Points of View
Agricultural Extension
Agricultural extension involves offering advice, helping farmers to analyze problems and identify opportunities, sharing information, supporting group formation and facilitating collective action. Traditional extension services were both financed and provided by the state. They aimed to deliver information and new technologies to farmers in order to raise production. Many have failed to meet their objectives and, in some cases, it has been unclear whether they have had any impact at all.
More recently, agricultural extension has been provided not only by government-based extension agencies but also by farmers, scientists, NGOs, commercial companies and mass media organisations. Food security, improved nutrition, equity and poverty alleviation have also become part of the agenda of organisations providing extension services. But there is still concern about the way in which information is generated and delivered in rural areas, how appropriate objectives for extension are identified and how farmers can be supported to be more effective in their demands for improved extension. Latin American countries, in particular, have learnt much about the hazards and opportunities of privatization, decentralization, use of new media and farmer-to-farmer information networks. There is much, perhaps, to be gleaned from these experiences but what other lessons should be learned so that agricultural extension in the future serves farmers better?
A focus on the enterprises of a whole farm and its natural and human resources is more likely to contribute to sustainable livelihoods and
production systems than one which concentrates on a single commodity or which deals with crops but leaves livestock, fisheries, agroforestry and
forestry extension to different organisations.
Extension objectives can range from the effective transfer of technology to the building up of strong rural organisations which can exert influence
over future research and policy agendas, and also take and enforce collective decisions over natural resource management. A shift towards the latter
will promote more sustainable agricultural development.
Professor Chris Garforth & Anna Lawrence, ODI Natural Resources Perspective No. 21
Farmers, regardless of their resource and socioeconomic status, will adopt new technologies and modify resource use when they consider the change
is relevant to their circumstances and can help them achieve their goals. An extension service can have an important function in speeding farmers'
adoption of measures that can enhance their productivity and welfare… Hence extension has the potential to increase the rate of adoption by
directly increasing awareness, by helping producers acquire skills, and by helping them understand a technology and its relevance to their
circumstances.
Extension can have an important role in feeding back information on farmers' constraints and potentials, to encourage relevant research. It can also
introduce the research system to innovations by farmers.
Lesson and Practices No.6: Agricultural Extension, WorldBank
Extension designed to support sustainable smallholder agriculture will need to respond more to local circumstance, which means being more flexible
about whom to work with and how. There will need to be affirmative actions to make sure the poorest and women farmers are reached; without this,
experience has shown that more attention is paid to better-off farmers, and approaches develop which are less appropriate to poorer and women
farmers, creating a viscous circle. Extension provided by a diversity of organisations is probably more likely to be able to provide the flexibility
of provision required.
Martin Whiteside, Living Farms: encouraging sustainable smallholders in Southern Africa
There is growing experience in farmer-to-farmer extension, visitation and peer training as mechanisms to support agricultural improvement…But
one of the greatest constraints for promoting wider use of farmer-to-farmer exchanges lies in the quality of available facilitators.
Jules Pretty, Regenerating agriculture
One of the main difficulties in establishing an effective and accountable information system is that demand is often under-developed. Rural people
may have no experience of interacting with external agencies and little understanding of what types of benefits they stand to gain. Equally, they
often have very limited individual purchasing power and no tradition of working together to pool resources.
Agricultural Extension, DFID Keysheets
The agriculture sector must nearly double biological yields on existing farmland to meet food needs, which will double in the next quarter
century. A sustainable approach to providing agricultural extension services in developing countries—minimal external inputs, a systems
orientation, pluralism, and arrangements that take advantage of the best incentives for farmers and extension service providers—will release the
local knowledge, resources, common sense, and organizing ability of rural people.
Agricultural Extension: Generic Challenges and Some Ingredients for Solutions by Gershon Feder, Anthony Willett, and Willem Zijp, World Bank
Putting responsibility in the hands of farmers to determine agricultural extension programs can make services more responsive to local conditions,
more accountable, more effective and more sustainable. To realize these benefits, the role of the public sector has to be redefined to permit
multiple approaches that account for user diversity and to develop partnerships with farmer organizations, NGOs, and the private sector for service
delivery.
A higher level of training and skills is needed if extension staff are to collaborate effectively with farmers, applying technical knowledge to
site-specific socioeconomic and agronomic conditions, rather than delivering prepackaged messages. Agents also need training in participatory methods
of working with farmers. Some of these additional costs can be offset by reductions in the number of staff needed, as farmers themselves take on more
responsibilities, and the economies of "distance" methods (using mass media and modern information technology) are more fully exploited.
WorldBank, Participation in Agricultural Extension
Recent reforms in the delivery and financing of extension services in developing countries have addressed issues of efficiency and effectiveness,
but there is concern that they may be reducing access for resource poor households to agricultural support services. Recent reforms such as
decentralisation in Colombia and the Philippines, privatisation in Mexico, strengthening of the role of farmers organisations in Thailand, and
emergence of the NGO sector in Zimbabwe and Ghana, have led to little improvement in, and in some cases may have reduced access by resource poor
households to support services and therefore to sustainable livelihoods.
Abigail Mulhall, Chris Garforth and Kate Warren. Equity Implications for reforms in the financing and delivery of agricultural extension services:
a literature review. AERDD Working Paper 98/2. AERDD, The University of Reading.
The development of Bangladesh's agricultural extension system over the last 20 years reflects a blend of forces: rising expectations in the
farming community for better services, changing agricultural needs, and the arrival of NGOs and private extension services on the scene. Responding
to these forces, the government of Bangladesh has adapted, capitalizing on new resources and modifying its own role and the way it does business
within a new extension system. Strategic challenges in the years ahead will be to continue this evolutionary process, adjust to new
opportunities, and thereby improve services to all segments of the country's farming community.
WorldBank, South Asia Rural Development Project Brief
Despite its growing importance, livestock production extension is a field neglected both by policy-makers and by researchers. The importance of
livestock to household welfare, fertility maintenance and production is still under-recognised in many developing countries. But livestock production
extension faces the additional institutional problem of being marginal to both agricultural extension and animal health services.
Agricultural extension services have developed around crop production, and remain tied largely to the seasonal nature of cropping. Such a system is
less useful for livestock production, with a longer time-scale and a lack of synchronisation of different animals and herds.
John Morton and Richard Matthewman, ODI Natural Resources Perspective No. 12
