Women and the re-making of civil society
by Janice Jiggins
A young farmer and her daughter stood up at the community meeting in Albany at the southern tip of Western Australia and said: "I am flattered at being consulted but I also want to be heard." During the nationwide meetings on environmental issues sponsored by the National Women's Consultative Council through 1991-92, women in Australia repeatedly stressed that merely consulting them was not enough. Like the young women in Albany, they were angry that their time and energy was too often used as a resource to achieve other people's agendas. They wanted women's voices, values, knowledge and skills to contribute to defining the pressing problems that face families and societies today. They wanted a part in shaping the agenda for action and in managing the search for solutions.
Women all over the world, in global negotiating fore as well as in their own neighbourhoods, are enriching and democratising civil society by their increasingly well-organised, informed and confident participation. This article shares experiences from South Asia in relation to Integrated Pest Management (IPM).(1)
1. This has been published as port of a chapter in a book 'Governance in the 21st Century - The Rise of Civil Society, ed. John Burbidge, Institute of Cultural Affairs International. See the information note on the ICA Global conference 'The Rise of Civil Society in XXI Century on p. 50 for more information
Farmers Field Schools, Tamil Nadu, India
Mrs. Vijay Ghowri, holding a net tied to a long bamboo pole, stood in the muddy rice field with her baggy trousers rolled up to her knees. She slowly waved the net back and forth a few inches above the head of the rice plants. Other women were scattered across the neighbouring fields some also with nets, others bent double with a plastic bag in hand, scooping something from the stems of the plants. Others huddled in small groups, examining with a magnifying glass something cupped in their hands. What on earth were they doing?
Mrs. Ghowri is a member of a Farmers' Field School in integrated pest management (IPM). The field schools are held weekly through the rice growing season, and are based on an approach to experiential reaming pioneered in Indonesia and the Philippines. Experiential learning is based on the principles of adult reaming. and follows a cycle of focussed experience, systematic observation (and measurement where appropriate), critical reflection and interpretation of the experience, followed by planning and taking action. The action in turn begins a new cycle of experience-based reaming and critical reflection.
It is interesting to relate how the programme itself came to learn 'experientially' about the most effective way to share IPM principles. Scientists at first thought it would be possible to establish biological 'thresholds' to trigger appropriate pest management; the task would then be simply to inform farmers of these thresholds and the recommended action. But scientists and extension workers were forced to realise that, as pest-predator relationships are dynamic, and the specific occurrence of any one set of relationships is dependent on the context (local weather, stage of crop growth, level of water in the rice fields etc.), it would be Impossible to extend a uniform message which would be useful for all farmers and effective over wide areas.
They then considered the potential of converting the biological thresholds into 'economic' thresholds, so that farmers need take action when, and only when' the potential loss in yield falls below the threshold. But again the scientists and extension workers were confounded. They came to realise that every farmer makes his or her own economic decisions, in the light of a range of other specific considerations; the economic threshold is a relative and not an absolute trigger for management intervention.
The Field Schools thus are designed to build upon farmers' understanding of the principles of agro-ecological relationships, and to improve their capacities to systematically observe, document, and interpret these. The goal is not prescriptive control (e.g. "don't use chemical sprays") but pest management based on an informed understanding of the ecological processes which govern the interaction between plant growth and pest predation. The work involves taking samples of insects in the crop, then counting the number of examples of each species of beneficial (defenders) or harmful (predators) insects present. The results are used in conjunction with individual and group analysis of the weather and stage of crop growth, to assess whether action is needed to control the pests, and, if so, the type of action required. The trainees are encouraged to discover whether a hitherto unrecorded insect is a defender or predator by placing it with a known predator in an 'insect zoo' and observing what happens to it, or to observe the extent to which a rice plant recovers from the effects of leaf-eating insects. By varying the experimental variables, a group of farmers can quickly gain substantial insight into predator, defender, and plant interactions.
Benefits to the environment, the household and to health
The evident advantages of this approach are a marked reduction in the use of chemical insecticides, with measurable benefits to the environment (e.g. an increase in the populations of beneficial insects and birds, and the conservation of edible frogs, snails and fish in rice fields). Households are better off as less cash is spent on purchasing insecticides while rice yields tend to increase owing to better crop management. In addition, a major threat to human health and nutrition is eliminated or greatly reduced. In southern India, as in all of Asia wherever intensive cropping is practiced, data on pesticide residues in market samples of rice grain, bran and straw, typically show contamination above permitted levels by chemicals hazardous to human health. Accidental death by chemical poisoning is not uncommon among farmers, while labourers frequently complain of a range of symptoms, such as nausea, skin rashes, and giddiness when they are working the fields after spraying. Reliable data on the harm to women's reproductive health in particular are scarce, but pesticides are implicated in a range of gynaecological disorders and birth defects.
