ICARDA Caravan 4

They also faced questions from farmers on the measures they have devised for safeguarding and improving the jessour system. Dr Chehbani and his team have developed water-retention, damage-control and erosion-control measures using a computer-based watershed runoff model. These included additional terraces, planting of medicinal and forage plant species on the degraded hilltop to capture surface run-off, flood-water discharge systems and other measures; tested without farmer participation in the first instance, they proved feasible.

But farmers then raised practical concerns; for example, the surface runoff from the degraded land is actually diverted through the elaborate hamala canal system to unproductive land lower down, where it is regarded as a key part of the farming system. In the lower land, moreover, runoff spillover from neighbors is brought to whoever is next down the line; again, it is vital to them, and they have no rights in the matter if it is suddenly cut off.

Farmers also pointed out that the improvements IRA had devised were designed to protect the jessours from damage by rainstorms causing a flow of up to 200 mm/hour, which is 90 mm/hour more than is ever received; and in any case, the farmers expect to take a risk and repair the systems once every 15-20 years. (Although, as IRA has found, the supply of skilled labor to carry out such repairs is declining.) Last but by no means least, the cost of such improvements was commented upon. In view of all this, IRA will develop computer models to projections of differing rainfall intensity and to cost-benefit analysis.

IRA's approach will now be to introduce the improvements to selected sites, rather than attempt to bring them into farmers' fields on a large scale, and then organize field tours so that the farmers can examine the technology, decide what they think is worth testing in their own fields, and reject what they don't.

That is how it works with Drump. Take a farmers' system that has worked for centuries; find out why it doesn't any more; devise a solution in collaboration with farmers; see if they think it will work; and incorporate necessary modifications.

To do that, you need engineers, economists, anthropologists, soil scientists and results from water-use efficiency research. It must be interdisciplinary. A little lateral thinking helps, too. But the most important element is farmer participation. It is no longer enough to develop technology and then serve it up to farmers.

They must be in the kitchen with us, helping with the cooking.

Dr Aden Aw-Hassan is Coordinator of the Dryland Resource Management Project (DRMP).

This has worked well for centuries, but recently the jessours have not been well maintained, due to outmigration and the shortage of skills and labor. This has led to increasing run-off during the storms, destroying the systems and causing not only waste of water but faster soil erosion.

The Tunisian Government is well aware of all this. Dr Chehbani and his colleagues in IRA have been researching improved traditional water and soil systems for many years. Indeed HE Abderrahman Limam, the Governor of Medenine, is implementing a policy firmly based on conservation principles, and he and the former IRA Director General Dr N. Akrimi both took part in the traveling workshop that had brought the participants to the region.

What is innovative about the current Tunisian approach is participatory improvement and two-way technology transfer. It is in this respect that ICARDA is involved. In 1990 it founded, with several national research programs, the Dryland Resource Management Project (DRMP), known, perhaps inevitably, as Drump. Drump is a story in itself (see box). But its basic function is to initiate interdisciplinary and participatory research on natural-resource management. This became linked to a broader system-wide initiative in the CGIAR, ICARDA's parent body, and it was following a conference on the subject at our sister Center, CIAT, in Colombia that the idea took hold in Tunisia. It was as part of Drump's work that the ICARDA team was there: the author, agricultural economist Dr Abelardo Rodrìguez and soil and land management specialist Dr Michael Zöbisch.

Part of Drump's work is to organize multidisciplinary work in the field, with farmer participation. And that was what was happening at Gasre Jawame last September. We didn't go there just to marvel at Mr. Najeh's olive groves. Because the farm and the Tunisian work has attracted attention, we were using it as a venue for a traveling workshop for scientists from Spain, Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Pakistan, as well as Tunisia and ICARDA.

We found ourselves in a heated but cheerful discussion between scientists, farmers and the local village head, or Omda, about cost, risk, the role of the farmer, plant/water/soil relationships and other matters. The Omda, for example, asked who was expected to pay for such systems? The regional representative from Tunisia's soil and water conservation department promptly said that a grant of up to 50% and soft loans would be made available--a demonstration of Tunisia's serious commitment to conservation work in the field, and one we found shared by the District Governor, the Mutamed, when we visited him earlier that day. However, the Tunisian team felt that some of the questions the farmers had raised required more analysis.

What is DRUMP?

Drump is DRMP--the Dryland Resource Management Project. It was set up by ICARDA in 1990 in collaboration with national scientists from countries in the West Asia/North Africa (WANA) region in order to initiate multidisciplinary and participatory research into natural-resource management. It is coordinated by ICARDA's Dr Aden Aw-Hassan, who succeeded Dr Elizabeth Bailey, the project's first coordinator and now ICARDA's Project Officer, at the end of the first five-year phase. Seed money came from ICARDA itself but also from the International Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada, the Ford Foundation and the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC).

DRMP's rationale was, first, that natural-resource management involves many factors, and that it must be multidisciplinary; second, that natural-resource management is ultimately implemented by the resource users--that is, farmers--and that they must participate in research and decision-making; and third, that scarce funds in developing countries are likely to go first to research that enhances productivity, while resource management could prove to be the loser.

Seven countries are now involved, and at least two besides Tunisia (Yemen and Lebanon) are actively pursuing this type of research. Others are held back by a lack of external funding. There is also sometimes a perception that participatory research is more expensive, but there is good evidence that this is not the case. It could be argued that, if farmers are offered technology they do not want, there is no harm done - they will simply reject it. They certainly will, but by then much time and effort has been expended. To preserve scarce natural resources with equally scarce financial resources, we need to get it right from the beginning.