Roland
Bunch and Mateo Canas
Background:
PTD Programmes in Honduras
Technologies Generated Independently
by Peasant Farmers
Communication
and Dissemination of Locally-Generated Technologies
This paper
reports on the results to date of a study of the technologies that more than 60
peasant farmer experimenters in Honduras have developed in the total absence of
outsiders. This work was carried out with the support of funds from the
International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.
During the
1980s and early 1990s, about 20 agricultural development organisations in
Honduras began using PTD methods to encourage and train peasant farmers to
become farmer experimenters (FEs). Most of the 30 or so programmes run by these
organisations closed down after their normal period of 3–10 years of working in
a given area. Many of the FEs continued to do PTD, experimenting with a wide
gamut of different ways of improving their productivity or reducing their
risks. Hundreds of FEs have been experimenting totally on their own, without
any outside intervention, for up to 12 years after the closing of the
programmes in which they had previously been involved.
In 1999, the
Association of Advisors for a Sustainable, Ecological and People-Centered
Agriculture (COSECHA) in Honduras decided to find out what technologies these
FEs had been developing on their own and how these technologies can best be
disseminated to other farmers. With the support of a three-year grant from
Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), COSECHA selected the
120 FEs around Honduras who were reputed to have developed the most interesting
post-programme technologies. Then, COSECHA began systematically interviewing
what will be a total of 80 of these FEs in order to learn of their technologies
and then disseminate these among other FEs in central and southern Honduras.
The technologies included were only those that the peasant farmers had
developed on their own after programme termination and that had not been
promoted or known within the country prior to the FEs’ generation of the
technology.
The study shows that FEs are capable
of developing large numbers of very significant and original technologies,
providing evidence that collecting and disseminating FE technologies in other
nations around the world could be a very useful activity for institutions
involved in agricultural development.
Starting with the initiation of the
World Neighbors-managed Guinope Integrated Development Program in January 1981,
PTD has become a fairly widely used methodology for agricultural development in
Honduras. Some 20 development organisations, including Catholic Relief
Services, the Honduran Coffee Institute (IHCAFE), the Zamorano Panamerican
Agricultural School and the Honduran Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), taught
farmers to experiment in at least 30 different programmes around the country.
Many of these programmes ended in the late 1980s or early 1990s, with the
result that Honduras is one the richest nations anywhere in the world in terms
of its per capita concentration of FEs who have been working without any
institutional support. Hundreds of small-scale peasant farmers in Honduras have
continued to experiment and develop new technologies for up to 12 years after
the outside agency terminated its work in the area. Rumours and individual case
studies through the years suggested or gave evidence that some of these FEs
were developing very interesting technologies that resulted in greatly
increased yields or reduced unit costs.
Nevertheless, no institution had
ever studied this phenomenon, either to learn how and why farmer
experimentation has become sustainable, nor what technologies the FEs have
developed and how these technologies might best be disseminated.
In 1999, IDRC
offered COSECHA a three-year grant in order to conduct just such a study. For
this purpose, Mateo Canas, an agronomist and the son of a peasant FE, has
visited the FEs’ homes and the fields where they are applying the technology
they developed. During each visit, Mateo carries out an interview, which
consists of an informal conversation in which he tries to make sure that each
of a list of some 20 issues is covered. After each visit (which typically takes
at least half a day), Mateo checks over the list of questions prepared at the
beginning of the study to make sure that all have been dealt with, and asks
those that have been missed.
The questions
deal with such issues as what technologies the FE has experimented with and
which ones seem to be successful (i.e. the farmer has continued to use).
Detailed descriptions are made of each of the successful technologies,
including a cost/benefit analysis comparing the technology with control plots.
Data as to the elevation, rainfall, total size of landholding, slope of the
fields etc are recorded. The farmer is also asked about other farmers’
responses to, and adoption of, the technology. COSECHA also inquires into such
issues as what the farmer feels are her/his limiting factors, whether s/he
would be interested in working with certain marketing ventures, whether s/he
would be interested in joining a nation-wide organisation of FEs and, if so,
what the principle objectives of the organisation should be.
