to provide credit for the production of certain crops that CIALs have had success
with (like peas and maize) but that were not previously eligible for support. And some
local municipal extension groups, called UMATAs, are incorporating CIAL research results
into their own recommendations to farmers.
CIAT also observed that, as the CIALs matured, fewer advisory visits by agronomists
were needed. And it found that, by the third phase of the project, farmers trained as
paraprofessionals could in fact substitute for trained agronomists as long as they could
consult the agronomists when the need arose.
The issue of efficient use of public resources in conducting adaptive research is of
special concern to governments and donors. From this perspective, the CIALs again seem to
be a success.
CIAT analyzed the labor required for on-farm varietal trials. It found that a fully
trained CIAL can do the work for a little over one-third the cost (based on salaries) of
having it done the more traditional way — by research and extension agencies. An
important implication here is that high-paid professionals can at least double the number
of farmer groups and on-farm trials they support if adaptive research is decentralized to
CIALs.
For farmer-researchers like Don Carlos Daza, the rationale for CIALs has little to do
with concepts like demand-pull and comparative research costs. Rather, the emphasis is on
something much closer to home: survival on the land.
"From poverty arose the need to set up CIALs for improving our standard of
living," he says. While farm sizes here in Cauca vary a lot, the average in Pedregal
vereda is around 4 hectares. In adjacent San Bosco, it’s only about half that —
an area whose perimeter, if square, could be walked in under 10 minutes. In many cases,
the residents of San Bosco and Pedregal own no land except the small lot their house sits
on. So they are forced to share-crop or work as paid laborers for other farmers.
This scarcity of land, along with the inherent difficulties of farming steep terrain,
poses a serious food production challenge to the many poor families of these two
communities.
Beyond Coffee
In years past, says Don Carlos, many farmers grew coffee as a cash crop. Profits
allowed them to buy other foods, especially chicken. But then a new pest arrived —
the coffee borer — and many farmers had to abandon production. This forced them to
consider other options such as growing more maize. But here, too, the road to food
security was littered with obstacles.
Because maize production tends to deplete soil nutrients rapidly, tradition has favored
the clearing of new land for the crop. A group of farmers would typically find an unused
hillside and quickly strip it of vegetation. Unable able to remove all the rocks, stumps
and roots, they would plant seeds helter skelter, often as much as two meters apart. Don
Carlos, a lanky man, gets up from the table and takes five or six giant steps around his
veranda to illustrate the large planting distances. Along with other factors, this
cropping method produced variable, but generally feeble, maize yields.
In years of surplus, all the farmers would end up bringing their maize to market at the
same time, explains Don Carlos. This was because they didn’t have equipment to
process the grain into meal and lacked information about proper storage. The temporary
glut resulted in low prices — exacerbated by the cheap maize imports permitted under
Colombia’s trade liberalization policies. So, local producers ended up with very
little cash to buy other necessities of life.
To make matters worse, insects attacked whatever stores of maize seed were set aside
for the next cropping season. So most farmers simply accepted the fact they would have to
buy seed every year from commercial suppliers. This was an added drain on their savings
and, at the same time, they were never sure about the quality of the seed they were
buying.
Experimenting with Maize
In this region of Colombia, the main crops are maize, beans, cassava, plantain and
coffee. Maize is an especially versatile staple grain. A coarse meal called
"cuchuco" is the main ingredient in a popular soup. Maize is also used to make
bread called "arepa" and the fermented drink "chicha".
When the local research committee was formed, it was up to the residents of the veredas
to decide on the research priority. They chose maize because they felt that improvements
in its production would make the best overall contribution to family nutrition.
As with the work of all CIALs, the research took place in several stages. To begin
with, the farmers worked closely with experts on the design of their experiments.
The farmers had a precise idea of the traits they were looking for, says Don Carlos.
They wanted maize varieties with high yield, bright color (white or yellow), and kernels
"the size of a horse’s tooth." Besides that, their preference was for plant
stocks of intermediate height. If the stocks were too short, the farmers reasoned, the
cobs would be too small. If they were too tall, the plants might "lodge", that
is, fall over in high winds.
CIAT gave the farmer-researchers access to 10 candidate varieties of maize. These came
courtesy of the seed bank of CIAT’s sister institute, the International Maize and
Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which has a regional office at CIAT headquarters.
The farmers then carried out three sets of maize experiments over three years. They
decided not to clear new land for the experiments because, as Don Carlos says, "In
the long run, it is not good for the environment." Rather, they planted the maize in
existing fields in two locations, along a river and on a hillside. With each round of
experiments, the area planted increased.
The experiments were a success. The CIAL members’ evaluation of the results led
them to select two improved varieties from among the 10 candidates. Both were
open-pollinated varieties rather than hybrids. This meant that farmers would be able to
collect and store their own seed for later crops rather than having to buy it.
The impact of the CIAL’s varietal testing and extension efforts with local farmers
has been nothing short of remarkable. Where producers in Pedregal and San Bosco used to
get only about 100 kilograms of maize per half-kilo packet of seed, they now get 1,250
kilograms.
