Academics among farmers: Linking intervention to research

Geoforum 40 (2009) 217–227

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Geoforum j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / g e o f o r u m

Academics among farmers: Linking intervention to research Harold Brookfield a,*, Edwin A. Gyasi b a b

Depart­ment of Anthro­pol­ogy, Research School of Pacific and Asian Stud­ies, Aus­tra­lian National Uni­ver­sity, Can­berra ACT 0200, Aus­tra­lia Depart­ment of Geog­ra­phy and Resource Devel­op­ment, Uni­ver­sity of Ghana, Le­gon, Ghana

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 7 March 2008 Received in revised form 27 June 2008  Key­words: Devel­op­ing coun­try farm­ers Inter­ven­tions Research among farm­ers Research­ers’ obli­ga­tions United Nations Uni­ver­sity Land man­age­ment On-farm bio­di­ver­sity Ghana

a b s t r a c t Geog­ra­phers and other aca­dem­ics whose rep­u­ta­tions and advance­ment depend on their work among devel­op­ing coun­try farm­ers have an obli­ga­tion to assist the farm­ers in tan­gi­ble ways. A pro­ject of the United Nations Uni­ver­sity which did this in 1993-2002 (PLEC)is described, with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to Ghana, together with a fol­low-up pro­ject in the same coun­try. Best meth­ods of resource man­age­ment were sought among the farm­ers them­selves, and expert farm­ers were encour­aged to instruct oth­ers in their meth­ods. More­over, in a pro­ject con­cerned with the con­ser­va­tion of bio­di­ver­sity on farm, the farm­ ers were also assisted in enter­prises cre­at­ing added value from bio­di­ver­sity. Get­ting behind the farm­ers in their own enter­prises can enrich aca­demic research. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Intro­duc­tion Geofo­rum has never been a jour­nal to avoid con­tro­versy, and we touch on one in offer­ing this paper. Aca­demic research­ers among the farm­ers of devel­op­ing coun­tries are in a priv­il­ eged position. We are able to under­stand what farm­ers are doing, and to observe the often poor results of offi­cial inter­ven­tion. Through our writ­ ing we are able to reach wide audi­ences, includ­ing some gov­ern­ ment offi­cials and deci­sion-mak­ers. There is now a host of research reports which describe and ana­lyse the mis­takes that have been made through top-down inter­ven­tion, many of which offer rec­ om­men­da­tions to the author­i­ties on what might be done bet­ter in the future. Many aca­dem­ics write at length on mat­ters of pol­icy which they some­how feel they have the power to influ­ence (e.g. Blai­kie and Brook­field, 1987; Brook­field, 1993). Unless these rec­ om­men­da­tions are spe­cif­i­cally sought, which is rare, they prompt little action. This paper dis­cusses attempts to offer more direct sup­port to devel­op­ing coun­try farm­ers within what was orig­i­nally con­ceived as a com­par­at­ ive research pro­ject. We also show how doing this can enlarge and ben­efi ­ t the research pro­ject. We begin by locat­ing such efforts in a grow­ing move­ment among behav­ioural sci­en­tists to write, teach and act beyond the aca­demic frame. With excep­ tions mainly in the uni­ver­si­ties of devel­op­ing coun­tries, geog­ra­ * Cor­re­spond­ing author. E-mail addresses: har­old.brook­f [email protected] (H. Brookfield), edg­plec@ ­af­ri­caon­line.com.gh (E.A. Gyasi). 0016-7185/$ - see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.006

phers are john­nies-come-lately in this busi­ness. In anthro­pol­ogy it goes back more than half-a-cen­tury. Mod­ern anthro­pol­ogy began in the colo­nial world, pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion on social orga­ni­za­ tion, pro­duc­tion, land ten­ure and trade that was of direct value to colo­nial admin­is­tra­tors. Pio­neers among them, includ­ing the foun­ der of mod­ern social anthro­pol­ogy, Broni­slaw Mal­in ­ ow­ski, were directly spon­sored and even paid to do their research by the admin­ is­ter­ing gov­ern­ments (Young, 2004). Some colo­nial gov­ern­ments hired anthro­pol­o­gists and con­tin­ued to do so into the 1950s. In an anti-colo­nial late 20th cen­tury world, this spon­sored research was much crit­i­cized as pro­vid­ing sup­port for colo­nial exploi­ta­tion, or at best of ‘indi­rect rule’ and, in spite of the endur­ing qual­ity of much of the research, a later gen­er­a­tion of anthro­pol­o­gists has looked askance at this part of their his­tory (e.g. Ho­ben, 1982; Lewis, 2005; Ryl­ko-Bau­er et al., 2006). More rel­e­vant to pres­ent-day issues is the fairly long his­tory of advo­cacy on behalf of the people stud­ied among anthro­pol­o­ gists and also some geog­ra­phers (Wright, 1988; Brosius, 1999; ­Lamp­here, 2004). Today, work of this type would be termed ‘activ­ ist’, involv­ing the author in action of some form with or on behalf of the people involved (Pain, 2003; Ward, 2007). Within geog­ra­phy, there has been quite a bit of it con­cerned with social or envi­ron­ men­tal issues, mostly at local or regional level within the devel­oped coun­tries, work which we do not dis­cuss in this paper. We look for exam­ples of activ­ist involve­ment by research­ers in the rural scene of devel­op­ing coun­tries. In some nota­ble cases such advo­cacy has been very unpop­u­lar. Anthro­pol­o­gist Wil­son' (1942) report on the con­se­quences of labour migra­tion in what is now Zam­bia led to

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the forc­ible ter­mi­na­tion of his research. Geog­ra­pher Nie­tsch­mann (1989) went very pub­lic in defence of the Miskito people against a San­di­nista regime in Nic­a­ra­gua that was at the time the dar­ling of the Amer­i­can left (and was under direct attack by the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion) and endured savage crit­i­cism from among his peers. Eth­no­bot­a­nist Po­sey was threatened with crim­i­nal pros­e­ cu­tion by the Bra­zil­ian gov­ern­ment (after the period of mil­i­tary rule), because he had taken two Ka­yapó lead­ers to the World Bank in Wash­ing­ton to pro­test a dam which would have flooded much of their ter­ri­tory (A friend of Bra­zil, 1988).1 Nie­tsch­mann’s and Po­sey’s inter­ven­tions were dra­matic forms of advo­cacy. Wil­son’s was dra­matic only in the con­text of its place and time, and within a few decades what he wrote in the 1940s would become received wis­dom in a wider south­ern Afri­can debate. Writ­ing of anthro­pol­ ogy as a whole, Ryl­ko-Bau­er et al. (2006, p. 186) argue that applied anthro­pol­ogy, which nec­es­sar­ily involves advo­cacy in some form and in favour of some inter­ests, should ‘serve as a frame­work for pragmatic engage­ment’, as a goal for the whole dis­ci­pline which its find­ings enrich in the­o­ret­i­cal as well as empir­i­cal terms. Writ­ing for another dis­ci­pline, and using a var­i­ant lan­guage from those of anthro­pol­ogy and geog­ra­phy, Bur­awoy (2005) drew a dis­ tinc­tion between pro­fes­sional and pol­icy soci­ol­ogy as dom­i­nant sub­ fields, and crit­i­cal and pub­lic soci­ol­ogy as ‘subaltern’ divi­sions of a larger soci­ol­ogy. Mak­ing a case for a much stron­ger com­mit­ment to pub­lic soci­ol­ogy, address­ing a wider civil soci­ety, he treats crit­i­cal soci­ol­ogy as the inter­nal con­science of the dis­ci­pline, its crit­i­cisms directed toward a pro­fes­sional soci­ol­ogy which tends to become too set in its ways. To geog­ra­phers, the term ‘crit­i­cal geog­ra­phy’ is more strictly con­fined to the aca­demic left, and to writ­ing on issues of ­pub­lic moral outrage. While there is the same con­cern over the irrel­e­vance of much work that is done, the dif­fer­ence seems to be that crit­i­cal geog­ra­phers feel their work to be irrel­e­vant if it fails to reach the pub­lic domain, as it often does (Mar­tin, 2001; Stor­per, 2001). Cas­tree (2002) argues that this con­cern is mis­placed, and that the teach­ing of stu­dents and the enhance­ment of knowl­edge are them­selves suf­fi­cient jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. The involve­ment of stu­dents in com­mu­nity-based pro­jects and other activ­i­ties is advo­cated as one means of reach­ing beyond the con­fines of aca­de­mia by Ja­rosz (2004) and – from anthro­pol­ogy – by Aus­tin (2004). Involve­ment of stu­dents is one thing; involve­ment of aca­dem­ ics, and espe­cially unten­ured aca­dem­ics is some­thing else. Sep­ a­ra­tion of ‘pure’ from ‘applied’ research has for most of the 20th cen­tury been a dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of the behav­ioural sci­ences in the aca­demic core regions of Europe and North Amer­ica. Applied research, advo­cacy in pub­li­ca­tion, even pub­li­ca­tion in local out­ lets in devel­op­ing coun­tries have been lux­u­ries which only the estab­lished aca­demic could afford, since they were not seen as con­trib­ut­ing to the advance­ment of dis­ci­plines strug­gling for respect­abil­ity in a com­pet­i­tive aca­demic envi­ron­ment. The gen­er­ a­tion of the­ory, through pub­li­ca­tion in major ref­er­eed jour­nals or by uni­ver­sity presses is the ave­nue to pro­fes­sional advance­ment. This lim­i­ta­tion has never applied to aca­dem­ics work­ing in devel­ op­ing coun­try uni­ver­si­ties, whose spon­sored research – if funded at all – has been expected to be on top­ics related to national devel­op­ment, albeit respon­sive to gov­ern­ment pol­i­cies. Our own back­grounds, Brook­field’s in a research school set up ini­tially to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about and for peoples of direct inter­est to Aus­tra­lia, and Gy­asi’s in a West Afri­can uni­ver­sity – despite the neo-colo­nial ori­gins of these insti­tu­tions – ill-dis­pose us toward mod­ern debates that seem to be largely con­cerned with the health 1 In a very much more minor key, one of us was com­pelled by a sen­si­tive UNE­SCO to with­draw, mod­ify and reprint an early report on UNE­SCO-spon­sored work in Fiji, because it con­tained a crit­i­cal com­ment on inter-eth­nic atti­tudes (Brook­field, 1978). It was only after the 1987 coup d’état that, when writ­ing with­out UNE­SCO finan­cial sup­port, we were able openly to dis­cuss this and other sen­si­tive issues (Bay­liss-Smith et al., 1988).