After most of the interviews have
been finished, COSECHA will try out three or four methods of sharing the
technologies discovered with other FEs in central and southern Honduras. These
methods will include township-level exchange visits to other farmers’ fields,
township-level one-day conferences and a nation-wide conference of FEs. In each
case, the FEs themselves will present to the other participants what they did
in their experiments and the results they obtained. In each case, the cost per
person of the event will be recorded and, several months later, the number of
new experiments that the event stimulated will also be investigated in order to
obtain a figure for cost/experiment stimulated.
The 20 Most Promising
Techniques
Thus far, Mateo
has interviewed 52 FEs from ten of Honduras’ 23 Departments. These FEs include
farmers who had originally been trained by 17 organisations, ranging from 12
NGOs such as World Neighbors, COSECHA and FUNBANHCAFE (Foundation of the
Honduran Coffee Bank) to three governmental and semi-governmental organisations
– the MoA, IHCAFE and GTZ (German Agency for Technical Cooperation) – and two
academic institutions (Cornell University and the Zamorano Panamerican
Agricultural School). They also include seven women FEs, even though women in
Central America, by and large, are not heavily involved in extensive cropping
(that is, outside the homestead garden) until after the harvest, nor had they
been trained to be FEs by the development programmes in the 1980s and early
1990s. Their increased involvement in more recent programmes should help
increase the number of women available for this sort of study.
The 52 FEs have developed 82
technologies, mostly having to do with in-field agriculture, but including a
small minority of post-harvest and food-preparation technologies. We have
attempted to grade these technologies in three categories. Category A
represents those technologies which seem valuable enough in terms of farmer
benefits accrued and width of applicability among other farmers in Honduras
that they would be worthy of further validating and then, depending on the
results of the validation process, possibly dissemination to other farmers.
Category B includes those technologies that might be worth validating, but
which we would leave for doing so later. Category C includes those technologies
that very likely are not worth disseminating, because they either provide so
little benefit as to not be worth the effort, or they would very likely not be
applicable to the situations of many other farmers. Although these are
necessarily rather subjective evaluations, COSECHA does work with a list of 19
criteria for appropriate technology (Bunch 1982) that help us evaluate each
one.
Of the 82 technologies developed by
the 52 FEs interviewed, we have classified 39 as being in Category A (those
worthy of further validation and perhaps dissemination). Of these 39, the
following number pertained to each of the categories listed below:
|
Insect control |
15 |
|
Fertilisation |
10 |
|
Control of plant diseases |
8 |
|
Weed control |
2 |
|
Food preparation |
2 |
|
Animal husbandry |
2 |
|
Plant propagation |
1 |
|
Green manuring |
1 |
|
Soil conservation |
1 |
|
Others |
3 |
|
|
45 |
The total number
of technologies is greater than 39, because some of them included aspects of
two categories. For instance, some foliar sprays work both as a fertiliser and
to control insects or diseases.
This list shows
that FEs have chosen to experiment with a wide variety of different
technologies, including even some (e.g. food preparation) that are not commonly
included within the purview of agriculture. Furthermore, the priorities that
the FEs appear to have in their experimentation do not coincide very closely at
all with the technological priorities of the programmes that worked with them.
Whereas most of the programmes that worked with the farmers emphasised soil
conservation and basic grain production practices (e.g. plant spacing), farmers
seem to have established fertilisation and pest and disease control as their
highest priorities. Thus, the farmers have established their own priorities as
to which technologies they seek.
Of course, one
might argue that the development programmes taught these farmers how to manage
soil conservation and basic grain production so well that these factors were no
longer priorities on the FEs’ agendas. However, there are always new things to
learn about crop production techniques and even soil conservation techniques.
It also might be true that farmers find it easier to think of technologies that
might control a certain insect than those that would, for instance, conserve
their soils. Nevertheless, it is still likely that, at least to some extent,
the difference between what was taught by the programmes and what the FEs
subsequently experimented with is the result of either the programmes’ having a
longer-term vision than the farmers (probably the case with soil conservation),
or the programmes’ still not having perceived what the farmers’ priorities are
or are not (probably the case with basic production practices).
