Editorial Introduction to Volume IV 7as well as for interactive analysis. In this chapter by Jules Pretty, the many ways that
development organizations interpret and use the term participation are resolved
into a typology of seven clear uses. These range from manipulative and passive
participation, where people are told what is to happen and act out predetermined
roles, to self-mobilization, where people take initiatives largely independent of
external institutions. This suggests that new systems of learning are needed, using
participatory methods and criteria for establishing trustworthiness. These have
profound implications for agricultural professionals, who must now actively create
a whole new professionalism.
Jan Douwe van der Ploeg has contributed a great deal to our understanding of
the motivations and actions of farmers and their ‘farming styles’. In this first chap-
ter from The Virtual Farmer, he explores and takes forward the idea of a storylines
framework, which interweaves and interconnects in particular places. These sto-
rylines are important to van der Ploeg. The first concerns agriculture as a complex
practice, as a carefully coordinated effort to mobile resources, to convert these
resources into end products, and then the sale of these end products. The second
storyline concerns the heterogeneity of farming as an expression of a ‘dance through
time’. The third storyline is a systematic critique of various forms of determin-
ism – technological, economic and structural. This opening chapter addresses past,
present and future, in which actors create projects, and collaborate or compete.
Time is important, as desired future outcomes reach back to the present to affect
actors in different ways.
Integrated Pest Management has been increasingly spread to farmers of a wide
variety of agricultural systems. Perhaps the most successful advances have occurred
in the rice-based systems of Asia. This article by Marc Barzman and Sylvie Desilles
describes the experience of CARE-Bangladesh over an eight-year period, which has
raised agricultural productivity by diversifying agroecosystems, reducing the costs
of production, and creating new income sources for small farmers. Some 150,000
farmers have been involved in the programme, which has emphasized five tech-
nologies: (1) sustainable agricultural practices in rice; (2) vegetable production on
rice field dykes; (3) fish production inside the rice field; (4) production of fish
fingerlings; and (5) tree planting on rice field dykes. The main institutional mech-
anism to promote change is the farmer field school, in which farmers are trained
over the course of a season in new approaches, and during which they come to
appreciate the value of experimentation and sharing of results amongst one another.
The article documents the economic benefits of the programme, as well as the
non-economic ones, which include better nutrition, improved environments, and
empowerment of farmers and their communities. There remain difficulties,
though, particularly in ensuring participation of the very poorest families, and the
reorganization of agricultural services and suppliers to the new agroecological sys-
tems that have emerged.
In the final article, Madhav Gagdil, colleagues and members of the People’s
Biodiversity Initiative show how folk knowledge and wisdom can be maintained.
Gadgil indicates that such folk knowledge is transmitted and augmented almost