Being There and Standing Back

When crop researchers target the poorest marginal environments, farmer participatory breeding puts them on the ground, as geographic information systems provide a bird's eye view.

That international agricultural research has helped farmers and boosted food production is beyond doubt. But has it helped everyone? In particular, has it helped the poorest farmers in marginal areas?

Yes, but it could do more, according to Mauricio Bellon, Director of the Diversity for Livelihoods Program of Bioversity International. He has just published a review examining the technical challenges and tools available to target poor farmers in marginal areas.

Three fundamental questions underpin the analysis: Why has crop research not benefited many of the poor farmers in the developing world? What are the challenges to targeting relevant and appropriate crop research to serve those farmers? What tools can be used, or are being used, to reach this goal?

The why question is reasonably easy. Primarily, it doesn't pay. Good environments are more productive, so returns on research investments there are high. Some consider it uneconomic to invest in crop research for less productive marginal environments.

By their nature, these environments are variable, making breeding for improved crop performance difficult. Environmental variability also makes it much harder to apply good results in one location directly to another, precisely because they differ so much. Nevertheless, tools are emerging to address these challenges. Among the most promising are participatory plant breeding and better use of geographical information systems (GIS).

Bringing farmers directly into crop research is perhaps the most useful strategy. It targets the research by allowing farmers to identify the problems to be tackled. For example, farmers may be interested in multiple traits beyond simple yield that may have no market value, so outsiders would be hard pressed to identify them. Farmers help to ensure that the research is relevant to them and appropriate for their communities and cropping systems. And their extensive experience of environments in which they live and work all the time helps to overcome some of the scientific and technical difficulties of breeding for diverse environments. Bellon reviews several examples of how participatory research can deliver real benefits.

GIS enables researchers to gain a bird's eye view of the factors that may be associated with rural poverty. In Kenya, for example, scientists of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) have used high-resolution GIS data to examine the geographical factors associated with rural poverty to facilitate analyses that inform local and national policies. For example, district water officials use poverty maps to target interventions to the communities that need them most.

GIS can also help researchers compare communities across the globe, identifying which locations are similar to one another with much greater accuracy and thus making it easier to share the results of research for marginal environments.

"Developing and carrying out crop research that benefits poor farmers in marginal areas of the developing world is complex and difficult," observes Bellon, adding that this is no reason not to try. "It requires not only strong technical and scientific skills but also a commitment to creating research that is targeted, relevant and appropriate for these farmers, their families and their communities."

Poverty mapping in Mexico reveals that few national maize breeding trial sites overlap with areas of persistent poverty.