of aca­demic dis­ci­plines in the metro­pol­i­tan coun­tries. Rob­in­son (2003) aptly remarks that what passes for gen­eral the­ory in at least in parts of human geog­ra­phy has its empir­i­cal foun­da­tion squarely in the North Atlan­tic coun­tries. With her, we agree that for the rest of the world much of this cher­ished core of the­ory has little rel­e­vance to basic pop­u­lar needs. What does attract us in this mod­ern lit­er­a­ture is the grow­ing sense of respon­si­bil­ity toward the people among whom behav­ioural sci­en­tists work, and who pro­vide a major part of the infor­ma­tion on which their career advance­ment rests. We find this sense of respon­si­bil­ity in some of the pub­li­ca­tions men­tioned above, but it seems absent from oth­ers, though not nec­ es­sar­ily from the wider con­scious­ness of the authors. Lamp­here (2004) recounts instances in anthro­pol­ogy where research­ers have returned to their devel­op­ing coun­try com­mu­ni­ties to offer tan­gi­ ble repay­ment, or to work in com­mu­nity pro­jects. Much ear­lier, Tax (1958) set up a whole ‘action-anthro­pol­ogy’ pro­ject designed to bring ben­efi ­ ts to Amer­in­dian par­tic­i­pants. Dur­ing the 1990s, some anthro­pol­o­gists and other social sci­en­tists made use of the then-new tech­nol­ogy of global posi­tion­ing sys­tems (GPS) to assist indig­e­nous people, mainly in cen­tral Amer­ica, to make maps of the ter­ri­to­ries they claimed, as described in a whole issue of Human Orga­ni­za­tion introduced by Her­lihy and Knapp (2003). In cases of dis­pute, these maps became impor­tant polit­i­cal doc­u­ments. The same was done in Sar­a­wak, and suc­cess­fully used in a 1999 court case con­test­ing gov­ern­ment alien­ation to a devel­op­ment com­pany of land under indig­e­nous claim. Gov­ern­ment responded in 2001 by leg­is­la­tion requir­ing the reg­is­tra­tion and licens­ing all land sur­vey­ ors, effec­tively mak­ing such com­mu­nity map­ping ille­gal (Cramb, 2007, pp. 243–244). Of par­tic­u­lar note for geog­ra­phers should be a recent paper by Walker (2007) who lays stress on respon­si­bil­i­ties to infor­mants who have given up work­ing time to sup­ply infor­ma­tion to research­ ers, often at real cost to them­selves. Refer­ring spe­cif­i­cally to a pro­ por­tion of polit­i­cal ecol­ogy writ­ing, he finds that there is a risk of ‘too often ignor­ing the polit­i­cal and there­fore eth­i­cal dimen­sions of its own actions and inac­tions [so that the work has] few obvi­ ous links to tan­gi­ble mate­rial or social pro­gress for those who are the objects of study’ (p. 368 empha­sis in original). More widely, it may or may not be true that what is most impor­tant to the people stud­ied is sim­ply to get our accounts of them and of how they see the world right in their own eyes (Öst­berg, 1995), but most of them are poor and mar­gin­al­ized; devis­ing ways in which to improve their lot should not be least among our duties. There is one whole large pro­fes­sion that has this lat­ter aim at the core of its whole ethos. This is the multi-dis­ci­plin­ary devel­op­ment pro­fes­sion, and in the pres­ent con­text we are con­cerned with that part of it that is involved with agri­cul­tural devel­op­ment. Few will deny that the results of more than 40 years of such work have, on bal­ance, been dis­ap­point­ing. There is a per­ceived need for new approaches, espe­ cially in the years since the book ‘Farmer First’ (Cham­b ers et al., 1989) appeared and over­came a lot of ini­tial scep­ti­cism. The field of rural devel­op­ment has become more multi-dis­ci­plin­ary, and a stron­ger place has emerged for behav­ioural sci­en­tists, includ­ing anthro­pol­o­gists and geog­ra­phers prepared to give cog­ni­zance to farm­ers’ abil­i­ties as exper­i­ment­ers and ‘per­form­ers’ (Rich­ards 1985, 1986, 1989). They can col­lab­o­rate with agri­cul­tural sci­en­ tists in shift­ing the research focus away from the exper­i­men­tal sta­tion and onto the farm (Sco­ones and Thomp­son, 1994). While this shift has been accepted only in part by an agri­cul­tural-sci­ence pro­fes­sion still widely hos­tile to what are termed (even by friends) ‘pop­u­list’, ‘neo-pop­u­list’ or ‘eco-pop­u­list’ approaches (Kirk­by et al., 2001) there has been a nota­ble change of empha­sis in many quar­ters and a new will­ing­ness to listen to behav­ioural sci­en­tists. It pro­vides a new set of open­ings for aca­dem­ics wish­ing to involve them­selves more closely with the people whom they study.



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Farm­ers are fre­quently crit­ic­ ized for the impact of their activ­i­ ties on the nat­u­ral envi­ron­ment, and need informed defend­ers. The prob­lem­atic rela­tion­ship between farm­ers, con­ser­va­tion­ists and the pub­lic is dis­cussed at length by Brook­field and Par­sons (2007, pp. 128–156), and we do not repeat this dis­cus­sion here. Farm­ers also need sup­port in their endeav­ours to man­age not only the nat­ u­ral envi­ron­ment but the whole eco­nomic and polit­ic­ al sys­tem in which they are embed­ded. Capa­ble observ­ers and exper­i­ment­ ers though they may be, they often lack con­fi­dence in their own abil­i­ties to inno­vate. Win­arto (2004, p. 60), whose unusual exam­ ple we dis­cuss toward the end of this paper quotes the farm­ers among whom she first stud­ied and later col­lab­o­rated as describ­ing them­selves ‘met­a­phor­i­cally as “a flock of ducks or buf­fa­loes” and the gov­ern­ment as “herder”. Their life would be pros­per­ous if the “herder” led the flock well. But the “flock” would become unman­ age­able if the “herder” did not lead them prop­erly’. Given that gov­ern­ment sup­port has so often shrunk under the impact of neoliberal ‘struc­tural adjust­ment’ and that much of what they have offered has been ill-informed and inef­fec­tive, should aca­demic research­ers under­take their own inter­ven­tions, even though they can be only at local level? We write to urge that they should do so, within cer­tain lim­its, not so much by inter­ven­ing from above, but from among the farm­ers. In a recent book, the former World Bank econ­o­mist East­erly (2006) has con­trasted the top-down efforts of those he describes as ‘plan­ners’ (many doing more harm than good) and of the ‘search­ers’, over­whelm­ingly local, whose focussed efforts have often been far more reward­ing. Although not shar­ing East­erly’s faith in the omni­science of the mar­ket, we sug­gest that by join­ ing the ‘search­ers’, and them­selves becom­ing ‘search­ers’, aca­ demic research­ers can con­trib­ute a great deal. Many research­ers feel they are not qual­i­fied to inter­vene and in any case inter­ven­ tion is not part of the task for which they are funded. But a lot can be done by sup­port­ing farm­ers in the exer­cise of their own exper­i­men­ta­tion and inven­tive­ness. More­over, doing this can add value and depth to the research task for which aca­dem­ics are funded. In this paper we offer the expe­ri­ence of a pro­ject which did this, in which we were both engaged from 1993 to 2002, and which in Ghana has, since 2005, gone on to a suc­ces­sor pro­ject in which the sci­en­tists them­selves have more spe­cif­i­cally adopted a ‘searcher’ role. 2. An unusual pro­ject among farm­ers From 1993 to 2002 the pres­ent authors were prin­ci­pals in a United Nations Uni­ver­sity (UNU) pro­ject on People, Land ­Man­age­ment and Envi­ron­men­tal Change (PLEC), Brook­field as inter­na­tional sci­en­tific coor­di­na­tor and Gy­asi as head of the pro­ject teams in West Africa with spe­cific respon­si­bil­ity for work in Ghana. The ori­gin lay in a pro­posed net­worked research programme of the United Nations Uni­ver­sity (UNU), based in Tokyo, which in the early 1990s sought to pro­vide new infor­ma­tion to deci­sion-mak­ers on the effects of farm­ing on bio­di­ver­sity loss and land deg­ra­da­ tion, espe­cially in devel­op­ing coun­try regions of rapid pop­u­la­tion growth. Brook­field was asked to ini­ti­ate it, but declined to accept the prop­os­ i­tion that pop­u­la­tion growth nec­es­sar­ily led to deg­ra­da­ tion. He was given a freer hand. Pre­fer­ring to adopt a more empir­ i­cal and positive approach, he and one of his ear­li­est col­leagues pro­posed the still unusual view that ‘effec­tive man­age­ment sys­ tems do not have to be invented by mod­ern sci­ence. They exist, and have been ­con­tin­u­ously devel­oped by the world’s farm­ers’ (Brook­ field and Pa­doch, 1994, p. 43). More­over, the best among them seem to be those that sus­tain a high diver­sity of crops and other activ­i­ties, what we called “ag­ro­di­ver­si­ty’’. We pro­posed to study diverse farm­ing sys­tems in a search for what the farm­ers them­ selves might have to teach about con­ser­va­tion.

