THE EARTHSCAN READER IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

EDITED BY JULES PRETTY

EARTHSCAN          2005

PART XI

 

PART V: PERSPECTIVES FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

 

Perspective 23: Soil Recuperation in Central America: How Innovation was Sustained after Project Intervention by Roland Bunch and Gabino Lopez

 

Introduction

Much has been said and written about the sustainability of agricultural development. But there have been few studies on programme impact after the outside intervention has ended. This chapter describes a study of three agricultural development efforts in Guatemala and Honduras and assesses impacts up to 15 years after termination of outside intervention. The study was carried out by the Honduran organization (Associación de Consejeros una Agricultura Sostenible, Ecológica y Humana, COSECHA).

The study assessed the impact that soil recuperation interventions have had over many years. The results show considerable increases in productivity after intervention, and indicate that while specific technologies do not generally have long-term sustainability, the process of agricultural innovation does. The study points to a need for future agricultural development programmes to design their work in such a way that villagers are given strong motivation to innovate.

 

The Three areas studied

This chapter concentrates on the following three areas of Guatemala and Honduras.

The Cantarranas area

Between 1987 and 1993, the Cantarranas Integrated Agricultural Development Program, financed by Catholic Relief Services and managed by World Neighbors, worked in some 35 villages around the central Honduran town of Cantarranas. Using in-row tillage and intercropped green manures as its cutting edge, it expanded into a general programme of agricultural development and preventive health.

Cantarranas lies at about 300m in elevation in a narrow valley about 40km long, between two parallel mountain ranges that rise to over 1800m. The programme worked almost entirely with small farmers with 2-5 hectare landholdings. These hillsides vary in slope, with an average of about 30%. The forests have been seriously degraded. The climate of the Cantarranas area varies from hot and semi-arid, with frequent and severe droughts in the bottom of the valley, to a cool climate, with sufficient rainfall for six months of the year.

The Guinope area

Between 1981 and 1989, a similar World Neighbors programme worked in 41 villages, most of which are included in the townships of Guinope, San Lucas, and San Antonio de Flores in southeastern Honduras. This programme also worked heavily in soil recuperation, basic grains and diversification, as well as preventive health. The programme’s lead technologies were drainage ditches (at 0.5% slope) with live barriers and the use of chicken manure.

The Guinope area contains the same variations in altitude and rainfall as Cantarranas, but with less severe slopes. Nevertheless, an impenetrable subsoil underlies the 15cm to 50cm deep topsoil. When this thin layer of topsoil has eroded away, agriculture becomes impossible. Before 1981, emigration from the Guinope area was heavy; some residents referred to it as a ‘dying town’.

The San Martin Jilotepeque area

The San Martin Integrated Development Programme was financed by Oxfam-UK and carried out by World Neighbors between the years 1972 and 1979. It was a highly integrated program, working in everything from agriculture and health to road construction, functional literacy and cooperative organization. The Programme used contour ditches and a side-dressing of nitrogen on maize as the initial technologies to motivate people.

The San Martin township lies just 50km west of Guatemala City. The southern half of the township, where the Programme worked in some 45 villages, varies in altitude from about 800m to 2000m, and has enough rainfall for a good maize crop in most years. The mainly Cakchiquel Indian population is extremely land poor, owning an average of less than 0.5ha of seriously depleted land per family.

Methodology for the impact study

• The methodology consisted of a combination of:

v  Observation and a checklist of questions;

v  Individual open-ended interviews;

v  Open-ended informal conversations;

v  Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods;

v  A review of programme documents, including evaluations made of programme impact.

• COSECHA personnel made a list of all the 121 villages, and divided these into three roughly equal categories: those in which they judged the impact to have been best; moderate; and relatively poor.
• One village was then selected from the best category two from the middle category, and one from the poorer impact category.

 

Findings of the impact study

Changes in technologies used

• The figures displayed in the tables below give some idea of the relative sustainability of the technologies used.

 

Changes in productivity

• In Central America, maize is the basic staple. As it is very sensitive to soil fertility, maize productivity is a good indication of overall soil fertility, and of productivity in general.
• Table 23.2 shows that major increases in productivity have been achieved after the programme ended.

