| Property | Value |
| Name | The Impact of Farmer Participatory Research on Biodiversity of Crops |
| Description | Witcombe, J.R. and A. Joshi. 1997. The Impact of Farmer Participatory Research on Biodiversity of Crops. IN: Using Diversity: Enhancing and Maintaining Genetic Resources On-Farm. L. Sperling and M. Loevinsohn (Eds). IDRC 1, ISBN 0-88936-833-3.Farmers are increasingly participating in agricultural research as scientists and development workers become more aware of the philosophy of 'farmer first and its effectiveness. Many farmer participatory approaches are possible in farmer participatory research for improved crop cultivars by farmers. They should be broadly categorized into farmer participatory varietal selection (PVS) and farmer participatory plant breeding (PPB) since they conveniently define two approaches that are very different, and are likely to have very different impacts. Methods are reviewed in PVS and PPB that employ differing levels of farmer participation and researcher inputs. Depending on the situation, either PVS or PPB can be the most appropriate method to use. PPB often follows from the successful participatory identification of cultivars. Although both PVS and PPB can increase biodiversity found in farmers fields, PPB has the greatest effect. Indeed, if PPB is used with the maximum possible involvement of farmers using material generated from landrace x exotic crosses then it represents a dynamic form of in situ genetic conservation. This method is likely to have the greatest impact on conserving biodiversity. Little attention has been paid to the impact of farmer participatory research on biodiversity. In the published examples on participatory plant breeding (Salazar, 1992 and Worede and Mekbib, 1993) the idea of preserving biodiversity has been in the mind of the researchers, and there has been emphasis on improving landraces or using them as parents. The issue of biodiversity has hardly been considered in the work on PVS. In this paper, work and results are reported in PVS and, to a lesser extent, in PPB of the Crops Programme of the Krishak Bharati Cooperative Indo British Rainfed Farming Project (KRIBP). |
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