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At a 1992 IGU meet­ing in Wash­ing­ton, DC, Brook­field first met Gy­asi, and talked about the pro­posed pro­ject. In a fruit­ful exchange, Gy­asi, who had for some time worked in an NGO pro­ject con­cerned with rural devel­op­ment in an area of south­east­ern Ghana, liked the idea of a research pro­ject focus­sing on farm­ers’ ways of con­serv­ ing bio­di­ver­sity, but urged that the programme should not be only research: it should also be con­cerned with improve­ments in the welfare and devel­op­ment of the farm­ing people. Brook­field cer­tainly did not object, but was aware that UNU saw pol­icy-mak­ers as the tar­get audi­ence for their pro­jects, and might not read­ily agree. They did agree, but not at once. Major sup­port by our aca­demic offi­cer in Tokyo ( Ui­tto, 2002, 2005) was nec­es­sary before they did. Such ques­tions con­tin­ued to arise as our grow­ing pro­ject, after 1995 sup­ported also by the UN Envi­ron­ment Programme (UNEP), advanced to become part of the programme of the Global Envi­ ron­men­tal Facil­ity (GEF) in 1997. Dur­ing the five-year for­ma­tion period from 1992 to 1997, PLEC evolved quickly to shift its focus closer to the people. After 1995, when the first research stage had been com­pleted in Ghana, ahead of other coun­tries (Gy­asi et al., 1995), PLEC down­graded the research ele­ment in its plans, and became pri­mar­ily con­cerned with bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion on-farm. Its research sites became sites for the dem­on­stra­tion of farm­ers’ skills. As such it received GEF fund­ing for four years start­ ing in 1998.2 We describe PLEC’s activ­i­ties in Ghana in more detail below, but first dis­cuss what else was hap­pen­ing in those early years of rapid change. In Thai­land, Yun­nan (China) and Ama­zo­nian Bra­zil and Peru, PLEC work sprang out of pre-exist­ing pro­jects already focus­sing on spe­cific sites.3 The pro­ject among the Ama­zo­nian flood­plain farm­ ers was con­cep­tu­ally inno­va­tive in the very direc­tion that we sought for Ghana. Not con­tent with describ­ing what they found, the small research teams in Bra­zil and Peru actively sought to iden­tify those farm­ers whose prac­tices were the most con­ser­va­tion­ist and sus­tained the great­est diver­sity, and dis­cov­ered that among these inno­va­tive people were some of the most pro­duc­tive and pros­per­ous farm­ers in the local­i­ties con­cerned. Already by 1995, the Ama­zo­nian teams had begun to use these “expert farm­ers” to dem­on­strate to oth­ers.4 What they dem­on­strated was ways of using bio­di­ver­sity for profit, not by fol­low­ing known exter­nal mod­els, but exper­i­ment­ing and learn­ing while doing, and encour­ag­ing oth­ers to do the same. Find­ing the expert farm­ers became the key to pro­gress. It was itself a major research task, call­ing for inti­mate knowl­edge of people and their agri­cul­ture. The experts were rarely the com­mu­ nity lead­ers, or those farm­ers who had closely col­lab­o­rated with many other exter­nal pro­jects and were well known to the author­ i­ties (Pin­e­do-Vas­quez, 1996). The detailed knowl­edge, part-tra­di­ tional and part-acquired, on which their exper­tise was based, could not read­ily be grasped by stan­dard meth­ods such as ‘par­tic­i­pa­tory rural appraisal’, ques­tion­naires and focus-group dis­cus­sions. As Ama­nor (2002, p. 131) put it in Ghana: Rather than sit­ting under the fig tree at the chief’s pal­ace with dig­ni­tar­ies, [indig­e­nous envi­ron­men­tal knowl­edge] is best explored by tak­ing off along the wind­ing paths and ­dis­cov­er­ing the extrem­i­ties of the vil­lage, the chop bars with their bush-meat soup, the drink­ing spots, the jok­ers, the old women with their pithy com­ments, and the young women car­ry­ing water.

2 GEF fund­ing was agreed in 1997, but not sup­plied until 1998. Since the GEF pro­posal was already in final form at the begin­ning of 1997 we take this year as the start of the revised dem­on­stra­tion pro­ject. The effec­tive end was in early 2003. 3 Ulti­mately, PLEC teams were formed in Peru, Bra­zil, Mex­ico, Jamaica, Guin­ée, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Tan­za­nia, Thai­land, China (Yun­nan) and Papua New Guinea. Inter­na­tional coor­di­na­tors lived in Can­berra, New York, Nor­wich (UK), and Tokyo. 4 In the lit­er­a­ture, such farm­ers are some­times iden­ti­fied as ‘mas­ter’, ‘model’ or ‘lead­ing farm­ers’.

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He could have added that it was also nec­es­sary to walk fur­ther and to seek this knowl­edge in the farm­ers’ fields, as he him­self did very effec­tively in his own inde­pen­dent research (Ama­nor, 1994). A focus on bio­di­ver­sity on farm was what might now­a­days be described as a ‘pre-ana­lyt­i­cal choice’ for PLEC. Our work had to begin with inven­tory, both of bio­di­ver­sity and of ‘ag­ro­di­ver­si­ty’, the var­ied crop, field, fal­low and live­stock man­age­ment meth­ods of farm­ers in each area (Brook­field, 2001). After some­thing of a false start in which the coun­try sci­en­tists used a vari­ety of tran­sect meth­ods with which they were famil­iar, we moved rap­idly in the first GEF-funded year to develop a stan­dard sam­pling approach. It was based on what we termed land-use stages (much the same as land-uti­li­za­tion types in FAO ter­mi­nol­ogy) and field types within them, used both for bio­di­ver­sity inven­tory in quad­rats, and of land man­age­ment inven­tory in the whole fields, with their edges, in which the pur­po­sively-selected sam­ple quad­rats lay. Guide­lines were quickly dis­trib­uted, pub­lished in a spe­cial issue of the pro­ject peri­od­i­cal PLEC News and Views, and later repub­lished in the pro­ ject’s first gen­eral book (Za­rin et al., 2002; Brook­field et al., 2002). They were suc­cess­fully employed in all sites, and were the essen­ tial basis for the work that fol­lowed. Inven­tory, both of bio­di­ver­sity and of agri­cul­tural meth­ods, dem­on­strated the key impor­tance of farm­ers’ prac­tices in the con­ ser­va­tion of on-farm bio­di­ver­sity, as Pin­e­do-Vas­quez et al. (2002) were later able to dem­on­strate to a large audi­ence of spe­cial­ists and deci­sion-mak­ers in Ghana. It also helped iden­tify the best expert farm­ers, those who expand the thresh­old of ag­ro­bi­odi­ver­ si­ty by prof­it­ably incor­po­rat­ing addi­tional crop plants. Once the best farm­ers had thus been iden­ti­fied it was then nec­es­sary to estab­lish what among their meth­ods was capa­ble of being use­fully dem­on­strated to other farm­ers and, no less impor­tant, what the expert farmer was will­ing to dem­on­strate and to whom. Estab­lish­ ing what was wor­thy of wider prop­a­ga­tion, and how this was to be done, was a major task. In ret­ro­spect, PLEC found that the more time and the more care had been spent on this pre­pa­ra­tory work, the greater was the chance of later suc­cess (Pin­e­do-Vas­quez et al., 2003). This basic research done, dem­on­stra­tion work fol­lowed quite read­ily. But it could not be the same every­where. In some soci­e­ ties there are com­mu­nity meet­ings which can be used, or fre­quent work groups that can be brought together. There may be hab­its of social vis­it­ing among extended fam­i­lies (Pin­e­do-Vas­quez et al., 2003). Or there may be none of these. Soci­ety may be so rid­den with mutual sus­pi­cion and mis­trust that no one farmer’s teach­ing would eas­ily be accepted. Meth­ods had to adapt to the social and polit­ic­ al con­di­tions of each region, even within the same coun­try. Among the eth­ni­cally-mixed cabo­clos of the Ama­zon flood­plain we dealt with indi­vid­ual farm­ers with­out sig­nif­i­cant social strat­i­fi­ca­ tion. In Tan­za­nia, where adop­tion of the farmer-teach­ing-farmer strat­egy was out­stand­ingly suc­cess­ful, it was nec­es­sary to work first through vil­lage gov­ern­ments inher­ited from a period of semicol­lec­tive devel­op­ment in the 1970s, and also deal with seri­ous jeal­ou­sies and inter-per­sonal con­flicts within each com­mu­nity (Kaih­ura, 2002). In Jamaica there was almost no ‘social cap­i­tal’ in the form of com­mu­nity coher­ence at all, and it was nec­es­sary to cre­ate this through ad hoc work­ing groups (‘work-expe­ri­ence days’) formed around the minor­ity of farm­ers who rejected the mono-crop­ping advice of the banana mar­ket­ing board (ThomasHope and Spence, 2003). In Ghana, where chiefly dom­i­nance is con­sid­er­able, it was advis­able to work through the chiefs and to spend a great deal of time on the required for­mal­i­ties. Even in this one coun­try, there were major dif­fer­ences between regions. In the south­east, a large pop­ul­ a­tion of migrant ten­ant farm­ers were at first outside our work­ing groups, and it was only toward the end of the pro­ject life that some of these could be incor­po­rated and take a lead­ing role

