Book review
THE EARTHSCAN READER IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
EDITED BY JULES PRETTY
EARTHSCAN 2005
PART IV
PART 3: SOCIAL PERSPECTIVES
Introduction to Part 3: Social Perspectives
Part 4 of the Reader in Sustainable Agriculture contains five articles on social perspectives for sustainable agriculture by Robert Chambers, Jules Pretty, Richard Bawden, Niels Röling and Kevin Gallagher and co-authors. Many of the technological changes known to be necessary to make progress towards sustainability require collective social action as a prerequisite – and this in turn requires individuals to act and think differently.
In the first article, drawn from the seminal 1989 book Farmer First, Robert Chambers discusses the reversals necessary to put farmer’s knowledge and capacities at the heart of agricultural transformations. For decades, agricultural research and extension institutions have used a transfer-of-technology mode of working, with farmers and their communities simply as recipients of technologies and practices developed on research stations. A farmer-first approach requires professionals to adopt different attitudes and behaviour, becoming, for example, convenors, catalysts, advisers, travel agents and supporters of farmers’ own analyses, choices and experiments. The complex, diverse and risk-prone environments of many developing countries are not well suited to homogenous technologies, however effective they have been on research stations. They require that professionals reverse past practices, and encourage farmers to conduct their own analyses and experiments, thus adapting and fitting technologies to their own situations. Such reversals of ‘normal practice’ also require institutional change, with policies and institutions needing to facilitate such efforts. As Chambers said, the stakes are high, and a decade and a half after this chapter was written, they remain disturbingly high for millions of people and their environment.
In the second article, Richard Bawden describes the remarkable experience of Hawkesbury College in Australia, and its quarter century journey of institutional change towards action and research. Their aim was to create reflective practitioners, in which theory and practice inform one another. Praxis is the emergent property of experiential learning processes by which we try to make sense of the world. Finding out and taking action are thus linked together. This paper also sets out key principles for soft systems learning (in contrast with hard systems approaches), and indicates how researched systems need to evolve through researching systems to critical systemic discourse. These principles are then put into practice through the redesign and continued adaptation of the curriculum and learning at Hawkesbury (later to be part of the University of Western Sydney). Even after having achieved so much, Bawden indicates that there is a very long way to go.
In the third article, Jules Pretty sets out the importance of social capital in the collective management of natural resources. The term social capital captures the idea that social bonds and norms are important for people and communities. It emerged as a term following detailed analyses of the effects of social cohesion on regional incomes, civil society and life expectancy. As social capital lowers the transaction costs of working together, it facilitates cooperation. People have the confidence to invest in collective activities, knowing that others will also do so. They are also less likely to engage in unfettered private actions with negative outcomes, such as resource degradation. Four features are important: relations of trust; reciprocity and exchanges; common rules, norms and sanctions; connectedness in networks and groups.
Collective resource management programmes that seek to build trust, develop new norms, and help form groups have become increasingly common, and are variously described by the terms community-, participatory-, joint-, decentralized- and co-management. They have been effective in several sectors, including watershed, forest, irrigation, pest, wildlife, fishery, farmers’ research, and micro-finance management. Since the early 1990s, some 400,000 – 500,000 new local groups were established in varying environmental and social contexts, mostly evolving to be of similar small size, typically with 20-30 active members, putting total involvement at some 8 – 15 million households. The majority continue to be successful, and show the inclusive characteristics identified as vital for improving community wellbeing, and evaluations have confirmed that there are positive ecological and economic outcomes, including for watersheds, forests and pest management.
Niels Röling makes the case in the fourth article for the expansion of beta/gamma science to address issues of ecological rationality and agricultural sustainability. This paper is based on the assumption, as Röling puts it, ‘that we live, not in epoch change, but in a change of epoch’. Though we have built economies and technologies that have transformed the lives of most, allowing many to escape from poverty and misery, we have not done a good job of managing the Earth. The paper iterates the importance of a constructivists perspective for mobilizing the reflexivity needed for change, and provides the theoretical underpinning for the human predicament for having to address coherence and correspondence. The challenge, says Röling, is ‘not in dealing with land, but in how people use it’.
