Sep 03
Third Distinguished Lecture, The Cropper Foundation; UWI, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago; September 1, 2010
Biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, and sustainable development are very closely linked. The indigenous knowledge systems of the peoples of the South constitute the world largest reservoir of knowledge of the diverse species of plant and animal life on earth. For many centuries, their indigenous agricultural systems have utilized practices and techniques which embody, what one scientist has called ‘Principles of Permanence’- ..
I respond to Mr Claxton’s lecture as an active agricultural experimental scientist based mostly in Nigeria.
Claxton referred to “˜milpa”™, a farming system which has been successful in some contexts. I will use milpa to make a practical strategic point for general use in development work.
Milpa is a maize-based zero-tillage system associated with Central America, e.g. Guatemala and Honduras. The maize seeds used, have been the product of selection by growers over many generations. Zero-tillage, a component of the milpa system, is a viable practice in many places worldwide.
Post-Columbus, maize seeds were taken across the Atlantic from the Western Hemisphere to the Eastern Hemisphere including West Africa, e.g. Nigeria and Benin Republic (Benin Republic is the former Dahomey). Maize did not exist in the Eastern Hemisphere before then. One hundred years ago, maize grain yields under milpa in Central America were just under 1000 kg/ha (kilograms per hectare). Maize grain yields in Nigeria and Benin were also just under 1000 kg/ha.
In Nigeria in the 1970s, tools were developed that replicated the method used by milpa farmers in placing seeds in the ground in a zero-tillage system, but these tools did the job much faster. I personally devised a way of mounting four of the fastest of these tools behind a tractor and, with the tractor driver, successfully grew six hectares of maize every year for four years under zero tillage.
By 1990, maize grain yields in Nigeria were around 4000 kg/ha, having risen from earlier levels owing to interventions including further breeding and selection, accelerated by scientists. In Central America, maize grain yields in milpa were still around 1000 kg/ha in 1990.
Throughout the last century, scientists in Nigeria sought to optimize the maintenance of soil fertility. Scientists”™ soil fertility maintenance trials, running from 1922 to 1951, showed that maize benefitted in some ways from interspersing the maize crop with a leguminous creeper.
However, farmers in Nigeria have never adopted this interspersed leguminous creeper practice in a big way up to now. This practice was also not known, or hardly used, in the milpa system in Central America. But beginning around 1990, the interspersing of maize crops with a leguminous creeper took off exponentially on a massive scale in Benin Republic, which is Nigeria”™s neighbour.
The idea of interspersing maize crops with a leguminous creeper may have been transferred from Nigeria to Benin Republic by (1) scientists of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture based at Ibadan, Nigeria, and/or (2) Beninois agronomy students who did their final year at the University of Ibadan and learned about the Nigerian results, and/or (3) some other information transfer route.
The leguminous creeper practice also took off massively from around 1990 in Central America, including milpa areas. In the milpa areas it was not a replacement of the milpa system, but was an additional practice within the milpa system. Hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers adopted the practice in Benin and Central America (and some other places). But in Nigeria, still, it did not take off.
Claxton gave the definition of “˜indigenous”™ as: “˜local, or native to the country concerned”™.
My question is: In which parts of the scenario above, would one distinguish “˜indigenous knowledge”™ from “˜non-indigenous knowledge”™? I assume that the reader agrees that an answer is virtually impossible to give.
I contend that the distinction between “˜indigenous knowledge”™ and “˜non-indigenous knowledge”™ is hardly useful once emphasis is placed, as it should be by good scientists, on true openness in the quest for useful knowledge.
Agreed?
Peter Vine
Dr Vine, thank you very much for your informative and though-provoking comment on Mervyn’s lecture.
Mervyn may respond on his own account. My own view is that your Nigeria experience actually substantiates Mervyn’s point about the importance of “indigenous” (in the sense of non-Western, “native”) knowledge. The Milpa experience to me is an excellent example of a South-South knoweldge exchange which then became the plarform for further South-based technological adaptation and innovation. I have never thought of “indigenous” knoweldge as being a static thing fixed in time or space, or as “belonging” to one country.
