10.6 Social/societal acceptability

Contents - Previous - Next

Evaluating technologies from a social/societal viewpoint has two dimensions. These are to evaluate it from the viewpoint of:

• Relations among people in the present generation (i.e., intra or within generation)
• Relations between the current and future generation (i.e., inter or between generation ) -- that is, ecological sustainability.

Although individual farmers in the current generation, particularly if they are very close to the survival level, are not likely to be too concerned with intergenerational relationships, it is more difficult to separate out broader societal issues and social acceptability as far as the individual farming family is concerned with respect to intra-generational relationships, As far as the individual farming household is concerned, intra- or within-household relationships are likely to be important in assessing the social acceptability of a proposed improved technology, but such households may, or may not, be too concerned about what is likely to happen to relationships between households if the technology is adopted, Therefore, no attempt is made in the following discussion to differentiate social issues of interest to the individual farming family from the collective interests of society as a whole, In any case, individual farming households influence, and are influenced by, what is acceptable to society as a whole,

10.6.1 Present Generation Relationships

Because individual household members are differentiated and households are also members of the community, social criteria include both effects within the household (intra-household) and across households in the village as a whole (inter-household).

A couple of important intra-household social criteria include:

• Gender Issues, What would be the effects of the proposed technology on other activities undertaken by women and men? For example, would more frequent weeding by women reduce time available to them for child care? Would a technology that decreases work for the men increase work for the women in the household? Thanks to the work of Feldstein, Flora, Poats, and Jiggins, methodologies have been developed in recent years to evaluate such gender issues, It is important to identify who in the household is the decision maker with reference to the enterprise or operation the technology relates to, who controls and applies the resources assigned to it, and who reaps the benefit. If the same person is not connected with all three, then complications will arise in designing relevant technologies for improving its productivity that will be attractive to all parties, For example, men could require women to work harder as a result of the introduction of a new technology in an enterprise or operation concerning which they are the decision makers and from which they themselves reap the benefit.
• Short-Term Livelihood Issues. What would be the effects of the proposed technology on the seasonal cash, resource demand, production, and consumption flows of the household? For farming households very close to the survival level, any technology that is likely to exacerbate seasonal flows with respect to any of these are likely to be socially unacceptable. With respect to the production/consumption relationship, poor seasonal synchronization between the two and the poor overall level of production often result in seasonal hunger. In many parts of the world, this in turn, may, result in differentiation in levels of nutrition of individuals within households, according to gender and age. The prospects of such problems, combined with the uncertainty of the climate in many areas where limited-resource farmers operate and the general low level of living, predisposes such households to implement not only strategies to try and minimize production risk but also closely related coping strategies of various types to try and maintain household security, This enables them to consume during periods when production is deficient [Frankenberger and Goldstein, 1990; Jodha,1990]. Some of these can adversely affect future productivity. Obvious examples would be selling off productive assets (e.g., animals used for draught purposes) and obtaining access to food at high rates of implicit interest (e.g., repayment in terms of labour at busy times in the farming cycle) or explicit interest, It is important to know if such coping strategies exist, whether they are among the factors determining how risk averse such households are likely to be. They also indicate how much reliability can be placed on the availability of cash for improving the productivity of the farming system, in contrast to buying food to ensure survival.

Other social criteria involve inter-household relations, These may involve changes within the community, if new technologies are adopted. Some of these criteria include:

• Effects of proposed technologies on labour-sharing or food-sharing networks. For example, does the increased ploughing time required for double ploughing mean that the family traction will not be available to other members of the extended family'?
• Effects of proposed technologies on differences in power and status among different people in the community.

Some of the community-based social criteria involve preferences and taboos. For example:

• Cultural or religious preferences for a specific crop or animal management practice. An example would be the practice of keeping animals as a store of wealth to be used in a time of need, rather than being sold on a regular basis.
• Cultural or religious taboos against specific crop management practices. An example would be having to delay ploughing at the beginning of the rainy season until the village leadership gives permission.

Social criteria also can effect economic and agronomic criteria, The use of cattle as a store of wealth means that farmers may not want to reduce their value by using them as traction animals.

Therefore, it is important to evaluate potential improved technologies for possible negative social impacts.

