Uganda: Learning around online repositories

Open to all organisations and individuals interested in sharing agricultural knowledge, experiences and information, the Uganda Exchange Group started at the end of 2009. Since then, it has attracted members from all over the country, including extension workers, researchers, NGOs, rural entrepreneurs, public institutions, farmers, and students. It is now hosting the new interactive TECA, (Technologies for Agriculture), an online information, knowledge and communication system for agricultural technologies and proven best practices. This is a pilot FAO initiative that provides an opportunity for researchers and end users to exchange information and learn from each other.

TECA is unique in that it provides information about technologies that have been tested by small-scale farmers, and which can be easily replicated in similar farming systems. At the moment, members of the Uganda Exchange Group are interested in drawing specific lessons in relation to the use of the platform for sharing information, but one is already clear: the need to recognise the importance of sharing information. These lessons will be used to help to set up and facilitate similar exchange and discussion groups in other countries. Thematic discussions and exchange groups on issues such as beekeeping have already been started.

To find out more, contact Estibalitz Morras, Karin Nichterlein, or Bruce Kisitu, at teca@fao.org, or visit the TECA site: www.fao.org/teca

Colombia: Peer-to-peer training

Several months ago, thirteen young women and men from the community of Palenque, in northern Colombia, travelled for ten days around the districts of Santander and Cauca, to visit four micro-enterprises. They were taking part in one of the 40 “Learning Routes” organised by PROCASUR (the Regional Programme for Rural Development Training) in different countries. These Learning Routes are an innovative approach to facilitate exchanges of knowledge and skills between farmers, development projects and private organisations. The thirteen visitors were interested in seeing how their hosts commercialised their products and how they organised themselves to increase profits.

After ten days of talks and field visits, they returned to Palenque with a set of concrete action plans for their own crops and micro-industries. Since then they have been implementing these plans, with some seeing their incomes rise by 35 percent. While those being visited “realised how much we knew”, the Palenque participants were happy to “learn from those like us, with similar problems”. Learning Routes expose participants to case-based experiences and best practices, and use peer exchange to scale up encouraging approaches.

To find out more, contact Ariel Halpern, at PROCASUR, Santiago, Chile. E-mail: ahalpern@procasur.org

South Africa: Cherry peppers in Pothini and Obonjanemi

Looking for crops which would help them earn higher incomes, several farmers from the Okhahlamba district of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, had talks with a commercial farmer who suggested they could grow “cherry peppers” (Capsicum), which could be processed and sold together with his own production.

With help from the Farmer Support Group of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, two groups of farmers from Potshini and Obonjaneni decided to try growing it in their fields. They signed a partnership agreement with the commercial farmer, who agreed to provide the required inputs at cost, technical advice, and to help them transport the produce to the processing unit. At the end of the season, a detailed evaluation showed very positive results, in terms of both crop performance and net incomes: “cherry pepper” proved to be a viable cash crop for this area.

With different stakeholders involved, this experiment included both a technical and a social component. Farmers tried a new crop, and proved that they could produce it successfully. But, through the process, they also developed a new relationship with the commercial farmer. While interactions between them in the past had been limited to discussions (and conflict) regarding the movement of animals from the community to the adjacent farm to seek grazing, working together allowed them to try out new ideas, develop expertise, and increase their incomes.

To find out more, contact Nono Shezi, at the Farmer Support Group, Scottsville, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. E-mail: shezin@ukzn.ac.za

Ethiopia: Empowering farmers’ organisations

Established in 2007, the Ethiopian Learning Alliance is a joint initiative between the member organisations of Agri-Profocus and their Ethiopian partners, and it is designed to empower farmers’ organisations in their dealings with value chains. The Alliance involves a learningby- doing approach to value chain development, in which farmer organisations and service providers get together for a series of workshops and assignments. In the process they identify and map the main actors, establish stronger relationships and build engagements, and monitor and evaluate all their activities. Several farmers’ organisations that have been through the process have subsequently developed specific business plans. They have also found different ways of containing losses or increasing incomes by working together as a farmer-marketing organisation (FMO).

In 2009, for example, farmers in Maja Gero had a bad harvest due to an extremely short rainy season, so prices went up. The FMO allowed members to buy grain at a below market price, in exchange for their share of the group’s dividend. The opposite happened in Tulubulu this year. Farmers had bumper harvests of teff, which lowered prices. The FMO would have incurred a loss selling it on the open market. Farmers kept their grain for consumption and agreed to deliver the same amount of grain + 10 percent by the next harvest, thus saving the organisation from a financial blow and benefiting everybody.

To find out more, contact Wim Goris and Eva Smulders, Agri-ProFocus Ethiopia, at wgoris@agriprofocus.nl, or visit http://apf-ethiopia.ning.com

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Farmers are keen observers. But new technologies and other far-reaching changes in agriculture have taken many decisions out of their hands. Inevitably, some crucial observation skills have got lost. Farmer Field Schools and other participatory learning approaches stimulate farmers to reconnect with nature through discovery learning. The focus of such schools is to improve farmers’ observation skills and to trust their own assessments, rather than depending on the advice of extension workers and input providers. This may seem a simple idea, but it is crucial. Such an approach empowers small-scale family farmers.

