Transitioning from paternalism to empowerment of farmers in low-income countries: Farming components to systems

Reasons for the initiation of farming systems/participatory approaches in non-Green Revolution (i.e., in more heterogeneous and less favourable production environments) areas in low-income countries is fol owed by a discussion of their evolution. Four phases are described along, with a brief description of some of the signiifcant methods in which farmer participation has been sought, accessed and evaluated. They enabled/facilitated the evolutionary process. Although, over the last 40 years there has been a progress in making smal-scale farmers much more visible in driving the agricultural research/development agenda through using the four basic stages embodied in the farming systems approach (i.e., descriptive, diagnosis, testing/evaluation and ifnal y dissemination), much stil needs to be done. This leads on to a discussion as to some of the barriers stil inhibiting true farmer empowerment and why further, such empowerment is imperative, if the agricultural chal enges of this century are to be addressed successful y, namely substantial y increasing agricultural productivity in an ecological y sustainable manner. Given the heterogeneity of the production environments and that many identiifed improvements are likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary in nature, this wil require farmers’ intimate involvement in their identiifcation, evaluation and dissemination. Discussion in the paper recognizes that there is increasing globalization/commercialization of agriculture and is predicated on the need to consider the whole farmer-research-development continuum involving multiple stakeholders (i.e., farmers, scientists, extension workers, input/output service providers and policymakers). Such a con-tinuum has been explicitly recognized in the operational plans for the recently reformed international agricultural research (i.e., CGIAR) system. The paper concludes with a short discussion on the potential role of formal model ing.