Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
and in Nepal in 1993. These policies encouraged the involvement of non-
governmental organizations as facilitators of local group formation -
governments realized that they were not good at doing this themselves.
There are now nearly 30,000 forest protection committees and forest
users' groups in these two countries alone, managing more than 2.5 million
hectares of forest, mostly with their own rules and sanctions. 31 Benefits
include increased fuelwood and fodder productivity, improved biodiversity
in regenerated forests, and income growth amongst the poorest households.
Old attitudes are changing as foresters come to appreciate the remarkable
regeneration of degraded lands following community protection, and the
growing satisfaction of working with, rather than against, local people.
There is still a long way to go, though, with an estimated 31 million
hectares of forest in India that is still degraded, and state institutions not
readily capable of engaging in a participatory fashion with communities. 32
Integrated pest management and farmer field-schools
Farmer field-schools have been another significant model for social
learning to emerge in the past decade and a half. Integrated pest manage-
ment comprises the joint use of a range of pest-control strategies (insects,
weeds or disease) in a way that reduces pest damage to below economic
thresholds and is sustainable and non-polluting. Inevitably, it is a more
complex process than just relying on the spraying of pesticides. It requires
a high level of analytical skills and understanding of agroecological
principles, and it also necessitates cooperation between farmers. Farmer
field-schools are called schools without walls, in which a group of up to
25 farmers meets weekly during the rice season to engage in experiential
learning. The farmer field-school revolution began in South-East Asia,
where research by Peter Kenmore and colleagues on rice systems demon-
strated that pesticide use was correlated with pest outbreaks in rice. The
loss of natural enemies, and the free services they provided for pest
control, comprised costs that exceeded the benefits of pesticide use. The
programme of field schools has since spread to many countries in Asia
and Africa. At the last estimate, roughly 2 million farmers are thought
to have made a transition to more sustainable rice farming as a result. Field
schools have given farmers the confidence to work together on more
sustainable and low-lost technologies for rice cultivation. It appears, too,
that the process of learning is more likely to persist. One study compared
farmers in China who had been trained either in field schools or by the
calendar spraying methods. Evidence showed that field-school farmers
continued to learn in the years after training, whereas conventionally
trained farmers experienced no changes in their accumulated knowledge. 33
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