Agricultural Administration and Extension最新文献

Agricultural production in difficult areas faces multiple constraints, requiring intervention at several levels. It is argued here, on grounds of production and equity, that technology development is an important component of the necessary set of interventions. However, conventional ‘technology transfer’ strategies of R & D work poorly in complex and highly variable environments. As an alternative, much work has recently been undertaken on participatory, problem-oriented approaches. These innovations and their underlying concepts are reviewed here, and their potential and constraints highlighted. Participatory research tends to focus initially on small numbers of clients. It is therefore more expensive per client than the technology transfer approach, but much more effective. Two questions need to be addressed in future work: how the costs of research can be spread over a larger number of clients without loss of effectiveness, and to what extent flexible, participatory approaches can be incorporated into the work programmes of national agricultural research services.

For purposes of this paper, states are grouped by total population size, those with less than five million inhabitants being classified as small.

Small states do not necessarily have smaller farms. However, external economies of scale in research, extension, training, procurement and distribution of inputs, and the transportation and marketing of output may be missed. Product specialisation and regional co-operation offer some scope for alleviating these problems.

Foreign trade is important for the development of small economies; and for those well-endowed with natural resources, may be based on primary production. For those less well-endowed, increasing dependence on industry and other sectors is necessary, and agriculture must undergo adjustment. The plantation system, common in the Caribbean and other island economies, imposes a rigid structure and obstructs the change to family farming, food production and more intensive methods of cropping, appropriate to the development process. For those small countries with high man:land ratios, land reform is crucial. This highlights the need for sector planning and sector-based development finance.

Island small states can often encourage tourism in place of manufacturing which is limited by market size constraints. Tourism increases the demand for food and agriculture must adjust to meet this demand and prevent over rapid emigration to the tourist sector.

The location of small countries can influence agricultural development prospects, adversely in the case of remote islands and favourably when near to large industrialised countries with markets for high value market garden crops.

The National Agricultural Research Project (NARP), launched by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in 1979 with World Bank assistance, aims at conducting need-based, location-specific and production-oriented research with a mission-oriented problem-solving approach. This innovative approach fulfils many of the requirements of FSR. Based on agro-climatic and ecological potentials, the country has been divided into 126 agro-climatic zones. Research on problems specific to each zone or recommendation domain is developed by considering its resources, constraints and environment. The multidisciplinary problem-solving approach in addressing to farmers' problems, which is critical in this project, is similar in concept to FSR. So is the farmers' participation in the critical research planning stage. Further, testing and evaluation of the developed technologies at the farmers' level through on-farm activities, which is the key to the success of FSR, is one of the components of NARP. Establishment of effective linkages between research and extension for enhancing technology adoption and utilisation by moving away from the traditional transfer of technology approach, further moves it towards fulfilling the objectives and approaches of FSR.

Cotton still plays the role of the most important crop in the Sudanese economy. The Blue Nile Agricultural Corporation (BNAC) is a government organization established to administer about 270 000 feddans of cotton schemes along the Blue Nile. There is a low rate of family labour participation in cotton picking which is the most labour-demanding cultural operation. Hired labour is not easy to come by. The objective of this study is to examine family and hired labour supply in the BNAC schemes and to identify the underlying causal factors for labour shortage. The analysis has compared two ethnic groups in the area, Arabs and West Africans, to discover the influence of cultural backgrounds on the attitude towards farming. The data have shown that there is a higher rate of family participation in cotton picking among the West Africans than among the Arabs. The West Africans had been exposed to farming practices before, have a higher polygamy rate and lower enrolment of children in schools. The Arabs are originally pastoralists. The picking operation, for socio-economic reasons, is limited to women and children. The wage rate is too low to attract enough of the local hired labourers. Difficulties of transportation, their high costs and lack of good incentives make it difficult to secure large numbers of seasonal migrant labourers. Matching school holidays with the picking season and freeing women partially from home care responsibilities could help in increasing family labour participation. Facilitating the movement of seasonal migrant labourers and giving them incentives could increase their availability.

The already precarious food and fibre production levels in Nigeria took a sharp turn for worse during the early 1970s. This paper takes diagnostic and prognostic views of policy and organizational reforms within the agricultural sector between 1960, when Nigeria became independent, and 1985. Among the reasons for the ineffectiveness of the government concerns, investments and reorganizations within the sector are: polarity between the federal, state and local governments on policy issues; alienation of farmers from programme designs and implementation; existence of artificial barriers between training, research and farmers; and the promotion of nation-wide programmes at the expense of local and ecological peculiarities. To encourage rapid agricultural development, a new eight-zone organizational structure based on a farming-district concept is proposed. Apart from the offer of quick diagnosis which this system promotes, it is based on active farmer-participation and mass involvement of the country-side dwellers. It also allows for a better organized distribution network of agricultural inputs and farm products for the benefit of producers and consumers—a system which by itself may support an agrarian revolution.

The need to increase fish production to provide a good source of protein in many developing countries has led to various development programmes in their fisheries sub-sectors. An in-depth look at these programmes will find a common trend in them: an attempt to modernize the fishery through the introduction and provision of modern fishing materials and infrastructure to the predominantly rural and traditional communities. However, some of the modernization efforts have brought, in many instances, other attendant socio-economic problems that seem to negate their original objectives.

This paper identifies and examines various aspects of such innovations in the fisheries sub-sector. Thereafter a critical assessment of the socio-economic and technical issues relevant to such innovation adoption/modernization approach to fisheries development in developing countries is offered. The overriding perspective is the fact that the fisheries of most of these countries are artisanal in nature, and hence any innovation must be adapted for this purpose.

Shifting cultivation is, for around half of Sarawak's farm households, the traditional means of growing a subsistence crop of rice. It is, however, widely regarded as damaging to the environment and unsustainable in its present form, given high rates of rural population increase.

The second of these conclusions was confirmed by a socio-economic survey in 1973/74 of three villages practising a farming system based on shifting cultivation. The report on this survey forecast that farmers would turn increasingly from shifting cultivation to cash-crop production, even though this involved their entering commodity markets under uncertain if not unfavourable terms of trade.

A re-survey of the same villages in 1982 showed this forecast to be seriously inaccurate. The area under shifting cultivation had increased to absorb a sizeable population increase while cash-crop production had decreased. In one land-scarce village, mature rubber gardens had been felled in order to plant rice. Income from non-agricultural employment (mainly in the form of migrant remittances) had largely replaced the income previously earned from cash crops.

Levels of living were judged not to have declined between 1973/74 and 1982 and possibly to be more secure in the short term since they were less dependent on commodity prices. However, in the longer term the breakdown of shifting cultivation can still be foreseen, as even in relatively land-abundant villages fallow periods are approaching the critical minimum. Some technologies which use land less extravagantly have recently appeared (one an indigenous technology) and are being promoted by a Government extension service which has recently devoted more resources to work in poor and isolated regions of the State.