GVT’s Participatory Approaches in Crops productivity – A road to success for poverty alleviation in tribal areas.

India is becoming a top global innovator for high-tech products and services. Yet, the country is underperforming relative to its innovation potential. To sustain competitiveness, economic growth, and rising living standards over the long term, India needs to aggressively harness its innovation potential. Globally, 800 million people are malnourished. Heavily subsidized farmers in rich countries produce sufficient surplus food to feed the hungry, but not at a price the poor can afford. Most poor people earn their living from agriculture, so a deluge of free food would destroy their livelihoods. Thus, the only answer to world hunger is to safeguard and improve the agricultural productivity. A major goal of the crops programmes in GVT is to popularize and disseminate new varieties with farmer preferred characteristics that are not only suitable for but also desired by the local farmer and consumer communities. A farmer participatory approach called Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) has been used to popularize and disseminate the newly released varieties by the national variety release system for the central zone in the country. Therefore, the socio-economic dimension of improved field crops production and the analysis of factors influencing the acceptance of novel varieties is an integral part.

"The world has acknowledged India’s R&D potential and more than 300 multinational corporations have set up R&D and technical centers in India," said Isabel Guerrero, World Bank Country Director for India. “As important if not more, is the better diffusion of existing knowledge across India

“The disparities in productivity levels across firms within manufacturing sectors is wider in India than in China, Mexico, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of Korea,” said Mark Dutz, World Bank Senior Economistand Editor. “The output of the economy could increase more than five-fold if all enterprises could achieve national best practices based on knowledge already in use in India.”

Thomas Malthus’s prediction that the world’s population would outstrip global food supply has not come true so far, thanks to technological advances in improving biological productivity, coupled with pro-farmer policies of the government (Swaminathan M.S. 1992, Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 26, No. 6,).

Over the past decade participatory and more client-oriented approaches have produced officially released and recommended varieties that are highly adapted to the needs of farmers in marginal areas. They have greater drought tolerance; higher and more stable yields; and other traits that are important to farmers such as early maturity, high grain quality, and high fodder yields. Because they substantially improve their livelihoods, farmers enthusiastically adopt these highly adapted varieties (HAVs) and spread the seed of them to other farmers.

Rationale of PVS and COB

  • Synergy between scientific knowledge and farmers wisdom
  • Opportunity for an optimal use of Mendelian, Molecular and Participatory Breeding
  • Creates an economic and social stake in the conservation of land races
  • Win-win situation for the farmer, scientist and the environment.

Purpose of COB

  • An approach to address critical issues in agriculture to demystify science and to bring key stake holders together to address the present and future concerns.
  • Emphasizes gendered ITK and participation of farmers, options and doable methods that could be adopted by men and women and could minimize failures.
  • Is based on the concept of conservation, sustainable utilization and equitable benefit sharing.
  • Utilizes the gains of breeding for specific adaptation through selection in target environments.
  • Gives gendered voice to the farming community particularly: the traditionally marginalized groups like tribal’s and elevates local knowledge to the level of science.

Features of COB

  1. COB should take a broader approach to solve the critical problems arising out of modern agriculture such as economic viability of crop production, food and nutritional in security, degradation of land, destruction of biodiversity and unsustainable agricultural practices.
  2. COB should recognize and value the knowledge and important role of women in conservation of biodiversity and agriculture and should address gender imbalances in participation, in decision making and benefit sharing.
  3. COB should be based on principles that emphasize deposition of problems to be addressed, symmetrical relationships among partners and constant evaluation and monitoring of the success of participatory improvement programmes.
  4. COB should take into account farmers’ gendered priorities and practices and strive for social and gender equity in conservation.
  5. Participatory breeding need to be cost effective, work on downstream technology and breed site-specific varieties capable of sustaining production.
  6. Farmers’ gendered ITK and wisdom need to be recognized rewarded and incorporated in participatory initiatives.
  7. Scientific analysis of COB data should be a source of strength for farmers for making optimal decisions.
  8. COB approaches should not deal only with improving yield of farmers’ varieties but also provide a strategic frame for saving grains and seeds and gainful marketing, as provided in the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001. Government should make it a policy to procure farmers’ land races at a remunerative price and distribute them through the Public Distribution System (PDS).
  9. Participatory plant breeding has been shown to be efficient and accelerate adoption of acceptable varieties.
  10. Novel genetic combinations incorporating drought and salinity resistance need to be properly programmed into participatory breeding taking care to assign proper weightage to phenotypic expression.
  11. Indigenous varieties like Indian rice with special traits like Njawara, Kalajeera and Kalanamk should have their place in participatory improvement. It is essential to characterize them for bio-molecules that are relevant to the medicinal properties.

