From Pesticides to People 93to those interested in buying the gear. Remarkably, 46 of the 66 participating
families in three communities purchased complete packages of equipment. A
number of farmers rented their equipment to others in the community in order to
recuperate costs. Follow-up health studies are not complete, but anecdotal evi-
dence is promising. As the wife of one FFS graduate who previously complained
of severe headaches and tunnel vision due to extensive use of carbofuran and met-
amidophos said:
Carlos no longer has headaches after working in the fields. He used to return home
[from applying pesticides] and could hardly keep his eyes open from the pain. After the
Field School and buying the protective equipment, he is a far easier person to live with
(personal communication, farm family, Santa Martha de Cuba).Complementary projects have supported follow-up activities in Northern Ecuador
and elsewhere, including the production of FFS training materials (Pumisacho and
Sherwood, 2000; Sherwood and Pumisacho, in press), the training of nearly 100
FFS facilitators in Carchi and nearby Imbabura, the transition of FFS to small-
enterprise production groups and the establishment of farmer-to-farmer organiza-
tion and capacity building. Concurrently, over 250 facilitators have been trained
nationwide and hundreds of FFS have been completed. Recently, Ecuador’s Min-
istry of Agriculture decided to include FFS as an integral part of its burgeoning
national Food Security Program. Furthermore, in part due to the successful experi-
ence in Carchi, FFS methodology has subsequently spread to Peru, Bolivia and
Colombia as well as El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, where over 1500 FFS
had been conducted by mid 2003 (LEISA, 2003).
Concluding Comments
Much conventional thinking in agricultural development places emphasis on sci-
entific understanding, technology transfer, farming practice transformation and
market linkages as the means to better futures. Consequently, the focus of research
and interventions tends to be on the crops, the bugs and the pesticides, rather than
the people who design, chose and manage practices. Recent experiences of rural
development and community health, however, argue for a different approach (see
for example, Uphoff et al, 1998; Norgaard, 1994; Latour, 1998; Röling, 2000). Of
course, technologies can play an important role in enabling change, but the root
causes of the ecosystem crisis such as in Carchi appear to be fundamentally con-
ceptual and social in nature, that is, people sourced and dependent.
There is a general need for organizing agriculture around the development
opportunities found in the field and in communities (van der Ploeg, 1994). Expe-
rience with people-centred and discovery-based approaches has shown promise at
local levels, but ultimately such approaches do not address structural power issues