HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT - Science for Agriculture and Rural Development in Low-income Countries - page 21

programmes. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, increasingly more field-based
experiences emerged, creating more space for methodological and institutional
innovations for agricultural research and extension. Within these participatory
approaches - as they became commonly known - special emphasis was placed upon
participation of local people and their communities, especially working with and
through groups; and building upon the traditional or indigenous knowledge that they
held (Chambers et al . 1989; Waters-Bayer 1989; Haverkort et al . 1991).
The rise of Farmer Participatory Research (FPR) was a deliberate effort among
agricultural professionals to combine farmers' indigenous traditional knowledge
with the more widely recognized expertise of the agricultural research community.
The approach aimed to distinguish itself from FSR in its more deliberate attempt to
actively involve farmers in setting the research agenda, implementing trials and
analysing findings and results (Farrington and Martin 1988). FPR has gone beyond
the on-farm trials which became the standard of FSR, and actually called for farmers
to design, monitor and evaluate experiments - in collaboration with researchers -
carried out in their own fields (Okali et al . 1994). Some have argued that while FPR
approaches can increase participation among farmers, as a research methodology, it
has not brought about impact and output (Bentley 1994), or may require more than
short-term technology development efforts (Humphries et al . 2000). Research from
Africa supports this argument by showing that less than 15% of 'experiments led by
farmers' resulted in the definition of new knowledge or the development of new
technologies (i.e., were not already in existence elsewhere). The study concluded
that farmers' experiments are in fact more 'complementary' than 'synergistic' to
formal agricultural research efforts, and that farmers' experiments are more closely
linked to agricultural extension activities rather than to agricultural research
accomplishments (Sumberg and Okali 1997).

Ecological/biological/organic agriculture

In response to the increasing concern on the use of chemicals (fertilizers and biocides)
in intensive agricultural production, pleas emerged for a 'more natural, sustainable'
century a movement
promoting 'chemical-free' agriculture did exist 6 , it really gained momentum in the
1980s and 1990s.
Different terms are used more or less interchangeably to denote this type of
agricultural practices, i.e., biological agriculture, ecological agriculture, organic
agriculture, and different definitions are used, depending on the source and on the
purpose of the definition 7 a very general definition reads like “ both a philosophy and
a system of farming. It has its roots in a set of values that reflects an awareness of
both ecological and social realities. It involves design and management procedures
6 The term organic, as a descriptor for certain 'sustainable' agricultural systems, appears to
have been first widely used by Lord Northbourn (1940) in his topic 'Look to the land'. The
term organic was first widely used in the USA by J.I. Rodale, founder of Rodale Press, in the
1950s.
7 We will use the term 'organic' in the remainder of this text.

agriculture. Although already in the early parts of the 20th