Windhoek
Due to growing populations and changing food preferences, estimates indicate that the world needs to produce up to 60-100 percent more food by 2050.
In Namibia food insecurity is compounded by production limitations such as agricultural land having few expansion possibilities and limited access to water. Consequently, farming and herding are increasingly being carried out in marginal, fragile and more risk prone areas. Climate change further complicates the management of future agricultural systems, requiring an array of adaptation and mitigation measures.
The Farmers’ Field School (FFS) guide of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) provides strategic direction for engagement with relevant actors and stakeholders, build awareness of the FFS approach and its relevance to national and regional programmes. To meet increased food demands in the future, strategies are needed to intensify food production sustainably. Sustainable intensification by its nature needs to be location-specific: it must take account of local ecology as well as local socio-economic conditions to respond to local opportunities. The changing environment means that many farmers and other producers can no longer rely on their local knowledge the way they had in the past. For that reason, farmers must be able to access ecology-literacy training where new knowledge is generated locally to fit specific conditions, allowing farmers to master the management skills required to play a leading role in sustainably intensifying production, the document recommends.
Additionally, cash is becoming increasingly important among smallholders due to their needs to pay for health care and the schooling of children, etc. This has triggered a need for more market-oriented agriculture as well as diversification of income sources among rural farming communities, a major shift for the traditionally agriculturally based livelihoods of communities. The nature of the challenges faced go beyond the level of individual farms and necessitate a high level of coordination.
This changing situation requires farmers, pastoralists and fisher folk who are innovative and flexible. However, those producers will need new skills and capacities, along with new tools, processes and ways of organising and managing farming, if they are to make agriculture more economically, socially, and environmentally efficient. With their holistic nature, in which the technical, social and financial domains of farmers lives are addressed concurrently focusing on developing critical decision-making capacity, FFS play a critical role in supporting farmers’ needs in this challenging context.
From the 1980s and for more than two decades, most countries in the developing world embraced the Training and Visit (T&V) system, which was built on the concepts of diffusion of innovation and transfer of technology from scientists to farmers using an essentially one-way mode of communication. However, in the wake of a number of large impact studies, this concept is nowadays largely considered a failed system. In many situations the dissemination of standard packages of inputs and practices and blueprint recommendations are now thought to be inappropriate. In the past national priorities of increased production (often to feed urban consumers as part of economic development strategies) led to top down extension systems that did not help farmers sufficiently to solve new and emerging problems. Nor improve and adapt scientific and technical innovations to their local conditions. Neither did these commodity-centred rather than people-centred – programmes build strong, responsive and adaptive local institutions that could improve smallholder farmers’ livelihoods by better leveraging market opportunities.
There is a general recognition now that sustainability of the agricultural improvement process is not necessarily to be found in the technologies introduced, but rather in the social process of active farmer-managed innovation and dissemination of ideas where farmers manage and coordinate ecological processes. Appropriate technological solutions will vary depending on local circumstances. Therefore the understanding of the specific context is essential, requiring knowledge that is complex and diverse. While past extension was seen as mainly an act of transferring technologies to farmers, there is thus now a growing focus on farmer participation in the innovation process and on the facilitation of experimentation among communities.
Despite this positive shift in agricultural extension systems, contradictions within those systems still complicate efforts in many countries.