By JEAN MARC VON DER WEID*
The approach to promoting agroecological development
Problems in approaching the promotion of agroecological development – concepts
The first question refers to the understanding of the concept of agroecology. Despite the very consistent definitions developed by Altieri and Glissman since the eighties and reproduced with complements and some clarifications by theorists and practitioners in various parts of the world, the perception of this proposal varies according to the public and within each public.
Farmers, technicians and scientists, public agents, extension agents, financial agents, teachers, media, politicians, perceive agroecology in different ways.
The confusion between agroecology and organic production has already been mentioned in this article, but it is worth returning to it, without fear of repetition. An organic production system is focused on avoiding the use of chemical inputs and transgenic seeds, but does not require the integration of natural biodiversity into production designs or the restriction to monocultures. This allows green agribusiness to invest in organic production and have its products certified by various legislation around the world.
By maintaining an approach that greatly simplifies the design of the production system to allow the mechanization of various activities, the organic proposal distances itself from the diversity existing in the natural systems in which it is inserted and ends up being less efficient from the point of view of productivity, resistance and of resilience.
These systems end up dependent on external organic inputs, whether for fertilization or for the control of natural enemies (invasive plants, insects and pathogens), which continue to emerge as part of the effect of the environmental imbalance of organic monocultures. This dependence ends up affecting production costs, making organic systems more expensive.
Organic production, a very simplified version of the agroecological proposal, ends up being attractive to green agrocapitalism and we are already seeing companies with this identity taking on important spaces in food markets on a larger scale. Another effect of this system is the abandonment of the agrobiodiversity of cultivated plants, either through the use of conventional varieties or through the adoption of a few landraces that are more performant or more adapted to market demand.
In other words, organic production systems tend to be a model close to conventional and easier to apply on a large scale, in competition with more complex and smaller-scale agroecological systems, applied by family farming. This facilitates research and rural extension processes by focusing on each plant instead of working with production systems as a whole. Likewise, financing processes are similar to those currently dominant, focused on one product or another.
It is clear that replacing the conventional system with organic systems is an advance from many points of view, in particular that of soil conservation and the non-chemical pollution of the environment, producers and consumers. But the greatest environmental, social, economic and nutritional advantages of agroecological systems are no longer taken advantage of.
On the other hand, agroecology practitioners, especially those more integrated into the market, end up surrendering to pressure, whether from the market or from the search for scale increases and adopting simplified forms moving towards organic systems.
Furthermore, the complexity of agroecological systems poses a methodological challenge for technicians and Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (ATER) entities focused on their promotion and this also leads to simplifications in the search for “generalizable” productive designs, that is, that can be adopted en masse by the public of family producers.
To conclude, poor mastery of concepts ends up affecting all mechanisms for promoting agroecological development. The low understanding of the concept of agroecology has even more deleterious effects on the formulation of public policies to support the transition, giving rise to unfeasible proposals for financing, research and technical assistance and rural extension.
Problems in approaching the promotion of agroecological development – methods
In conventional or organic systems, there is a logic centered on one or more monocultures. Research institutions are dedicated to formulating a productive “recipe” for each crop and today there are countless manuals, from Embrapa, state research centers or universities, showing how to organically produce lettuce, beans, corn, and many others. .
In countries where this organic culture is more advanced, there is already an important market for organic inputs (fertilizers, biological controls) that continue to reinforce uniformity in production designs. As previously mentioned, the genetic resources used in these simplified systems tend to be conventional or, if landraces are used, employing a low diversity of varieties.
This model allows the application of conventional development promotion approaches: the production design is formulated in research centers and taken to farmers by a rural extension that teaches farmers how to apply it in a fairly uniform way, through training and support visits. .
In an agroecological system none of this exists. It starts from another paradigm, that of the diversity of production designs of each farmer, adapted to the specific conditions of each one: soil, relief, hydrology, size, availability of labor, preferences and skills.
This diversity in the reality of each farmer prevents the proposal of a generalized model to be applied by everyone equally. And it poses an enormous challenge for research and rural extension.
Research into complex production systems instead of research by product? As? Would scientists have to look into the specific reality of each producer to develop an ideal system for each one? Unfeasible!
The question of how to design production models for each farmer is still a major obstacle in the advancement of agroecological production. Experiences around the world have shown that this production of specific knowledge for each farmer can only be done through participatory methods where the farmer's role is essential. However, the formulation of these methods is still in its infancy.
Some non-governmental technical assistance and agroecological rural extension organizations have made progress in developing methods, but there are still many problems to resolve.
Firstly, the recognition of the role of farmers in this process often comes up against a reductionist concept: the definition of the figure of the “experimenting farmer”.
For technical assistance and rural extension entities, this character becomes the axis from which production designs are formulated, with the support of technicians and researchers. This option has to do with restrictions on technical personnel at these institutions, which choose to concentrate their efforts on more “advanced” farmers (more innovative and more receptive to the principles of the agroecological model).
