INTRODUCTION

Participation has been on the lips of development professionals for many years now. People's participation in development requires that the top-down approach be replaced by a process of helping people to articulate their problems, form self-help groups and formulate plans to use their own resources to achieve their objectives. Such methods have been used in projects to rebuild infrastructure in the wake of cyclones, to organize villagers to run their own night schools for adult education, and to form groups to guarantee jointly the repayment of business loans.

'Participation' aims to empower people through joint activities; the alternative style of intervention – imposing projects on passive recipients, or offering them project 'handouts' – is disempowering, and creates dependency on the external agency. In an era when aid is increasingly rationed across ever-expanding areas of need, helping people make the best of their own resources rather than hope for bounty from outside seems to be the only realistic policy.

For poor farmers in the marginal lands around the world the drive for participation in agricultural projects comes with an additional impetus. The goods from outside – in this case the 'green revolution' technologies of high-yielding seed varieties, packaged with fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides – are not only unaffordable, but they are inappropriate. It is now well recognized that introducing high-input agriculture to areas of the world where poor people cultivate difficult soils in adverse climatic conditions is not successful, not because the farmers themselves are ignorant or are unable to apply the new technologies according to the book, but because the technologies are often not suitable for the variable conditions under which the farmers work.

Technologies developed on research stations and promoted by agricultural extension services may yield well in the prosperous lands of, for example, the Punjab or the commercial farming regions of Zimbabwe, but perform erratically in the semi-arid, dryland farming regions of southern India, and the communal lands of Zimbabwe. The result is that farmers are barely able to cover the investment costs of these seed packages and feed their families as well.

Those areas where modern varieties were successful can be termed 'green revolution' regions: where rainfall is reliable, or irrigation possible. Marginal lands which are distributed all over the Third World, and cover much of sub-Saharan Africa, have been characterized as complex, diverse and risk-prone (Chambers 1989): here agriculture is rain-fed, and droughts are a regular occurrence.

This book describes the Chivi project, a pilot study which explored alternative ways of working with smallholder farmers to develop technological options appropriate for such conditions. The first part of this chapter considers farmer innovation and technology development, and contrasts this with the failure of agricultural extension services to deliver relevant technologies for marginal conditions. Two themes are then explored: participation – but by whom and to what extent? – and the sustainability of livelihoods and institutions.

Farmers as experimenters

Poor farmers in marginal lands traditionally plant a range of crops and vegetables, often intercropping, as well as preserving trees in their fields for their fruit and firewood. To the eyes of most commercial farmers, their farms appear an untidy mixture of crops, with tiny plots and low yields. Agricultural scientists and social scientists increasingly recognize, however, that what poor farmers have always used – their own varieties and traditional farming techniques – are well adapted to their environment, and are more appropriate than the monocultures that research stations and extension services tend to promote. From all over the world, practices previously dismissed as unscientific and backward are now recognized to have a rational basis, and to be the result of informal innovation and experimentation on the part of often uneducated farmers.

There is now plenty of evidence that farmers are skilled at selecting seed varieties to suit the varying agronomic conditions on their farms, and plant a range of varieties to suit different soils and water availability within their landholding. Mende farmers in Sierra Leone, for example, select shorter- or longer-season rice varieties to plant in marshy areas, in water-retentive soils in valley floors, in free-draining upland areas, and in water courses – and thus avoid the need to irrigate (Almekinders 1999). This adaptation of the germ plasm to suit the conditions contrasts with the conventional approach of adapting the conditions (for example, applying irrigation) to suit the requirements of modern varieties. Farmers identify favourable characteristics in other farmers' varieties and combine these with their own varieties, selecting the plants with the most promising characteristics and multiplying up the seed. While formal research tends to concentrate on yield alone, farmers' selection criteria are more complex and include taste, texture and cooking properties, suitability for intercropping, pest resistance, ability to grow in the shade of trees, length of duration, reliability of yield during drought years, and so on.

