posted on 2024-09-06, 06:59authored byRobert Chambers, B.P. Ghildyal
Rural poverty is much less a problem of total food availability than of who
produces the food and who has the income to buy it. A high priority is
therefore to enable the tens of millions of resource-poor farm families to
increase their production and improve its stability. The normal transfer-of-
technology (TOT) model for agricultural research has built-in biases
which favour resource-rich farmers whose conditions resemble those of
research stations. TOT approaches have been modified through on-farm
trials and demonstrations but the basic model and approach remain the
same. A second emerging model is farmer-first-and-last (FFL). This
starts and ends with the farm family and the farming system. It begins
with holistic and interdisciplinary appraisal of farm families' resources,
needs and problems, and continues with on-farm and with-farmer R and D,
with scientists, experiment stations and laboratories in a consultancy and
referral role. FFL fits the needs and opportunities of resource-poor farm
families better than TOT, but there are obstacles to its development and
introduction. These can be tackled step-by-step, through combinations of
methodological innovation, interdisciplinarity, including the social
sciences, and provision of suitable resources, rewards and training. FFL
approaches promise a greater contribution from agricultural research to
the eradication of rural poverty.
History
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Chambers, R. & Ghildyal, B.P.,1984 ‘Agricultural research for resource-poor farmers: the farmer-first-and-last model’, Agricultural Administration, 20 (1), pp1-30