The bet of this strategy is that the technical advances of the experimenters will produce practical examples to be followed by “others”, leading to the widespread dissemination of a productive design. Basically, it is the same mistake as a conventional system, the expectation that a single model will be adopted by many. It is an option that ignores the immense diversity of family farmers, even in a limited territory (settlement, community, district, municipality, water basin, etc.).
In this way of acting, technical assistance and agroecological rural extension NGOs rely on a two-step process: the design of a production system adopted by an experimenter and the adoption of this same system by others to whom this result is presented. Reality shows that this process does not work. After a few years of experimentation with “more advanced” farmers, it was discovered that adherence to the new designs was not widespread.
There are several explanations for this fact. The first is the differences between innovators and the general public. This makes it difficult for the farmer to whom it is proposed to imitate the experimenter in applying the proposal in his specific reality. What often happens is the adoption of one or another practice, without significantly altering the original productive design of the “imitator”.
How is the scale of agroecological transition processes expanded in the practice of TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE AND RURAL EXTENSION NGOs?
What happens in the most advanced technical assistance and agroecological rural extension experiences is a dissemination of practices developed by groups of experimenters, but ignoring the universe of the closest producers who were not incorporated into the process from the beginning. The entities and movements associated with them begin to publicize the results of the first groups to wider audiences and seek volunteers to form new groups. What often happens is that everyone who does not spontaneously join the process is left behind.
To give a hypothetical and simplifying example, but very close to reality, if in the first attempt the Technical Assistance and Rural Extension entity brings together 10 families in a community of 30, when expanding the process it does not worry about the 20 “resistant” to proposal, but will look for people willing to join in other communities. If there are few communities with members in a municipality, the search expands to neighboring municipalities. The result is the creation of a mosaic of farmers participating in the agroecological transition, diluted in a majority of non-adherents. The scale is increased in terms of the number of participants and the size of the area of the target territory of the strategy to expand the agroecological transition.
In my opinion, this strategy fails to analyze why so many people do not join and why the minority joins, which would make it possible to outline strategies aimed at winning over the “resisters”, deepening the collective transition processes. At various times this author found in the Technical Assistance and Rural Extension entities a certain fatalism and the bet on a hypothetical future membership, a kind of historical determinism.
The difficulty is to admit that each person's agroecological production design is different and that specific experimentation will be required for each case. This means admitting that the distinction between 'innovators' and 'followers' is false. Every farmer, at his level and in his specific reality, is an experimenter and must be treated as such.
This finding implies a model of experimentation that cannot be individual, but collective. Collective experimentation processes imply the organization of groups of farmers with similar production systems and similar problems. It should be noted that these are systems with common characteristics and problems, but with an inevitable variability to be respected and contemplated in collective experimentation.
There is an entire process of evaluation and diagnosis of each one's agroecosystems that allows, as a collective, the participating farmers to understand the roots of their problems and the elements that condition their solutions. They will not be identical for all participants, but the exchange of information and knowledge between them and between the advisory technicians will allow everyone to look at their own systems in more depth.
Discussions about practices capable of overcoming identified and diagnosed problems will allow groups to select techniques to be tested on each property, adapting them to each specific reality. These tests or experiments will feed back the collective effort with new information from each person's practice, the evaluation of results and the correction of practices in new tests.
It is clear that these groups (of neighbors as much as possible) are not made up of farmers with the same capacity for innovation or adaptation. But these differences do not constitute a problem as the construction of knowledge applied by each person is the object of collective exchange, serving as support for the decisions of each participant.
The role of the Technical Assistance and Rural Extension entity in this process is to encourage the dynamics of collective production of knowledge and adaptation to each case, in addition to feeding the debate with information on the principles of applied agroecology and specific techniques not known to the participants.
Some technical assistance and rural extension NGOs adopted this approach for some time, but ended up drifting towards the widespread dissemination of simpler and more generalizable practices, mainly due to pressure from financiers. The latter, without understanding the complexity of agroecology and the methods for its promotion, began to demand quick results. This is to ignore that the participatory approach leads to gradual processes of change in production systems that accelerate as more and more groups of farmers engage in the collective production of knowledge.
The deepening of this participatory methodology for producing agroecological knowledge and its systematization is something that will be fundamental for any effort to massify the agroecological transition.
Difficulties in jumping from the experimental scale to application on the property.
Another problematic element has to be included in this equation. The issue is how farmers carry out their experiments and how they take their results to their production systems.
It is very common for the tests carried out by experimenters to be carried out on a small scale and for the various techniques to be incorporated into a productive microsystem that becomes more complex. Some farmers seek to take each result of micro experiments to a subsystem of their property or even to the whole, as the case may be. But the majority (as far as my experience allows) end up creating a complex agroecological system on a small scale, distinct from their traditional or conventional systems, leaving the increase in scale for a later time, perhaps with the production design already formulated.
In both cases, there is an important problem to be resolved: how to apply an approved practice on a small scale in a larger space on the property? Technical assistance and rural extension entities have left this problem to be solved by farmers, failing to understand the complexity of this stage. It is for this reason that so many properties with complex agroecological designs are found in small spaces apart from existing production systems, often with ingenious solutions that the farmer is unable to generalize. In many cases, the leap from micro experience to farm-wide or subsystem adoption depends on financial resources and this is the next issue we will address.
