African Farmers call for Agroecological approaches

Heather here...just read an interesting article about a "citizen's jury" - 50 farmers and fisherfolk who met in Sélingué, Mali 11–17 Januaryto issue "their verdict on the future of food and agricultural research". Their verdict supports many of AGRA Watch's critiques of AGRA...

"The juries urged researchers to focus on improving local crops, a call that echoed the outcome of a similar jury process held in India last year ...And they showed concern that research would be applied to generate hybrid seeds — seeds produced by cross-pollinating to improve traits such as crop yield. They requested a greater degree of understanding from researchers of local ecology and farming systems.

"Farmers indicated that crop breeding work should go hand in hand with research aimed at improving the ecology of soils in which selected seeds will be grown," Michel Pimbert, director of the sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and livelihoods programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development, told SciDev.Net. Farmers said that the main reason for wanting to build on local-level diversity was because they felt using hybrid seeds would make them dependent on seed companies, according to Pimbert.

Furthermore..."A substantial conclusion of the farmers' jury is that research on access and control over land tends to ignore women and their needs. Research should consider relations between women, men and younger people in studies on who has access to, and control over, land and other natural resources," said Pimbert.

"There are clear differences between the citizens' views and what agricultural researchers are doing and thinking — such as the farmers' emphasis on agroecology, which considers the whole farm, rather than researchers' more narrow concerns, he said. Pimbert said that agricultural research has typically neglected integrated approaches that take into account the complexity of African farms and African farmers' knowledge and priorities."