Chapter 20 - Extension's role in sustainable agricultural development
Niels Röling and Jules N. Pretty
Niels Röling is Extra-ordinary Professor of agricultural knowledge systems, Department of Communication and Innovation Studies, Wageningen Agricultural University, Wageningen, Netherlands. Jules N. Pretty is the Director of Sustainable Agriculture Programmes, International Institute for Environment and Development, London.
Emerging challenges for sustainable agriculture
Sustainability and levels of action
Resource-conserving technology development and transfer
Incorporating farmer experimentation
From teaching to learning and a whole new professionalism
From directive to participatory extension
Challenges for supportive policy processes
References
Emerging challenges for sustainable agriculture
During the past fifty years, agricultural development policies have been remarkably successful at emphasizing external inputs as the means to increase food production. This has led to growth in global consumption of pesticides, inorganic fertilizer, animal feed-stuffs, and tractors and other machinery.
These external inputs have, however, substituted for natural processes and resources, rendering them less powerful. Pesticides have replaced biological, cultural, and mechanical methods for controlling pests, weeds, and diseases; inorganic fertilizers have substituted for livestock manures, composts, and nitrogen-fixing crops; information for management decisions comes from input suppliers, researchers, and extensionists rather than from local sources; and fossil fuels have substituted for locally generated energy sources. The basic challenge for sustainable agriculture is to make better use of these internal resources. This can be done by minimizing the external inputs used, by regenerating internal resources more effectively, or by combinations of both.
Evidence is now emerging that regenerative and resource-conserving technologies and practices can bring both environmental and economic benefits for farmers, communities, and nations. The best evidence comes from countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the concern is to increase food production in the areas where fanning has been largely untouched by the modem packages of externally supplied technologies. In these complex and remote lands, some farmers and communities adopting regenerative technologies have substantially improved agricultural yields, often using only few or no external inputs (Bunch, 1991; GTZ, 1992; UNDP, 1992; Lobo & Kochendörfer-Lucius, 1992; Krishna, 1993; Shah, 1994; SWCB, 1994; Pretty, 1995).
But these are not the only sites for successful sustainable agriculture. In the high-input and generally irrigated lands, farmers adopting regenerative technologies have maintained yields whilst substantially reducing their use of inputs (Kamp, Gregory, & Chowhan, 1993; UNDP, 1992; Kenmore, 1991; van der Werf & de Jager, 1992; Bagadion & Korten, 1991). And in the very high-input lands of the industrialized countries, farmers have been able to maintain profitability even though input use has been cut dramatically, such as in Europe (Vereijken, 1992; Vereijken, Wijnands, Stol, & Visser, 1994; Van Weeperen, Röling, Van Bon, & Mur, 1995; Pretty & Howes, 1993; Jordan, Hutcheon, & Glen, 1993; El Titi & Landes, 1990) and in the United States (Liebhart et al., 1989; NRC, 1989; Hanson, Johnson, Peters, & Janke, 1990; Dobbs, Becker, & Taylor, 1991; Faeth, 1993).
All of these successes have three elements in common. They have made use of resource-conserving technologies such as integrated pest management, soil and water conservation, nutrient recycling, multiple cropping, water harvesting, and waste recycling. In all, there has been action by groups and communities at the local level, with farmers becoming experts at managing farms as ecosystems and at collectively managing the watersheds or other resource units of which their farms form a part. And there have also been supportive and enabling external government and nongovernment institutions, which have reoriented their activities to focus on local needs and capabilities.
Most successes, though, are still localized. They are simply islands of success. This is because an overarching element, a favourable policy environment, is missing. Most policies still actively encourage fanning that is dependent on external inputs and technologies. It is these policy frameworks that are one of the principal barriers to a more sustainable agriculture (Pretty, 1994a). Figure 1 illustrates this chapter's area of discourse and its focus on the interfaces between natural resources, local stakeholders, supportive institutions, and the policy context.
