FAO.org

The pesticide industry's Global Safe Use campaign has reportedly produced a dramatic decline in pesticide-related health and environmental problems in Guatemala. This paper challenges this claim, reanalyzing existing data and further evaluating claims of the campaign's efficacy.

Farmer field schools (FFS) and local agricultural research committees (CIALs) are participatory platforms for improving decision-making capacity and stimulating local innovation for sustainable agriculture. CIALs are a permanent agricultural research service staffed by a team of four or more volunteer farmers elected by the community. The committees create a link [...]

In many popular intervention methodologies aimed at stimulating sustainable rural development (in the widest possible sense) the idea of ‘participation’ is a leading principle. This article will demonstrate that the process in which actors are supposed to participate is often thought of as being a process of planning, decision‐making and/or [...]

A study conducted on female spray operators and a non operators to assess the reproductive impacts of pesticide use.

Document describing a village planning meeting in Vietnam.

The authors' personal experience in watershed planning and decision making in the agricultural Midwest is described to illustrate how: (1) formalization of the process of community-based management is not sufficient to guarantee that local people will meaningfully consider scientific information and opinion when making decisions about watersheds, and (2) genuine [...]