rather than only in the testing of technologies
What is farmer participation
The Rationale for Farmer Participation
Plant breeding has been beneficial to farmers who enjoy favorable environments or those who could profitably modify their environment to suit new cultivars. It has not been so beneficial to those farmers (the poorest) who could not afford to modify their environment through the application of additional inputs. Farmers in favorable environments using high levels of inputs are now concerned with the adverse environmental effects and the loss of genetic diversity.
Poor farmers in marginal environments continue to suffer from chronically low yields, crop failures and, in the worse situations, malnutrition and famine. Because of its past successes, conventional plant breeding has tried to solve the problems of poor farmers living in unfavorable environments by simply extending the same methodologies and philosophies applied earlier to favorable, high potential environments.
Decentralized selection, defined as selection in the target environment, has been used by ICARDA's barley breeding program to avoid the risk of useful lines being discarded because of their relatively poor performance at the experiment stations. Decentralized selection is a powerful methodology to fit crops to the physical (climate and management) environment. However, crop breeding based on decentralized selection can still miss its objectives if it does not utilize the farmers' knowledge of the crops and the environment, and it may fail to fit crops to the specific needs and uses of farmers communities unless it becomes participatory.
Participation of farmers in the very initial stages of breeding, when the large genetic variability created by the breeders is virtually untapped, is expected to exploit fully the potential gains from breeding for specific adaptation through decentralized selection by adding farmer's perception of their own needs and farmers' knowledge of the crop.
