Summary
Partnership production of innovation and smallholder experimentation support
in the Northeast of Brazil
This paper presents the result of a monitoring of the smallholder-led experimentation
process in the Agreste region in Paraíba State (figure 1). The main objective was to identify
the role of smallholders families and their organisations in the development and
dissemination of agricultural innovation. The first section presents the region, the
methodological overall of the project and the birth of smallholders’ experimentation
groups. It shows how these activities, that started by addressing individual interested
farmers, slowly shifted towards the monitoring and support of innovation processes in
which farmers’ experiments play a very important role (tableau 1). The second section
presents the progressive building of an institutional partnership around farmers-led
experimentation process and the methodological monitoring activities to these groups
(tableau 2). These partnership activities cover four different roles: helping to organise
experiments. Feeding experimentation processes in terms of methods, information and
material inputs; helping to collect and analyse data and evaluate results; and providing
support for dissemination of results and lessons. By the time, scholars from regional
research centres and universities were involved in the experimentation process. It was not
easy because farmers and researchers are not monitoring the same criteria during the
experiment or are not interested by the same kind of trial results. The smallholder-led
experimentation process has produced positive and rapid results on local scale. But such
partnership and participatory approach requires important efforts in terms of human
resources especially for peasant’s training, methodological and institutional support. The
last section discusses the first results and lessons learnt, trying to answer such questions
as: How can Smallholder Experimentation Groups take on new roles in term of innovation
process? These groups can become the traducers of different logic of innovation and the
methods introduced in Paraíba Agreste help to re-think or to renew agriculture research
and extension services.
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