6. RECOMMENDATIONS

Throughout this report a number of specific recommendations have been made. The more important general recommendations arising from this study are highlighted below.

Enormous socio-economic and environmental benefits could be obtained from the restoration of the fertility of extremely degraded soils and from the substitution of conventional cultivation systems with crop rotations and no-till. Unlike medium and large farmers who have the technical and financial capacity to realise a lot of these benefits themselves, small farmers will require a lot of publicly-funded help if they too are to benefit from these technologies. Government support in the following areas is strongly recommended since it will be essential and fully justified on socio-economic and environmental grounds: 

1. Provide an on-farm research and development support service to enable small farmers to successfully introduce no-till and green manure crops on their farms. The providers of this service would need to be MAG. Government would need to train a small number of DIA and DEAG personnel for this since this capability does not exist at present. Technical assistance would be needed to build up capacity within these institutions to competently provide the level of service that would be needed.

2. Support a specific extension programme aimed at the expansion of no-till and crop rotation techniques as rapidly and cost-effectively as possible. Specific training for this would be part of this programme and would need to be implemented by DEAG. The extension personnel to be trained to provide the extension service would be Government employees as well as employees of the private sector, especially farmer co-operatives and NGOs. Wherever feasible and cost-effective, private sector extension service providers should be contracted by Government to provide the necessary extension services. It will be imperative that Government funds this extension programme for at least the medium-term and possibly over the longer term (5-10 years). This is because the adoption and spread of these technologies will be much slower and more complex amongst small farmers than it is among medium and large mechanised farmers.

3. Ensure that long-term credit is available for small holders to: (a) purchase individually the necessary technical inputs of seeds, fertilisers, matracas and grain storage silos, etc; and (b) to purchase in small groups manual and animal traction no-till machinery imported into Paraguay mostly from Brazil. In the case of extremely degraded soils, there will be a need for a specific line of credit and separate programme to fund the initial inputs required to bolster the levels of fertility to more normal levels. Loans for up to 4 years would be needed for this. In the case of (b), loans of from 5-7 years would be needed. It is recommended that the CAH, and wherever possible farmer co-operatives, would be the most appropriate institutions to administer these lines of credit. Such credit would need to be subject to normal financial viability criteria and be made available only to farmers who are supported by the recommended on-farm development and extension services. Loan repayment assistance clauses in the case of recuperation of soil fertility, to cover the risk of crop failures, are recommended.

4. Ensure lines of short-term credit, subject to the normal financial viability criteria, are available to small farmers to purchase seeds, fertiliser and pesticides that would be needed to successfully establish no-till and green manure crops.

5. Although outside the scope of the study, it is recommended that Government urgently overhaul its policies for assisting small farmers so that there is a coherency and consistency in the policies of the different institutions. There is also an urgent need for major institutional restructuring of State credit institutions to reduce the current drain on limited Government resources caused by the enormously high costs of administering credit to farmers.

There is need now to move beyond purely technical aspects of no-till and green manure crops in small farming systems. It is now known that technically no-till and green manure crops work well under small farm conditions. Not only have they been well accepted by the few small farmers who have had the opportunity to use them, but it is now known from the findings of this study that they are highly profitable for small farmers. However, while there is a need to continue this technical work along the lines recommended above, there is an urgent need now to ensure that farmers can get access to trained and competent extension services as well as the seeds of green manure crops and the necessary machinery and equipment. Up to now these have been provided without any charge to a very small number of farmers through MAG-DEAG with the assistance of GTZ.

Emphasis needs to be placed now on:

1. providing funds for the training and functioning of the needed extension services;

2. developing sustainable seed production of green manure crops;

3. ensuring small farmers get access to affordable credit to buy the necessary no-till equipment and to organise themselves to operate and maintain this equipment.

It is recommended that pilot projects be initiated in Itapua with the Colonias Co-operative and in San Pedro with the Small Farmer Co-operative there. A number of groups of small farmers should be formed (3-4 per group) and assisted to access credit. These co-operatives can act as intermediaries to prepare investment plans to present to banks (CAH possibly BNF) and to administer the loan repayments. Short-term technical assistance is recommended to build up capacity in these two co-operatives for this.

For the immediate future, two specific programmes are highly recommended:

1. A programme for the recuperation of soil fertility and the introduction of no-till/crop rotations in Central Paraguay with activities focused in the Departments of Paraguari, Corillera and Caaguazu;

2. A small farmer no-till/crop rotation expansion programme in Itapua and Edelira.

These immediate programmes are recommended now to prevent spreading limited manpower resources too thinly, since the institutional capacity to implement them is very limited, and to ensure that there will be measurable impacts. From these programmes, important experiences and lessons will provide a sound foundation for expanding later cost-effectively into other parts of Paraguay and institutional capacity will have increased through these initial programmes.

A limited number of simple crop variety and fertiliser trials on-farms should be an integral part of these immediate programmes. This is because there are absolutely no crop yield data, under small farm conditions in Paraguay, of the main crop varieties at differing levels of fertiliser and for alternative crop rotations incorporating residual nutrients of green manure crops. It is imperative that these data be generated as soon as possible so that farmers can rationally decide on what crop varieties, levels of fertiliser and green manure crop/crop rotations, best suit their needs. This development work, which should be practically based on-farms, should be part of the soil conservation efforts of DEAG, but will need to be done in close association with DIA. It will be imperative that trials are kept simple yet comprehensive enough to be meaningful. Emphasis would be placed on farmer participation/farmer acceptability of the options tested and on economic analysis of data rather than statistical analysis.