It is also
interesting, however, that a few categories of technologies are totally missing
in the list. Not a single FE experimented with the harvesting or use of water,
even though many areas of Honduras have moderate to severe droughts; in much of
southern Honduras, periodic and overall water shortages are without a doubt the
limiting factor in the production systems of peasant farmers. Furthermore,
experience with FEs in current programmes, since COSECHA began working with
water harvesting in southern Honduras, shows major evidence that FEs are very
interested in experimenting with water harvesting and more efficient water use,
but none of these FEs are included in the study because this COSECHA programme
is still in operation.
None of the technologies have to do
with the introduction of new crops or the use of tree crops or agroforestry.
The criteria used in the study, perhaps too restrictive, would not permit
inclusion of the introduction of any crop that already existed anywhere else in
Honduras. FEs probably did not experiment with new crops because the crops, in
order to be included within the study, would have to be ones grown outside
Honduras, in which case the FEs would have had considerable difficulty learning
about them or obtaining planting material.
It is very
likely that some categories of technology (e.g. water harvesting) were not the
subject of farmer experimentation because farmers did not think that any
solutions were within their grasp, or simply because working with such
technologies had never occurred to them. Thus, agricultural programmes in the
future should perhaps discuss with farmers, before they terminate their work in
an area, what sorts of possible future technologies they might experiment with.
Another reason
why certain types of technologies are missing among those generated by the FEs
may be that farmers are aware of them and know that they could work with such
technologies, but do not perceive these to be of a very high priority. For
instance, in the case of tree crops, FEs are certainly aware that they exist
and are profitable, but the many years one must wait before payback may make these
technologies of lower priority than those with a quicker payback. This might
also be the case with agroforestry systems, although farmers in southern
Honduras in the FAO programme, which is emphasising dispersed trees, are
experimenting quite a lot with various modifications of the dispersed tree
system.
Top Technologies
generated independently by peasant farmers
To give a
flavour of the technologies themselves, plus an idea of the value they could
have for other farmers, both within Honduras and further afield, here is a list
of the 20 that appear most promising:
1. Farmers
observed that aphids died if dried out. They therefore tried using wheat flour
diluted in water to spray on fruit trees in their nurseries and found that they
could control aphids and other similar sucking insects fairly easily this way.
2. Sugar
water or slightly salty water, applied to the growing tip of the plant, was
tried successfully as a way of controlling the corn borer.
3. One
FE noticed that leaf-cutter ants did not like living near neem trees. By
planting neem trees immediately over several troublesome nests of leaf-cutter
ants, he was able to get rid of them (they moved their nest elsewhere).
4. A
mixture of the leaves and bark of the mother-of-cacao tree (Gliricidia sepum)
with insecticidal qualities was used successfully to control several Coleoptera
that were affecting bean leaves.
5–8. Foliar fertilisers were developed by different FEs using either
animal manure, mother-of-cacao leaves, the leaves of several common weeds, or
wood ash (the last-mentioned also turned out to be of great use in preventing
plant diseases).
9–10. One woman FE found that coffee pulp could be dried just by
spreading it out to dry in the sun. Another FE found that mixing the wet coffee
pulp with chicken manure or sawdust would also dry it out. Once dried, the
coffee pulp is an excellent fertiliser, whereas it had previously just polluted
the country’s rivers.
11. A solution of leaves of mother-of-cacao and eucalyptus was found
to be very good as a fungicide for tree nurseries.
12. One farmer found he could apparently disinfect the soil in a
nursery by cultivating the soil well and then covering it with clear plastic so
it heated up thoroughly under the mid-day sun.
13–14. Both spraying crops with wood ash dissolved in water as well as
placing wood ash around the stems of plants have been found to be effective in
controlling various plant diseases, even very dangerous ones like late blight (Phytophthera
infestans) in tomatoes and potatoes.