How to finance the transition to agroecology?
Financing systems through bank credit, made more accessible by PRONAF, were unable to adapt to the specific conditions of agroecological transition processes.
The guiding matrix of these credits is entirely centered on the conventional concepts of so-called “modern” agriculture: centered on a product operated in monoculture, using seeds recommended by companies and research centers and developed to react to the use of chemical fertilizers, the use of chemical controls of pests, invaders, fungi, pathogens, in the use of heavy mechanization.
For a credit project to be approved by a bank agency, it must comply with the recommendations of agricultural research centers. Although some relaxation of these standards was achieved in some places, banks generally resisted providing financing for agroecological practices. At the limit, they accepted simplified organic type projects, simply exchanging conventional inputs for organic ones, but maintaining the orientation focused on financing a single product and never on the production system as a whole.
After much discussion with PRONAF technicians, an alternative credit proposal entitled PRONAF Sistéticos was drawn up, but it was never implemented. This proposal aimed to overcome the allocation of credit per product to start financing the property as a whole.
The proposal for a credit modality aimed at the agroecological transition (PRONAF Agroecologia) showed the limits of government technicians' understanding of the concept of agroecology. To accept financing, banks began to require the farmer to present a transition project defining all stages of the process. Each conventional practice had to be replaced by an agroecological practice and changes had to be identified year by year, until the property was completely converted.
The producer would have to predict the expected results of each change and calculate costs and benefits in order to guarantee the ability to repay the loan. And a period of three years was given for this process to be completed.
As I hope the previous presentation made clear, agroecological transition processes are not homogeneous nor are they capable of being formulated in advance. As mentioned, the construction of a new production design is the result of a gradual construction process where practices are tested that add up and become more complex. Requiring a prior roadmap for the transition is impossible.
The most appropriate format to finance the agroecological transition was the so-called PRONAF B, adopted as a microcredit system for the poorest farmers in the Northeast and North. This is an annual credit to be used at the discretion of the producer and which can be repeated at the pace and need defined by the farmer. This credit allowed Northeastern farmers engaged in the agroecological transition to expand the application of practices tested in their collective experimentation processes, taking them to broader productive areas on their properties.
However, this credit leaves aside the financing of the experiment itself, which, despite having small costs, can be harmed when the public is made up of the neediest sector of family farming.
There are few experiences in the world where a credit model adapted for the agroecological transition has been tested. There are many difficulties, especially due to the nature of the agroecological transition itself and its extreme variability.
The most promising financing practice, so far, is that which escapes bank credit, completely incapable of dealing with the diversity of agroecological transition projects and known by the name of Solidarity Revolving Funds.
Although this experience has not been applied to the adoption of more complex systems, it has been highly successful in specific operations during the transition, particularly in the financing of infrastructure and inputs. The best example is the financing of “productive backyards”, also known as “around the house” in the northeast region.
The intervention of technical assistance and agroecological rural extension in these cases is aimed at improving existing backyards, aiming to expand, diversify and make them more efficient and resilient. Also in these cases, the diversity of designs is great, but some basic problems are common and require financing.
Firstly, any backyard needs water infrastructure to make the leap in quality of the agroecological transition. There are many possible technical options of different types for each use (house supply, watering animals, irrigation, etc.). Furthermore, a diversified backyard system will require the fencing of spaces for different subsystems such as pasture, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, grains, and others. And finally, shelter infrastructures are needed for different animals (chickens, pigs, cows, draft animals). And warehouses and silos.
These backyard systems incorporate various plants and animals that have to be purchased, in most cases, constituting a cost that must be covered with some type of financing.
It is unlikely that a family producer that runs a backyard will have the financial resources to cover all these investments and they will get them from the FRS. The funds do not finance a complete package of investments, as they are structures with limited resources from supporting NGOs and contributions from members. Eventually, PRONAF B was used. As payment capacity is also limited, loans are made little by little and setting up an “advanced” backyard can take several years.
The advantage in this system is that women farmers have confidence in the funds, as they are an integral part of its operation, decide the operating rules and monitor their application. Another positive point is the absence of bureaucracy and the simplicity of access. Each farmer defines what she will do and what she will finance, discussing with the collective that can help her with her choices.
It is clear that the FRS can operate with larger investments and shorten the time to implement a more advanced backyard, but this depends on donation resources so that the fund can operate loans and reproduce them as payments are made. The multiplier effect of these initial donations is of the utmost importance as the FRS can diversify the type of investments according to the needs of producers.
What differentiates this model from bank credit are several aspects: greater autonomy, greater flexibility, less bureaucracy, greater self-confidence, lower cost of money. Faced with the clear blockage of conventional agricultural financing systems, public authorities should test the alternative of Solidarity Revolving Funds more broadly.
*Jean Marc von der Weid is a former president of the UNE (1969-71). Founder of the non-governmental organization Family Agriculture and Agroecology (ASTA).
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