All this does not mean that farmers are producing enough to feed their families: regular food relief in these regions is evidence to the contrary. Nor does it suggest that farmers have all that they need in terms of varieties and technologies at their disposal, and that agricultural research stations or extension services have nothing to offer them. Farmers are interested in formal variety trials, as was demonstrated by the case of the Mahsuri rice, a variety that 'escaped' from a research station in India via a farm labourer, was multiplied and spread informally among farmers with whom it was popular, and was only officially released by the government some time later as a result of popular demand (Maurya 1989). It is also a mistake to label modern varieties as 'bad' and traditional varieties 'good' for marginal farmers – they themselves are usually interested in trying out the new alongside their native varieties, incorporating a new variety that has performed well in their fields within their own germplasm banks along with several of their favoured native varieties; indeed they probably do not see a great dichotomy between new and native varieties (Rhoades 1989).

What is becoming clearer is that, when farmers adopt new technologies, they do so incrementally, trying out different elements that seem most promising rather than investing resources in the whole new package. This can be seen in the example of the introduction of diffused-light storage shelters for seed potatoes: there was apparently a low level of adoption of this technology until it was discovered that, although the farmers had not gone to the expense of building new shelters, they had incorporated the principle of diffused light into a variety of different storage situations (ibid.). Similarly, rather than unreservedly adopting a new variety, many farmers buy a small quantity of seed in order to combine particular genetic characteristics of the new variety with their own seed, and so get the best of the new while preserving the adaptability to adverse conditions of the local variety. What farmers want, it seems, is not an all-or-nothing package, but a 'basket of technologies' from which to chose what is most appropriate for them.

What then is the role for 'outsiders' – whether agricultural researchers, extension workers or non-governmental organization (NGO) project workers – in farmers' experimentation? Rather than instructors in improved methods, they need to act as facilitators of experimentation, convenors of meetings, suppliers of genetic material, or even as travel agents to arrange visits between farms. This is the role played by the project officer in the Chivi project; and chapters 7 and 8 describe how exposure visits to research stations were arranged, farmers discussed which techniques they wanted to try out, and trials were carried out and evaluated. Taking farmers to view a range of technical options placed the onus upon the farmers themselves to choose what they considered most suitable, and left them free to drop whatever they decided had not performed well in the trials.

The gap between farmers and extension workers

The story of the agricultural extension service in Zimbabwe provides an essential background to our understanding of the Chivi project. The situation of the farmers in the communal areas of Zimbabwe, outlined in chapter 2, derives from a history where legislation deprived Africans of the best areas and resources, and forced them to farm the poorest land. Men were encouraged to work away from their homes, leaving the farms to be run single-handed by women. Agricultural extension messages in the colonial era were designed with the conditions of the wetter, commercial agricultural areas in mind, and as well as being detrimental in some ways, they were enforced upon the African farmers by legislation: those who refused to implement the prescribed measures could be punished.

In Zimbabwe the differentiation between rich and poor farmers, and the capture of the best farming resources by the rich, was driven not just by economic forces but by legislation based on race. The lack of understanding between the extension service and marginal farmers, which around the world is often caused by differences in education, background (often urban vs. rural), life expectations (career development vs. survivalist farming), was here exacerbated by the divide of race and culture. It is small wonder that the techniques adapted for such complex, diverse and risk -prone areas were overlooked rather than investigated.

Chapter 2 describes how this imposition of unpopular measures was halted at independence, and a commitment made to grassroots development. The agricultural extension service has operated for the most part on a 'transfer of technology' model, however, with extension messages being directed mostly at the farming elite of master farmers: richer farmers who had undergone some training and who had gained a diploma. The hope was that other farmers would copy the methods demonstrated by the master farmers; the reality was that these technologies were considered unsuitable by poorer farmers, and the anticipated 'trickle down' did not take place. Most farmers received little attention from the hard-pressed agricultural extension workers and those who carried out their own experimentation or employed indigenous methods were more likely to be secretive about what they had done than share their expertise.

Such experiences are not unique to Zimbabwe but also apply to many agricultural extension services around the world. It is estimated that 80 per cent of all agricultural extension 'messages' in India are not taken up by farmers – and it is probably more than this for advice for dryland farming (Chambers 1989). Carney (1999, quoting World Bank 1994) writes:

Notable successes such as the yield increases of the Green Revolution, have been offset by notable failures such as collapsed rural credit schemes and research and extension systems which remain dysfunctional despite enormous investment over the years. For example, a 1994 review of World Bank extension project found that 90 per cent experienced recurrent cost funding problems and 70 per cent were probably not sustainable. Since the Bank committed over $1.4bn in new loans to extension during the period 1987–93 the magnitude of this underperformance problem was significant.

