Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
could have existed for this or vice versa for farmers to influence the
formulation of less-toxic products.
According to Guisse (M. Guisse, 2005, in-depth interview), Senegal is
primarily a nonindustrial culture where the sense of responsibility to the
industrial environment is limited. According to Guisse, if an accident occurs
from pesticide exposure, no collective management body (the state, district
medical o
cer, ministry of health, pesticide distributor) is mandated to
intervene. In fact, farmers are alone in the world and are victims (M. Guisse,
2005, in-depth interview) unless they organize with others. The GIE Provania
has attempted to address these power issues. The secretary, for example, has a
diploma in horticulture and is a municipal politician. Because he is the group's
driving force in regard to partnership and project development, he wields the
most political influence. However, because he is the quickest to respond to
questions about process, content and what action to select to address
problems, others of the group do not always have the time to provide their
input.
Participation
Extension workers commented that the GIE Provania had brought together all
the farmer associations in the area on the issue of environment and health.
Participation of farmers was facilitated by close collaboration with the
executive of GIE Provania, who were local community leaders. All had at
minimum a secondary education, which allowed them to access information
easily and communicate with me in French, as well as act as translators and
facilitators during the PEAR process. These leaders used the internet to access
websites which were pertinent
to the issues being addressed,
including
information on pesticide toxicity.
Having the GIE Provania executive team, who are farmers, administer
questionnaires to other farmers may have produced some biases because
translation of Wolof terms might not have been consistent. In addition,
farmers who were trainers also administered evaluation questionnaires, which
may have skewed responses through the prompting of respondents by the
interviewer. Because of my inability to speak Wolof, I was unable to speak
directly to the most marginalized, illiterate farmers. Similarly, my involvement
was exclusively with men, and I did not work with women, despite their
important role in marketing produce and their potential exposures to
pesticides and wastewater. Working with this population might have been
possible in small groups and using a translator. The GIE Provania executives,
however, provided a legitimate brokering role, enabling messages to spread
more rapidly in order for action to take place.
Mapping changes
The first time farmers constructed a map, they focused on physical features of
the site: a golf course, a body of water, fields, an experimental water filtration
basin, typha plants, mosquitoes and the main road through the fields. Farmers
explained that bodies of water where typha grows become stagnant, killing