Discovery learning is not just about facts; it is about relationships in a system, about causes and effects. It empowers farmers to deal with complex, often unexpected, situations. The common theme (or as us Dutch say, the “red thread”) of this issue is the role of partnerships in learning .

How do different stakeholders collaborate? What do they learn from working together? What drives them to collaborate? We all know that such processes are complex and often “messy”. They are always political. Pressures on the natural resource base are increasing everywhere, so partnerships that involve different actors – be it a Climate Field School or a group of actors working to establish a sustainable commodity chain – have to deal with an increasing range of perspectives, power relations and vested interests.

Yet groups and individuals increasingly recognise the benefit of collaboration, as people can rarely solve such problems by themselves. We hope that the articles in this issue will trigger your imagination. The real learning adepts will enjoy Steve Sherwood’s thematic overview which discusses some interesting theoretical perspectives on learning, knowledge and social change.

Let’s get cracking and have a closer look at partnerships and learning.

Text: Edith van Walsum

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The establishment of strong and efficient partnerships can contribute enormously to family farming, in many different ways. All efforts to enhance learning, however, must ensure that local people remain in control of the process. External agents need to be very aware of the role they want to take and of the role they are in effect taking.

While facilitators of technologycentred approaches tend to preoccupy themselves with “what farmers do not do” and on “how to get them to farm differently”, a people-centred approach seeks to help farmers understand what they do and why as a source of inspiration for continuity and change. This must be our point of departure when looking at partnerships, or at the role that “outsiders” play in promoting learning that is founded on local experience.

Critics of externally led rural development rightfully raise serious concerns over the influence of outsiders in local development. We call special attention to the moral and ethical obligations that an externally based organiser – be it a farmer from another community or someone from a nearby city or another country – is as transparent as possible about her or his worldview, motivations and agenda in seeking a partnership for change.

This edition of Farming Matters presents a diversity of learning-based approaches. Here, I highlight a handful of ideas on rural education that came to mind upon my perusal of the articles, before summarising some thoughts on effective partnerships for learning.

Culture as the seedbed of learning

In his provocative book, “A short history of progress”, the anthropologist Ronald Wright explains that, from a biological perspective, humans are no smarter today than they were 10,000 years ago. In other words, an ice-age child could be reared in a modern family and, afforded the right nurturing and opportunities, he or she could perform perfectly well and have every bit the same chances as any child in excelling in school and becoming a medical doctor. This insight is a sharp criticism of most modern education programmes, but it is consistent with the sort of approaches that ILEIA has been championing for the last 26 years.

Wright convincingly argues that knowledge is not stored in the brain; rather, it is embedded in culture. Similarly, farmers belong to communities of practice and, as such, they contribute to and learn from unfolding histories. In this sense, learning is about routine – reproducing age-old traditions expressed, for example, in a certain way of planting. But agriculture, of course, is not static. Each time a farmer drops her seed it falls into an ever-changing world. Learning is also about change – occasionally breaking with timehonoured practice and giving birth to future tradition.

Cultivating the human farm

The Honduran educator and farmer-philosopher, the late Elias Sanchez, inspired a passion for popular education in thousands of community organisers. Elias argued that, at the most basic level, learning involves “cultivating the human farm”. He summarised learning as the process of managing the “head”, the “heart” and the “hands”. His ideas were based on a fundamental tenet of individual learning described by Benjamin Bloom as “domains of knowledge”: cognition (mental skills – the ability to associate, comprehend, and think creatively), affective capacity (the ability to grow emotionally and have feelings, to value and find inspiration for action), and psychomotor skills (the ability to perform manual and physical skills). Accordingly, effective learning involves the simultaneous “cultivation” of each. Neglect the head, heart or hands, Elias said, and learning is incomplete – the human farm collapses.

In this issue, Winarto and colleagues (p. 10) explain how outsiders helped Indonesian farmers to “read” and interpret rainfall patterns, demonstrating why it is important for them to understand the multiple aspects of the “human farm”. They also show why it is important to understand that the “human farm” does not emerge and operate exclusively through the activities of an individual. Rather, it involves the family, which is a part of communities of neighbouring human farms. These, in turn, seamlessly interact in networks of other activities around food. Thus, learning in agriculture is very much a collective enterprise, and as such, effective partnering in peoplecentred development requires special attention to the social aspects of agriculture.

Social transformation

The tradition of “participation” in development is rooted in the tradition of non-formal, popular education and life-long learning pioneered by Nikolaj Grundtvig, founder of the Danish Folk Schools in the 19th century.

This groundbreaking work influenced similar rural peoples’ movements throughout Europe. A century later it directly inspired activity across the world, such as that supported by James Yen’s Mass Education Movement in China, Paulo Freire’s adult literacy programmes in Brazil, Myles Horton’s Highlander Folk Education Center in Appalachia in the United States, and countless other examples.

Such examples show that if well managed, and if planned as part of a democratic spirit that respects local tradition and the right to self-determination, partnering can help people break through their preconceived notions of what is possible. Beyond mere participation in learning activities, local control over the learning agenda is central to democratic change. This means that an external facilitator must be continually aware of his or her own role in the community.