The paper presents a model for knowledge based action, showing how organisms, including humans, can learn or adapt a coherent set of elements of cognition in order that we might change circumstances. The idea drives the change. At the same time, it is our thinking that brings forth a world. And what does it look like – a society geared to generating wealth and satisfaction, in which we think we control many of the factors that cause suffering? Ask the question, and we may not get the answer we want – such as of a Chinese woman spreading night soil on her land, a picture of tradition it appears, until she reveals that she is fed up with this stupid and dirty job, and would rather be in Paris. The agricultural treadmill appears to give benefits, but the costs are enormous. The paper draws these theses together by indicating the implications for interdisciplinarity, through the domains of using instruments and incentives, and continuous learning (and co-learning).
In the final article on social perspectives, Kevin Gallagher and co-authors describe the ecological and social basis for integrated pest management in rice agroecosystems in Asia. The chapter, drawn from the book The Pesticide Detox, first sets out the specific ecological basis of rice fields, and why pesticide applications have not resulted in cheap and effective pest control. Pesticides may kill pests in the short term, but they also eliminate natural enemies that exert good ecological control over pests. The idea behind integrated pest management (IPM) is to put technologies into the hands of farmers and communities, so that they may learn to farm with low to zero use of pesticides, yet also do not suffer pest losses. Many tens of thousands of Farmer Field Schools have been held throughout Asia, and these have been highly effective at increasing farmers’ own capabilities and knowledge for ecological management of rice fields.
Many countries are now reporting large reductions in pesticide use. In Vietnam, one million farmers have cut pesticide use from more than three sprays to one per season; in Sri Lanka, 55,000 farmers have reduced use from three to a half per season; and in Indonesia, one million farmers have cut use from three sprays to one per season. In no case has reduced pesticide use led to lower rice yield. Amongst these are reports that many farmers are now able to grow rice entirely without pesticides: a quarter of field school trained farmers in Indonesia, a fifth to a third in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, and three-quarters in parts of the Philippines.
Perspective 13: Reversals, Institutions and Change by Robert Chambers
Farmer first and TOT
- The new behaviours and attitudes presented by the contributors to this book conflict with much normal professionalism and with much normal bureaucracy. Normal professional training and values are deeply embedded in the transfer of technology (TOT) mode, with scientists deciding research priorities, generating technology and passing it to extension agents to transfer to farmers.
- With farmer first, the main objective is not to transfer known technology, but to empower farmers to learn, adapt and do better; analysis is not by outsiders – scientists, extensionists or non-governmental organizations (NGO) workers – on their own but by farmers and by farmers assisted by outsiders; the primary location for research and development is not the experiment station, laboratory or greenhouse, necessary though they are for some purposes, but farmers’ fields and conditions; what is transferred by outsiders to farmers is not precepts but principles, not messages but methods, not a package of practices to be adopted but a basket of choices from which to select. All this demands changes in activities and roles.
Farmer –first activities and roles
Contributions to this chapter show farmers carrying out or participating in various activities which in the TOT mode are conducted only by scientists. Three of these, again and again, are analysis, choice and experiment. To support farmers in these activities generates and requires new roles for outsiders.
Table 13.2 Roles generated for outsiders by farmer’s activities
Farmers’ activities New roles for outsiders
Analysis convenor, catalysts, advisor
Choice searcher, supplier, travel agent
Experiment supporter, consultant
Institutional change
Unfortunately, normal bureaucracy tends to centralize, standardize and simplify, and agricultural research and extension are no exceptions. They fit badly, therefore, with the conditions of resource-poor farm families, with their geographical scatter, heterogeneity and complexity within any farm and farm household. In resource-rich areas of industrial and green revolution agriculture, production has been raised through packages, with the environment managed and controlled to fit the genotype. The third agriculture, being complex, diverse and risk-prone, requires the reverse, with searches for genotypes to fit environments. In industrial and green agriculture, higher production has come from intensification of inputs and simplification and standardization of practices; in the third agriculture, it comes more from diversifying enterprises and multiplying linkages. Green revolution agriculture has been convergent, evolving towards a greater variety of differing enterprises and practices.
At first sight, then, the farmer-first approach appears incompatible with normal bureaucracy. But reversals in government research organizations, though difficult to start and to sustain, are not impossible. Some contributors were working in special projects linked with NARS; others were working in more normal conditions, as with the innovator workshops in Bangladesh (Abedin and Haque, 1987) and the distribution to farmers of advanced lines of rice in India (Maurya et al, 1987).
