LESSONS LEARNED - Science for Agriculture and Rural Development in Low-income Countries - page 108

Lesson 6: Agriculture and on-farm and off-farm biodiversity are tightly linked
Agronomists and environmentalists need to collaborate in taking local perspectives
as the starting point for development of new biodiversity management programmes.
Until now, lack of common understanding and lack of an operational framework
have strongly hampered successful implementation of such programmes. Local
improvement of germplasm can integrate and complement breeding activities in the
public sector and contribute to conservation of agrobiodiversity and to rural
development.
Lesson 7: Interaction is needed to increase impact
In addition to increasing interaction and integration between the different scientific
disciplines, attention must also be given to strengthening interaction with stakeholder
groups. Over time, participation and multi-disciplinarity, complemented by capacity
building, have become leading principles in research projects, reflecting the insight
that interaction with relevant stakeholders is an essential element in translating
insight into impact. Multi-disciplinarity that evolves into inter-disciplinary research,
thus, implies building upon the knowledge and experience of all relevant stake-
holders (including young and old, men and women, rich and poor, etc.). This entails
a joint learning process, in which the different groups of rural communities such as
farmers, researchers, policymakers, traders, NGOs, and other local resource managers
learn from and with each other within the context of the research project.
Lesson 8: Invest in involvement of stakeholders
Stakeholders' capacities, involvement and relevance depend on cultural, institutional
and financial factors. Accurate identification and involvement of stakeholder groups
is essential for effective research and policy implementation. Communication is a
key element in this process. The identification and involvement of relevant stake-
holders is not always easy, as the same cultural, institutional and financial factors
may constrain some groups from actively participating (such as women, landless,
minority ethnic or religious groups). Additional care and effort must be put into
facilitating the involvement of these less vocal and powerful stakeholders.
THE WAY AHEAD
There are many challenges ahead for any research programme that aims at
supporting rural development and sustainable agriculture. This is perhaps best
underlined by the display of the world population clock, currently (May 2007)
counting 6.59 billion people and the counter that shows the area of arable land
(currently some 8.57 billion hectares 1 ). About every 7 seconds, 1 ha of arable land is
lost, and it is just six years ago that the world population clock surpassed the 6
billion.
1 www.irri.org (May 2007)