Participation has been widely touted as “the answer” to a number of problems facing sustainable development programs. It is not enough, however, to involve rural people as workers and informants in research and planning endeavors defined by outsiders. A truly collaborative approach will...

The history of international responses to problems of hunger and malnutrition, while uneven in effectiveness terms, might more accurately be described as a progression of programmatic approaches. These approaches (1) have usually embodied considerable logic based on contemporary understandings,...

The recent enthusiasm for “participation” in agricultural development has fueled the development of new approaches to research and extension. The rhetoric of “participation” extends the horizons of agricultural research and extension beyond technical problem-solving. Yet in practice few...

Hunger is defined as the inability to obtain sufficient, nutritious, personally acceptable food through normal food channels or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so. After the depression of the 1930s, widespread concerns about hunger in Canada did not resurface until the recession of...

Recent trends in agricultural science have emphasized the need to make local people active participants in the research and development process. Working under the populist banner “Farmer First”, the focus has been on bridging gaps between development professionals and local people, pointing...

Farmers are experts on their natural environment and are innate experimenters. However they do not know everything. Filling in gaps of missing farmer knowledge can help them improve their experiments. The authors designed and taught a course to Honduran farmers that effectively covered a number...

Studies of local knowledge and farmer participatory research tend to focus on raising crops and livestock. Little attention is given to processing and marketing farm products, an important source of income for rural households, particularly women. This article presents the case of an...

In this paper, dimensions of the debate surrounding the application of gene technology to food production are discussed and a study assessing perceptions of the technology among a sample of the UK public (n=1499) is reported. The general picture that emerges from the study is one of people...

User participation is a critical ingredient for relevant technology development, whether in agriculture or industry. This has long been recognized in private sector R&D firms. In most public sector agricultural research organizations in developing countries, however, systematic involvement of...

Biodiversity and genetic resources have become the focal point of major national and international biological and political debates regarding control, ownership, access, and erosion of critical resources. While these issues are key to environmental sustainability and food security, biodiversity...