Partnering for learning

As a first step towards assuring democratic facilitation, a practitioner needs to carefully manage how he or she goes about promoting change. In particular, locally led learning processes need to:

• help individuals in understanding themselves as learners (through open discussion of learning styles and processes of critical reflection);
• encourage individuals to expand their learning experiences and styles (overcoming barriers and exploring new strategies);
• employ a variety of instructional approaches (so that participants experience different ways of interacting and learning);
• create an environment in which tolerance and diversity can thrive; and
• create a climate in which collaboration exists (where participants work with one another as resources).

Admittedly, arriving to a community with a partnership in mind and a learning agenda in your pocket can be problematic. For an outsider, effective partnering for development begins first and foremost with reflective practice and honesty. This means understanding and being up-front with one’s own worldview, biases, agenda and motivations for seeking a partnership for change. It then involves the capacity to work shoulder-to-shoulder with others — both as individuals and in collectives — to mobilise their single most valuable resource for continuity and change: people.

Text: Stephen Sherwood

Stephen Sherwood, a family farmer in Ecuador, teaches part-time at Wageningen University’s Communication and Innovation Studies Group. He is also co-founder of Groundswell International (www.groundswellinternational.org), a partnership of grassroots practitioners dedicated to rural transformation.
E-mail: ssherwood@ekorural.org

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Farming Matters | 30.4 | December 2014

The World Health Organization reports that in Nepal, 39% of under-five’s are underweight and 48% have anemia. The country’s primary nutritional issues were identified as chronic energy deficiency in mothers, low infant birth weights, widespread childhood malnutrition, and deficiencies in Vitamin A, iron and iodine. Inadequate micronutrients are especially common in remote rural communities where dietary diversity is limited, and is a particular problem with women and children. Lack of nutritional education and resources for maintaining long term food and nutritional security contribute to these problems.

Home gardens

Despite these serious problems, some rural communities have started to improve their food and nutritional security through investing in more genetically diverse home gardens. Various programmes are supporting this move, including a large project implemented by LI-BIRD over the past 12 years, a national NGO supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and Bioversity International.

Home gardens used to be a cornerstone of traditional Nepalese farming systems, but over time, they have slowly begun to lose their importance in people’s eyes as a relic of old-fashioned customs. But now, their importance is being recognised once again.

A home garden is the area around a homestead where traditional and improved varieties of vegetables, fruits, fodder, herbs, spices, mushrooms and ornamental plants are grown, along with livestock, fish and bees. Production from home gardens is primarily intended for family consumption though many farmers may also produce a surplus for sale.

Nutritional calendars were developed with local people that showed the monthly gaps in nutrition for each community. Farmers were supported with the provision of vegetable seeds and fruit saplings. They also received training on human nutrition, and on low cost sustainable home garden management techniques. The introduction and integration of goats, pigs, poultry, mushrooms, fish and bees was also promoted, to complement family nutrition and household income as well as providing agroecological benefits to the farming system as a whole.

How home gardens were developed was decided by farmer groups within each community. These groups are village level institutions with a defined legal status that also abide by national rules and regulations. In each home garden group, the inclusion and participation of marginalised groups based on ethnicity, gender or poverty, allowed more equitable access to the opportunities and benefits. The garden groups received support not only in specific techniques, but also in organising themselves, thus preparing them long for continuation of project activities. The farmer groups built knowledge and skills on governance, accounting and finance, and building relations with service providers. They also implemented a savings and credit programme that allows them to overcome unforeseen financial problems.

Cultivating diversity

The tiny home garden of Surya and Saraswati Adhikari is flourishing. Situated directly in front of their house in Begnas village, Kaski district, just a few steps from the kitchen and storage areas, more than two-dozen different plants can be found in their eight square metre plot. Papaya and banana trees stand tall. Below grow many local vegetable varieties, and climbing beans vines wrap themselves around edible bamboo stalks.

Other medicinal, cultural, and decorative plants such as tulsi, barbari, and til, help the family and the community as a whole to preserve traditional knowledge and practices otherwise at risk of being forgotten.

Chemical contamination and poisoning from unregulated use of industrial pesticides by untrained farmers is a widespread problem. But Surya and Saraswati use no insecticides, herbicides or fertilizers in their garden, preferring mulches and compost to enrich the soil and natural fertilizers to promote plant growth.

Still, many farmers with home gardens struggle to maintain vegetable production during the dry season, especially in hilly areas where the availability of water is limited. To overcome this, farmers began collecting waste water in small tanks and using this to irrigate their gardens. Mr Lok Bahadur explains, “I have constructed a water tank of nearly 500 litres in my garden and I can now grow vegetables even in the dry summer.” This result has been aptly described as producing ‘taste from waste’.

Women and nutrition

Women know the importance of home gardens for family nutrition very well as they typically take responsibility for both. With respect to which fruits and vegetables to grow, food preparation and feeding the family, women make critical decisions that have lasting impacts on the lives of their children and other family members.

A proper understanding of the relationship between the plants grown in the family garden and the nutritional makeup of meals prepared in the kitchen is indispensable for addressing the issue of malnutrition.

