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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Fri, 16 May 2014 18:20:52 +0200
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This is Atse Yapi again.



Dr. Dick Tinsley's contribution (message 35) raised many interesting points, one of  which I wish to comment on here.



Dick wrote: "... and wonder how you would factor into your ex-post facto evaluation farmers who have understood the innovations, like it and want to adopt it, but don’t have the means to do so, or do so only on a limited area, while make some substantial modifications to accommodate their limited operational resource base". 



It is a reality in most poor rural areas that farmers don't have the means to fully adopt innovations despite the fact that they wish to do so. At best they settle for partial adoption through substantial modifications of the technology to accommodate their limited operational resource base. This is the case for example of agricultural technologies that require great capital investment or substantial modification in the farming system for successful adoption. This reality has led many scientists to question the rationale to devote great efforts and resources to develop new agricultural technologies if these technologies are to be used in the traditional farming environment of smallholder farmers. 



How would one factor this reality in ex-post impact assessment?  I think this could be done at two levels: first, the impact assessor could redefine the technology in terms of its different "sizes/components", with "full size" meaning the full adoption of the technology without any modifications; "medium size" and "small sizes" depending on the extent of the modifications operated on the technology before adoption. Such a methodology could reveal adopting farmers' preferences based on their limited operational resources! Such an approach was used in a study in Mali (Yapi et al, 2000) and we found that given the traditional farming systems in effect in the country, technologies that are way too advanced are least adopted while technologies that are only a slight improvement from the traditional varieties of farmers are most adopted. This leads to the second way to factor the issue into ex-post impact evaluation; and that is in terms of lessons learned, which would orient future agricultural research efforts towards technologies that are not totally divorced from the traditional farming environment of the smallholder farmers. In the Mali study I mentioned above, scientists have reached greater adoption by considering slight modifications (improving drought resistance for instance while leaving the yield and other characteristics unchanged) in the traditional sorghum varieties well known to farmers.



Thanks for reading this.



Dr. Atse M. Yapi

Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy Consultant 

FAO Regional Office for Africa 

Box 1628 

Accra, 

Ghana

Email: Atse.Yapi (at) fao.org ; atseyapi25 (at) yahoo.com



Reference:

Yapi, A.M., Kergna, A.O., Debrah, S.K., Sidibé, A., and Sanogo, O. 2000. Analysis of the economic impact of sorghum and millet research in Mali.  (In En. Summaries in En, Fr.) Impact Series no.8. International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. 60 pp. http://oar.icrisat.org/1084/ 



[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/217706/ ].



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