{"id":770,"date":"1990-01-01T15:12:19","date_gmt":"1990-01-01T20:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/?p=770"},"modified":"2016-08-04T15:21:39","modified_gmt":"2016-08-04T19:21:39","slug":"farmer-knowledge-institutional-resources-and-sustainable-agricultural-strategies-a-case-study-from-the-eastern-slopes-of-the-peruvian-andes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/1990\/peer-refereed-articles\/farmer-knowledge-institutional-resources-and-sustainable-agricultural-strategies-a-case-study-from-the-eastern-slopes-of-the-peruvian-andes\/","title":{"rendered":"Farmer knowledge, institutional resources and sustainable agricultural strategies: A case study from the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>| By Anthony Bebbington | Published in the <em>Bulletin of Latin American Research<\/em>, 9(2):203-228 |<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Abstract:\u00a0<\/strong> Many concerned in designing sustainable agricultural strategies for resource-poor farmers have identified a key role for indigenous agricultural knowledge (Altieri, 1987a,b; Browder, 1989; Hecht and Cockburn, 1989;\u00a0Norgaard, 1984; Redclift, 1987). It is argued that farmers, as a result of their\u00a0intimate engagement with the biophysical environment, are frequently able\u00a0to exploit a wide range of niches, producing food in ways that reduce risks\u00a0and maintain the local environment intact (Richards, 1985; Wilken, 1987).\u00a0Whereas modern technology commonly works against the environment in\u00a0order to control it, indigenous technologies tend to work with, and adapt to,\u00a0environmental resources. For this reason the knowledge of peasant farmers\u00a0must be a key component in the design of sustainable food production\u00a0strategies (Redclift, 1987). Having said that, while peasant farmers\u00a0frequently have in-depth knowledge of local ecological patterns and must\u00a0accordingly be intimately involved in the process of technology generation\u00a0and dissemination (Bebbington, 1989; Rhoades and Bebbington, 1990), we\u00a0must also recall that famines are evidence of the adaptive limitations of\u00a0farmer innovation (Turner, 1983; Newman, 1990). This paper aims to\u00a0examine some of these issues in the context ofa detailed case study of peasant\u00a0farming in the Oxapampa region on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes,\u00a0where farmers have created two distinct cropping systems in the space of<br \/>\nonly three decades. More specificaUy, the article attempts to demonstrate: (1)\u00a0there are social, economic and ecological relations that mediate and may\u00a0undermine the sustainability of agricultural strategies based on farmer agro-ecological skills; (2) there are production contexts, where what farmers\u00a0already know may not be sufficient to sustain a family farm strategy; and (3)\u00a0farmer skills may not be equipped to sustain a farm when farmers&#8217; production\u00a0contexts change?particularly when they move between ecological zones, or\u00a0when market-oriented production replaces production for consumption. I<br \/>\nsuggest that these are important points to bear in mind for two main reasons,<br \/>\nthe one conceptual, the other practical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>| By Anthony Bebbington | Published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research, 9(2):203-228 | Abstract:\u00a0 Many concerned in designing sustainable agricultural strategies for resource-poor farmers have identified a key [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":455,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34933,34831],"tags":[28776,34801,24544,34932,31555,31509,31455],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-34933","category-peer-refereed-articles","tag-agriculture","tag-andes","tag-development","tag-indigenous-agricultural-knowledge","tag-latin-america","tag-peru","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/455"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/abebbington\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}