For the future, to achieve farmer-first reversals in national bureaucracies, especially NARs, three aspects of management merit special attention: decentralization and resources; search and supply; and incentives.
Methods and interactions
In themselves, these things – decentralization and resources, organization for search and supply and providing incentives – are not enough. Much also depends on what is done and how it is done – on the methods available and the quality of interactions.
- The need here is to develop further, describe and disseminate farmer-first methods in detail. The more important methods to be developed and described include:
v Aiding farmers’ analysis and learning their agendas;
v Getting started with families and communities;
v Finding out about agricultural research (for NGOs);
v Finding and supporting farmers’ experiments;
v Convening and assisting groups;
v Convening and managing innovator workshops;
v Searching, and supplying farmers with what they want and need;
v Designing and managing incentives for scientists;
v Communicating: farm family and outsider face to face.
Practical action: Starting and sustaining change
Professionals concerned with agricultural innovation, research and extension – whether they are farmers, or physical, biological or social scientists, and whether they are independent or working in universities, training institutes, government departments of NGOs – will have found in his book many ideas for what they might do. Non-farming agricultural professionals, just like resource-poor farmers, are faced with diversity and complexity, and similarly need a repertoire of methods so that they can be versatile and adaptable.
At a personal level, it is tempting to say that nothing can be done until a whole bureaucratic and professional system changes. Usually, though, there is room for manoeuvre. Some steps can be taken; a start can almost always be made. Even if the start is small and progress slow, it may be the seed of a self-sustaining movement. In the spirit of the learning process approach to development, it is better to start, to do something and to learn on the way, than to wait for better conditions before acting.
In the spirit of pluralism, action can and should start in many places. But not everything can be done at once. There are questions of how and where to start.
Two principles help here. The first is to start where it is easier, simpler and quicker, while weighing the danger of biases against poorer farmers. It is better to start and learn by doing and through mistakes than to wait for perfect conditions. By starting, experience is gained and confidence built up.
The second principle is to change behaviour before attitudes. Preaching about attitudes invites acquiescence without deep change. Action means experience gained and that, more than exhortation, reorients attitudes and habits of thought.
Taking these two principles together, analysis by and with farmers appears the most promising point of entry, followed by search, choice and experiment. A basic question to ask is what farmers would like in their basket of choices. From this question follow demands which reverse the normal top-down flow. Whether a department of agriculture, a university, an NGO or combinations of these can handle such requests can then be put to the test. Activities and roles then have to change. Procedures to accept and handle demands are required. Information systems for management from below have to be created and made to work. Subsequently, other elements of the paradigm become active, with testing and experiments by farmers and consultative support by others.
Finally, for professionals to innovate by working in the farmer first mode demands vision and leadership on the part of those with power and responsibility. These include senior officials in capital cities, vice chancellors and deans, directors of research stations, leaders of teams and senior staff in regional, provincial and district headquarters, as well as in aid agencies and NGOs. Leaders can act like normal professionals and normal bureaucrats who simplify, standardize and stifle; or they can break out and encourage and support initiative and change, providing resources and room for manoeuvre for those under their management who have the aptitude and will to work in new participatory ways; and they can reorganize departments, procedures and management information systems so that searches can be made to meet farmers’ demands and fill their baskets with choices.
Alliances and mutual support also help. Those who seek or sense the potential will do well to seek out and support like-minded fellow professionals in their own and other organizations. Shared ideas and experiences speed up learning. If those in this book provide stimulus and encouragement, they will have served their purpose. And if the new paradigm fulfils its promise, and is accepted and practiced much more in the 1990s and the 21st century, then those who take risks now to support, develop and spread it will not have acted in vain.
For the stakes are high. Over a billion people are supported by third agriculture. The challenge is to enable many of the poorer among them to secure better and more sustainable livelihoods from their complex, diverse and risk-prone farming when normal agricultural research has so largely failed. This book points to new potentials. It shows that reversals in the farmer-first mode can be effective for farmers and exciting for professionals. A quiet revolution has already started, but it is scattered and still small-scale. Which countries, institutions and individuals will now lead remains to be seen. Change depends on personal decisions and action. Those who now explore the frontiers of farmer participation cannot expect Nobel prizes, or be confident of early recognition or promotion; but they will be joining a vanguard. Their rewards, more surely, will be the exhilaration of pioneering, the satisfaction of seeing innovations spread and the knowledge that through their work, poor farm families are being truly served.