Salvation on a Shoestring

Improved varieties and cropping practices help smallholder farmers in Ecuador's remote Saraguro Valley achieve food security without leaving their beautiful home.

A modest project funded for less than US$600,000 from 1995 to 2008 brought $2 million per year in profits to farm families in the remote Saraguro Valley of Ecuador, according to a final report on the effort. Participants included thousands of households in 21 largely indigenous communities whose members gained access to improved crop seed and technical support from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT by its Spanish abbreviation), International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), and International Potato Center (CIP). The project drew on funding from Spain's National Institute of Agriculture and Food Research and the Canadian International Development Agency, as well as leadership and community-level work by Ecuador's National Institute of Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIAP by its Spanish abbreviation).

Farmer María Alegría Vermeo Namicela of the Saraguro area with Ecuadoran cereals specialist Jorge Coronel. Vermeo and her husband served as local leaders under the Saraguro project.

"We started with a single farmer who adopted an improved barley variety and eventually got more than 3,000 farm families involved," says INIAP cereals specialist Jorge Coronel, who led the project and spent most of it living in and working out of a two-room house and storage facility near the Saraguro village square. "Average incomes of participating households went from US$1.20 to US$3.00 per day after switching from traditional farming systems to the improved varieties and practices we promoted."

The Saraguro region's spectacular, Andean mountain vistas impress visitors but also suggest the challenges its inhabitants face when trying to communicate with or reach markets and urban centers.

The Saraguro region's spectacular vistas impress visitors but also make clear the challenges inhabitants face in reaching markets and urban centers. Photo: CIMMYT.

Coronel and INIAP legume breeder Luís Eduardo Minchala Guaman leveraged funding of less than $30,000 per year, close partnerships with international research Centers like CIMMYT, hard-earned local contacts and trust, and farmer-participatory approaches. They helped farmers obtain and use improved seed of barley, wheat, maize and potatoes; fertilizer and farm credit; and more sustainable and diversified farming systems that improved profits, nutrition and natural resource use. Finally, they helped farmers to access markets for selling produce and to attend courses in farm technology and local organization. "We wanted to make sure that achievements outlive the project's lifespan, so we helped form a network of farmer leaders from each community who continue to test and spread new practices with peers," says Coronel. "The increase in average crop yields through the project has been dramatic. In the case of wheat, farmers who were getting 750 kilograms of grain per hectare in 1995 harvested 2.7 tons per hectare in 2007-a nearly-fourfold increase."

Other improvements introduced under the project included six water-harvesting reservoirs and micro-reservoirs for supplemental irrigation, grass borders to control erosion on the region's steep slopes, value-added processing of farm products, and improved grain storage facilities and practices.

"At least half the families in the region now sow certified seed of their crops that is produced either on site or at INIAP's Chuquipata research station, which has also been instrumental in project achievements," says Coronel.
With approximately 31,000 inhabitants (nearly half with direct indigenous descent) occupying rugged land isolated from urban areas, Saraguro was one of Ecuador's poorest zones. "We estimate an out-migration rate now of about 25% in the 18-to-35 year age group, as compared with 50 or 60% for the youths of other, similar zones in Ecuador," says Coronel. "At one time, roughly half the adults of Saraguro regularly left the zone each year to seek seasonal work so their families could survive. Now far fewer farmers say they need to leave, which implies a significant improvement in agricultural sustainability and local organization."

The Saraguro project's chief architect was the late Ecuadoran scientist Hugo Vivar, who retired in 2000 after 16 years of service in the ICARDA/CIMMYT Barley Breeding Program for Latin America, plus 9 years of service at CIMMYT.