Saraswati Adhikari is responsible for the family’s cooking, and is fully aware that creating a proper nutritional balance in each and every dish is a delicate task of the utmost importance. Most rural families only eat two main meals a day, with white rice as the staple carbohydrate source. Daal is a typical Nepali dish prepared from lentils or beans, both of which are an important source of dietary iron and protein for rural communities.

On days when it is not served, she prepares a stew of taro leaves or mustard greens that supplements the iron intake. Taro leaves are also a rich source of vitamins A and C, and when consumed with vegetable sources of iron and protein, significantly increase their absorption by the body. In the summer, ripe cucumber is sprinkled with iodized salt as a cooling afternoon snack, helping the family to avoid the range of disorders associated with iodine deficiency.

Saraswati carefully crafts each family meal with a wide range of fresh fruits and vegetables from her home garden. And the health benefits of such a nutritious diet are being felt. Now able to consume fresh vegetables all year round, Lok Bahadur explains, “I feel in good health compared to before. Previously I had to travel to Kathmandu up to four times a year for medical treatment, but not any more.”

Beyond self-sufficiency

Home gardens have also added to household incomes and the nutrition of others, with surplus produce sold for cash in local markets. Home gardens have also proven to be useful ‘testing grounds’ for some farmers, where they have experimented with new plants and practices, learnt, adapted, and then scaled up the successes on their fields. After learning from their home gardening experiences, others have increased production to such an extent that for the first time, they have excess to sell.

Mrs Champa Chaudhary is from the indigenous Tharu community in western Nepal. Not long ago she had limited access to resources and used to have practically no say in household decisions despite her responsibilities for cooking and household tasks.

Wage-labour was the only source of income, and the food that she could grow was never sufficient to support her family for more than four months in any year. Champa has since improved her gardening skills, increased and diversified her production portfolio, and last year she was able to earn 5000 Nepalese Rupees (around US$50) from selling surplus crops. She proudly explains, “I do not have to spend my husband’s hard earned money any more to buy expensive vegetables from the market. And now the community has also started listening to my advice on how to grow vegetables.”

Women step up

Champa is not alone in finding herself having a new social status. The development of home gardens has brought prosperity and social development to communities in a number of ways. Not only have women developed their skills and knowledge about growing fruits and vegetables, rearing small livestock and linking farm products to markets, but they have also, developed leadership skills and increased their participation and influence in local affairs.

In addition, saving and credit groups have provided a platform for women to manage their individual and family financial resources. They now meet and discuss various issues at the community level. This increased and regularized group interaction has thus mobilised and enhanced rural womens’ leadership skills.

More than 80 home gardeners have stepped up to become their local community’s ‘resource home gardener’, a role played by one in every 25 home gardeners. With initial technical and material support from the LI-BIRD project, ‘resource home gardeners’ have become focal points for the exchange of local knowledge and seeds. Sita Bhugel, living in Kathjor, Ramechhap, once grew very few vegetables and only during the wet season. After participating in the home garden programme, she started to grow many different crops all year round. She inspired and taught many of her neighbours and became a local resource contact. She has become so respected in her community that she was recently nominated to be vice president of the village-level Agriculture, Forest and Environment Committee.

An ideal approach

The maintenance and expansion of genetically diverse home garden systems is an ideal approach to ensure nutritional security for farm families in Nepal. A wide range of fruits, vegetables, medicinal herbs and spices helps to supplement often limited family diets, and provides a host of essential micronutrients in the process. As the vast majority of rural families already maintain home gardens this undertaking can build on existing local knowledge and requires minimal financial investment. The result is widespread implementation and spread of this grassroots method.

On a broader level, home gardens offer increased resilience for farming households in the face of risks brought about by climate change and the migration of many men who migrate to urban centres in search of off-farm employment. Women are developing their capacities to produce food, generate income and take leadership positions. They are feeding their communities while cultivating and conserving a wealth of local biodiversity – species and varieties that are better able to resist the vagaries of more frequent and severe droughts, unpredictable climate changes, and pest and disease outbreaks.

Roshan Mehta, Roshan Pudasaini and Jacob Zucker

Roshan Mehta and Roshan Pudasaini work for Local Initiatives for Biodiversity Research and Development
(LI-BIRD) in Nepal. Jacob Zucker is a student at Princeton University and was an intern at Bioversity International’s Nepal office.
Email: roshankmehta@gmail.com or jzucker@princeton.edu

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The “Degraded Pastures” project in Central America has had an impact that has extended far beyond the duration and scope of the project. This is because the joint learning process that it established motivated the participants to continue working together, and also motivated other organisations, both public and private, to join or support them.

In the past 40 years the area under pastures in Latin America increased from 473 to 555 million hectares, and the number of cattle has risen from 195 to 394 million. This growth has resulted in forest loss and fragmentation. Pastures are now the main agricultural land use, particularly in areas like El Petén, in Guatemala.

However, between 50-70% of those pastures are degraded, with low forage yields that have poor nutritive value. This lowers their carrying capacity and the performance of the cattle. Equally, degraded pastures are less effective in providing ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity and water availability and quality. All these aspects of pasture degradation reduce the income and food security of livestock farmer families and the livelihoods of rural communities.