in the host­ing of our meet­ings.5 In cen­tral Ghana, where almost all men had jobs in the nearby city of Kum­asi, one par­tic­i­pat­ing group was made up entirely of women, the effec­tive oper­a­tors of both owner- and ten­ant-farms (Od­uro, 2002; Agb­e­ny­e­ga and Od­uro, 2004). Noth­ing of this nature arose in the male-dom­i­nated soci­ety of north­ern Ghana. Farm­ers’ asso­ci­a­tions, some of them spon­ta­ne­ous, were spon­ sored by PLEC in sev­eral regions for orga­ni­za­tion of dem­on­stra­tion work and for the man­age­ment of enter­prises add­ing value from bio­di­ver­sity. They were a strong ele­ment in Ghana, and in China the first one, estab­lished in western Yun­nan in 1995, was report­ edly the first farm­ers’ NGO to be for­mally set up in the whole coun­ try. Its small mem­ber­ship was built around a core of expert farm­ers who saw them­selves as tak­ing a lead­ing role in local rural devel­op­ ment (Liang, 2002). Yet it was not pos­si­ble to rep­li­cate this suc­cess in another part of Yun­nan, where the his­tor­i­cal model of guid­ance from above was more firmly embed­ded. There were wider dif­fi­cul­ ties involved in devel­op­ing the coop­er­a­tion and trust needed for farmer-to-farmer dem­on­stra­tion to work. Many NGOs offer tools, seed, food and even money along with the advice they dis­sem­i­ nate. PLEC teams were not funded to do this, although they were able some­times to pro­vide small mate­rial rewards to the expert farm­ers them­selves,6 and to pro­vide germ­plasm in small quan­ti­ties for wider dis­tri­bu­tion. In the main, PLEC had to secure coop­er­a­tion by dem­on­strat­ing results. The few years in which PLEC dem­on­stra­ tion sites oper­ated were short for this pur­pose. The achieve­ment at some sites, out­stand­ingly in Bra­zil and Peru, Tan­za­nia, Thai­land, Guin­ée and Ghana, is the more remark­able given the short time and lim­ited resources avail­able. The farm­ers with whom we worked were drawn ini­tially from among those with some time and resources to spare, but over time we were able to reach men and women who held very little land, or were wholly ten­ants. The expert farm­ers who dem­on­strated to them were less widely rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the whole social range, and this was prob­a­bly inev­i­ta­ble given the demands made on their time. But they did include a few rather out­stand­ing inno­va­tors from among the poor­est and least let­tered. The activ­i­ties spon­ sored by PLEC were as var­ied as the man­ner in which they were organized. The com­mon sin­gle pur­pose of PLEC field activ­i­ties was to con­serve agri­cul­tural bio­di­ver­sity through diverse farm­ ing. Var­i­ous forms of agro­for­estry were the strat­e­gies most widely employed, but man­age­ment of soil fer­til­ity was often also of high pri­or­ity. We were not seek­ing to elim­i­nate use of agro­chem­i­cals, but to ensure that organic sup­ple­ments were also used to the max­ i­mum degree fea­si­ble. ‘Tra­di­tional’ meth­ods were some­times pre­ ferred, but in gen­eral we favoured ‘hybrid’ sys­tems in which both old and new were employed. Thus in some regions we encour­aged expert com­post-mak­ers to dem­on­strate their skills, and in oth­ers our experts were dis­tin­guished by their abil­ity to intro­duce and estab­lish new germ­plasm. Man­age­ment of erod­ing or eroded soils is a skill in which some our expert farm­ers excelled. Many of our experts planted and tended wood­lots, or encour­aged spon­ta­ne­ous growth of indig­en ­ ous spe­cies, man­ag­ing their growth through the crop­ping stages. Since we were encour­ag­ing farm­ers to improve pro­duc­tion, using diverse farm­ing meth­ods while tend­ing com­pat­i­ble bio­ 5 In one south­ern Gha­na­ian com­mu­nity in 1999, farm­ers farmed freely on land inher­ited from their fore­bears, but 23% rented addi­tional land, while 62% also hosted ten­ants on their land (Gy­asi et al., 2003). At our meet­ing in 2001, held in a ten­ant vil­lage, active trad­ing in germ­plasm among women on the out­skirts of the for­mal meet­ing made it dif­fi­cult for the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally-long for­mal speeches to be heard. Four or five years ear­lier the ten­ants, men and women, had remained silent through these meet­ings. 6 In one recorded case, an expert farmer received a wheelbarrow, a hoe, a machete and a spade (Kaih­ura, 2002, p. 135). PLEC was able to pay its expert farms only in kind, if they received pay­ment at all.



H. Brook­field, E.A. Gy­asi / Geoforum 40 (2009) 217–227

di­ver­sity, we nowhere sought the elim­i­na­tion of farm­ing or the delib­er­ate res­to­ra­tion of wild veg­e­ta­tion. Our inter­ven­tions were mainly indi­rect in that we sought suc­cess­ful adap­tive farm­ing meth­ods that were also effec­tive in con­serv­ing on-farm ag­ro­bi­odi­ ver­si­ty. Where PLEC did more directly inter­vene in all its work­ ing sites was in the pro­mo­tion of eco­nomic activ­it­ ies which added value from nat­u­ral or cul­ti­vated bio­di­ver­sity, thus offer­ing mate­ rial ben­efi ­ t from par­tic­i­pa­tion. For this pur­pose we sup­ported, for exam­ple, experts who made effec­tive eco­nomic use of the banks on the edges of their fields, dou­bling nor­mal income in this way in one case in Thai­land. Had we worked in another part of Thai­land we might have given strong sup­port to a minor­ity of farm­ers prac­ tic­ing inte­grated sys­tems, involv­ing the cre­a­tion of wood­lots and ponds, and increas­ing pro­duc­tion for home use far beyond that of neigh­bour­ing com­mer­cial rice farm­ers (Tip­raqsa, 2007). In sev­eral cases in Ghana, we encour­aged and sup­ported com­mer­cial beekeep­ing for honey pro­duc­tion, and else­where sup­ported the mak­ ing of cas­sava flour and of bread and cakes made with this mate­ rial. In one rather strik­ing case in Guin­ée, we sup­ported revival of an old cloth-dye­ing practice using local plant dyes, with such com­ mer­cial suc­cess that in a year or two the ladies con­cerned had sat­ u­rated the avail­able regional mar­ket (Bo­iro et al., 2002). All this is described in detail in the two gen­eral books which PLEC pro­duced, the first writ­ten while the pro­ject was in full stream, the sec­ond one based closely on the final report to UNEP and the GEF (Brook­ field et al., 2002; 2003). PLEC’s gen­er­ous fund­ing from the GEF came to an end in 2002 and it had already been agreed that the coun­try ‘clus­ters’ should seek their own fund­ing for fol­low-up pro­jects. Sev­eral did so, with par­tic­u­lar suc­cess in Amazo­nia, Thai­land and Ghana, and later in north­ern South­east Asia where UNU has con­tin­ued to be more directly involved. PLEC had been reviewed at mid-term and was com­pre­hen­sively reviewed, for UNEP, on com­ple­tion of the GEF fund­ing by three review­ers. The gen­eral part of the review report was pub­lished in PLEC News and Views (Final Eval­u­at­ ion, 2003). High­lighted in the UNEP exec­u­tive sum­mary were these remarks by Janis Al­corn: PLEC has cre­ated and dem­on­strated a way to reform agri­cul­tural research in order to reverse global trends toward mono­cul­ture, land deg­ra­da­tion and bio­di­ver­sity loss. PLEC should not be mis­taken for sim­ply being a suc­cess­ful farmer ­dem­on­stra­tion pro­ject net­worked around the world. PLEC dem­on­strates that it is pos­si­ble for sci­en­tists to col­lab­o­rate with agri­cul­tural advis­ers and the ‘end users’ of agri­cul­tural tech­ni­cal advice. A con­tin­u­a­tion of PLEC into the next phase offers the prom­ise of rad­i­cally reform­ing agri­cul­ture and ­land­scapes in ‘mar­ginal areas’ to nur­ture eco­log­i­cally and socially sus­tain­able agri­cul­ tural sys­tems that cre­ate a landscape that in turn sup­ports the con­ser­va­tion of bio­di­ver­sity (pp. 8 and 13). Unfor­tu­nately, there was no ‘next phase’. Efforts to re-fund the inter­ na­tional net­work were unsuc­cess­ful. Some cen­tral work still con­tin­ ues, on a vol­un­tary basis.7 Fol­low-up pro­jects in Thai­land, Laos, Bra­zil and Peru obtained fund­ing and remain active today. Another prin­ci­ pal direct suc­ces­sor to PLEC was in Ghana, where work dur­ing the whole period since 1993 is dis­cussed in the fol­low­ing sec­tion.

