Knowledge systems

I recently edited a special edition of Farming Matters on the subject of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). This is a new way of growing rice that relies on leaving more space between the individual plants enabling them to create more and stronger tillers and roots and be much more efficient in their uptake of water and nutrients and solar radiation. It also uses using a wet/dry irrigation regime (as opposed to flooding the paddy fields permanently with water). I don’t want to explain the whole agronomic system here – interested readers can read more about it here. The result is a crop that is far more resilient to droughts, pests and diseases. It is also interesting for farmers because it means buying less seed, using less irrigation water and can give higher yields: a doubling to tripling of yields is not uncommon and Sumant Kumar, a peasant farmer in Bihar State, India, recently achieved a world record of 22.4 tons /hectare of paddy yield using the system. Of course there are downsides to it to. It is very labour intensive during the planting season – when the plants have to be individually transplanted from a nursery (instead of broadcasting seed), it’s complicated to learn and it runs against practices that farmers have employed for generations, if not millennia. Farmers need to see the system in practice to be convinced of its value and that means some farmers need to be willing to be pioneers - experimenting with and showing it off on their own farms (or parts of them).

That issue of Farming Matters was full of success stories from around the world – which makes one think that SRI could be highly interesting from the point of view of addressing world hunger. The more so since rice is staple crop in many of the countries with a high level of malnourished people (including India, the country with numerically the most malnourished people). What is interesting to me is the role that knowledge systems have played in this process. SRI was invented by Henri de Laulanié, a French pastor working in Madagascar in the 1960s (some say he might have learnt it somewhere else). It has mostly been disseminated and supported by NGOs and farmers organisations – and is now practiced in most rice producing countries around the world.

The letters page (which is twice as long as usual) in the forthcoming issue of Farming Matters contains a somewhat heated debate about the role that the official agricultural institutes (particular the CGIAR and IRRI) have supported, been indifferent to or actually tried to suppress this new technology. It’s hard as an outsider to know the full facts of the case – but it is impossible to ignore the rivalry between formal and informal knowledge sectors. The latter accuses the former of ignoring or suppressing a system that doesn’t conform with received knowledge and the theoretically understand mechanisms about what promotes plant growth, while some in the formal knowledge system argue that the claims made for SR are insufficiently documented (and by implication perhaps exaggerated).

SRI does not rely on high yielding varieties (hybrids or GMOs and does not require high levels of fertiliser input. These were the factors that were responsible for the high levels of growth in yields during the Green Revolution (until they hit diminishing levels of returns – both in terms of yields and profits – because of the rising costs of inputs). But, years later, these are the factors that the formal agriculture knowledge institutes continue to focus on. SRI seems to work on different principles, though these are still little understood- but the idea is that phenotype characteristics play a bigger role than genotype ones (which have dominated research for more than forty years). This could suggest a need for a fundamental rethink (a ‘paradigm shift’) in the focus of agricultural research. The debate suggests that reluctance to engage in such a paradigm shift could mean that formal knowledge institutes are impeding progress.

Yet this paradigm shift needs not only to be intellectual but also institutional and this for perhaps three reasons. First there is a huge difference between agricultural praxis on research stations and that in farmers’ fields. The former are well equipped with machinery, access to seed, other inputs, credit and are knowledge intensive. Such resources are rarely available in sufficient quantities or at the appropriate time to resource poor farmers in ‘low potential’ areas: the ones who are closest to drifting into poverty and malnutrition in bad years – and thus those who most need support if global hunger is to be effectively addressed. (There is a tendency for knowledge institutes to focus on well-endowed farmers in high potential areas – as it is assumed that these farmers have the highest growth potential and thus can contribute more to the aggregate global food supply).

Second, the priorities of researchers and of farmers are very different. Even the most idealistic researcher dedicated to using his/her knowledge to feeding (or saving in some other way) the world soon learns the reality that career progress is largely (if not exclusively) based on the number (and ‘citation index’) of peer reviewed journal articles. This is what builds their reputation and more pragmatically a large determinant of future funding for them and their departments / institutions future funding. But research has to be repeatable and testable to be credible and it is much easier to repeat and test research in the lab-like conditions of a research station than in the field where all sorts of exogenous factors can disrupt the experiment. In this sense it is less attractive for researchers to engage in devising undertaking the context specific research that development agencies say is necessary to address hunger issues. Different farming communities work in very different ecological, economic and cultural situations. These situations may change from year to year. Also farming communities are rarely homogenous – there are different groups within them: men/women farmers with sufficient/limited access to land water or credit and those who are interested in farming and those who do it as a default occupation as there are few other options. So to work in such situations researchers not only need to know the technical aspects of agronomy – but the anthropological ones concerning the structure and values of the community(ies) they are working with. This takes time and involves a lot of communication and trust building, something that generally can’t be achieved within a 2-3 project funding window.

I’m not sure which of these is the critical factor (if there is one single critical factor). Expanding the training of researchers so it is broader and less focused on technical aspects, revising the criteria for evaluating researchers professional development and having longer funding periods could all help to reduce the large gap that currently exists between knowledge systems and farming praxis. Addressing these issues seems fundamental if we are to make more progress in reducing the hunger and poverty experienced by many marginal farming communities and giving them a chance to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. It is not just a case of throwing more money at the agricultural knowledge system (however chronically underfunded it may have been in recent years).