Agricultural research for resource-poor farmers: The farmer-first-and-last model

Rural poverty is much less a problem of total food availability than of who produces the food and who has the income to buy it. A high priority is therefore to enable the tens of millions of resource-poor farm families to increase their production and improve its stability. The normal ‘transfer-of-technology’ (TOT) model for agricultural research has built-in biases which favour resource-rich farmers whose conditions resemble those of research stations. TOT approaches have been modified through on-farm trials and demonstrations but the basic model and approach remain the same. A second emerging model is ‘farmer-first-and-last’ (FFL). This starts and ends with the farm family and the farming system. It begins with holistic and interdisciplinary appraisal of farm families' resources, needs and problems, and continues with on-farm and with-farmer R and D, with scientists, experiment stations and laboratories in a consultancy and referral rôle. FFL fits the needs and opportunities of resource-poor farm families better than TOT, but there are obstacles to its development and introduction. These can be tackled step-by-step, through combinations of methodological innovation, interdisciplinarity, including the social sciences, and provision of suitable resources, rewards and training. FFL approaches promise a greater contribution from agricultural research to the eradication of rural poverty.