Learning about sustainable land use…

Between 2003 and 2008, the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) carried out a project on sustainable land use alternatives for degraded pasture lands in Central America, the “Degraded Pastures” project. Its main objective was to promote a joint learning process between livestock farmers and their families, the staff of research and development institutions and policy makers. This was intended to develop and strengthen peoples’ capabilities and skills for more sustainable land use practices. In this article we only refer to the experiences in El Petén (Guatemala), although similar results were achieved in central Nicaragua and the northern coast of Honduras.

Although several institutions (academic, governmental and NGOs) were invited to participate, during the first two years the project staff worked almost solely with farmers’ groups. Potential institutional partners appeared hesitant to participate and follow approaches that deviated from the “top-down” extension model with its “sender-receiver” approach to communication. But in the end, the use of the Farmer Field School methodology was highly appreciated by farmers and by the field staff of the institutions that did participate. This approach helped catalyse a general shift in training modes from the formal, traditional approaches, towards a more practical “learning-bydoing” approach.

… through more participatory methods

All programme partners were trained in Livestock Farmer Field Schools methodologies to ensure that sessions followed the principles of participatory learning and experimentation. An unplanned result of the exposure of faculty staff to these innovative methods was the introduction of “new” topics (such as agroforestry, rural development, sociology and tropical forages) into the curricula of several undergraduate courses at the university. FFS methodologies also became part of the basic training for advanced students. Between 2007 and 2008, 230 students, and 46 lecturers and other staff of partner institutions were trained in Guatemala (and an equivalent number of professionals and students were trained in Honduras and Nicaragua).

Forty Farmer Field Schools, with more than 500 participants, were established in different regions of Guatemala. In the lowlands (in the southern and eastern part of the country) these focused on dualpurpose cattle systems, the main livestock activity. In the Central Highlands they focused on small ruminants. In all cases advanced students and staff from the university functioned as facilitators. The target groups were very diverse, from “ladino” men who traditionally work with cattle, to women from the Ixil ethnic group. It was expected that these experiences would enrich the curricula of other agriculture schools in Central America, and result in a large group of motivated young professionals trained in effective extension measures that can be used in other communities in the region.

Expanding and sustaining success

The Degraded Pastures project tried to engage institutions by sharing documented experiences and by offering to train staff in participatory methods. They also organised farmer-to-farmer exchange visits, inviting new groups to visit those that had participated in the project for at least two years. And they shared project resources with partner institutions and new farmer groups in order to scale up efforts.

By the end of the project, many of the partners had become enthusiastic participants, having seen the benefits of using participatory approaches. A similar change was seen, for example, with one of the project’s concrete activities, the Leucaena protein bank. Before this started, farmers believed that livestock could only be fed on pastures. Farmers learned to feed their livestock with Leucaena, which became an important fodder during the dry season. At the start of the project, only one hectare was established on one farm; after three years, more than 160 farmers were growing 100 hectares of Leucaena.

The University of San Carlos of Guatemala, four El Petén municipalities and two regional NGOs (FUNDEBASE and PROPETEN) joined forces to further promote and scale up this approach. The municipalities of San Luis, Dolores, Melchor de Mencos and Poptún (grouped together as the Commonwealth of Municipalities in Southern Petén, MANMUNISURP), hired two livestock extensionists and contacted FUNDEBASE to work as partners. This partnership was positively evaluated by the local governments, in particular by the newly elected mayors, because it provided technical assistance to the previously neglected smallholder livestock sector. The local authorities were particularly impressed by the attitude and motivation of the NGO staff trained by the Field School.

The experience gained by FUNDEBASE through the work done in association to MANMUNISURP and the Degraded Pastures project, motivated its leaders to take a more relevant position in a new partnership project: “Sustainable use of agricultural land in Mesoamerica” (MESOTERRA). FUNDEBASE is promoting participatory and territorial approaches within this project. They estimate that, by the end of 2010, they will have worked with 625 small and medium scale farmers, and strengthened a network of more than 250 rural promoters in three municipalities of El Petén. In this new partnership, FUNDEBASE is applying the experiences in livestock production from the Degraded Pastures project, as well as strengthening platforms of community leadership at the municipal and departmental levels.

Farmers’ interests

MESOTERRA also covers livestock systems, so the methodological approach and training materials developed by the Degraded Pastures project are still relevant in this programme, and are being applied by new partners and communities with good success, leading to an improvement in farmers’ livestock activities.

Livestock farmers are interested in developing partnerships, and are very keen to diversify and/ or intensify their traditional cattle systems, as they are faced with declining beef prices. Opportunities for exporting hair sheep to Mexico and support for reforestation are two of the options identified from the Degraded Pastures project that farmers find interesting. At the same time, more information is needed about the interactions between livestock and forest plantations in order to revise the current regulations for reforestation incentives. Members of the different partnerships, NGOs, national and regional authorities, municipalities and the local associations of livestock farmers and of tree growers are working together to resolve these issues.