Successes of PVS and COB in GVT

Farmer and scientist collaboration: the success of maize in western India

We start with the success story of a better maize variety that, by yielding grain even under droughted and low fertility conditions, has brought new hope to poor farmers in western India. It is the successful outcome from the close collaboration of scientists and farmers.

The breeding programme that produced this maize variety, GM-6, was highly targeted to meet the needs of our clients, the resource-poor farmers of the hilly districts in adjoining areas of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Rajasthan.

GM-6 maize variety is extra-early to mature and is proving to be a popular option for farmers in all of these three states (Figure 1). It matures about 7 days earlier than the earliest of the local varieties. It has a high yield because it has larger ears, and unlike local varieties, the grains fill to the tip. Farmers appreciate the good grain quality of this variety.

Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS)

One way of increasing the adoption of new varieties is to help farmers test for themselves a wide range of novel cultivars in their own fields. This is participatory varietal selection (PVS).

In PVS, the cultivars should be selected carefully to match the traits that farmers require. To do this we ask farmers what qualities are required in the traits that are important to them.

We have used already-released cultivars. In India, there are many varieties that have only been released and widely grown in a single state, yet could be useful in others. Using already-released cultivars saves time because sufficient seed is usually readily available. We have found that the varieties farmers prefer the most are almost invariably imports from other regions rather than those recommended for the area (see box below).

A successful participatory varietal selection programme has four phases:

  1. Participatory evaluation to identify farmers’ needs in a cultivar;
  2. A search for suitable varieties to test with farmers;
  3. Experimentation on their acceptability in farmers’ fields;
  4. Wider dissemination of the farmer-preferred cultivars.

One of the great strengths of PVS is that it is both an extension and a research method. Varieties tested in PVS, if acceptable, can rapidly spread from farmer to farmer.

Client-Oriented Breeding

The centralized plant breeding techniques that produced the Green Revolution produced impressive results in the more favourable agricultural environments. They have been less effective for low-resource farmers who cultivate poorly productive land.

In comparison to centralized breeding, farmer participatory approaches in plant breeding result in a better orientation to the needs of the client farmers. In the past, such approaches have been described by the activity of involving farmers – participatory plant breeding (PPB). We now prefer to use a term that explains the purpose of involving farmers – highly client-oriented breeding (COB).

Each stage of COB is designed to better account for the needs of the clients:

  1. The new variety is specifically designed to have the combination of traits that the client farmers desire.
  2. The parents are very carefully chosen on the basis of having the potential to produce this desired combination. At least one is locally adopted by farmers.
  3. The selection in the segregating generations is done in environments that closely match the fields of the client farmers.
  4. The results of this selection, new varieties, are immediately tested with the client farmers in PVS trials

COB is much more powerful than PVS alone because it creates new variability rather than relying on existing varieties. In our COB, we use varieties selected by farmers from PVS trials as parents of crosses because they are adapted and acceptable. Farmers sometimes identify specific weaknesses in a variety; these can be eliminated by crossing it with a parent chosen for its complementary strengths. One great advantage of COB is that it is much faster than conventional breeding because new varieties are immediately tested with farmers.

Successful PVS and COB crops varieties in GVT project areas:

The farmer preferred varieties in the PVS and COB crops programme of GVT and have subsequently been released or recommeded.
Rainfed maize / Gujarat Maize 6 and ZM 421
Chickpea / Pratap Chana 1, ICCV 2, KAK 2 and JG 412
Blackgram / JU 8-6, JU 4-8-6
Upland rice / Ashoka 200F, Ashoka 228, Sugandha 1, Barkhe 3010 and PY 84.
Horsegram / IVH 2

Ongoing Crops programmes in GVT

A. Seed Multiplication and Dissemination Project:

To popularize the impact of GVT’s new crop varieties developed through participatory technology research in Crops Improvement Programme of GVT, the large scale seed multiplication of maize and rice varieties namely GM -6 and Ashoka 200F respectively and also the popular prevalent crop varieties has been undertaken. Seed has been supplied to WORLP, MPRLP, GVT projects, Departments of Agriculture in all seven states, NGOs such as Catholic Relief Services and many more that are active in country and to private sector organisations. The seed thus produced by GVT or for GVT by State Agricultural Universities made available to the public or private organizations who are involved in the livelihoods enhancement of the rural farming community. The major thrust is to spread the seed of improved cultivars through the process of farmer to farmer in a shorter time frame. This is particularly more relevant for the varieties which are not marketed by the profit making organizations like private seed companies.

