SPFS GOOD PRACTICES AND THEIR SYSTEMATIZATION

Political commitment, coupled with major financial investment, is essential to reduce food insecurity and alleviate rural poverty in Guatemala. However, macro-level incentives might be insufficient to have a direct impact on the livelihoods of campesino farmers, the country’s primary food producers. According to analysts and policy makers, there is a strong need to identify and disseminate environmentally sound, economically efficient, socially viable and culturally acceptable alternative rural activities, which may create linkages between campesino agriculture, the market and national food security policies^[7].

With its threefold emphasis on policy-making, social participation and dissemination of appropriate agricultural technology FAO’s Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS) seems particularly suited to assisting the Guatemalan Government in strengthening food security at the micro, meso and macro levels. During its first phase (1999-2003), SPFS Guatemala tested and validated, in selected field sites in the Sololá and Chiquimula Departments, a number of "good practices" (GPs) in household food security, alternative crop production, livelihood diversification and grassroots organization.

Some of these GPs are currently being disseminated in the framework of SPFS second phase, (2004-2008), which is expected to directly benefit 80,000 households in eleven Departments. To ensure adaptation to local conditions and to promote ownership and participation, the dissemination of SPFS’ GPs has been outsourced to local government bodies and NGOs. Synergy with other development initiatives is also actively sought, and assistance in policy making is provided at the national level to facilitate an enabling environment for GPs dissemination^[8].

According to its Phase 2 mandate, SPFS is emphasizing the issue of "scaling-up". However, the programme management and staff are aware that, if the GPs do not prove effective in the field, a scaling-up strategy will not work. As such, there is still scope to question the benefits of these good practices. According to the SPFS operational definition, an activity qualifies as a GP when evidence exists that:

• It decreases vulnerability to food insecurity through income-generation and food production.

• It is based on local knowledge and requires low-cost and low-input technology.

• It is effective for more than one agricultural cycle.

• It is being spontaneously adopted after initial testing.

In order to strengthen relevant know-how and to prepare reference materials for dissemination, a "systematization"^[9] of each of these GPs was started in 2003. So far, this has basically consisted of a review of the GP’s implementation and the identification of the environmental, financial, social and institutional factors that affected initial testing and validation (i.e. a constraints analysis). In addition, a cost-benefit analysis was conducted in May-June 2004 to assess the financial viability of some of these GPs^[10].

By mid 2004, an advanced draft of the systematization documents was available for five GPs. However, SPFS management and the FAO Representation team were not fully satisfied with these outputs. Some reviewers criticized the documents for over-emphasizing the "success stories" and not sufficiently highlighting the problems and constraints met during the initial test. Others felt that too much attention was paid to the technicalities of implementation, while insufficient evidence was presented on the GPs’ effectiveness in improving household income, welfare and food security. Furthermore, some professionals, aware of sustainable livelihood approaches (SLAs), found the analysis of the interplay between GPs and household livelihood strategies to be insufficient.

Based on these considerations, and thanks to a LSP/LDED micro-project, the author was given the opportunity to assist the SPFS-Guatemala team in incorporating livelihoods analysis in the systematization of the GPs. A six week action-research exercise was carried out in November and December 2004, focusing on one particular good practice - local multiplication of certified maize and bean seeds - as implemented in one particular SPFS location, the Municipality of Jocotán, in Eastern Guatemala.

This exercise was primarily an opportunity to test the relevance and usefulness of a livelihoods analysis in GP systematization, and as a learning-by-doing scenario for training. As the methodology for this study has previously been presented elsewhere^[11], this paper focuses specifically on the findings of the livelihoods analysis. It describes the overall vulnerability context and processes of change to which the participants and other indirect beneficiaries of seed multiplication are exposed. It documents changes in household livelihoods that might be specifically associated with the adoption of this GP. It explores the economic and cultural logic that has supported a cautious incorporation of seed multiplication into participants’ livelihood strategies. Finally, some suggestions are given that may contribute to the scaling up of this GP from household livelihood diversification to market-based enterprise development^[12].