LABORATORY FOR FERTILE FIELDS.

• Author: Pratt, Timothy

Inspired by committees of farmers, agricultural communities in several countries are improving yields through their own scientific research

Last October, while much of the Americas was welcoming in saints and dressing up children as skeletons, Hurricane Mitch careened through parts of the Caribbean and Central America. Its floods and winds swept away or buried entire villages in Honduras and Nicaragua and thousands died. In the midst of an international outpouring of aid, some of the first attempts to look to the future came from the field. From the farmers, to be more exact. Dozens of groups of farmers and their surrounding communities began to look at how their land had fared, and what they would have to do in order to replant.

Having farmers involved in recovery was vital for these two countries, in which a third of the population lives in the countryside. Canned foods, powdered milk, medicine, and other forms of relief were urgently needed in the days and weeks following the four feet of rain that fell, but these alone wouldn't allow the region to take a step forward after getting back on its feet.

Where did these groups of farmers come from? Bearing the unwieldy name of Local Agricultural Research Committees (Comites de Investigacion Agricola Locales--CIALs), they are part of a movement that began in Colombia nearly a decade ago and has taken root in eight countries from Bolivia to Nicaragua. The idea is for farmers to apply basic scientific research methods to their work on the land. They experiment with new farming methods and crop varieties and marry them to local practices, in order to solve their own problems. When tragedy hit Honduras and Nicaragua, it was clear that the CIALs could play an important role in starting over.

This unusual idea was not created to deal with disasters, however. It came out of a discovery about the way research think tanks like the International Center for Agricultural Research (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical--CIAT)--based near Cali, Colombia--traditionally did their work. According to CIAT agronomist Jose Ignacio Roa, "we used to think that technology was enough to face hunger and related problems. Then we realized that you can't achieve progress without considering the human side." Of course, the "human side" of the agricultural equation is the farmers, their families, and communities. Led by rural sociologist Jacqueline Ashby, at the close of the eighties Roa and his colleagues developed a method in which farmers could design and carry out research on their own land.

Each research committee has four members chosen by their community for their interest in solving local agricultural problems. These include a treasurer, a secretary, and an extensionist. The latter is in charge of spreading the results of the research and giving help to those who make use of these results--usually, the community itself.

The very idea of starting a committee in the first place is almost always brought to a community by an outsider. The community may have an interest in solving local agricultural problems, but rarely a sense of how to go about it. This "outsider" is usually an agronomist trained in the method who invites everybody in the community to a motivational...