Mervyn began his lecture with a defnitional/conceptual discussion in which he argued that the word “indigenous” had over time had its original meaning changed from meaning essentially “native to the enevironment” to one that had a pejorative meaning — “inferior” — with a subliminal political message — i.e. “non-Western, colonised peoples have nothing of value in their native culture”. This became an element in the justtification of colonial rule–the “mision civilatrice’ (this point is one I am adding to what Mervyn said, though I think it is implicit in his treatment of the subject).
The perverse result of this is that colonisers, believing in their own propaganda, overlooked what could have been of value to them in indigenous culture, as in the case of the Foot and Mouth Disease example mentioned by Mervyn.
It is in this sense that I support the view that it is useful to recognise the distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ knowledge, as there continue to be deeply entrnched cultural prejudices against the former; which, Claxton argues, are blocking the kind of ‘good science’ and ‘openeness in the quest of knowlefge’ that both you and I agree to be necessary.
I certainly dont hold the view that non-indigenous knowledge should be rejected merey because of its provenance, or that it has no role to play; and I dont read Claxton as proposing such a foolish idea either.
regards, Norman
The prevailing underlying thesis of Mervyn Claxton’s paper is that knowledge is situated. That is an idea that is beginning to demand respect even in current western science circles where quantum physics is turning old ideas upsided down. That he also correctly shows knowledge to be situated in power is clear throughout his presentation.
Mervyn Claxton therefore offers a base for CARICOM countries to attend more to what is a significant problem of our development. That is the problem that development is conceived in a knowledge system that has more to do with knowledge for and as power than knowledge for and as effective achievement of collective goals. Our history of colonialism dictates that it would be so but does not consign us to that paradigm forever. It is afterall history and not something natural like soil.
However, it is the treatment, as if it were itself given of nature, of our history- and its effects such as the valorisation of the western science which undetrgirded it- that makes many of our leadership imagine that technological solutions based on artifacts will solve Caribbean problems. This notion not only pervades the area of agriculture as Mervyn Claxton ably shows but includes the treatment of crime, the latest development problem of Caribbean societies.
I like the point in the lecture about the definition about cultural heritage. Currently, the countries of the region are in process of designating UN declared world heritages. How many of our countries are interpreting this to EXCLUDE the knowledges of which Mervyn Claxton speaks?
The questions that I have for the lecture have to do with the effects of rapid urbanisation in the region with the subsequent loss of bio-diversity and eco-indigenous capacity, and the cultural revolution in diets which have been occasioned by the same spread of western-centered technology. Of course these can be countered. Have we started in our college class-rooms from where we apparently recruit our leaders after feeding them the knowledge as and for power (of the individual) paradigm?
Guidance,
margaret kawamuinyo
i like the lecture
Dear Dr. Vine
I appreciated very much your valuable and informed comment on my lecture. First of all, I wish to assure you that I was not attempting to make a false distinction between “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” knowledge, nor was I engaging in indigenous “nationalism”. Unfortunately, that distinction does exists in the minds of many in the South as well as in the North. In his response to your comment, Norman Girvan summed up, perfectly, my own views on that issue and why I thought it necessary, at the very beginning of my lecture, to discuss the pejorative connotation of the term “indigenous” and the subliminal effect such distorted usage has had on peoples of the South and how they subconsciously perceive their own cultures.
As Norman observed, that pejorative view led colonisers to overlook or dismiss “indigenous” knowledge that could have been useful to them as, for example, the use of the root plant, Rauwolfia Serpentina, in India’s traditional medicine, to treat mental illness, of which British doctors in colonial India had been aware since the 19th century. But more importantly, the pejorative connotation of whatever is indigenous to the South has, in my opinion, prevented effective, sustained South-South cooperation in areas of development.
I am quite thrilled by your evidence that the milpa system has been successfully transferred to another region in the South. The fact that it had to be adapted to West African conditions (“It was not a replacement of the milpa system, but was an additional practice within the milpa system”, as you said) is perfectly natural. Santos and the farmers in the organization he created, CEDICAM (Center for Integral Small Farmer Development in the Mixteca) also found it necessary to adapt the ancient milpa system to modern conditions – to upgrade and modernize it. The successful transplantation, to Benin, of an adapted form of the milpa system, and its adoption by hundreds of thousands of small-scale Béninois farmers, is a powerful argument in favour of Caricom countries attempting a similar transplantation. It would contribute greatly to promoting rural development and food security, while helping to reduce rural poverty. Moreover, in the context of rapid climate change and the even more rapid depletion of the earth’s natural resource base, the transfer/dissemination/adoption ecological agricultural knowledge and techniques, so crucial for sustainable development, should be a top national and international priority.