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and adap­tive strat­eg ­ ies in three sites, Gy­amfi­ase-Ade­nya, Se­ke­ sua-Os­on­son, and Aman­ase-Whan­a­be­nya. All are located in the south­east­ern sec­tor within the severely defor­ested but agri­cul­ tur­ally dynamic semi-humid for­est-savanna mosaic zone (Fig. 1). The sec­tor cov­ers the cra­dle of Ghana’s fore­most indus­try, cocoa farm­ing, which in this region has largely given way to com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion of assorted food crops, espe­cially cas­sava and maize, for the mar­ket in Ac­cra, the national cap­i­tal, and other neigh­bour­ ing urban set­tle­ments. The ini­tial stud­ies were car­ried out by an inter­dis­ci­plin­ary team of Uni­ver­sity of Ghana sci­en­tists in coop­er­a­tion with local farm­ ers using ques­tion­naires, group dis­cus­sions, casual obser­va­tion, ground tran­sect, and aer­ial pho­to­graphs. Pres­sures of pop­u­la­tion and urban demand plus less-than-ideal farm­ing prac­tices, nota­ bly heavy use of the hoe and fire, were iden­ti­fied as fun­da­men­ tal forces driv­ing bio­phys­i­cal and agri­cul­tural changes, includ­ing sig­nif­i­cant changes in bio­di­ver­sity. The abil­ity of some farm­ers to adapt tra­di­tional land man­age­ment prac­tices to chang­ing pro­duc­ tion cir­cum­stances includ­ing dete­ri­o­rat­ing soils, within the lim­ its of their low finan­cial resources, under­scored a need for closer study of such adap­tive strat­e­gies as a pos­si­ble basis for sus­tain­able agri­cul­tural devel­op­ment inter­ven­tions. The links devel­oped with farm­ers through field vis­its, group dis­cus­sion and other forms of inter­ac­tion proved effec­tive. They sug­gested part­ner­ships between sci­en­tists and farm­ers as a prom­is­ing approach for plan­ning the man­age­ment of agri­cul­tural land resources (Gy­asi et al., 1995; Gy­asi and Ui­tto, 1997). A recent paper in this jour­nal con­cerned with PLEC in south­east­ ern Ghana, one rely­ing prin­ci­pally on our ear­lier reports, has sug­ gested that our pur­pose there was to reverse the declin­ing den­sity and diver­sity of trees in the landscape and by encour­ag­ing tree fal­ lows to reha­bil­i­tate the degraded for­est eco­sys­tem (Aw­anyo, 2007, pp. 740–742). The author con­cluded that we were unsuc­cess­ful in this enter­prise because the farm­ers were inter­ested in their crops, not in trees. This was not, how­ever, our pur­pose. Like most of the West Afri­can and many other for­ests the south­east Ghana tran­si­ tion zone was a dynamic landscape made by people over many cen­tu­ries. It had grown a fairly dense for­est in the 19th cen­tury and was partly cleared for cocoa in the early 20th cen­tury then fur­ther opened to per­mit food crops to be cul­ti­vated; since the 1950s there has been substantial reduc­tion of remain­ing for­est.8 Our pur­pose was to sus­tain and enhance the bio­di­ver­sity of a farmed region, not to restore a ‘vir­gin’ for­est that in mod­ern his­tory had not existed. The prac­tices we pro­moted to achieve this end were selected from among the farm­ers’ own. Where we sought spe­cif­i­cally to con­serve, it was in the threatened sacred groves and medic­i­nal wood­lots, or to pro­tect water­sheds as in other areas of the world. The enlarge­ ment of con­ser­va­tion ter­ri­tory was nowhere our aim. When PLEC became a GEF programme in 1997, these par­tic­i­ pa­tory meth­ods, and the local farmer asso­ci­a­tions devel­oped to imple­ment them, promptly went into high gear. Work in the three original sites was inten­si­fied, and in close col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­ en­tists in the uni­ver­si­ties at Kum­asi and Tamale, newer sites were devel­oped in the cen­tre and north of the coun­try, prin­ci­pally Ja­chie and Bon­gnay­il­i-Dugu-Song, in Ghana’s remain­ing major ag­ro­eco­ log­i­cal zones, humid for­est and semi-arid savanna (Fig. 1).9 Each

3. PLEC in Ghana Ini­tial PLEC work in Ghana was pre­pa­ra­tory. It involved stud­ ies on envi­ron­men­tal change with a spe­cial focus on farm­ers roles 7 The peri­od­i­cal PLEC News and Views was con­tin­ued in elec­tronic form until 2005, and the infor­ma­tion ser­vice on rel­e­vant lit­er­a­ture, PLEC­serv, still con­tin­ues on a vol­un­tary basis (http://c3.unu.ed­up ­ lec). All issues of PLEC News and Views, from 1993 to 2005, are also on the UNU web­site.

8 The for­ests now under piece­meal reduc­tion in south­east­ern Ghana have a long and dis­turbed his­tory. A sim­i­lar case in south­east­ern Nige­ria is recorded by von Hel­ler­mann (2007). A for­ested area that was reserved as ‘vir­gin’ for­est early in the colo­nial period had, in fact, been densely occu­pied before wars in the 16th and 17th cen­tu­ries. 9 Mem­bers of Ghana’s other two prin­ci­pal uni­ver­si­ties joined the original team at the Uni­ver­sity of Ghana, Le­gon, in the mid-1990s. Cen­tral Ghana work was devel­ oped from the Kwame Nkru­mah Uni­ver­sity of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy in Kum­asi, and north­ern Ghana work from the Uni­ver­sity of Devel­op­ment Stud­ies in Tamale.

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H. Brook­field, E.A. Gy­asi / Geoforum 40 (2009) 217–227

Fig. 1. PLEC and SLaM sites in Ghana.

of the five prin­ci­pal sites was devel­oped into a dem­on­stra­tion site, which we defined as: a place where PLEC sci­en­tists, farm­ers and other envi­ron­men­ tal stake­hold­ers carry out work in a par­tic­i­pa­tory man­ner to con­serve and even enhance agri­cul­tural and bio­log­i­cal diver­ sity and the bio­phys­ic­ al resources under­pin­ning it. It is an area where the sci­en­tists work with farm­ers in the cre­a­tion of pro­jects that are (the farm­ers’) own, and (where, together, the sci­en­tists and farm­ers) dem­on­strate the value of locally devel­ oped tech­niques and tech­nol­o­gies. It belongs to the farm­ers, in that the work done in a dem­on­stra­tion site is the farm­ers’ own. The role of sci­en­tists is only to facil­i­tate, mea­sure and eval­ua ­ te local meth­ods, and help to select the method most likely to be sus­tained (Ab­du­lai et al., 1999,p. 19). In each area, a farm­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion was formed, the bet­ter to under­ take farmer–sci­en­tist col­lab­o­ra­tive work, and to facil­it­ ate exchange

vis­its between the sites. They also helped spread the PLEC mes­ sage and mobi­lize latent knowl­edge, energy, and other resources of farm­ers for the pur­pose of con­ser­va­tion and devel­op­ment. Through them were organized group dis­cus­sions, and col­lab­o­ra­ tive work with farm­ers knowl­edge­able in eth­no­bot­any (Enu-Kwe­si et al., 2004). Above all was the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and dem­on­stra­tion of tra­di­tional bio­di­ver­sity-con­serv­ing farm man­age­ment prac­tices. Build­ing from a core of just ten par­tic­i­pat­ing farm­ers in 1993, the asso­ci­a­tions achieved a mem­ber­ship of around 1400 by 2001. Over half the mem­bers were women, due largely to the dis­tinc­tive allfemale asso­ci­a­tion at Ja­chie, near Kum­asi (Od­uro, 2002; Agb­e­ny­e­ga and Od­uro, 2004), which by exam­ple helped estab­lish a stron­ger role for women in Gha­na­ian rural devel­op­ment. The asso­ci­a­tions also fea­tured cen­trally in the con­duct of activ­i­ties that aimed simul­ta­neously at con­serv­ing bio­di­ver­ sity while add­ing to farmer incomes (Blay et al., 2004). At their peak, the keep­ing of pol­li­nat­ing bees, com­bined with pro­duc­



