Civil Society Organisations are concerned about a development towards an agricultural production that continues to rely on farmers, but in a different way. Farmers in the North are under constant pressure to invest heavily and update their installations, too often with the help of subsidies. Food has to become cheaper. The paradigm is: Yields have to be increased, and everything -except for the weather- is under control: Soil, water, fertilizer, pests, diseases, and, as a comparably new development, genetics. Control is so tight that phenomena that were not foreseen can be simply ignored or hushed up. BSE existed in England but was not systematically studied or treated for many years. How could farmers not have noticed? Where were the farmers who are expected to care for healthy food, appropriate livestock keeping, unspoiled soil and water, rich biodiversity? Distracted by other objectives? Only a small percentage of Northern farmers produce aside of the mainstream. They reject short-term economics and refuse to externalize environmental cost.
Farmers in the South work in equally unromantic but different settings. Most of them live in poverty or under its constant threat. Farmers decided for high yielding varieties, and landraces got lost by the hundreds, although they carried genes that may help to fight future types of pests or diseases, or to tackle climate changes. Only extremely limited mechanisms are in place to conserve these invaluable resources. Farmers used Northern soil preparation techniques, only to learn decades later that old, more sustainable techniques are being rediscovered by scientists. Decades ago, African farmers were taught to grow maize instead of cassava or sorghum, only to come back to their more reliable food security crops. Integrated pest management, based on many old farmer developed techniques, comes to replace fixed schedule pesticide applications. Irrigation dams and canals were built with high inputs. That experience is not completely through, however, farmer developed irrigation techniques are already documented and the re-teaching has started.
Food production based on technologies developed by scientists without farmers is rarely sustainable. This publication calls for a change in agricultural research and a change in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Most of the contributions in this publication were produced for the International Workshop of Non-Government and Small Farmer Organisations on Research for Poverty Alleviation.
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