Further scaling up of the lessons learnt

In early 2010, civil society organisations in the watershed of Lake Peten-Itza expressed their concern about the conservation of the lake and started an initiative called “All Together for the Lake”. This platform included the local municipalities, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAGA), the National Forestry Institute (INAB), the National Council for Protected Areas (CONAP) and many members of the civil society. They are seeking to promote eco-friendly production systems in order to reduce erosion, preserve the volume and quality of water in the lake, improve the livelihoods of the communities and contribute to the conservation of natural resources and wildlife within the watershed.

The members of the platform saw value in the approach developed by the Degraded Pastures project, and use it as a source of information and inspiration for promoting sustainable management in the watershed. They are making use of several mechanisms developed by the Degraded Pastures project, including Farmer Field Schools; the ways of generating field-based knowledge that can be used for building land use policy proposals; or also the way of providing efficient and effective technical assistance to livestock farmers.

More opportunities

Projects have a fixed life span and spatial range. However, the dynamics of institutions and communities may create opportunities for the lessons learned from a project to be more widely applied, even when the project is finished. These experiences from Guatemala show that the opportunities for scaling up projects can greatly exceed the original expectations of the originators of a project. The training of technical staff and farmers, and a systematic sharing of experiences within a partnership, can open the doors for the lessons learned being much more widely spread.

Text: Danilo Pezo, Jorge Cruz, Karen Hernández and Raúl Villeda

The post Exceeding expectations appeared first on Ileia.

On closer examination, this article seems to have been "planted"

A couple of months ago, The Economist published a long article praising Brazilian agriculture, something that led to outbursts of patriotism, and to many colleagues expressing pride on our “success”. But how successful is this model that The Economist so generously praised? On closer examination, this article seems to have been “planted” by those interested in talking up the role of agribusinesses in my country, and in playing down the environmental and social impacts of our agricultural model.

The magazine says that the growth of large-scale farming in Brazil in recent decades shows its greater competitiveness. The truth is that the history of Brazilian agribusinesses is full of renegotiation processes and debt forgiveness. Official data, not mentioned by The Economist, show how taxpayers actually pay the bill. Equally absent are the figures of the latest agriculture census, released in September 2009, which show how family farming, though occupying only 24% of the total area, produces between 60 and 70% of the food that all Brazilians eat, and provides 8 out of 10 jobs in rural areas. And no mention is made of the relation between the praised model and the social and environmental problems we regularly hear of.

It is equally striking to read that other countries are recommended to follow Brazil’s example. But the type of agriculture praised by the magazine does not produce foodstuffs. Rather, it produces commodities for export (soybeans, orange juice, sugar, coffee), mostly to meet the demands coming from livestock-producing countries. Is this a good recommendation for countries hoping to reduce hunger? These countries should also be told that Brazil imports two thirds of the fertilizers that it uses, or that Brazil has become the world’s largest consumer of pesticides – despite the promise that GM crops would bring a reduction in the use of agricultural chemicals.

The magazine also refers to those who prefer small-scale farming systems and organic practices as “agro-pessimists”. This is another sign that the article was “planted”, as it is hard to believe that The Economist does not know about the increasing production and consumption levels of organic products, or about the strategic role which family farms play in producing foodstuffs all over the world. To label people who advocate for healthy food production systems, without a serious environmental impact, with a better distribution of wealth, or with more job opportunities, as “agro-pessimists”, shows, to say the least, a deeply flawed analysis – something uncommon in The Economist.

Text: Francisco Roberto Caporal

Francisco Roberto Caporal works as General Training Co-ordinator at the Ministry of Agrarian Development in Brasilia. He lectures at the Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, and is president of the Brazilian Agroecology Association, ABA-Agroecologia.
E-mail: caporalfr@gmail.com

The post Opinion: The Economist is wrong appeared first on Ileia.

Working at the the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), Bill Vorley is helping to co-ordinate a new Knowledge Programme on Small Producer Agency in the Globalised Market. How does this programme aim to help smallholders?

Why start a new programme on smallholder agriculture? What are the issues this is responding to?

Right now, a lot of expectations are piling up at the doorstep of smallholder farmers. They are expected to deliver global food security. They are expected to be engines of rural poverty reduction. They are expected to manage natural resources and adapt to climate change. And they are expected to organize themselves in regional and global markets.

By building this agenda in the world of donors and international NGOs, we risk making the same mistake that has beset so many development interventions — treating poor people and smallscale producers as passive beneficiaries of an external agenda, rather than as agents in their own development and as economic actors in their own right. The purpose of the Knowledge Programme is to change this approach.

What does it mean for small-scale farmers to be agents in their own development?

We are defining agency as the capacity of small-scale producers to make effective choices that advance their interests, and to act on those choices.

Nowhere is that capacity needed more than in markets. There are a lot of promises out there about the ability of markets to “work for the poor”. In much of the world, globalisation is changing the way that markets operate, exposing small-scale producers to risks and opportunities. The price of food is going to be very volatile because of increased demand, changes in climate, speculation.

There are NGOs in the countryside saying, you should be diversifying, growing high-value crops, forming a co-operative. There are companies looking for new sources of supply. There are new market instruments to pay land users for managing carbon in their soils and managing biodiversity on their farms.

So agency is the knowledge and skills to find your own course through those risks and opportunities — and also to shape the rules that govern them.