H. Brook­field, E.A. Gy­asi / Geoforum 40 (2009) 217–227

tion of honey and wax in home gar­dens and for­ests con­served in the back­yard, involved 70 house­holds in Se­ke­sua-Os­on­son alone (Gyasi and Nartey, 2003), while young women trained in spin­ning and weav­ing of yarn from cot­ton grown with PLEC encour­age­ment towards agri­cul­tural diver­si­fi­ca­tion, num­bered 42 in Bon­gnay­il­i-Dugu-Song. Female mem­bers of a PLEC farmer asso­ci­a­tion were instru­men­tal in dem­on­stra­tions of rare local vari­e­ties of Afri­can rice, Oryza glab­err­ima, at a subsidiary site in the far north­east of the coun­try. Results of activ­i­ties ori­ented towards enhanc­ing bio­di­ver­sity and improv­ing incomes were mixed. But the fact that some, nota­bly bee-keep­ing and bio­di­ verse farm­ing inte­grat­ing non-tra­di­tional crops, were sus­tained by farm­ers on a pop­u­lar basis well after the end of PLEC finan­cial sup­port under­scores the value and prom­ise of its farmer-cen­tred par­tic­i­pa­tory meth­od­ol­ogy. The early start in Ghana, and the pres­ence there from the out­set of a well-inte­grated multi-dis­ci­plin­ary team, led to some impor­ tant early pub­li­ca­tion (Gy­asi et al., 1995) and to PLEC’s first book, which was based on Ghana (Gy­asi and Ui­tto, 1997). Dur­ing the GEF years, more than 50 draft sci­en­tific papers were pro­duced, and some of these were later com­pleted and brought together in book form (Gy­asi, 2004). When PLEC ended, some of its mem­bers were imme­di­ately involved in an IP­GRI (now ‘Bio­ver­si­ty’) study of the cul­ti­va­tion of yam and rice crop-land­races, employ­ing the same par­tic­i­pa­tory meth­ods (Gy­asi et al., 2005). Mean­time, a fol­ low-up pro­ject was nego­ti­ated with UNDP for GEF approval, which it received in 2004. The fol­low-up pro­ject focused on the ame­lio­ ra­tion of land deg­ra­da­tion, an aspect prom­i­nent in the early writ­ ings of the PLEC-Ghana team, and of one of their close col­leagues (Ama­nor, 1994, 1997). It engaged most of the PLEC sci­en­tific par­tic­ i­pants, in the same three uni­ver­si­ties but, of neces­sity, new groups of farm­ers though in the same gen­eral regions as under PLEC. This pro­ject, which is mod­eled on PLEC, is in pro­gress at the time of writ­ing. We describe it next. 4. SLaM, a sequel pro­ject on sus­tain­able land man­age­ment in Ghana SLaM (Sus­tain­able Land Man­age­ment for Mit­ig­a­tin­g Land Deg­ra­da­tion, Enhanc­ing Agri­cul­tural Bio­di­ver­sity and Reduc­ing Pov­erty) is a mainly GEF-funded 4–5 year pro­ject. The land deg­ ra­da­tion spe­cif­i­cally addressed includes defor­es­ta­tion, inva­sion by weeds, soil ero­sion, and bio­di­ver­sity loss. In Ghana, offi­cial esti­mates of uncer­tain value give 70% of the land as sub­ject to severe ero­sion, regarded as the lead­ing fac­tor under­min­ing pro­ duc­tiv­ity of agri­cul­ture (Min­is­try of Food and Agri­cul­ture, 2002). Another offi­cial esti­mate, perhaps even more prob­lem­atic, holds that bio­di­ver­sity alone lost through defor­es­ta­tion and land deg­ ra­da­tion amounts to 4% of national GDP (Min­is­try of Envi­ron­ ment and Sci­ence, 2002). Whatever the worth of these esti­mates, there is no ques­tion but that land deg­ra­da­tion is seri­ous and wide­spread in Ghana. Indexed first by loss of soil organic mat­ter, and hence fer­til­ity, then by changes in land cover, and with var­ i­able inten­sity of sheet and rill ero­sion, it was remarked on both gen­er­ally and in a Gha­na­ian con­text in clas­sic work by Nye and Green­land (1960, 1964). In the early days of PLEC changes in soil qual­it­ ies and land cover were stud­ied in detail in what became the south­east­ern Ghana sites by Ow­usu-Ben­noah (1997) and Enu-Kwe­si (1997). Farm­ers saw the prob­lems through decline in crop yields and inva­sion of grasses and, in all more humid areas, of the South Amer­i­can weed Chro­mo­la­e­na od­o­ra­ta (Acheam­pong in Ghana), which sprang up in almost every small for­est clear­ ing and spread rap­idly in cul­ti­vated and fal­low land. How­ever, the PLEC authors also remarked on a sig­nif­i­cant recov­ery in soil organic mat­ter, Ph, and cat­ion exchange capac­ity under C. od­o­ ra­ta, not­ing also that farm­ers expe­ri­enced use­ful improve­ment

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Table 1 Essen­tially tra­di­tional man­age­ment prac­tices/regimes and their advan­ta­ges in PLEC dem­on­stra­tion sites in Ghana Practice/regime

Major advan­tage

1. Min­i­mal till­age and con­trolled use of   fire for veg­e­ta­tion clear­ance 2. Mixed crop­ping, crop rota­tion and   mixed farm­ing

Min­im ­ al dis­tur­bance of soil and biota

3. Tra­di­tional agro­for­estry: cul­ti­vat­ing   crops among trees left in situ

4. Pro­ka or oprow­ka, a no-burn farm­ing   practice that involves mulch­ing by   leav­ing slashed veg­e­ta­tion to   decom­pose in situ 5. Bush fal­low/land rota­tion 6. Usage of house­hold refuse and   manure in home gar­dens and   com­pound farms 7. Use of nya­batso (Neu­boul­dia la­evis),   as live stake for yams, and as an   agro­for­estry spe­cies

8. Stag­gered har­vest­ing of crops 9. Stor­age of crops nota­bly yams, in   situ, in the soil for future har­vest­ing 10. Con­ser­va­tion of for­est in the   back­yard

Max­i­mizes soil nutri­ent usage; main­ tain crop bio­di­ver­sity; spread risk of com­plete crop loss; enhance a diver­sity of food types and nutri­tion; favour soil regen­er­a­tion Con­serves trees; regen­er­ates soil fer­til­ity through bio­mass litter. Some trees add to pro­duc­tive capac­ity of soil by nitro­gen fix­a­tion Main­tains soil fer­til­ity by con­serv­ing and stim­u­lat­ing microbes and by humus addi­tion of decom­pos­ing veg­e­ta­tion; con­serves plant prop­a­gates includ­ing those in the soil by the avoid­ance of fire A means of regen­er­at­ing soil fer­til­ity and con­serv­ing plants in the wild Sus­tains soil pro­duc­tiv­ity

The basi­cally ver­ti­cal root­ing sys­tem of nya­batso favours expan­sion of yam tubers, while the can­opy pro­vides shade and the leaf litter mulch and humus. It also is sus­pected that nya­batso fixes nitro­gen Ensures food avail­abil­ity over the long haul Enhances food secu­rity and secures seed stock Con­serves for­est spe­cies; source of medic­i­nal plants at short notice; favours api­cul­ture, snail farm­ing and shade lov­ ing crops such as yams

Source: Gy­asi, (2004), Gy­asi et al. (2004).

in soil fer­til­ity, though still regard­ing this almost inerad­i­ca­ble invader as a nox­ious weed.10 SLaM started work in 2005. It is exe­cuted by the Min­is­try of Local Gov­ern­ment, Rural Devel­op­ment and Envi­ron­ment, and imple­mented by a multi-dis­ci­plin­ary team of sci­en­tists, who oper­ ate in con­cert with farm­ers in the par­tic­i­pa­tory man­ner of PLEC. By dem­on­stra­tions and capac­ity build­ing pro­grammes focused on good/best land man­age­ment prac­tices, includ­ing some dis­cov­ered by PLEC (Table 1), SLaM strives towards its prin­ci­pal goal of heal­ing degraded lands to improve agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion, food secu­rity, and rural live­li­hoods in Ghana. SLaM inter­ven­tion has focused ini­tially on approx­i­mately 100 degraded farmed and non-farmed lands selected on the basis of cri­te­ria devel­oped jointly with farm­ers. They are dis­trib­uted among 27 com­mu­ni­ties spread across Ghana’s major eco­log­i­ cal zones (semi-arid savanna; humid for­est; semi-humid for­estsavanna tran­si­tion) in the north­ern, cen­tral and south­ern sec­tors

10 Aw­anyo (2007) regarded use of C. od­o­ra­ta as fal­low cover, man­aged by heavy ini­tial weed­ing before the start of cul­ti­va­tion, as the best option for agro­nom­i­callysound land man­age­ment in the Gy­amfi­ase-Ade­nya area. While this deep-root­ing and heavy-lit­ter­ing shrub cer­tainly has advan­ta­ges in sup­press­ing growth of more seri­ous weeds, and is a pre­ferred fal­low cover for some farm­ers in South­east Asia, its man­age­ment presents great prob­lems, and it may have alle­lo­pathic effects on tree growth. Although it does have some of the use­ful prop­er­ties of an induced fal­low cover, not enough is known about its ecol­ogy and effect on other plants to warrant its pro­mo­tion (Sty­ger and Fer­nan­des, 2006; Roder et al., 2007). At pres­ent it con­trib­utes very sub­stan­tially to the work-load of Gha­na­ian farm­ers and worldwide the con­se­quences of its rapid 20th cen­tury spread remain a mat­ter of con­tro­ versy. On the basis of pres­ent knowl­edge we there­fore can­not sup­port Aw­anyo’s sug­ges­tion.