10.6.2 Ecological Sustainability (i.e., Future Generation Relationships)

Another part of the societal evaluation is to determine whether the proposed technologies contribute positively to -- or at least do not have a negative impact on -- the sustainability of the land in the long-run, However, until recently, this has received insufficient attention in evaluating technologies, Reasons for this neglect include:

• The primary effort of FSD has been to respond to the 'felt' needs articulated by farmers. The closer farmers are to the survival level, the more likely these needs will demand fulfillment in the short-term (e.g., producing enough food to survive until next year). As a result, farmers will be less concerned about environmental degradation in the long-term,
• Because of responding to the 'felt' needs of farmers, much FSD work generally has a short-run focus, This is in contrast to a long-run orientation in which societal impacts become more crucial, The short-term focus, combined with the methodological complexity of incorporating societal evaluation criteria and the time required in deriving such societal impact evaluations, has meant that FSD has played a limited role in this area, Emphasis on long-term evaluation has been confined largely to subjective ex ante evaluations, Such evaluations influence choices of problems to work with and the solutions to be advocated,
• Most FSD, because of its institutional affiliation, tends to concentrate on the development of relevant improved technology, It is possible to develop technologies that do not have a negative impact on the environment -- particularly the agro- ecological environment, such as soils, and, to a much lesser extent, the socio-economic environment in the equitable distribution of benefits, However, it is the implementation of relevant policy/support systems that play an even more important role in making sure that societal goals are fulfilled,

Although recognizing the dilemmas implied by the above discussion, it is important to bear in mind that what is done now by the current generation of farmers has a bearing on what is possible in the future, A prime example of this is the issue of environmental stability recognizing the negative impact of environmental degradation on the livelihood of future farming families and possibly on the whole of society,

Current adoption of technologies and implementation of policy/support programmes can have either negative or positive influences on environmental stability. Hopefully, as discussed above, technologies developed by researchers increasingly are being screened ex ante for their possible environmental impact. In most countries, there is an explicit concern for conserving the productivity of the soil, Because of the likely short-run focus of most limited-resource farming families, conservation measures by themselves are unlikely to be very attractive to most of them, However, production does not have to be undertaken at the expense of conservation, as long as the people responsible for developing technologies and policy support programmes take conservation into consideration, through linking policies designed to encourage production with those designed to encourage conservation [Norman and Douglas, 1994],

The objective of this discussion is simply to emphasize the need to be aware of the possible conflict between farmers' and societal needs and the importance of technology and policies supporting each other in developing a system of agriculture that will help provide satisfactory levels of living, not only for the current generation of farmers, but also for future generations. Unfortunately, appropriate methodologies for handling these types of the issues still remain to be fully developed.

10.7 Formulating recommendations

The first important point to make with reference to this topic is that the results from the evaluation procedure determine whether a recommendation is made for extending the technology through the extension service.

Information required for approving recommendations often has consisted of hard objective data collected in an RMRI experimental environment. However, there is an increasing acceptance of the need to conduct a socio-economic evaluation, as well as the more common technical analysis. To more closely approach the farmers' operational environment, much of the data required are collected best in an RMFI experimental environment. However, there is likely to be a corresponding increase in the softness of the data -- thereby, for some, potentially reducing its acceptability in the technology evaluation process. Increasing amounts of qualitative attitudinal data, collected at the FMFI level, are likely, for some, to be even more suspect in such an evaluation exercise. As has been emphasized earlier, it is unfortunate that a move towards greater incorporation of the farmer -- the ultimate customer of trial work -- in the evaluation process has a tendency to result in a more qualitative/softer type of data that is generally less acceptable in approving official recommendations. There is obviously no easy solution to this problem, but it is apparent that a judicious mix of hard/quantitative and soft/qualitative data may be useful in the evaluation process (Box 10.2).

Scientific objectivity, requiring many years of painstaking experimental work -- often in a somewhat artificial environment -- should not be substituted completely for researcher judgement. Resources for research are limited, and ways need to be sought to maximize the return from them, so as to facilitate the agricultural development process.

With respect to this. it its important that the recommendations are formulated and passed on to extension at the earliest possible opportunity, in order to maximize their impact on the farming population. Although it is desirable to defer making recommendations until some adoption has occurred, this often results in unacceptable time delays. Rather, recommendations need to be based largely on ex ante evaluation. Because of limited research resources and diverse interests of groups using research results, it would be desirable to see a move toward devising interim best-bet recommendations, based on the best knowledge currently available to the research scientists. These should have the proviso that they can be modified in the light of further research. Of course, there is an inherent danger in doing this, especially if an interim recommendation has any possibility of adversely affecting the environment or farmers' welfare. However, if the relevant interested parties are brought together? it should be possible to avoid drawing up inappropriate recommendations.

In an earlier section (see Section 5.9.2), mention was made of the desirability of incorporating conditional clauses and targeting information into recommendations. Much of the information needed for this process does not require exhaustive experimentation but can be derived from the knowledge and experiences of trained scientists working at the farm level. Thus, in recognizing the diversity of farmers, on-farm trials can help in developing targeted and conditional clauses for proposed improved technologies. Doing so can potentially improve the return from the limited research resources by providing a technology that is appropriate to more farmers through widening intervention possibilities. It is particularly important to develop a range of options when dealing with a difficult farming environment (Box 10,3). Such guidelines indicate how greater numbers of farmers can more closely approach the optimal situation.

