Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Making Soil and Water Conservation Sustainable 389

methodologies, which have reoriented their activities to focus on local needs and
capabilities.

Value local knowledge and technologies

Before deciding on the course of action, projects should start with what people
know and do well already. The problem with agricultural science and extension is
that it has poorly understood the nature of ‘indigenous’ and rural people’s know-
ledge. For many, what rural people know is assumed to be ‘primitive’ and ‘unscien-
tific’, and so formal research and extension must ‘transform’ what they know in order
to ‘develop’ them. An alternative view is that local knowledge is a valuable and
underutilized resource (Chambers et al, 1989; Röling and Engel, 1989; Warren,
1991; Scoones and Thompson, 1994). Within this context, understanding processes
of agricultural innovation and experimentation is an important new focus.
It is now well documented that for several thousand years farmers have con-
served soil and water to sustain agricultural production in many varied contexts.
Across North Africa to the Negev desert, farmers under Roman rule created a set-
tled agriculture that lasted for several hundred years in semi-arid conditions (Evan-
eri et al, 1971; Barker and Jones, 1982). Elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East,
at least 40 different indigenous systems of soil and water conservation have been
recorded (Reij, 1991; IFAD, 1992; Critchley et al, 1994).
A major problem is that professionals disregard indigenous knowledge and
technologies all too easily. In Niger, traditional stone lines in the Ader Doutchi
Maggia can be observed by anyone driving on the main road from Konni to Tah-
oua (Reij, 1991). Despite the presence of conservation projects in the region since
the early 1960s and visits by many ‘experts’, no reports contain reference to these
stone lines. In both Niger and Burkina Faso, farmers prefer stone lines and bunds,
yet all major projects have constructed only earth bunds, which of course have not
been maintained by local ‘beneficiaries’ (Reij, 1991).
In the medium to high rainfall red-soil areas of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka,
the government recommends graded bunds and contour farming for soil and mois-
ture conservation. Farmers, however, use a diverse mix of technologies, including

Table 16.2 (continued)

Philippines Upland rehabilitation programmes run by the Mag-uugmad Foundation,

the Farm Management Institute of the Visayas State College (FARMI)

and the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) have

shown the value of farmer-based extension systems, in which farmer

groups experiment with and spread new technologies, with the result

that agricultural yields have more than doubled, soils have been

conserved, and local economies regenerated

Sources: GTZ, 1992; Balbarino and Alcober, 1994; Campbell et al, 1994; Cerna et al, 1994;
Devavaram, 1994; Fernandez, 1994; Freitas, 1994; Kiara et al, 1994; Krishna, 1994; Shah and
Shah, 1994; Hinchcliffe et al, 1995