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(Fig. 1). These sites com­prise land man­aged by house­holds and areas man­aged by com­mu­ni­ties on pub­lic or com­mu­nity prop­erty. Other sites are con­trols for mon­it­ or­ing change. Key inter­ven­tions towards the planned goals and objec­tives include on-farm reha­bil­i­ta­tion by bio­log­i­cal mea­sures mod­eled on agro­for­estry prin­ci­ples, com­mu­nity plant nurs­er­ies and watershed and river bank reha­bil­i­ta­tion by tree plant­ing and stone bun­ding. By late 2007, there were 23 plant nurs­er­ies run on a com­mu­ nity basis. Com­pre­hen­sive train­ing in reha­bil­i­ta­tion and sus­tain­ able land man­age­ment had reached over 50 farm­ers includ­ing 19 women; these core farm­ers, as in PLEC, pass on their knowl­edge to oth­ers. A mid-term review in 2007 reported very pos­i­tively on the reac­tion to SLaM among the farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties involved. This eval­ua ­ ­tion con­cludes (Bas­sey et al., 2007, p. 31) that SLaM

resem­bling Wa­gen­in­gen meth­ods out of reach of an unsup­ported behav­ioural sci­en­tist. Yet in fact a major part of the reg­u­lar research pro­grammes of most geog­ra­phers and anthro­pol­o­gists work­ing in rural com­mu­ni­ties yields infor­ma­tion of the sort which the Wa­gen­ in­gen diag­nos­tics set out to achieve (Röling et al., 2004; Ne­der­ lof et al., 2004). To say this is not to belit­tle the insights which CoS has achieved through its con­tin­u­ously adap­tive meth­od­ol­ogy (Ne­der­lof et al., 2007).12 On the con­trary, it is to encour­age geog­ra­ phers and anthro­pol­o­gists who wish to make seri­ous con­tri­bu­tion on their own. A final exam­ple, from the other side off the world, shows why, and in what way. 6. A dis­tinc­tive anthro­pol­o­gist

While PLEC was still con­duct­ing its GEF work, another ambi­ tious pro­ject came to Ghana and also to nearby Benin, and in some ways it has gone beyond the meth­ods of PLEC. Based in the Uni­ver­ sity of Wa­gen­in­gen, justly cel­e­brated for the range and depth of its programme of research on agri­cul­tural mat­ters in devel­op­ing coun­ tries, this pro­ject arose from dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the local impact of agri­cul­tural research on farm­ers’ pro­duc­tiv­ity and welfare. Most imme­di­ately, it fol­lowed a cri­tique of an anon­y­mous soil-fer­til­ity pro­ject in Togo which had lim­ited effect (Ne­der­lof and Dan­gbé­ gnon, 2007). PLEC drew atten­tion to this deva­stating anal­y­sis in an issue of PLEC­serv (2007) under the title ‘Mis­takes all down the line’. To avoid such errors, the ‘Con­ver­gence of Sci­ences’ (CoS) pro­ ject set up exten­sive pro­grammes of diag­nos­tic and tech­no­graph­ic stud­ies before any exper­i­men­tal research (by its eight doc­toral stu­dents and their super­vi­sors) began.11 CoS is not con­strained by pre-ana­lyt­i­cal choices imposed by the source of fund­ing to focus on bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion or the man­age­ment of degraded land, but aims only to improve farm­ers’ welfare by find­ing win­dows of oppor­tu­nity within which improve­ments worth-while to the farm­ ers could be devised. Time-con­sum­ing preliminary stud­ies focus on find­ing these oppor­tu­ni­ties by study­ing the pro­duc­tion sys­tem in its social and eco­nomic/polit­i­cal set­ting both in com­mu­ni­ties and in the wider econ­omy. Social and nat­u­ral sci­en­tists are equally involved, and each has to become famil­iar with the exper­tise of the other (Röling et al., 2004; Ne­der­lof et al., 2004, 2007; Houn­kon­ nou et al., 2006). Although more for­mally con­ducted, and in most instances more exhaus­tive, the CoS diag­nos­tic and tech­no­graph­ic sur­veys are com­pa­ra­ble with what PLEC’s sci­en­tists under­took in their explor­atory inqui­ries in each pro­posed ‘dem­on­stra­tion site’ (Pin­e­do-Vas­quez et al., 2002). They take the care­ful PLEC and SLaM approach fur­ther. The CoS labels dis­tin­guish their approach from oth­ers, but this admi­ra­ble pro­ject still has les­sons for under-re­sour­ced indi­ vid­ual research­ers. Long-period diag­nos­tic stud­ies, and acquir­ ing ­famil­iar­ity with other dis­ci­plines might seem to put any­thing

More com­plex forms of new knowl­edge, such as that of inte­ grated pest man­age­ment (IPM) never dif­fuse read­ily. CoS encoun­ tered this prob­lem with IPM, as many oth­ers have done. Win­arto (1995, 2004) is an anthro­pol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­sity of Indo­ne­sia who in the late 1980s became inter­ested in efforts to resolve Indo­ ne­sia’s mount­ing prob­lems with insect pests in rice through IPM, substi­tut­ing train­ing in pest man­age­ment for the mas­sive flood of instruc­tions and chem­i­cals that had char­ac­ter­ized the first two decades of the coun­try’s green rev­o­lu­tion. As a doc­toral stu­dent she went in 1990 to the first ‘school with­out walls’ IPM train­ing ses­sion in Su­bang Regency, West Java, par­tic­i­pated in the weekly ses­sions over ten weeks, and then fol­lowed up what hap­pened in the com­ mu­nity dur­ing the subsequent two years. All this began, and con­ tin­ued, dur­ing a severe multi-sea­son out­break of the White Rice Stem Borer, a pest not known in this region in more than a gen­er­ a­tion. The IPM school was far from per­fect in design and con­duct, and it left its par­tic­i­pants with more uncer­tain­ties than answers. There was no fol­low-up programme. In a neigh­bour­ing vil­lage it failed, and in Win­arto’s vil­lage the mea­sure of suc­cess achieved was due to a tiny group among the small num­ber of farm­ers who had attended the course, who con­tin­ued to observe and exper­i­ ment in an envi­ron­ment of con­sid­er­able scep­ti­cism. She recounts the man­ner in which they learned and kept on learn­ing, ulti­mately chang­ing the atti­tudes and prac­tices of a pro­por­tion of their neigh­ bours. She, a social sci­en­tist with only basic train­ing in nat­u­ral sci­ ence, learned ento­mol­ogy with them. Her involved sup­port must have been impor­tant to the bud­ding ‘farmer–sci­en­tists‘ but she kept her­self in the back­ground so far as pos­si­ble until, in the last months of her field­work, she smoothed the way for the inquis­i­tive farm­ers to seek fur­ther sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion at a nearby research sta­tion and in Bo­gor uni­ver­sity. That was by no means the end for Win­arto. Under FAO aus­ pices she went on to observe farm­ers’ efforts to develop an effec­ tive con­trol strat­egy against the same pest in the adja­cent In­dra­ mayu Regency, and then worked among a more com­pre­hen­sive and contin­uing ‘farm­ers’ field school’ in Suma­tra. The national IPM programme in Indo­ne­sia was in fact ter­mi­nated in the late 1990s, when decen­tral­iza­tion also broke up the former exten­sion ser­ vice. But the farm­ers who had learned new ways did not give up and con­tin­ued to exper­i­ment with new ideas. One of these was in breed­ing their own rice and veg­e­ta­ble vari­e­ties, grown organ­i­cally, par­tic­u­larly strongly devel­oped at In­dra­mayu despite con­sid­er­able oppo­si­tion from the author­i­ties. Win­arto returned to In­dra­mayu in 2006, with the inten­tion of study­ing their activ­i­ties and strug­gles against the bureau­cratic and com­mer­cial sys­tem. Almost at once she found her­self col­lab­or­ at­

11 The empha­sis on diag­nos­tic stud­ies in CoS arose from the expe­ri­ence of a Wa­ gen­in­gen ento­mol­o­gist in Bhu­tan. He spent most of a year seek­ing an open­ing for his exper­tise that would be most use­ful to Bhut­a­nese farm­ers, and shifted his pro­ ject from one pest in maize to a fruit fly in read­ily mar­ket­able man­da­rins as a result (van Schoub­roek, 1999, cited in Röling et al. (2004)).

12 These insights are not con­fined to tech­ni­cal aspects. Many of the prob­lems encoun­tered by the CoS research­ers lay in the insti­tu­tional domain, and we appre­ ci­ate Röling et al.’s (2004, p. 218) frus­trated com­ment that ‘the only depend­able insti­tu­tion in the West Afri­can rural scene is the mar­ket trader with her sense for busi­ness and entre­pre­neur­ship’.

is poten­tially very impor­tant for Ghana as it is using past expe­ri­ences and exper­tise to fur­ther develop meth­od­ol­o­gies that can be widely applied through­out the coun­try. A strong team of part­ners is in the pro­cess of being devel­oped which can ensure effec­tive­ness and sus­tain­abil­ity of [land man­ age­ment] activ­i­ties of the pro­ject. Farm­ers and part­ners are keen in (sic.) being involved in the pro­ject. 5. Beyond PLEC: ‘Con­ver­gence of Sci­ences’



