J. Lynam
The Rockefeller Foundation, P.O. Box 47543, Nairobi, Kenya
E-mail: j.lynam@cgiar.org
For many years agricultural research followed a standard approach of providing improved `technologies' (germplasm and management practices) that maximised yield and/or profit. Research methods were also focused to meet these objectives. Now the nature of agricultural research is changing in many ways. This paper outlines these developments to help biometricians evaluate the extent of their support to scientists in keeping up with the changing needs.
Two factors are responsible for forcing the changes in agricultural research.
The first is a change in the way agriculture itself is viewed. Stakeholders now recognise that the role of agriculture is much more than food production. It provides income and employment and is an integral part of rural livelihoods. Agriculture is recognised as having impacts on the natural resources not only of farmers but also of others, both nearby and distant. No longer are stakeholders interested in simple relationships between inputs of, say, fertiliser and the resulting crop outputinstead insist on the complex relationships between the uses of a range of inputs, social and natural capital and outputs of diverse products and services-the production ecology of systems.
Secondly, processes of market liberalisation, democratisation and decentralisation mean research has to be client driven , with farmers being the primary clientele .
Together, these changes made research to no longer be organised around the old commodity and disciplinary boundaries, but be based on understanding systems and problem solving using integrated approaches. The focus has moveed beyond farmers' plots to households, villages and larger scales and social sciences have to be as important as biophysical sciences in understanding key processes. Scientists and farmers are becoming research partners, with participatory methods used at all stages of the research cycle. The old applied research methods, using empirical relationships to find optimal, are no longer adequate. Instead strategic research that aims to understand important principles which suggest options for broad investigation with adaptive methods are favoured.
Changes in the research agenda can be summarised as:
There is a general change in emphasis in where experimentation should be done, with research stations becoming less important. Much research can be conducted in farmers' fields under the appropriate constraints faced by smallholders. Furthermore, it is necessary to carry out research along biophysical and social gradients which are not represented by research stations. Many research objectives are best reached using participatory methods in which trials are designed and managed by the farmers themselves. Researchers have to be aware and open minded about the range of possibilities and use an approach which will be most effective.
Evaluation of NRM aspects of agriculture requires looking beyond individual plots and farms. The `bench mark location' approach uses sites chosen to be as `representative' as possible of the type of environment or farming system they are intended to depict. These sites are used for cross-sectional characterisation and longitudinal monitoring studies with the expectation that the results they generate can be applied elsewhere.
Firstly, the set of disciplines needed to tackle agricultural research problems is expanding. Social scientists, ecologists and systems scientists are gradually becoming part of the team, along with animal or crop scientists, economists etc. Secondly, the box of tools and methodologies is changing. Research is continually moving on beyond the simple design of balanced experiments on-station, or even on-farm. Spatial characterisation and analysis by geographical information system (GIS) are becoming important tools for identifying problems, targeting research and extrapolating results. Surveys (formal and informal) and studies that link surveys with multi-site experiments are becoming important tools. With the need to extend results from benchmark and farmer sites to other areas within the region that they represent, there will be a greater need for simulation modelling to demonstrate the extent to which research results can be extrapolated. Thirdly, the boundaries between research and extension are disappearing, with the specialists in communication and community mobilisation becoming part of research methods.
It is important that the changing nature of agricultural research in Africa described here is taken on board and is encompassed in any proposals that may be forthcoming to enhance the capacity in applied biometrics in the region. Both biometricians and scientists need to be equipped with the appropriate tools to allow efficient and effective project design within the new research agenda.