 

Further impacts

Other positive impacts have also occurred:

v  Increased wage rates;

v  Increased land values;

v  Decreasing or reversed emigration from the project areas (Table 23.4);

v  Decreased resource degradation;

v  Increased number of trees planted;

v  Almost total elimination of the use of herbicides through hand weeding or green manures;

v  Significant reduction in the use of chemical fertilizers with a variety of organic fertilizers now used;

v  Increased crop diversity and practice of intercropping;

v  An increase in local savings, leading to a decreasing dependence on formal credit and increased investment in education, land improvement and purchasing animals;

v  Marked improvement in diets, including the consumption of more vegetables, native herbs, milk and cheese;

v  Improved resilience and resistance to drought and climatic variability;

v  Increased involvement in local groups, such as producers’ associations, agricultural study groups, community improvement committees, or groups formed by whole villages to protect communal forests from loggers or corrupt municipal officials.

Local innovation

Local innovation is critical to villagers’ becoming the ‘subjects’ of their own development. Within the study sites, the amount of continuing innovation has been remarkable. In San Martin, over 30 innovations have been adopted successfully since programme termination. These include the introduction of new crops (cauliflower, broccoli and herbs), adoption of new green manures (velvetbean and Tephrosia), planting improved pastures (such as Kikuyu grass), and building stables for animals.

Probably the most important is that each village has developed at least one whole new system of production. In one village, a whole system of intensified cattle raising has been developed, in which improved pastures are planted to supplement the Napier grass barriers, legumes are being tried to increase protein, animals are stabled, pastures rotated, and cheese making increases the value of the milk before it is marketed. In other villages, much land has gone into coffee or fruit production. In Las Venturas, a system of sustainable forest management has become a major economic factor, where villagers are planting out seedlings to fill clearings, and are cutting a certain number of the largest trees each year.

In Honduras, innovations have occurred in virtually all the villages.

 

Discussion

The persistence of specific technologies

The technologies that have proven sustainable over a 15-year period in San Martin Jilootepeque without significant abandonment are contour grass barriers fertilization with organic matter and crop rotation. In central Honduras, however, the grass barriers were losing popularity after only five years, and the local green manure systems have not fared well – largely because they still need some improving. The cessation of agricultural burning has also continued to spread, and should continue to do so.

• Farmers in San Martin are using methods of organic fertilization that are quite different from those originally introduced.
• Only one technology – crop rotation – has survived in its original form for at least 15 years.
• It is likely that most technologies have fallen by the wayside because changing circumstances, such as emerging markets, disease and insect pests, land tenure, soil fertility, labour availability and costs, and the adoption of new technologies, have reduced or eliminated their usefulness.
• This study has led us to believe that the half-life of well-chosen technologies for farmers is probably about six years.

 

The sustainability of the development process

The results clearly indicate that even though the vast majority of specific technologies disappeared, farmer’s productivity continued to climb. In some of the best villages, yields are continuing to increase at rates comparable with those achieved during the programmes’ presence. Thus, the sustainability of specific technologies may well be largely irrelevant. Much more relevant to farmers’ wellbeing and productivity is the sustainability of the development process. That this process can lead to significant increases in people’s well-being and can be carried out by the villagers themselves, is probably the most important single finding of this study.

• The programme of agricultural innovation was greatly accelerated by the programmes to the point that it is capable of improving yields over the medium and long term.
• This increase in the intensity of the innovation process requires that villagers:

v  Learn the rudiments of simple scientific experimentation;

v  Learn a minimum of very basic theoretical ideas about soils and agriculture, in order to orient their experiments in useful directions;

v  learn to share with each other the results of their experiments;

v  Become motivated to do all of the above sustainably.

 

The key to designing a sustainable soil conservation or agricultural programme does not consist, therefore, of choosing a group of technologies that will be sustainable. Rather, the key is choosing a very few technologies that will motivate farmers to become involved in a process of innovation, to search for new ideas, experiment with them, adopt those that prove useful and share the experimental results with others.

One of the striking features of soil conservation technologies is that they rarely accomplish any of the above. We have heard farmers say dozens of times, ‘But I can’t eat a grass barrier’. For farmers to accept soil conservation technologies and become involved in a sustainable process, the technologies must be combined with a technology that enhances yields. It is the increase in yields that convinces the farmers of the value of soil conservation.

Through such a process, subsidies in the form of food-for-work or direct financial incentives become irrelevant. If the yields have increased or costs decreased, artificial incentives are not needed. If the yields have not increased, no artificial incentive will make the technology’s adoption sustainable.

Recommendations for sustainable technologies

Combine soil conservation or recuperation technologies with technologies that raise yields or reduce costs

Use intercropped green manures (or other green manures that can be produced on land with no opportunity cost) wherever possible

Use simple, low-cost and appropriate technologies

Maintain flexibility in technological recommendations

Initiate the process with the smallest number of technologies consistent with achieving significant success