B. Rockefeller Foundation Project:

The participatory approaches have not only given the promising varieties for the tribal farmers in the GVT domain but also mandated the availability of the required amount of quality seed and continuous development of new genetic materials. Through this project GVT has identified three more new varieties of paddy suitable for the cultivation in the state of Jharkhand. In addition the popularization and multiplication of the farmer preferred varieties of paddy have been the major activities through this project. The out come from this project are the varieties Ashoka 200F (BVD 109), Ashoka 228 (BVD 110), and recently recommended are Sugnadha 1, Barkhe 3010 and PY 84.

C. Tribal people livelihood enhancementthrough innovative approaches of agricultural production in western Madhya.

It was recognized that the MPRLP, GVT and JNKVV have common interest in improving the yield potential of important food grain crops especially the maize, paddy, horsegram, blackgram and chickpea and developing suitable strategies of dissemination of quality farm seed of cultivars of these crops for cultivation in the aforesaid regions of Madhya Pradesh. To this end, a collaborative developmental crops research programme was agreed upon amongst JNKVV, GVT and MPRLP. We will continue with the innovative approaches, developed over the last fifteen years by GVT and its partners State Agricultural Universities, for the development of new varieties. These have been both participatory (involving farmers) and client–oriented (designing and producing products that meet the needs of the client farmers). Participation has predominantly been through the testing of new varieties.

D. Food Security Through Ricebean Research in India and Nepal.

Ricebean (Vigna umbellata) is a legume grown in NE India and Nepal but landraces predominate. The overall objective is to make the under-utilized crop ricebean more than locally popular by identifying and measuring the diversity within the range of germplasm available in India and Nepal and characterizing it for suitability to the cropping systems of the region, matching farmer-preferred varieties to diverse seasons, environments and markets, using a combination of genetic, agronomic, and socio-economic approaches firmly based on client-orientated principles to identify genotypes and parents for breeding programmes suitable for integrating ricebean into rice and maize-based cropping systems.

E. Improving Livelihoods in South Asia through Sustained Access to New Technologies in Rainfed Agriculture.

This project is led by CAZS-NR, BangorUniversity, Bangor, UK with Partners CRS, GVT, OXFAM, IFSSA and GARC Seed Company in India. This project is being implemented by GVT in Ranchi and Godda districts in Jharkhand,Baripada in Orissa, Jhabua in MP and Dhamtari in Chhattisgadh. GVT will organize community seed producer groups, production and maintenance of quality basic seed, and registration of promising materials (with CAZS-NR). Together with CRS and Oxfam, it will implement scaling out activities and be responsible for advocacy. The organization will use its expertise and experience of the Indian seed industry to manage and coordinate seed supply activities. For these activities GVT will link with:

Department of Agriculture, Jharkhand: Scaling out influential partner for advocating policy change with state government.

GARC Seeds Private Limited: Large scale, prfit motivated seed production. Marketing stratagies for sustainable seed supply.

India Federation Seed Services Association (IFSSA): Linkages with private seed producers.

F. Monitoring, Impact and Learning (MIL) study of Ashoka rice in Gramin Vikas Trust (East and West).

Under the project entitled “South Asia Rainfed Agriculture Case Study” recently an MOU has been signed between the BangorUniversity and the Gramin Vikas Trust for undertaking the survey study on “Monitoring, Impact and Learning study on Ashoka rice varieties”. Under this project five districts have been identified for the monitoring, impact and learning (MIL) study, four districts (Ranchi and Hazaribag in Jharkahand, Baripada in Orissa and Jhargram in West Bengal) from GVT-east and Banswara district form GVT-west. Impact of COB bred upland paddy varieties on tribal farmers’ livelihoods and their spread in the project areas in both the regions shall be the focus of this study.

Dr. JP Yadavendra

Coordinator (Crops Research)

Gramin Vikas Trust, Dahod.