7
Participatory Learning for Sustainable
Agriculture
Jules Pretty
Recent Impacts of Sustainable Agriculture
During the past 50 years, agricultural development policies and practices have suc-
cessfully emphasized external inputs as the means to increase food production.
This has led to growth in global consumption of pesticides, inorganic fertilizer,
animal feedstuffs, and tractors and other machinery.
These external inputs have, however, tended to substitute for natural processes
and resources, rendering them more vulnerable. Pesticides have replaced biological,
cultural and mechanical methods for controlling pests, weeds and diseases; inorganic
fertilizers have substituted for livestock manures, composts and nitrogen-fixing crops;
information for management decisions comes from input suppliers, researchers and
extensionists rather than from local sources; machines have replaced labour; and fos-
sil fuels have substituted for local energy sources. The basic technical challenge for
those concerned with sustainable agriculture is to make better use of these internal
resources. This can be done by minimizing the external inputs used, by regenerating
internal resources more effectively, or by combinations of both.
There is now emerging evidence that regenerative and resource-conserving
technologies and practices can bring both environmental and economic benefits
for farmers, communities and nations. The best evidence comes from countries of
Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the concern is to increase food production
in the areas where farming has been largely untouched by the modern packages of
externally supplied technologies. In these complex and remote lands, some farm-
ing communities adopting regenerative technologies have substantially improved
agricultural yields, often only using few or no external inputs (Bunch, 1991, 1993;
GTZ, 1992; UNDP, 1992; Lobo and Kochendörfer-Lucius, 1992; Krishna, 1993;
Shah, 1994; SWCB, 1994; Balbarino and Alcober, 1994; Pretty, 1995).
This article was published in World Development 23(8) 3, Pretty, J. N., Participatory learning for
sustainable agriculture, 1245–1263, copyright Elsevier (1995).