Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Small-scale farmers, like those in northern Ghana, are often the worst affected
by these changes, as they are barely able to purchase the external inputs required
under modern production systems. The rural poor generally have less access
to land, labour, and capital and thus rely more on the diversity available in their
local ecosystems. They have developed diverse land-races and cropping patterns
adapted to local climate, social, and cultural situations (M'Mukindia, 1994). Such
farmers therefore tend to exhibit some resistance to changes in production prac-
tices, and remain rather impervious to extension messages that stress high exter-
nal input agriculture.
A conspicuous example of this type of traditional agriculture has been the reac-
tion of farmers to improved crop varieties introduced to them from outside their
communities. The results of such introductions have seldom been spectacular. Many
farmers continue to grow their own crop varieties, which they are familiar with.
The women farmers of Gore, a village in the Bawku area of the Upper East
region of Ghana, provide ample testimony to this trend (Map B). They maintain
and continue to cultivate some traditional rice varieties, in spite of a proliferation
of improved rice types introduced into the community by research and develop-
ment workers. Farmers' varieties are uniquely adapted, genetically diverse, and
possess characteristics evolved over time through cultivation and selection in
their local environments.
The northern Ghana PLEC team of scientists was attracted into a partnership
with the Gore women group with a view to approaching the conservation, man-
agement, and utilization of the indigenous varieties of rice in a collaborative way.
This chapter reports the results of that effort.
Methods and materials
The conservation activities are in progress at Gore, one of the three subdemonstra-
tion sites where PLEC work is undertaken in the Bawku area. The site falls within
the Sudan savanna agro-ecological zone. It is located about five kilometres from the
Manga Research Station of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR). Mean annual rainfall at the site is about 900 mm. The area is characterized
by depressions suitable for rain-fed rice cultivation.
Rural women and men farmers are key partners in this participatory action
research. This approach is unique because research and extension agents had, in
the past, seldom targeted rural women for collaboration in this part of the country.
In PLEC's preliminary work in 1998 and 1999, a participatory technology devel-
opment (PTD) approach was used. The critical ingredient of this approach is a
multidisciplinary research team. The team consisted at various stages of an
engineer, an agricultural economist, an agronomist/soil scientist, an extensionist,
and a crop protectionist / IPM expert.