So how does the Knowledge Programme tackle this?

A global learning network has been established of people who work with, support and lead small-scale producers. Not just researchers, but also farmer leaders, traders and businesspeople — there’s the former director of a large Indian retail company in there, and there’s an officer of a regional African farmers’ federation, for example.

The learning network is pursuing a programme of research and advocacy, bringing new voices and analysis to support smallholder agency and shape the global debate. The aim is to figure out some new pieces of the puzzle — for example, regional trade agreements, arrangements that empower small producers in supply chains, and ways that informal markets can make a difference.

You’re talking about taking on sprawling global changes. How do you face the challenge of scale?

There are about half a billion small-scale farmers in the world. So it can seem ridiculous to say that we will, as just one organisation, support smallholders in finding their way through this tremendously challenging situation.

But the learning network model has a lot to offer. The overall programme is a collaboration between this learning network, IIED in the UK and HIVOS in the Netherlands. The network is led from Bolivia, with member groups in Peru, Nicaragua, Kenya, Uganda, India and Indonesia. Those groups also have their own networks in their countries. They’re grounded at the grassroots, but the insights they develop can spread through the network. It’s not so much top-down or bottom-up. It’s more middle-out. It’s been 18 months in development, and by the end of next year, I think we’re going to have some really useful insights.

In Europe, you’ve also launched a series of “provocations” – debates around smallholder agriculture. What’s the purpose of those?

We’re well aware that a lot of development policies are set in the headquarters of ministries and businesses. So you also need to shake the tree here in Europe. That’s why we set up what we call “provocations”, looking at some of the big assumptions in this area of markets and small-scale production.

Why “provocations”? Are you trying to stir people up?

We want to challenge parts of the discussion around smallholders and markets that have got stuck. For instance, the way that the development community paint two opposing development paths, one marked “rights-based” and the other “market-based”. Or the division between how the development community look at smallholders and how they look at farm workers. Each “provocation” will be a three-hour session in a different European city, streamed over the internet in English and Spanish, and also communicated through Farming Matters.

How can small-scale farmers get involved with this work?

In the countries where we have a learning network member, smallholders can be involved through them. And we really encourage small-scale producers and their organizations, as well as businesspeople and policymakers, to connect with this programme through our websites at IIED and HIVOS – to help us bring new perspectives to this debate around smallholders and markets.

Interview: Anna Barnett

More information:
For more information about the Knowledge Programme and the “provocations”, please send Bill Vorley an e-mail: bill.vorley[at]iied.org

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Since then, the cultivation of crops for bio-fuels, such as jatropha, has been a hot topic in the international development debate. Are bio-fuels an opportunity for small-scale farming?

Opponents of the development of a bio-fuel sector make us believe that cultivation of fuel crops is radically different from agriculture as we know it. But why? Farmers don’t really mind if their cash crop is cassava, tobacco, soy, coffee or jatropha. If jatropha pays better than coffee, the farmer will shift to jatropha. Should farmers only grow crops for food? Should we also ban cotton?
A major part of the food crops produced today is not consumed by humans. More than 40% of world grain production is fed to animals, and this is increasing rapidly with the growth in meat consumption. The resources allocated to bio-fuels are small in comparison.

Many studies, such as FAO’s 2009 report, “Small-scale bioenergy initiatives”, have concluded that bio-fuel production can be beneficial to small-scale farmers. It is true that bio-fuels have contributed to increasing food prices, which is particularly problematic for the many people who are dependent on cheap food. But food prices have been low primarily because developed countries have subsidised their farms for decades. This has made farming in developing countries a miserable way to earn a living, which has prompted young rural people to move out to the city – where they end up in slums. Higher prices for agricultural products are good for farmers in the long term, and bio-fuels remain an interesting option for breaking this negative spiral.

While agro-corporations grab land for bio-fuel production, this is a separate problem that emerges because there is now an agricultural commodity that fetches a reasonable price, and therefore attracts entrepreneurs and investors. If we ban bio-fuels to reduce land-grabbing then the logical consequence is that we ban any crop that is attractive to entrepreneurs, and condemn farmers to eternal poverty.
Obviously this is absurd: landgrabbing is a political and juridical problem that needs to be dealt with outside the discussion about bio-fuels.
Small-scale farmers should have the option to choose bio-fuels to develop their farming. Let them decide for themselves what makes sense to them.

Text: Flemming Nielsen
Flemming Nielsen can be reached at fnielsen[at]bananahill.net

Flemming Nielsen has been developing options for smallscale farming in Africa for two decades, and now works for the FACT Foundation.

As part of the word “biofuels”, the prefix “bio” has a false positive connotation, implying a solution to the depletion of fossil fuels and to climate change.
As we are talking about oil from agricultural crops, I prefer the word “agro-fuel” – and then their positive image disappears.

Agro-fuel corporations present Africa as a sick continent that has vast “marginal” lands waiting to be put to use. For example, industry claims that jatropha does well on degraded lands, such as those found in Swaziland, where a company, D1 Oils plc, told farmers that jatropha does not need water to bring income. It did not take too long for them to find out the bitter truth: that they not only need expensive chemicals, but also to divert water from their food crops.

