ILEIA Newsletter Vol. 11 No. 1 p. 2

Dear Readers

The editors

This issue of the Newsletter does not deal with a specific theme. Nevertheless this collection of encouraging articles seems to contain a common message: ‘give room to innovating farmers’. Sherwood and Bentley as well as Ruddell and Beingolea show that farmers can handle abstract concepts. Sherwood and Bentley stress facilitation of farmer experimentation, whereas Ruddell and Beingolea have good experiences in training scientific methods with farmers. Milton Flores and Reijntjes report on spreading of ecological practices in respectively Honduras and India.

Decreasing profitability of ‘modern’ agriculture is ‘forcing’ farmers towards ecological practices. Is this a chance to discover the potential of such practices or is it a last resort for marginalised farmers? The article by VACVINA on Vietnam shows that where governmental policies, training, information and the economic situation support each other, integrated agriculture can spread very fast and can be adopted to all prevailing ecosystems.

Yet, despite these positive achievements we wonder whether this will suffice to counter the real ‘bottlenecks’ to sustainability: economic processes and power structures leading to poverty and environmental degradation. We have the impression that the increasing number of publications and conferences on sustainable agriculture still leave farmers too much outside.

Are economists, for example, still unable to develop instruments to analyse sustainable agriculture on all aspects important to small farmers and the environment? If you can help ILEIA with information on ‘economics dealing with sustainable agriculture’ this will be appreciated very much. In the next ILEIA newsletter we hope to come back on this issue.

As editors, we have experimented with a new idea: a cartoon. Daniel Shamebo’s story would, to our opinion, better come across with cartoons. ‘I was frigthened by the assignment, but I ran out of my office to find a cartoonist’, and he succeeded. Do you like this new idea? Could you find a local cartoonist and send in a true story for one of the next Newsletters?

Back to Top