The CIAL experience has armed the farmers of San Bosco and Pedregal not only with more
suitable maize varieties, but also with better information on crop and land management.
For example, "When we grow maize now, we incorporate all the plant debris back into
the soil," says Don Carlos. In addition, the farmers plant in straight lines with
only 30 centimeters between plants and 80 centimeters between rows. They weed only once,
at the beginning of the season, and in cases where the root crop cassava has been planted
before the maize crop, they fertilize with chicken manure.
Seeds of Empowerment
During the research project, the CIAL members also tackled another major problem: seed
production, selection and storage. A CIAT agronomist arranged for the four CIAL members to
visit CIAT headquarters. There they were trained in basic seed-related techniques by a
CIMMYT scientist.
The farmers learned, for example, that seed is best selected from the center portion of
healthy cobs. And if they want to promote intermediate stock height, they can uproot very
short maize plants and break off the tops of very tall ones to prevent pollination. Seed
from the remaining plants is then more likely to produce maize plants to the farmers’
liking. These methods also helped the CIAL to improve a local maize variety called Junga,
says Don Carlos.
The farmers also learned to dry maize seed and store it safely. Whether used for food
or for subsequent planting, kernels remain viable for at least a year. Don Carlos, a man
who prefers to "show" rather than "tell", drives home the point for
his CIAT guests on the veranda by displaying a large container full of select maize seed.
Before being stored in plastic containers with tight-fitting lids, the sundried seed
should be cooled down, says Don Carlos. And there is no need to add insecticide. Testing
to determine whether sun-drying has sufficiently reduced the seed’s humidity for
storage purposes, he notes, is still done the traditional way — by biting into a few
kernels.
Local Milling
A logical extension of the CIAL’s work has been the installation of a maize mill
in San Bosco. The CIAL’s coordinator, Adelmo Calambas, presented a proposal to the
coffee growers’ federation and the umbrella group for the CIALs, CORFOCIAL. As a
result, the CIAL got the necessary loans to buy milling equipment and construct a building
to house it. Now local farmers can produce their own multiple-purpose maize meal instead
of having to buy it. The mill can also grind up maize cobs into pig feed, and the bran
from milling can be used for the same purpose.
By improving maize cultivation and gaining control of processing and seed production,
the CIAL has been empowered in two ways.
First, its members have gained community respect and recognition. This encourages them
to speak out on behalf of local farmer interests and to continue innovating. For example,
Mr. Calambas, who is 29, says his work as CIAL coordinator has boosted his self-confidence
and made him more articulate in dealing with institutions and officials. In fact, he
credits his CIAL experience with getting him elected head of his vereda’s local
action committee.
His CIAL is also considering other potential projects to benefit the community —
like reforestation around mountain springs to increase water supplies. And it is helping a
local women’s group to experiment with the production of vegetables — coriander
leaves, cabbage, beans, onions, lettuce and tomatoes — and different types of
fertilizer. The main aim of the 14 women is to prevent malnutrition among their children.
In the longer term, though, they also hope to generate income from sales.
The second type of empowerment from the maize boom, especially seed production, is
financial. The CIAL is selling seed of the selected varieties to farmers in about 25
surrounding veredas, most of which don’t have their own CIAL. To date, there has been
no need to advertise the service, says Don Carlos. News travels by "bush
telegraph," as one CIAT staff member put it. Encouraged by the community interest and
the cash flow, the CIAL is now keen to acquire a piece of land for continued varietal
trials and to produce more seed.
Both Don Carlos and Mr. Calambas agree that the main community benefit of the
CIAL’s work so far has been improved family nutrition. Not only is there more maize
for the dinner table, but surplus meal can be fed to chickens and pond-raised fish. A
second benefit, says Don Carlos, is that the local capacity to organize, experiment, and
share research results via the CIAL can now be used to improve other crops.
Promoting "Autogestion"
Ann Braun manages the CIAT farmer participation project linked to the CIALs. She refers
to this second kind of benefit as "autogestion," the Spanish word for
self-management. She means the ability of communities to take charge of problem-solving,
whether it relates to crop improvement or other needs. A key component of self-management,
she stresses, is mobilizing resources. "If you look at the impressive record of
success of Cauca’s CIALs when it comes to getting funding from PRONATTA, you see
‘autogestion’ at work." (PRONATTA is a Colombian national program for the
transfer of agricultural technology. With support from the World Bank, it cofinances
agricultural projects.)
"The CIALs have generally looked at crop production issues," says Braun,
adding that the CIAL model may have valuable applications in other areas. "Can CIAL
methodology be adapted and used to set up rural agroenterprises, such as seed production
and food processing?" she asks. "That seems to be the direction some of the
CIALs are headed in. And are the CIALs a way to address issues of natural resource
management, such as water supply protection?"
If the San Bosco/Pedregal CIAL is any indication, the answer to both questions appears
to be yes, though altered goals will require new skills and organizational models. Such
issues, says Braun, are important to CIAT. The center’s researchers are interested in
much more than the quality and technical details of farmer-led research on crops. They
also want to solve current organizational problems and identify new models that enhance
farmer participation in adaptive research of various stripes. The ultimate goal is to
boost technology adoption rates and family incomes.