An insect zoo is mode up of a rice plant growing in an earthenware pot, the whole covered by mosquito netting, in effect a simple version of the pot cage used in research experiments.
Benefits to participants
The evident benefits to civil society are proving to be of equal value as the programme continues. The benefits are multidimensional, as poor men and women as individuals are empowered to take greater control of their lives? contributing to improvements in household welfare and strengthening community interaction. In a country such as India, where women play a major, if unrecognised, role in agriculture but are poor, illiterate and socially oppressed, the subtle educational effects of a programme based on learning rather than instruction, are of particular importance.
Mrs. Ghowri's Field School is one of 4 specially for women, out of 30 established in the 1994 - 95 season in 18 selected Blocks (sub-districts) in the Madras area of Tamil Nadu. Her husband had heard about the schools from his friends in an adjoining village and he was very keen for her to learn also when the opportunity came for them both to attend a school in their own village. Both of them have to work in their rice field but usually at different times of the day. Mrs. Ghowri goes to the field early after cooking breakfast and walking the children to school. For the rest of the day she works on home-based garment stitching. Her husband goes to the field towards the end of the day after he returns from his labouring job in a near-by brick-making business. Both have only a few years of schooling and before they started the Field School, assumed that all scientific knowledge and information had to come from those who had education, such as the extension worker. They both refer to their growing excitement at learning to rely on their own powers of observation, informed judgement and experimental capacities as one of the chief benefits of the school, an enthusiasm shared by farmers in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka where IPM has been taken up by Ministries of Agriculture.
Mrs. Ghowri feels confident enough already in her new understanding to extend IPM principles to the management of her home vegetable garden. She no longer uses purchased chemical sprays to control pests. She removes the eggs or larvae of pests by hand, or uses a neem spray that she makes herself. This she has proven is not harmful to the beneficial insects by first testing its effects in her insect zoo.
The trainer of Mrs. Ghowri's group took a B.Sc. in agriculture and then worked for six years in a laboratory. She was dissatisfied with the limited opportunities open to women in scientific or technical careers so, when she heard that with DANIDA assistance, the Tamil Nadu Department of Agriculture was opening a programme to support women in agriculture (TANWAP), she joined as one of India's first women Agricultural Officers. The TANWAP officers not only conduct IPM Field Schools for women but also help them form savings and credit groups, and 'learn how to learn' improved vegetable and fruit cultivation methods, tree planting. chicken keeping and goat rearing. While the technical aspects of the programme are similar to many other agricultural training projects, the TANWAP team's commitment to experiential learning makes a special contribution to the growing self confidence of the largely illiterate women farmers. It helps them to become independent knowledge-seekers, and capable of defending their new knowledge, to subject their findings and observations to peer review and to put their ideas to the test.
Benefits to civil society
Farmers typically continue to meet after they have received this kind of training because they find the networking, and ongoing sharing of ideas and experiments, of proven value. There are a growing number of cases where farmers who have experienced an official Field School themselves organize field schools for members of their extended families and friends in neighbouring villages, without the support of organized programmes. As one farmer explained at a meeting in Pudyval: "Before, just one or two people would learn something new from the extension worker. Then we would all try to copy exactly because we thought it must be best. Now we all learn together but each one can decide for himself what to do." Farmers may meet together for example to discuss the effects on the incidence of pests of holding the water in the rice fields at a certain level, or to review a field trial of the effects of using neem spray against a particular insect.
Or maybe the local chemical dealer has introduced a new product, claiming that it would save them the effort of routine scouting for insects in the fields, wipe out all the predators in an instant, and yet is completely safe. The landlord is pressing his tenants to use the chemical (no doubt in return for payment from the dealer). The farmers invite the dealer and their landlord to a meeting, to observe a number of trials of the product. They spray some into an insect zoo in which they place both defender and predator insects: the chemical kills them all without discrimination. They spray a day old chick: it dies on the spot. They invite the dealer to wash his hands in a bowl of the chemical: he refuses. They place a fish which they have just caught in the rice field into the bowl: it floats to the surface gasping for breath and then dies. More is going on here than a demonstration of a lesson learned by routine instruction. The defiance of the exploitation of ignorance, the confidence of informed judgement, lies close to the heart of democratic civil society.