15. A very common but easily eliminated local weed called “camalote”
was used to control other more serious and persistent weeds.
16. A local dish much like meat paddies can be made of the leaves of
sweet potatoes fried in egg whites.
17. One woman FE made a wine that local people liked – from tomatoes.
18. A maize-based animal feed was made including leaves from Tithonia
spp and eggshells, thereby increasing egg production.
19. One FE found that by grafting neem material onto the locally
available “paradise” tree rootstock, he could get much faster growth of neem
trees at altitudes above 500 m.
20. Another FE found that, by intercropping jackbeans (Canavalia
ensiformis) among his cassava plants, he greatly reduced his weeding time
and increased his cassava productivity by over 25%.
It should be
noted that these technologies could, in almost every way, be included under the
label of low-external-input or ecological technologies and, in many cases,
under that of totally organic ones. They are also technologies that are highly
appropriate for peasant farmers with little capital. By and large, the
FE-generated technologies are extremely inexpensive (most require absolutely no
cash output), they use locally available resources, they do not increase risk,
they provide fairly quick and recognisable returns, most of them are highly
cost-efficient and most of them are fairly widely applicable. Of course, some
of the technologies in the second and third categories would not be as highly
rated according to these criteria as would the technologies listed above.
Nevertheless, this list shows quite clearly not only that peasant FEs can
develop innovative technologies, but also that the ones they develop are highly
appropriate for other small-scale farmers.
Top Technologies
generated independently by peasant farmers
Much interesting
information for development programmes has emerged from the other questions
investigated in the study. First of all, every one of the 52 FEs who were
interviewed thus far expressed interest in learning more about agricultural
technology. Much more surprising, every one of them stated that she or he would
definitely be interested in joining a regional or national organisation of FEs
or villager extensionists. They talked about how it was necessary to dialogue,
to learn from each other and to join hands for their common good. Of the
various possible objectives for such an organisation that were mentioned, by
far the largest number of FEs felt that the primary objective should be to
share and disseminate agricultural technologies, both those they had generated
themselves and those generated by scientists and development programmes. The
next two most often mentioned priorities were the need to work on developing
markets for agricultural produce and the need to have greater influence on
government policies so that these do not discriminate so much against the
small-scale farmer.
COSECHA has
done nothing so far to institutionalise the FE experience studied, or provide
some long-term framework within which the FEs could continue to share
technological information and work together towards accomplishing their other
goals. Nevertheless, COSECHA – and World Neighbors before it – have made some
isolated efforts to support the spread of FE innovations. Often, the factor
that most limits such a spread of information is the cost of transportation
that has to be incurred by farmers when they want to go to where
representatives of different villages can meet together. Such an expense is
minimal when compared to what most agricultural development programmes cost, but
it can totally inhibit the rapid spread of FE-generated technologies.
Therefore, the first requirement for achieving an ongoing healthy spread of
these technologies would be the establishment of some possibly rather small but
sustainable source of funding. For instance, after an irrigation project has
been established, part of the water-user fees could be set aside for such a
purpose. Or the earnings of a cooperative that are destined for educational
purposes could be used. In Honduras, COSECHA has been thinking of setting up a
large roadside farmers’ market, with the charges for use of the market stalls
destined to finance the national FE organisation. None of these possibilities,
however, has actually been tried to date.
An organisation
to support the sharing of FE technologies could, of course, be extremely
simple, with no permanent office, one part-time worker to arrange meetings and
cross-visits, and a very small budget.
Surprisingly,
in view of the fact that many of the FEs have worked as paid villager
extensionists (10 of the 52 are presently employed by some rural development
programme), finding off-farm employment for themselves was not among the
highest priorities cited by the FEs as a purpose for a regional or national FE
organisation.
One of the most
disappointing results of the study was that the technologies developed by the
peasant farmers had not spread very far. In no case did an FE-generated
technology spread to more than ten other farmers through the exclusive efforts
of local villagers. Only in two cases had the technologies been disseminated
widely: the use of coffee pulp as a fertiliser and the intercropping of
jackbeans in cassava fields. However, in both cases, this wide dissemination
occurred because NGOs happened to find farmers using the new technology and
decided to disseminate it themselves.
