Norman, David

Kansas State Univ, Dept Agr Econ, Manhattan, KS 66506 USA

farming systems research;farmer empowerment;farmer participatory approaches/techniques;globalisation;commercialisation;conservation agriculture;system of rice intensification formal modelling

Reasons for the initiation of farming systems/participatory approaches in non-Green Revolution (i.e., in more heterogeneous and less favourable production environments) areas in low-income countries is followed by a discussion of their evolution. Four phases are described along, with a brief description of some of the significant methods in which farmer participation has been sought, accessed and evaluated. They enabled/facilitated the evolutionary process. Although, over the last 40 years there has been a progress in making small-scale farmers much more visible in driving the agricultural research/development agenda through using the four basic stages embodied in the farming systems approach (i.e., descriptive, diagnosis, testing/ evaluation and finally dissemination), much still needs to be done. This leads on to a discussion as to some of the barriers still inhibiting true farmer empowerment and why further, such empowerment is imperative, if the agricultural challenges of this century are to be addressed successfully, namely substantially increasing agricultural productivity in an ecologically sustainable manner. Given the heterogeneity of the production environments and that many identified improvements are likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary in nature, this will require farmers' intimate involvement in their identification, evaluation and dissemination. Discussion in the paper recognizes that there is increasing globalization/commercialization of agriculture and is predicated on the need to consider the whole farmer-research-development continuum involving multiple stakeholders (i.e., farmers, scientists, extension workers, input/output service providers and policymakers). Such a continuum has been explicitly recognized in the operational plans for the recently reformed international agricultural research (i.e., CGIAR) system. The paper concludes with a short discussion on the potential role of formal modelling.