Restoring the Soil - Canadian Foodgrains Bank

Choosing The Right GM/CC Cropping System For A Specific Area195. Choosing the Right Green Manure/Cover CropSystem for a Specific AreaWhat about Farmer Participation?Many people working in agricultural development strongly believe that farmers shouldparticipate in their own agricultural development. I would go one step further thanthat. I believe that farmers should become the protagonists, the architects or, as PauloFreire wrote, the authors of their own development. In fact, if the smallholder farmersare not in charge of the process, at least after the first few years, I would questionwhether what is happening is really development.The achievement of broad-based authentic farmer participation is not easy. Seriousquestions need to be answered about participation. Are we talking about participationof the powerful, or of everyone? And if a few of the powerful can manipulate agroup, does participation exist, even if everyone is giving his or her “opinion”? Is trueparticipation occurring if people are giving us the answers they think we want to hear,or the answers other development people have told them are the “right” answers? Is itparticipation if the men do all the talking, or women also talk but are afraid tocontradict what the men have said? Can we assume that the farmers know all thetechnological possibilities in a given situation? If not, of how much value is their“participation”?For 40 years, development organizations have been told they are not using farmerparticipation as much as they should, yet seldom have the above questions been asked.When they are asked seriously, they can have a tremendous impact on what we callparticipation.These questions about participation should be in the back of people’s minds as theywork with the decision tree in this book. Most questions in the decision tree shouldbe discussed with the farmers, and most of the answers should be provided by thefarmers, in an atmosphere of complete freedom, trust and confidence.Furthermore, the gm/cc systems recommended by the decision tree are ones that havebeen tried and, at least for some farmers, have been successful over a period of severalyears. Still, they should not be considered the only possibilities that might be used ineach situation. It is quite possible, that over time, smallholder farmers will find bettergm/cc species or better ways of using them. I am sure that dozens of good gm/cc speciesare yet to be discovered, and perhaps hundreds of as-yet untried systems will alsobe discovered. The world is in serious need of more, and better, gm/cc systems. Farmersand programs should always be looking for more gm/cc species and more ways touse them, just as farmers are always looking for more crops to grow or better ways ofgrowing them. This decision tree should not be allowed to reduce people’s creativity.We must allow creativity to blossom.