Sustainability and levels of action
A necessary condition for sustainable agriculture is that large numbers of farming households must be motivated to use coordinated resource management. This could be for pest and predator management, nutrient management, controlling the contamination of aquifers and surface water courses, coordinated livestock management, conserving soil and water resources, and seed stock management. The problem is that, in most places, platforms for collective decision making have not been established to manage such resources (Röling, 1994a, 1994b). The success of sustainable agriculture therefore depends not just on the motivations, skills, and knowledge of individual farmers, but on action taken by groups or communities as a whole. This makes the task more challenging. Simple extension of the message that sustainable agriculture can match conventional agriculture for profits, as well as produce extra benefits for society as a whole, will not suffice.
Sustainability is commonly seen as a property of an ecosystem. But Sustainability can be seen from other perspectives, which are more relevant for extension. Environmental issues emerge from the human use of natural resources. Sustainability can therefore be defined in terms of human reasons, activities, and agreements. The definition of Sustainability then becomes part of the problem because people need to agree on how they define Sustainability and what priority they will give it (Pretty, 1994b).
In this approach, Sustainability is not a scientific, "hard" property which can be measured according to some objective scale, or a set of practices to be fixed in time and space. Rather, Sustainability is a quality that emerges when people individually or collectively apply their intelligence to maintain the long-term productivity of the natural resources on which they depend (Sriskandarajah, Bawden, & Packham, 1989). In other words, Sustainability emerges out of shared human experiences, objectives, knowledge, decisions, technology, and organization. Agriculture becomes sustainable only when people have reason to make it so. They can learn and negotiate their way towards Sustainability. In any discussions of Sustainability, it is important to clarify what is being sustained, for how long, for whose benefit and at whose cost, over what area, and measured by what criteria. Answering these questions is difficult, because it means assessing and trading off values and beliefs. Campbell (1994) has put it this way: "[Attempts to define Sustainability miss the point that, like beauty, sustain ability is in the eye of the beholder.... It is inevitable that assessments of relative Sustainability are socially constructed, which is why there are so many definitions."
It is therefore crucial to focus on more than one system level (Fresco, Stroosnijder, Bouma, & van Keulen, 1994). At the farm level, there is the farm household. At the above-farm level, there are the collective stakeholders, who might or might not be organized for sustainable use of the whole resource unit. In an irrigation scheme, it is common for an irrigators' association collectively to manage water use at the scheme level. But when it comes to watersheds or other vulnerable resource units, it is usually impossible to identify an appropriate "platform" for decision making (Röling, 1994a, 1994b).
A key example is the Indonesian programme for integrated pest management (IPM) in irrigated rice (FAO, 1994; Van de Fliert, 1993; Röling & Van de Fliert, 1994; Kenmore, 1991). At the farm level, this programme involves farmer field schools teaching individual farmers to manage their rice plots as ecosystems, carefully maintaining the balance between pests and their natural predators and only reverting to pesticides when observation shows that the situation is running out of hand. But IPM also needs collective management of resources comprising several farms. Thus nematodes can effectively be controlled by interrupting the cultivation of wet rice by a dryland crop such as soybeans. This requires decision making at the irrigation block level. The population dynamics of rats, the most important pest in irrigated rice, cannot be controlled at the farm level. Integrated rat management requires collective action at the village level (Van de Fliert, van Elsen, & Nangsir Soenanto, 1993).
Resource-conserving technology development and transfer
Although many resource-conserving technologies and practices have been widely proven on research stations to be both productive and sustainable, the total number of farmers using them is still small. This is because these technologies involve the substitution of management skills, knowledge, and labour for external inputs. The modern approach to agricultural research and extension, however, has been to emphasize comprehensive packages of technologies. Few farmers are able to adopt the whole modem packages of production or conservation technologies without considerable adjustments. Part of the problem is that most agricultural research still occurs on the research station, where scientists experience conditions quite different from those experienced by farmers.
This is true of many sustainability-enhancing innovat