We cannot be
sure of the reasons for this lack of spontaneous dissemination. Certainly, one
major factor is that most of the technologies were developed within the last
two or three years. Therefore, there has not been much time for the technology
to have been picked up by other farmers. A second reason is probably that most
of the technologies generated by FEs in the Honduran case are the type that are
not easily observed by other farmers. While soil conservation, green manure and
animal husbandry technologies are often highly visible and therefore easily
seen and tried by other farmers, these represent only four of the 39
technologies in Category A. The most common technologies discovered, such as in
fertilisation and in pest and disease control, are difficult for other farmers
to notice and impossible for them to apply without actually asking the
practitioner what s/he is doing and how.
It may also be
true that FEs, even those who have been farmer extensionists (perhaps 30% of
the above group of 52 FEs), will not expend much effort to spread the
technologies they themselves have developed. This is doubtful, however, because
many of these farmer extensionists have continued spreading some technologies
to their neighbours and the pride of personal discovery would seem to be a
factor that would encourage them to spread their own inventions at least as
fast as any other technologies. If it were the case that FEs are not spreading
their own technologies, the role of NGOs and other development organisations in
studying these technologies and spreading them to other areas of the country or
world would become even more important.
This study
leaves little question as to whether peasant FEs can develop, on their own,
technologies that appear to have considerable potential for other small-scale
farmers in the country, if not around the world. These technologies still need
to be further verified (although two or three have spread widely across
Honduras already, with the intervention of several NGOs), but their potential –
according to established criteria of appropriateness and their economic
cost-benefit ratios – would seem to be quite high.
Different organisations
in Honduras have used different techniques to train FEs. In the course of the
study thus far, we have noticed that organisations which had used the technique
of maximising success in farmers’ experiments during the first few experiments
they did, had motivated far more farmers to experiment in the future than did
the other organisations. In other words, achieving rapid and recognisable
success among farmer experimenters right from the start is an important part of
the total motivational process necessary for people to expend the effort to
experiment frequently (see also Bunch 1982).
In some cases,
development programmes will not be able to find any successful and validated
technology already being used by any programme in a similar setting (in terms
of ecology, culture etc). A programme may then have to experiment with several
technological possibilities before working with the farmers. Nevertheless, as
time passes, fewer and fewer programmes will find themselves in such a
situation. Then, programmes that give high priority to starting a PTD process
with future FEs selecting what to test from a list of potentially useful
technologies – which can be quite a long list – might consider reducing the
list to a fairly short one of technologies already proven to bring rapid and
recognisable success in similar settings.
The
technologies that farmers develop come from a wide spectrum of different
aspects of agriculture. They are not necessarily just the result of local
adaptive research, but may also include very basic research issues. Where the
technologies that FEs develop do tend to be limited is in their short-term
profitability. All technologies in all categories (except two or three
involving tree species) were those that would provide fairly short-term and
concrete benefits. None of them had to do with issues of sustainability,
long-term soil quality or any other issue that did not involve some sort of
return and one that would be perceived fairly quickly.
The study
provides major evidence that the collection, validation and further
dissemination of FE-developed technology may well be a very valuable activity
for some researchers and/or NGOs to become involved in. COSECHA, IDRC and other
related institutions will therefore use their abilities and means to
disseminate ideas around the world through various printed media, information
and communication technology, international conferences, and courses and
workshops so as to spread information about this possibility and its usefulness.
While farmer experimenters have been
found to continue experimentation long after PTD support projects ended, why
have their findings not spread widely to other farmers, except with support
again of an NGO? Are reasons given in the paper the real, or only, ones?
While all farmer experimenters
expressed an interest to join a FE network or organisation during the study,
has this been realised now? Is the outline of such network as in the paper
realistic?
Bunch R. 1982. Two
ears of corn: a guide to people-centered agricultural improvement. Oklahoma
City: World Neighbors.