For many developing countries, agricultural research has been built on the models of the previous colonial rulers. The supply of technical knowledge from the outside, and the local adaptation of this knowledge, would enable technology transfer to take place via·extension agents to the peasant farmer, expected to be a male between 30 and 40 years of age. It is with some regret that we must admit that many national research organizations still work like this. And it is with some regret that we can observe that there have been patterns in the behavior of international agricultural research institutions that have reinforced this historic model.
The modern peasant farmer of Latin America and many parts of Asia goes to his or her field in the morning with a transistor radio on their shoulder, blaring out the latest pop music from commercial radio stations. Most villages have a TV, fascinating its inhabitants with soap operas set in the urbanized contexts of USA, Europe, Mexico or Brazil. And most farmers are young, and in many countries, particularly in Africa, they are teenage girls trying to keep families together under the stresses of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. What we have witnessed in Sierra Leone and Liberia, in East Timor and parts of Indonesia and the Philippines, is that the lack of prospects of adequate rural livelihoods entices young men to become soldiers of fortune instead of soldiering on the farm.
How do we organize new agricultural research and extension to reach those that are about to leave the land (as they have done on a massive scale in Latin America and increasingly in Asia and Africa)? How to we make it likely that we can generate the kinds of income and settings that make it attractive to remain on the·land? It can be argued that the main incentive to stay on the land must come from increased income, not from increased production. Indeed, increased production (the target of so much agricultural research) repeatedly leads to decreases in prices and little economic improvement
There is in my view no single mechanism that can assist-in achieving this. But there are indications that information technology can be applied to set agricultural research agendas that are more directly relevant to the needs of small farmers. There are also indications that there are new tools that allow research findings to reach farmers much more efficiently than through classical extension methods. And there are now many experiments to show that information technology may offer the possibility to let knowledge travel up and down that last elusive mile to the farm gate of the most distant farmer.
Information technology is often now strongly linked to Internet technology. In the context of the developing world the term must be seen as more inclusive. The traditional news media (radio, TV) may be more important than the web, and Internet access is seriously limited in many countries in Africa, although less so in Latin America and parts of Asia. Rural radio constitutes a strong communication tool. Mobile telephones are about to revolutionize contacts in the countryside, opening up for two-way contacts that were unthinkable only 5 years ago. New computer access services over mobile phones offer additional connectivity. Television spellbinds many, but is less interactive for the rural poor. Emails are creeping in, and will be supplemented by web services. How do we make this technology available to the truly poor, to those who live below US$1 a day, or US$2 a day, and in addition may not have access to many infrastructural services that can otherwise compensate for low cash incomes? There are at least 1.5 billion people in this category, and the number is decreasing only very slowly. There are imaginative models being tried out: the "Information Villages" of the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation in India constitute one such effort, to ensure that there is one electronic communication point in a village, operated by a daughter or son in the village, and linking in to the agricultural research and extension community.
Faced with the direct connectivity of farmers, their associations, and their extension agents to the agricultural research community, the researchers will soon become exposed to the same consumer pressure as medical doctors increasingly see. Patients may arrive at the surgery with piles of printouts of medical diagnoses downloaded from the Internet, and medical doctors may become increasingly restless about their legal liabilities if the computer expert medical system arrive s at a different diagnosis or recommends alternative treatment. In industrialized countries, precision farmers hire their own research and extension communities and pay them on performance: Poor subsistence farmers are still a long way away from this. But public agricultural research in developing countries has got the same challenge waiting only a few years down the road as villagers tool up, through connectivity and knowledge, to set research agendas and tap directly into the latest advice.
In the midst of this connectivity revolution, our newly found appreciation of the value of traditional knowledge must ensure its viability. Our respect for the values of age-long learning and the wisdom of intergenerational experience must not disappear off the computer screen. Universal connectivity, to every farm everywhere, is a very long way off in developing countries, even at the village level. In this phase, it is critical to recall that the institutional structures on which learning relies, and the depositories of knowledge old and new, must find their rightful place as science surges forward. In the short and medium term, our efforts to improve food security for 3/4 billion people globally will not come from genetically modified crops, fish and animals. They will originate in doing better what we know now, giving market incentives for farmers to use their own innovation systems for improved earnings, and supplement their knowledge systems with modern science innovations. In constructing and maintaining institutions for this capacity building, information technology will have a significant role to play, as we move into new learning processes, including distance training, and the reliance of computer-based teaching. The fascination with technology will nevertheless have to be secondary to institutions filled with living women and men wishing to better their lives. Institutions still matter a great deal, and knowledge must have homes to develop and thrive.