Department of Anthropology | Miami University
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Listening to Farmers in the Third World
Submitted by petersm2 on November 11, 2009 - 11:42am
Attending to the cultures of local farmers can be crucial to the success of agricultural development projects, said Prof. Steve Zolvinski in a recently released report he wrote for the International Rice Research Institute.
Titled “Listening to Farmers: Qualitative Impact Assessment in Unfavorable Rice Environments”, the report compares the experiences of farmers trying out new rice-growing technologies in five places where rice has not historically thrived. Zolvinsky employed “farmer-participatory” that seek to integrate farmers’ knowledge, experiences and perspectives in agricultural research.
Even if technology reform is proven successful biologically, farmers may not adopt it because of social factors such as land tenure, poor infrastructure, lack of access to capital or just because they evaluate the usefulness of a technology differently than professional biologists or agronomists, the report said.
But success improves when programs make farmers partners. After all, “it is the farmers who will always have the final say in whether or not they will adopt a new technology,” Zolvinsky wrote.
Zolvinsky’s project included farmers from Bangladesh, India, Laos and the Philippines.
A visiting assistant professor in the anthropology department, Steve Zolvinsky previously worked as a researcher in the Consortium for Unfavorable Rice Environments (CURE) with the International Rice Research Institute.
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