n a hot spring morning in May, seven farmers are standing in a field on ICARDA's research farm in northwest Syria. They are surrounded by barley. Not just one type of barley, but a wide variety of selections. They are arguing about these. Which is the most drought-tolerant? Which has the better straw quality? With the farmers is a group of scientists and technicians, but they are not saying much. They are here to listen.
      The farmers are ICARDA's partners in  research on barley impovement. Tomorrow, though, they won't be standing here. They will be repeating the experiment in one of their own fields. They will travel around northern Syria for several days, analyzing, discussing, arguing--and making their selections for further study next year. And not all those selections will be the same.
        Which is the whole point, says senior barley breeder, Dr Salvatore Ceccarelli. "We have about 335mm average annual rainfall on the research farm, but only a few kilometres east of here farmers are working with 200mm or less. They don't all want the same thing from us."
      The participatory barley-breeding project in Syria, which is supported by the German aid arm BMZ, has been in operation since 1996 (see Caravan Nos. 1 and 4). But ICARDA started on this road about 15 years ago. Conventional plant breeding aims for broad adaptation; that is, to produce crop varieties that can be grown over a wide area,

producing economies in scale for commercial seed production. This means a compromise.  To get adequate yields from these broadly-adapted varieties, you need expensive fertilizer; and they may not cope at all with extreme conditions in a bad year. That could be OK in moderate environments in wealthy countries. It isn't in Syria. Or Ecuador. Or Ethiopia..."
     These broadly-adapted varieties have another drawback: their widespread adoption occurs by replacing local varieties, thus reducing the amount of genetic diversity in farmers' fields.

      This is mortgaging the future. That diversity in farmer's fields is the raw material for food security. ICARDA believes that the crops in the fields should be as genetically diverse as possible. ICARDA's answer to the question of diversity vs. productivity is to breed from landraces. It works: Arta, the first widely- used variety ICARDA bred this way, outperforms local landraces by 20% in Syria, yet it retains many of their characteristics. But this is not enough. The crops must be very location-specific. And that is where the farmers can help.
      The Syrian project initially involved
farmers testing 208 lines at nine loca-
tions; they were also tested on the
research station. Two years on, the
process has evolved; instead of inspect-
ing the lines in each others' fields, in
1998-99 the farmers want to prepare test

plots for the lines they think are promis-
ing. This is how ICARDA hoped they
would react. They are likely to start
commercial production of these loca-
tion-specific varieties themselves and
supply seed to their neighbors (thus
overcoming the seed-supply problem).

     It's not the first time ICARDA has joined hands with farmers to do diversity-friendly crop breeding. A long-standing project in Ethiopia has produced interesting results.Whereas in West Asia and North Africa farmers grow barley mainly for animal feed, in Ethiopia barley is a subsistence food crop. But that makes it even more important to breed from landraces and keep stable-yielding local varieties in the field, as a hedge against famine. In Ecuador, ICARDA breeder Dr Hugo Vivar and the national scientists are developing landrace-based varieties; in a joint project with farmers near Loja, in the south of the country, they are seeing high but stable yields. The number of farmers participating in the Ecuador project has shot up over the two years of its existence.

      There are broader implications of this sort of breeding work, says Dr Ceccarelli. "Perhaps most important, harnessing biodiversity to produce varieties suitable for harsher environments tends to benefit the poorer farming communities. "That's a crucial investment in the future."