ITDG's background in food security

The Agriculture and Fisheries Sector, ITDG's group that managed food security projects internationally in the 1980s and early 1990s, defined technology as 'skills and knowledge used by people to produce goods and services'. Appropriateness was determined more by social, economic and institutional 'fit' than by mechanical or technical assessment. It was underpinned by the maxim expressed by Fritz Schumacher, founder of ITDG: 'Find out what people are doing, then help them to do it better'. When work was initiated in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s it was within this internationally determined framework.

ITDG's Agriculture and Fisheries programme developed a people-centred approach in the 1980s. Pioneering work was done in Turkana in a water-harvesting project, which focused on strengthening local Turkana institutions, adekars, so that they decided the pace and nature of any interventions to sustain sorghum and livestock production and increase food security. Within ITDG, the Chivi project was seen as a way of testing some of the lessons learnt from Turkana: the importance of local organizations, of dialogue with the community, and of continuity. Other areas in ITDG were taking a similar approach, for example, the Maasai Housing Project in the Kajiado District of Kenya was using participatory technology development (PTD) as a means of increasing access to decent and affordable shelter.

In Zimbabwe, the context was one of the colonial heritage of food insecurity of the highly-populated and marginal agricultural 'communal areas' in agroecological zones IV and V. In these areas, food-aid disbursements were a routine drain on national resources. ITDG Zimbabwe placed a high priority on looking for alternatives for improving local food security in these areas, through appropriate and replicable interventions.

After a long search in co-operation with national, provincial and district government authorities and non-government institutions and discussions with local development committees, the way of identifying the location for the initial pilot work was agreed. Chapter 3 describes how Chivi District was eventually selected as being typical of the zone, and the district authorities with local ward committees finally decided that the work should begin in Ward 21.

At the outset there were many pressures brought to bear on ITDG by government and donors (even ITDG's UK management) to deliver 'technical solutions'. Reason prevailed, however, and the slower, more thorough process described in this book was developed.

Facilitating participation

The original objectives of the Chivi project were:

• To increase household food security through improved agricultural production;

• To strengthen local institutions and enable poor farmers (men and women) to articulate their priorities and control productive resources;

• To influence government agricultural policies to be more responsive to the concerns and circumstances of poor farmers.

The Chivi project built on the growing recognition within ITDG that technology development is a social process and that projects should be 'client-led' rather than 'technology-led'. Given this, it may seem contradictory that objectives for the project were decided upon before the people concerned could be consulted, and before their needs could be elicited. In addition, the choice of the project area itself – using criteria to select a resource-poor area where food security was an issue – was made without waiting for an invitation from the people. Once the project was well known in the area, villages did of course have the option of refusing to participate. This happened in one village, where for political reasons the sabhuku forbade farmers' club and gardening group members to join in.

Working within carefully chosen boundaries does not necessarily mean that control is taken away from local people, however; it simply means that the activities chosen and planned by the people are concentrated in one area of need – food security – and are less likely to become dissipated and ultimately unsuccessful. Encouraging people to voice their needs often leads to a 'wish list' that must be met with refusal and disappointment, and raising expectations that irrigation tanks may be dug, schools built and land reallocated would be to take on the role of fairy godmother, and may ultimately be disempowering. On the other hand, improvements achieved through building on people's own skills and ingenuity are both sustainable and empowering. Chapters 4 and 5 describe how the project elicited people's needs, helped them to prioritize their objectives and encouraged planning to meet these objectives.

Another aspect of participation is: participation by whom? Many research projects in the 1980s had stressed the participation of individual farmers in technology development, but the Chivi project went beyond this in stressing the importance of the participation of all farmers through their involvement in local institutions, so as to increase the food security of all. Local groups were seen to be the best way to encourage some of the poorest people to participate, and indeed there is evidence presented in chapter 9 that 80 per cent of the lowest wealth rank in the project villages were benefiting from the project.