In Ghana I recently spoke to farmers who feared a land use change from food cropping to agro-fuels production. And it’s the industry who determines prices. African governments and local chiefs now hand over land to corporations, which turn it into large-scale fuel production fields for the export market. This is land where local people used to graze their animals or grow locally adapted crops.

Farmers and pastoralists now risk becoming refugees in their own regions. In the process, GM giants are lining up with oil companies and contaminating our cassava and potato fields. The former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, classified agrofuels as a “crime against humanity”. Ironically, the contribution of agrofuels to the world’s energy supply is marginal: the entire 2005 soy and maize harvest in the United States could have only replaced 12% of the country’s fossil fuel demands.

Who really benefits from allotting poor people’s land to the production of fuels for cars? The answer is clear. History has proven time and again that such “innovations” benefit corporations, while communities are left hungry and impoverished. I do not dispute the use of agro-fuels for their use within a community, as happens in Mali, where communities grow jatropha in hedges to meet domestic energy needs. But, all in all, the earth is too small to cultivate agro-fuels on a large scale. Our governments should scrape all agro-fuels targets and enforce international moratoriums on exports. Agro-fuels are a false solution that threaten the livelihoods of millions of poor people.

Text: Mariann Bassey
Mariann Bassey can be reached at
mariann[at]eraction.org

Mariann Bassey is the food and agriculture co-ordinator for Environmental Rights Action / Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

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However, the growth in demand has given rise to land conflicts, deforestation and biodiversity loss, issues that have shaped the global debate. Joyce Msuya shares some lessons from a recent major multi-stakeholder process led by the World Bank Group (WBG) to help improve its palm oil strategy.

“The scale and format of these consultations were new for us,” explains Joyce Msuya, who oversaw the recent WBG palm oil consultations. Nine face-to-face workshops were held around the world with nearly 400 (out of 1,200 invited) people from civil society organisations, local groups, businesses, smallholders, government and research institutions participating. Thousands more took part in an electronic consultation.

Msuya is happy with the amount of useful feedback received from all the stakeholders. The consultations brought up many concerns that will need to be addressed in the WBG’s new palm oil strategy, although as Msuya says, “we never set out to get 100 percent agreement between them all.” The facilitators’ synthesis report does show some agreement, as stakeholders made “strong calls for the WBG to take a strategic role in the sustainable development of the sector.”

Msuya identifies a number of factors that contributed to the success of the consultations. Firstly, “we designed it to be as dynamic, open and transparent as possible.” For example, a website was created to post summaries of all the consultations and reports immediately. An independent facilitator, using varied participatory methods, also helped set the tone.

“We were lucky to get an excellent facilitator who was perceived as objective and neutral throughout the consultations. He helped us to take an iterative approach, which means that we kept adjusting the process as we learned more about what worked best and what not so well,” says Msuya. The “up-front and candid” face-to-face consultations played a key role in getting participants to voice their views while also being able to agree to disagree in a “mature way”. Msuya explains this further: “People needed to understand their connectivity. We all have more in common than differences – we all want the sector to be sustainable, inclusive and to reduce poverty”.
The concept of partnership was also important – that all participants have a role to play, while recognising the many challenges that exist.

Text: Mundie Salm

Illustration: Fred Geven

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In September 2008 Hans Feijen reported how the Egyptian FFS started with a “neutral” agriculture agenda, and then slowly introduced urgent social issues. What’s the situation today?

In September 2008 Hans Feijen reported how the Egyptian FFS started with a “neutral” agriculture agenda, and then slowly introduced urgent social issues. What’s the situation today?

According to Maaike van Hoeflaken, Team Leader of the Fayoum Farmer Field Schools project, most schools have now moved well beyond the original agricultural curriculum, and routinely start with a participatory needs assessment. While participants want to discuss all sorts of agronomical and livestock issues, they also want to talk about things like waste management in townships.

At least 60 percent of all field schools are mixed or for women only and, in such schools, health issues such as birth control or female circumcision are high on the agenda, even if they are culturally sensitive issues. Those in charge have contacted specialised organisations for their support in dealing with these issues.

Besides training farmers, networking with authorities has become an important part of the FFS curriculum. This is particularly effective when the requests are in line with government programmes.

For example, the government realises that the population in the region should not grow further because of water scarcity. An FFS that wants to discuss issues like family planning now finds it easier to access the services of a specialised government programme. But this relationship also works the other way round: when the government comes up with a specific programme, such as one to control avian flu, the FFS network provides a good vehicle to spread their message.

The National Rural Development Strategy says that rural development is about more than just agriculture. The ministries for health, education, and family and population have all approached the FFS network to make use of its outreach. Last May, Egypt’s First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, visited the programme.

FFSs were included in the national extension policy and the government created a separate budget line for them. The Fayoum Agricultural Directorate has been appointed as the lead agency for spreading the methodology all over the country, for which it is creating a “FFS Centre of Excellence”. Five more governorates are planning to introduce a FFS programme – showing that farmer field schools are becoming institutionalised in Egypt.

Text: Frank van Schoubroeck

For more information, send an e-mail to Maaike van Hoeflaken: fayoumffs@gmail.com

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