You described one of the technical adaptations you made to the original milpa system. However, with such cross-cultural transfers of techniques and technologies, the non-technical problems encountered often prove more redoubtable than the technical ones. Your experience of how the milpa system was “sold” to local farmers, national agricultural officials, and local and national government authorities, for example, would be very useful to the Cropper Foundation and its collaborators, in paving the way for a similar milpa transfer to Trinidad and Tobago and the Caricom region. Would you be prepared to post an article on Norman Girvan’s website, sharing your experience of how you helped to successfully transplant the milpa sytem to West Africa, and indicating any lessons from that experience which you think would be useful to us in Caricom? Alternatively, you could e-mail it to Norman (who is on the Board of Trustees of the Foundation) and it will be shared with the Faculty of Agriculture and the Foundation’s other partners. I am emboldened to make that request because of your remark that emphasis should be placed “by good scientists, on true openness in the quest for useful knowledge.” That is also the reason why I thought that you won’t mind posting it on Norman’s site, so that anyone interested in the subject could access the information. Although I am not a scientist, in the technical sense of the term, not only do I fully subscribe to your principle of openness, as in the sharing of useful development knowledge for example, but I also apply it systematically to my own work.
It would be interesting to know why Béninois farmers have taken to interspersing maize and leguminous creepers but not Nigerian farmers. I have lived in Nigeria and I know that the Nigerian-Benin border is no more than 70 miles or so from Lagos. It is quite strange that the quadrupling of crop yields by Béninois farmers, with the intercropped milpa system, has not persuaded Nigerian farmers to adopt it, despite their relative proximity.
The modernized mipla system in Mexico interperses maize, beans, squash, and quelites. Do Béninois farmers grow maize with another mix of crops? And how flexible is the mipla system in terms of substituting another main crop for maize? Has it ever been attempted, to your knowledge? You would realize that those are the questions of a non-agriculturist. There are three resource centres for indigenous knowledge in Nigeria: a regional centre, the African Resource Centre for Indigenous Knowledge (ARCIK), in Ibadan; and two national centres: the Nigerian Resource Centre for Indigenous Knowledge (NIRCIK) at Ahmadu Bello University; and the Center for Indigenous Knowledge on population, Resource and Environmental Management (CIKPREM) at the University of Nsukka. Are they paper organizations or do they function as they are supposed to – recording, disseminating, and exchanging indigenous knowledge with development potential? Is your succesful experience with the milpa system recorded on CIKPREM’s data base or on either the two other resource centres?
With regards,
Mervyn Claxton
Dear Colleagues,
The draft Caribbean Community Agricultural Policy (CAP) is based on five pillars; (1) Food and Nutrition Security; (2) Production Trade/Value Chain; (3) Sustainable Development of Natural Resources; (4) Rural Modernization and Youth Programmes and; (5) a Modern Agricultural Knowledge and Information System.
The first pillar has been completed and is now a formal policy of the regional governments. It was one of the more creative efforts of CARICOM since it was one of the few times a policy was built from the bottom up involving member states and included farmers organisations/ private sector and relevant institutions. The action planning for the Regional Food and Nutrition Security (RFNS) policy is the next phase that is now being focused on.
CAP is being recommended along the same methodology that was used for the RFNS and will bring together a broad cross section of farmers/ private sector and other relevant organisations.
While we may criticize CARICOM about many things, this RFNS policy document is a step in the right direction and can help us to build a more united regional organisation.
I am sending this to our CARICOM colleagues to release the draft document on the FAO-Carib-Agri list for comments and inputs since CaFAN has been asked to play a key role in this effort. I am hoping that tthe draft CAP document would be on the FAo-Carib-Agri list within the next few weeks.
Jethro Greene
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ECTAD/CaFAN Secretariat
Beachmont
P.O. Box 827, Kingstown
St. Vincent and the Grenadines