Links between the UMATAs and the CIALs exemplify the kind of organizational issues CIAT
is grappling with. The UMATAs are municipal agricultural extension agencies that often
serve as host institutions and technical advisers to CIALs within their jurisdictions. But
the UMATAs are prone to high staff turnover, since appointments are at the discretion of
locally elected politicians. A new mayor often means a new UMATA staff, which disturbs the
continuity of the CIAL-UMATA relationship.
A common complaint has been that UMATAs are hard to work with and their staff often
miss CIAL-related meetings. Some observers suggest that this behavior is an inevitable
part of local political culture where the mayor’s agenda, not always the same as the
farmers’, is the UMATA’s priority.
Making matters worse is the fact that the UMATAs are generally short on resources. They
do provide the CIALs with some technical advice and sometimes with seeds and fertilizer,
but not much else.
Such problems make it clear why CIAT is looking well beyond the biophysical aspects of
small-scale agriculture. "We have to know a lot of sociology too," says
CIAT’s Ignacio "Nacho" Roa, one of two agronomists who has worked
intensively at the grass roots during the 8-year development of the CIAL model.
"Culture and local customs have a huge influence on how farmers make decisions."
Roa recognizes that the priority for many communities wanting to form CIALs will
initially be food production for home consumption rather than market-oriented enterprises.
"First, people have to take care of their basic necessities. If they don’t have
enough maize, beans, and potatoes, they’re not going to be interested in something
like fruit production."
An Idea Spreads
The CIAL model is slowly spreading in Colombia. From the initial five experimental
CIALs set up in 1990, the number has grown to about 75. While this level of national
penetration is still modest compared with the overall size of Colombia’s agricultural
population, the successes to date have been a catalyst for a recent, bold move by the
country’s national agricultural research organization, CORPOICA.
In March 1998, CORPOICA, announced plans to extend the CIAL model to the entire
country. Created in 1993, the institute has close ties with CIAT and works with numerous
CIALs in rural areas near the capital, Bogotá. Its technology transfer program will take
2 years to formulate a detailed CIAL-based plan that will be put into place in the
following 3 years.
Santiago Fonseca Martínez, one of CORPOICA’s regional directors, points out that
when it comes to agricultural innovation in Colombia, "technology transfer is the
weak point due to the top-down research system we inherited." The CIAL approach, he
says, is "a good methodology for validating and testing technology" and it helps
CORPOICA set priorities for research. His point is important since CIAT’s evaluation
of the CIALs revealed that the crops farmers are interested in experimenting with are not
necessarily the same as those the public research system has chosen to work on.
Furthermore, technology transfer becomes much easier, says Dr. Martínez, when there is
a measure of community organization in place, as in many of the veredas that have set up
CIALs.
Meanwhile, CIAT, which has an international mandate, is working with partner agencies
to promote the CIAL concept in other countries of Latin America: Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In Honduras alone, 48 CIALs, including
six run by women, have been set up since 1994. About half of these are experimenting with
varieties of beans which, along with maize, is a chief staple.
In Brazil, the number of farmer research committees, there called COPALs, is only about
half that in Honduras. But the potential benefits, if the idea spreads, are enormous for
two reasons. First, Brazil is the most populous country of Latin America. Second, the four
northeastern regions in which the local committees are operating account for half of the
country’s cassava production. That semiarid area, where soil quality is poor and farm
productivity low, is home to some of the poorest farmers in the Americas. For them, even a
small increase in food security or income would make a big difference.
The creation of the COPALs in Brazil was part of a major international project on
cassava that also includes African countries. Funded by the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP), the work brings together researchers and other specialists from CIAT,
Brazil’s national agricultural research organization, called EMBRAPA, and state-level
research and extension agencies.
Moving Upstream
While CIAT continues to promote geographic expansion of the CIAL approach to adaptive
research, it is simultaneously pursuing an even more ambitious goal: moving farmer
participation, especially that of women, farther upstream in the research process. This
means involving farmers more fully not only in technology testing but also in setting
research priorities and other tasks.
To this end, CIAT has taken on the role of coordinator for a five-year, US$9 million
global initiative sponsored by four international agricultural research centers and funded
by six countries. It is called the Systemwide Program on Participatory Research and Gender
Analysis for Technology Development and Institutional Innovation. Launched in 1997, the
program was recently described by its coordinator as a means of "bringing farmers out
of the field and into the screen houses, labs, and meeting rooms."
Current efforts to give farmers a controlling role in research may one day be
remembered as the beginning of an historic shift in the way tropical agricultural science
is conducted — a kind of ‘revolution of relevance.’ Whether through the
emergence of CIALs working in adaptive research or through the new global program to
involve farmers even earlier in research, CIAT and its partners have sent a clear message
to the international development community, especially agricultural scientists: It’s
no longer business as usual; please step aside and make room for farmers.
If their efforts succeed, technologies will be more relevant, reach more poor farmers,
and improve family incomes. And for the governments, donors, and taxpayers who foot the
bill, it will mean more impact per peso or dollar invested in research.
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