Despite the efforts of development programs to upgrade the technologies, particularly of farmers, adoption is still low. What ingredients are missing in the approaches so far?
Dear Alexander, probably the main missing ingredient is: farmers!
There is a long history of very good technologies not adopted by farmers. At the level of diffusion and adoption, some studies on agroforestry in Africa found that technical, socio-political, ecological and economic constraints used to stop farmer from implementing these new technologies.
The question is: who did create the technology? Who did define the problems to solve with these technologies? Who did evaluate the context in which these technologies should be implemented? And, particularly, why haven't these constraints been predicted in these evaluation?
Here you find interesting thoughts and methods on how not to overlook farmers when trying to help them:
http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/5194.pdf
Dear Alexander,
The proof is in the pudding as they say. If the adoption rate is low, something went wrong somewhere. As Costanzo points out, an important ingredient of technology development is the farmers themselves.
The problem in agriculture, even more so in developing countries, is the uncertain environment in which farmers operate. Climatic variability (not mentioning climatic change), pests and diseases, but also market fluctuations, or even the farmer's health, are all factors that cause uncertainty. Within that uncertain and risky environment, a farmer also pursues a set of goals and objectives, some of which may have little to do with agricultural production. And in a highly uncertain environment, opportunistic behaviour can be the best strategy to survive in the short term.
If a technology is developed within a controlled environment, addressing one specific problem or objective, it may have adverse effects in an uncertain environment. Or it may not have any effect at all if the basic conditions for success for that technology (e.g. access to markets) are not met. I think that, too often, we do not sufficiently take into account the complexity and uncertainty of the context within which a farmer is operating, nor the different goals that a farmer has. For example, increasing production through new technologies has little benefit to a farmer if there are no easily accessible markets where the surplus can be sold for a profit. It may prove difficult to encourage farmers to implement soil conservation practices if they are more interested in irrigation to deal with erratic rainfall.
There is a lot of literature on technology adoption, and often we look at farmer characteristics to explain adoption rates. But I think we also need to look at the context (including the institutional level), and at ourselves, to do better and be more effective in technology development and dissemination. And most importantly, engage farmers in the entire process, realizing that the farmer community is extremely heterogenous.
What are your own thoughts on this issue?
By the way, you may find the following article by Douthwaite (How to Enable Innovation) also interesting: http://www.cigrjournal.org/index.php/Ejounral/article/view/347/341
In a word, NO. We didn't get it right. We've fallen into economic traps that have no escape, with the same thinking that created our significant and terminal problems. Two critical points come to mind.
First when we believe/act as if the environment is a subset of our economy, we seem to trash it with impunity and greed.
Secondly we haven't shown the wisdom of the 'precautionary principal' where we insure that we do no harm before we unleash any chemicals or technology. That should have been established in the 1930's when the beginning of man made chemicals began.
Lastly, we have yet to address the structural unemployment that follows in the wake of high tech and automation. Geometrically increasing population and extraction of earths resources with increasing economic, environmental and social consequences is a recipe for disaster. It''s just a matter of time now.... hold on.. the going is going to get rocky.....
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