From Pesticides to People 83
education. The experience reported here has led us to conclude that more knowl-
edge-based and socially oriented interventions are needed. These must be aimed at
political changes for enabling new farmer learning and organizational capacity,
differentiated markets and increased participation of the most affected parties in
policy formulation and implementation. Such measures involve issues of power
that must be squarely faced in order to foster continued transformation of potato
production in the Andes towards sustainability.
Potato Farming in Carchi
The highland region of Carchi is part of a very productive agricultural region, the
Andean highlands throughout Northern Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. Situ-
ated near the equator, the region receives adequate sunlight throughout the year
which, coupled with evenly distributed rainfall, means that farmers can continuously
cultivate their land. As a result, the province is one of Ecuador’s most important
producers of staple foods, with farmers producing nearly 40 per cent of the national
potato crop on only 25 per cent of the area dedicated to potato (Herrera, 1999).
Carchi is a good example of the spread of industrialized agricultural technolo-
gies in the Americas during the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s. A
combination of traditional sharecropping, land reform, market access and high-
value crops provided the basis for rural economic development (Barsky, 1984).
Furthermore, as a result of new revenues from the oil boom of the 1970s, the
Ecuadorian government improved transportation and communication infrastruc-
ture in Carchi, and the emerging agricultural products industry was quick to capi-
talize on the availability of new markets. A typical small farm in Carchi is owned
by an individual farm household and consists of several separate, scattered plots
with an average area of about six hectares (Barrera et al, 1998).
Not surprisingly, agricultural modernization underwent a local transforma-
tion. In Carchi, mechanized, agrochemical and market-oriented production tech-
nologies are mixed with traditional practices, such as sharecropping arrangements,
payments in kind, or planting in wachu rozado (a pre-Colombian limited tillage
system) (Paredes, 2001). Over the last half-century, farming in Carchi has evolved
towards a market-oriented potato-pasture system dependent on external inputs.
Between 1954 and 1974 potato production increased by about 40 per cent and
worker productivity by 33 per cent (Barsky, 1984). Until recently, the potato grow-
ing area in the province continued to increase, and yields have grown from about
12t/ha in 1974 to about 21t/ha today, a remarkable three times the national aver-
age (Crissman et al, 1998a).
To confront high price variability in potato (by factors of 5–20 in recent years),
farmers have applied a strategy of playing the ‘lottery’, which involves continual pro-
duction while gambling for high prices at harvest to recover overall investment. Nev-
ertheless, the dollarization of the Ecuadorian Sucre in 2000 led to triple digit inflation