Participatory Resilience

The Systemwide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis expands its research to strengthen food security and gender equity in the face of climate change.

As the effects of climate change on food security are increasingly felt - especially in the tropics and other regions with extreme climates - crop breeding and varietal development must be responsive to farmers' rapidly changing circumstances. To this end, the Systemwide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (PRGA Program) is providing small grants to three Centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and their partners to equip smallholder farmers and researchers for the challenges ahead.

The barley-breeding program of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas is developing a dynamic and inexpensive strategy for providing smallholder farmers in marginal areas with genetic resources to address their farming constraints both today and in the future. The research combines four elements: locally adapted landraces, farmers' knowledge and participation, the integration of plant breeding and crop management, and respect for farmers' rights. The goal is to strengthen farmers' ability to maintain food security in the face of current and future climate change. An underlying premise of the work is that seeds removed from the field and kept in a genebank are effectively frozen in terms of their evolution. If these seeds were brought out of storage in, say, 100 years, they might not be adapted to the prevailing climate and atmospheric conditions (e.g., higher carbon dioxide). However, if landraces and other potentially useful varieties are left to grow year after year in the field, they will adapt to changing conditions.

To ensure this, farmers will be given large populations of highly variable barley material (initially second-generation progenies of crosses) from which to select the plants best suited to their current on-farm environments. At the same time, they will be encouraged to save a portion of the bulk grain each year as seed to maintain the evolving variable population. While all this is going on, the researchers will document farmers' indigenous knowledge about the germplasm for future use. They will help farmers establish their own seed-production systems for the varieties they select and empower them with an understanding of intellectual property rights with respect to plant material. The work is being carried out in Algeria, Egypt, Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA), a joint program of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the Eastern and Central Africa Bean Research Network, and the Southern Africa Bean Research Network, wants to be able to predict when men's and women's variety preferences will converge. It is well documented that men's and women's preferences for varieties often differ, and plant-breeding programs have therefore been encouraged to be gender sensitive. However, researchers at PABRA think there are situations in which men's and women's variety preferences are the same. To test this hypothesis, they are looking at three scenarios: farmers in environments stressed by drought and with few market opportunities who grow beans primarily for home consumption; farmers with good production potential and access to markets; and, in between, farmers in stressed environments with strong market demand. PABRA hypothesizes that variety preferences will converge in the two extreme scenarios and diverge in the intermediate scenario.

Although the CGIAR has historically steered clear of global arguments about the rights and wrongs of genetic modification, a recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Confederación Colombiana del Algodón concluded that Colombian cotton growers had benefitted from the introduction of genetically modified cotton. However, the work paid little heed to gender aspects, despite women's heavy involvement in cotton production in much of the developing world, including Colombia. The PRGA Program is therefore funding top-up research to determine women's role in the choice of cotton, either individually or as members of regional cotton associations; the gender effects, if any, of adopting genetically modified cotton; and men's and women's attitudes to this cotton and what factors influence their decision to adopt it.

The PRGA Program has conducted gender-sensitive participatory research for 12 years and, most recently, included research on climate change, documenting the ways in which women farmers are affected. Learning firsthand from men and women farmers' traditional knowledge and their strategies to deal with extreme weather events, researchers will be more effective at helping them to sustain their livelihoods while supporting the development of adapted varieties in situ.