Government extension workers as individuals are usually as enthusiastic as the farmers, as they come to realise that they too can develop their own knowledge and understanding by "finding things out for ourselves", and by learning from the agroecological analyses that the farmers make through the growing season. They also have the satisfaction of seeing widespread changes in behaviour, otherwise difficult to achieve through conventional extension methods. The main drawback in some situations is the diminished incomes the extension worker might incur from the loss of kickbacks paid by chemical dealers. Indeed, the illicit financial rewards for licensing the import, formulation or distribution of agricultural chemicals are one of the major obstacles limiting the expansion of IPM activities. More generally the shifts in power implicit in experiential learning can be unwelcome among existing power holders, even or perhaps especially among power holders at the most senior levels of government.
The disposition of agricultural bureaucracies to organize the world on the basis of their own routines and timetables is another major handicap. Currently in Java, Indonesia, it is well-nigh impossible to run Field Schools in the short intermediate rice-growing season because funding for training can be authorized only during the two main rice seasons. Any use of pesticides by farmers in the short season gives rise to a higher risk of pest outbreaks in the subsequent season as the balance of defenders and predators is disrupted.
International non-government organisations such as CARE in Bangladesh or the indigenous voluntary organization Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka thus have a particular role to play in IPM. Their efforts help of course to extend the coverage of government programmes, but their greater flexibility, and their ski I Is in facilitating farmer-centred learning, also may apply corrective pressure against the rigidities, and technical bias of government agricultural departments.
The complementarily assumes a particular form in Bangladesh, where CARE is promoting IPM through two related projects, No-Pest and Inter-Fish (the cultivation of fish in flooded rice fields), on two counts. The women who work as CARE field trainers are still a controversial, if no longer a rare, phenomenon in the non-government sector, in a culture where the norms of purdah (seclusion) are deeply embedded. Secondly, as crop or water management decisions seldom can be made by an individual farmer acting alone, because of the complex interdependence among socioeconomic, political and agroecosystem factors, the collective aspects of learning take on special importance. CARE has developed experiential learning methods through which, for example, groups of farmers can develop and explore options for introducing fish ponds into rice fields by working with physical models made of mud to simulate the rice-fish environment.
Further, as one of the delighted female, non-government trainees attending an IPM training programme in Sri Lanka exclaimed: "You don't have to have an agricultural training to understand all these things." The science underlying the success of the approach has, as it were, been unpacked and repackaged as an opportunity for learning key principles and processes, thus making the approach accessible to a wide range of individuals and organizations who might lack specialist expertise in agricultural science. There is surely a lesson here for those concerned about the 'scientific illiteracy' of civil society as the world enters, it is claimed, the information age and the era of 'knowledge based' economic development.
Conclusions
The experiences related briefly here focus our attention on three attributes which appear characteristic of any struggle to enrich and develop civil society: acts of courage, the will and determination to persist in the face of entrenched and powerful economic interests, and the development of new personal and societal competences. The key in the case sketched above has been to find a methodology compatible with the democratising and empowering potential inherent in what might appear at first glance to be a solely technical activity: pest management. The development of the science-based knowledge underlying the programme is essential but not sufficient. It is the experiential learning approach that has placed science-based knowledge in the hands of ordinary men and women, and moreover is doing so in a way that augments their capacity to manage their own development.
Larger claims might be made. If alternatives to authoritarian control are to be found, then we must together develop mechanisms in which the interests of individuals and of the state in the public good can be reconciled. In the absence of informed understanding and a diversity of ways in which ordinary men and women can express - and make effective - their interests, it is only too likely that the 'public good' comes to be defined by the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. In this perspective, too, IPM can be seen to be making a not unimportant contribution to the development of civil society.
Janice Jiggins has written extensively on population, gender and health issues. A recent book 'Changing the boundaries Women-Centered Perspectives on Population and the Environment' is reviewed on page 55.
She is expected to take up a post as Professor in Human Ecology at SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) and can be contacted at the following address after September, 1996: SLU, Box 7005, 75007 Uppsala, Sweden.
The IPM Programme For more information about the IPM programme you can contact Dr. Peter Kenmore, InterCountry Program for Integrated Pest Control in Rice in South and Southeast Asia, P O Box 3700 MCPO, 1277 Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines fax: 63-28109409/8127725, e-mail: [email protected]. A case study on this subject has been written by Elske van de Fliert (1993): "Integrated Pest Management: farmer field schools generate sustainable practices. A case study in Central Java evaluating IPM training", No.93-3, ISBN 905485-124-4. Wageningen Agricultural University papers is available from the Wagening Research Programme on Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Agriculture, Wageningen Agricultural University, P O Box 9101, 6700 HB Wageningen, The Netherlands. |
