Reversals, Institutions and Change 99hassle-free and adequate access to means for travel, it is difficult for them to work
regularly and well with others further afield.
(ii) Search and supply. Search is neglected and rarely rewarded as a professional
activity. This includes search for farmer-innovators and experimenters, for genetic
material, and for principles, practices and technologies, whether locally, regionally,
nationally or internationally.
Search is basic for meeting farmers’ needs and widening their choices. In com-
plex, diverse and risk-prone agriculture, what farmers want and need often differs
from the simplifications of centrally planned priorities. Agricultural research and
extension have, for example, a tendency to specialize on single commodities. But
farmers’ analysis will often specify a non-commodity need, such as multi-purpose
trees for agroforestry, or a rapidly vining legume to suppress weeds, or a range of
vegetable seeds, or means to create, improve and exploit micro-environments, or
technology for harvesting water, capturing and concentrating soil, or improving
the supply of plant nutrients. As a result of past neglect, the potential for search
and supply of such varied material and technologies seems still very large.
Search and supply have institutional implications. These include that grassroots
extension staff and scientists have resources and are rewarded, for finding farmers’
innovations and experiments and for stimulating and articulating realistic demand
from farmers; and an ability of national and international agricultural research sys-
tems to respond with supplies of genetic material, principles and methods.
These reversals face two major obstacles. First, extensionists and scientists may
not be rewarded for raising problems and making requests. Extensionists seen in
the TOT and normal bureaucratic mode are there to pass on messages and pack-
ages downwards, not to multiply work for their senior officers by passing varied
requests upwards. Second, most NARSs lack capacity to respond to needs and
requests articulated by farmers for material or information. In practice, most man-
agement information systems are designed to feed information upwards to serve
central management, rather than to draw it downwards to serve farmers. Six of the
seven management information systems listed in 1987 for agricultural research in
the Philippines were for central management; only one, the Research Information
Storage and Retrieval System, was to provide information useful at the grassroots,
and that was described in the future tense, with the statement that financial sup-
port was needed to extend it into the regions. Many NARSs have poor institu-
tional memories for research findings (see e.g. Kean and Singogo Lingston, 1988,
p48), and work often has to be repeated because earlier records cannot be found.
Few, if any, are yet set up well enough to provide diverse information, genetic
material and technologies to meet diverse local demand.
The practical implications are for agricultural research and extension organiza-
tions to make three changes: to encourage field staff to search for, support and
spread farmers’ innovations; to judge and reward staff by the requests they make
upwards in response to analysis and demands by farmers; and to develop informa-
tion and supply systems to respond to those demands.