Module 2 - Local Agricultural Research Committees

Local Agricultural Research Committees (known by their Spanish acronym, CIALs) are locally elected groups of farmers who run volunteer agricultural technology testing services financed by local contributions in cash and kind and supplemented by state or NGO funds. CIALs enable farmers to express their technology demands and participate in designing, testing, and disseminating appropriate technologies. This adaptive research service is accountable to its clients, increases the outreach of technology services to remote areas, and provides feedback to improve technology design. Training facilitators and committees is a one-off investment that enables a research and extension program to expand its coverage at low cost or to reduce the overall cost of maintaining contact with farmer groups. The CIAL approach has been adapted successfully in eight Latin American countries and is expanding in Africa and Asia.

 

Development of technology recommendations is costly and time consuming, and mechanisms to ensure feedback to research and extension (R&E) providers from poor farmers are essential but widely lacking. The consequence is the low rate of technology adoption by resource-poor producers. Even where a market for R&E services exists, the weak capacity of farmers to express demand is a constraint. However, resource-poor farmers in tropical countries have successfully developed profitable and ecologically sustainable agricultural technologies on their own. Collaboration between farmers and researchers at an early stage in the design and testing of technologies has the potential to blend local and nonlocal technical knowledge and lead to successful innovations.

 

Local Agricultural Research Committees

Strengthening the capacity of poor farmers to articulate their research needs and to participate in the design, testing, and dissemination of appropriate technologies is the objective of widespread experimentation with farmer participatory research groups in developing countries. CIALs were developed to provide farmers and POs with a research service that is accountable to its client group, increases the ability of R&E services to reach remote areas, and provides feedback to improve the design of technology.

 

A CIAL is a farmer-run, volunteer research service that is initiated by and answerable to its client group. Client groups may be informal or formally organized groups of farmers motivated to test agricultural innovations (including the best local practices) when appropriate technologies are lacking or unproven for local conditions. The client group elects a committee of farmers chosen for their interest in experimentation and willingness to serve. The client group can replace committee members who do not put in enough time and elect new ones. Committees, ranging in size from 4 to more than 20 members, conduct research on local, priority topics. This approach enables farmers to share risk and build on local experience when trying out untested agricultural innovations.

 

The committee works with its clients to establish priorities for research topics, consults with R&E providers, raises funds, plans experiments, conducts trials on several farms, and regularly reports results to clients and R&E providers. Initially, the committee organizes a diagnostic process in which all clients participate in consultations with other farmers.