H. Brook­field, E.A. Gy­asi / Geoforum 40 (2009) 217–227

ing with the farm­ers in pro­duc­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of a film to help widen first local then offi­cial sup­port (Win­arto, 2008). She thus assumed an advo­cacy role which she con­tin­ues to sus­tain, tak­ing up aspects of the wider issues against the polit­i­cally pow­er­ ful com­mer­cial sys­tem, and adopt­ing some of the pro-small farmer ‘food sov­er­eignty’ argu­ments of the inter­na­tional small-farm­ers’ move­ment La Via Campe­si­na (Win­arto, 2007; Winarto and Ar­dhi­ an­to, 2007), now head­quar­tered in Jakarta. In her effec­tive link­ing of research with inter­ven­ing in sup­port of farm­ers, she has had to mas­ter exper­tise well outside her own dis­ci­plin­ary train­ing. In doing this, she is not unique, but pro­vides a strik­ing illus­tra­tion of what can be achieved. 7. Con­clu­sion PLEC did not work in Indo­ne­sia, though we tried unsuc­cess­fully to set up a group there. It was a pop­u­lar pro­ject with its worldwide mem­ber­ship, which at the peak reached around 200 sci­en­ tific par­tic­ip ­ ants, almost 10,000 farm­ers and some 50 stu­dents. Although very good rela­tion­ships between sci­en­tists and farm­ers had much to do with this, it was the effort to pro­vide improve­ ments in agri­cul­ture and live­li­hood that had most to do with this pop­u­lar­ity. While every­one would have liked money, ‘now they say that a per­son who gives you knowl­edge is a thou­sand times bet­ter … because one can do so much more with the knowl­edge’ (Kaih­ura, 2002, p. 144). Yet although PLEC was praised for its inter­ ven­tion­ist work among farm­ers, this was not widely pub­li­cized outside the pro­ject, except in the book derived from its final report (Brook­field et al., 2003). Our mid-term reviewer, an out­stand­ing aca­demic involved in the on-farm con­ser­va­tion of ag­ro­bi­odi­ver­ si­ty, advised that the sup­port offered to farm­ers be down­graded in favour of putt­ing more effort into ana­lys­ing and pub­lish­ing the strong research results already achieved by 2000.13 We did our best to fol­low this advice with­out, how­ever, stop­ping the sup­port given to farm­ers and rural com­mu­ni­ties on the ground which was cen­tral to our whole programme, research as well as assis­tance to the people. PLEC made a substantial con­tri­bu­tion to the meth­od­ol­ogy of bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion in agri­cul­tural areas (Ui­tto, 2005), but it would have taken longer time and more resources to have bet­tered the real, but lim­ited ben­e­fits we brought to our thousands of col­ lab­or­ at­ing farm­ers. Turn­ing to our research output, it is only hon­ est to admit that most of it was not path-break­ing, except perhaps in Amazo­nia and Thai­land. Even in Ghana and China where the research output was quan­ti­ta­tively great­est, many pro­vok­ing sci­ en­tific find­ings were not quickly or sys­tem­at­ic­ ally fol­lowed up by rep­li­cated work.14 In terms of applied sci­ence a valu­able mea­sure of syn­ergy was achieved, but only toward the end of the pro­ject did the full value of com­bin­ing ser­vice to the people with research begin to become appar­ent. Perhaps our main claim is to have been a pio­neer in this area, given our UN spon­sor­ship perhaps for­tu­nate in not hav­ing been con­fronted with issues demand­ing par­ti­san advo­cacy of the order faced by Win­arto and oth­ers. PLEC and SLaM do dem­on­strate how much aca­demic sci­en­tists have that they can offer to the people among whom they work, and how research inter­ests can be both broad­ened and deep­ened in so doing. This proven syn­ergy rein­forces our argu­ment that there is profit in com­bin­ing a mea­sure of inter­ven­tion with research. 13 This was S.B. Brush of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at Davis. Ghana was among the coun­tries he vis­ited in 2000, and he urged a research focus on yam vari­e­ties in this sec­ond­ary cen­tre of yam domes­ti­ca­tion. In the fol­low­ing years, and beyond the PLEC period, PLEC’s Ghana sci­en­tists greatly increased their input into work on yams, lead­ing to sev­eral pub­li­ca­tions. 14 Work in the fol­low-up pro­jects, includ­ing SLaM, did include de-facto rep­li­ca­tion of PLEC exper­i­ments and mea­sures, but not in the sys­tem­atic man­ner pre­ferred in the pure sci­en­tific dis­ci­plines.

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Beyond profit, there is duty. Sci­en­tists such as geog­ra­phers who seek to draw on work among rural people for their pro­fes­ sional careers and rep­u­ta­tions have an obli­ga­tion to give to the rural people what they most need, which is sup­port in their enter­ prises and in the man­age­ment of their nat­u­ral resources. To the sci­en­tists, PLEC was often stim­u­lat­ing as well as chal­leng­ing, and it affected both the con­tent and direc­tion of their own research. But it was a method, not a for­mula, and that is its lesson (Brookfield, 2002). What was done var­ied sub­stan­tially from place to place, in a con­stantly recur­sive learn­ing pro­cess. Research needs to be accom­pa­nied, where appro­pri­ate, by sup­port­ive inter­ven­tion, and if this leads to advo­cacy, then so be it. The con­tri­bu­tion of an indi­ vid­ual researcher, even a group of research­ers, can only be lim­ ited. We are not going to be able to resolve the larger prob­lems of rural welfare. But as Cham­bers (1983, p. 217) wrote in con­clud­ ing his appeal for rever­sal of biases and pre­con­cep­tions in rural devel­op­ment, writ­ten some years before ‘Farmer First’, ‘for most out­sid­ers, most of the time, the soun­dest and best way for­ward is through innu­mer­a­ble small steps and tiny pushes, putt­ing the last first not once but again and again and again.’ The effort must be made; it is a duty to do so. PLEC and its suc­ces­sor pro­jects offer good exam­ples of efforts to accom­plish some­thing positive in asso­ ci­a­tion with research, and even out of research, and we hope that this ex­posé of our own positive expe­ri­ence will encour­age oth­ers to reveal their own. Acknowl­edge­ments The authors are grate­ful to two anon­y­mous review­ers who not only sug­gested ways of improv­ing the paper, but also pro­vided valu­able ref­er­ences to enable us bet­ter to do so. We have tried to fol­low their sug­ges­tions as closely as we can. We are also grate­ ful to Muriel Brook­field for doing a substantial edit­ing job on the final man­u­script, and to Yu­ni­ta Win­arto for mak­ing a timely return visit to Can­berra dur­ing which it was pos­si­ble to catch up with the latest devel­op­ments in her research and ser­vice career. Ref­er­ences A friend of Bra­zil, 1988. In the course of devel­op­ment, Indi­ans and anthro­pol­o­gists. Anthro­pol­ogy Today 4(6), 2–3. Ab­du­lai, A.S., Gy­asi, E.A., Ku­fogbe, S.K., 1999. Map­ping of set­tle­ments in an evolv­ing PLEC dem­on­stra­tion site in north­ern Ghana, An exam­ple in col­lab­o­ra­tive and par­tic­i­pa­tory work. PLEC News and Views 14, 19–24, with assis­tance from P K. Ad­raki, F. Asante, M. Asu­mah, B.Z. Gan­daa, B.D. Of­ori, and A S. Su­man­i. Agb­e­ny­e­ga, O., Od­uro, W., 2004. Women envi­ron­men­tal pace­set­ters of Ja­chie. In: Gy­asi, E.A., Kran­jac-Beri­savlj­evic, G., Blay, E.T., Od­uro, W. (Eds.), Man­ag­ing Ag­ro­ di­ver­si­ty the Tra­di­tional Way: Les­sons from West Africa in Sus­tain­able Use of Bio­di­ver­sity and Related Nat­u­ral Resources. United Nations Uni­ver­sity Press, Tokyo, pp. 242–249. Ama­nor, K.S., 1994. The New Fron­tier: Farm­ers’ Responses to Land Deg­ra­da­tion, a West Afri­can Case Study. Zed Books, Lon­don. Ama­nor, K.S., 1997. Inter­act­ing with the envi­ron­ment, adap­ta­tion and regen­er­a­ tion on degraded land in upper Ma­nya Krob­o. In: Gy­asi, G.A., Ui­tto, J.I. (Eds.), Envi­ron­ment, Bio­di­ver­sity and Agri­cul­tural Change in West Africa, Per­spec­tives from Ghana. United Nations Uni­ver­sity Press, Tokyo, pp. 98–111. Ama­nor, K.S., 2002. Indig­en ­ ous knowl­edge in space and time. In: Brook­field, H., Pa­doch, C., Par­sons, H., Stock­ing, M. (Eds.), Cul­ti­vat­ing Bio­di­ver­sity: ­Under­stand­ing, Ana­lyz­ing and Using Agri­cul­tural Diver­sity. ITDG Pub­lish­ing, Lon­don, pp. 126–131. Aus­tin, D.L., 2004. Part­ner­ships not pro­jects! Improv­ing envi­ron­ment through col­ lab­or­ a­tive research and action. Human Orga­ni­za­tion 63 (4), 419–430. Aw­anyo, L., 2007. A Janus-faced bio­di­ver­sity change and the par­tial­ity of eco­log­i­cal knowl­edge in a world bio­di­ver­sity hot­spot in Ghana: impli­ca­tions for bio­di­ver­ sity reha­bil­i­ta­tion. Geofo­rum 38, 739–751. Bas­sey, M., Dup­hey, M., Fen­ing, J., 2007. Mid-term eval­u­a­tion report. Sus­tain­able land man­age­ment for mit­i­gat­ing land deg­ra­da­tion, enhanc­ing agri­cul­tural bio­ di­ver­sity and reduc­ing pov­erty (SLaM). UNDP, Mimeo. Bay­liss-Smith, T., Bed­ford, R., Brook­field, H., La­tham, M., 1988. Islands Island­ers and the World: the Colo­nial and Post-colo­nial Expe­ri­ence of East­ern Fiji. Uni­ver­sity press, Cam­bridge. Blaikie, P., Brookfield, H., 1987. Land degradation and society. Routledge, London. In: Brookfield, H., Parsons, H., Brookfield, M. (Eds.), Agrodiversity: Learning from Farmers Across the World. United Nations University Press, Tokyo.

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