BOX 10.2: USING LOCAL KNOWLEDGE TO MODIFY RECOMMENDATIONS

An experience of the Communication for Technology Transfer in Agriculture (CTTA) project in the Callejón de Huaylas, Ancash, Peru shows how technology developed on research stations can be modified in light of local needs and knowledge [Mate, 1992],

Farmers in the Callejón de Huaylas had reported that the potato worm (Premnotrypes sp.), called 'papakuru,' was one of their most serious pests on potato, In response, station scientists developed a double chemical treatment recommendation for control of this pest, The recommendation, comprising a curator powder application at planting and a volaton treatment at hilling, placed a high demand on draught and labour during ploughing and planting and this was unacceptable.

Farmers rejected the two chemical treatment but, working with the scientists, developed a compromise recommendation, Farmers knew that rotating potatoes with maize would help in controlling 'papa-kuru,' They knew that moistened seed would develop a bitterness less palatable to the pest, They also knew that exposing ploughed soil to the sun and bird predation for a few days before planting would also reduce populations of the pest, The compromise recommendation consisted of these known measures of control as a substitute for the curator powder application at planting combined with the volaton treatment at hilling, Volaton is an insecticide that is readily available and also affordable to most farmers.

The tone of the above discussion suggests that, generally, 'blanket' type recommendations are likely to have very limited value. Much wider adoption is likely to occur, if a number of options are offered to farmers and the recommendations are tied more closely to the farmers' own production environment, Consequently, in recognition of this, there is increasingly a move away from recommendations being approved at the national level to an approach where they can be approved at a more localised level (e.g., regional) by a group representing the different 'actors' in the agricultural development process at that level (e.g., something like a Regional Coordinating Committee (see Section 6.3.2)). Such a trend is obviously desirable, enabling decisions on recommendations to be made in a more timely manner and to be made by individuals who are more familiar with the local production environment. It is important to note, however, that a role still exists for some coordination of recommendations at the national level to:

• Provide a documentation role in terms of the status of appropriate technology available in the country.
• Play a distribution role in suggesting extension of technological recommendations to other areas with similar production environments.
• Provide a forum or conduit for technologies that require changes in policy/support systems to facilitate their adoption (e.g., facilitating multiplication of newly approved crop varieties).

BOX 10.3: OFFER THE FARMER OPTIONS INSTEAD OF PRESCRIPTIONS

The N.D. University of Agriculture and Technology (NDUAT), Faizabad, India, developed an on farm experimentation approach to reach resource-poor farming communities [Maurya, 1992]. Most farmers in these communities had missed the benefits of the Green Revolution with its packages of optimal recommendations.

The NDUAT approach stressed work with whole communities. It stressed the farmer's own criteria. It stressed making options available, even when these did not appear to be the 'best' choice. The NDUAT attempted to build a new aptitude among farmers of experimentation, critical evaluation, continued innovation, and adoption as appropriate.

During an 8-year period of on-farm work, more than 700 farmers tried options in the production areas of field crops, vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, goats, pigs, and fish. The NDUAT even introduced station 'rejects' to farmers, such as genotypes that would no longer be carried by station breeding and screening programmes.

10.8 A case study: Example of double ploughing technology in Botswana

Over the years in Botswana, FSD teams did a great deal of work on double ploughing which has now been approved as a recommendation [Heinrich et al, 1990]. A summary of the results, presented in the following tables (i.e., Tables 10.5 to 10.8), illustrates many of the points made in this chapter,

Conclusions on double ploughing were that it was suitable when:

• The first ploughing is done when planting is not possible (i.e., an option),
• Farmers control draught power and are faced with land constraint and/or lack labour for weeding.
• It is concentrated on deeper soils with higher clay fractions enabling higher water holding capacity (i.e., targeting information),

Later work looked at early ploughing plus other alternatives. Table 10.8 provides guidelines as to what can be done with different levels of control over traction and different types of seasons. The table contains both conditional and targeting information.

TABLE 10.5 NET RETURNS TO LAND AND LABOUR FROM GROWING SORGHUM IN DOUBLE-PLOUCHING TRIALS, FRANCISTOWN, BOTSWANA, 1985-87^a

1. Most of the data in this table are derived from results presented in Worman [1987] and involve trials for which labour data were recorded. The trials were research managed and farmer implemented (RMFI) with a sample size of 20. Planting of the single- and double- ploughed plots was done on the same day. Figures in the table are the average/plot.
2. Preparation time includes ploughing and planting.
3. Consists of weeding time only.
4. Gross return equals yield times price where the price of sorghum is PO.43/kg.
5. Net return equals gross return minus costs where costs equals seed (P0.30/kg for 4 kg) plus depreciation on equipment (estimated at P1.50/ha). In this calculation, labour has not been costed.
6. The difference has been the opposite way round for other trials undertaken at both Francistown and Mahalapye. From a sample size of 59 paired comparisons, the average weeding times per hectare for single and double ploughing were 34 and 19 hours, respectively. This makes the return per hour of weeding on double-ploughed plots even bettre.

Contents - Previous - Next