Two weeks ago we read about the banana growers of the Chapare, in Bolivia. One of their problems was black Sigatoka, an introduced fungal disease first documented in Fiji. Sigatoka attacks the banana leaves, killing them and sometimes the plant. Fruit losses can be devastating.

In 2003, a large, USAID-funded project was doing participatory research with farmers in the Chapare. Researchers and extensionists visited the fruit-growing associations and selected farmers willing to have an experimental trial on their land.

In the standard method, researchers establish a block on each farm, with several “replicates� of each treatment. But here they did it differently; each farm would be a replicate, with just one example of each of the treatments. This made the experiment easier for the farmers to manage, and easier for visitors to appreciate the difference between the four treatments and the control group.

Twenty five farmers replicated different combinations of fungicides and pruning (cutting off the diseased parts of the leaves). The control group was left up to the farmers, who were supposed to conduct their normal activities. Implicitly, the researchers expected the farmers to handle the control group like any ordinary piece of commercial banana land. The whole experiment with its 25 replicates would be evaluated statistically.

I didn’t design the experiment, but I liked it, because it seemed to have the right balance of scientific rigor and real-life flexibility. But when the statistician ran the numbers, he was shocked. The treatment with the least disease and the most bananas turned out to be the farmer control group.

When the farmers had heard the researchers talking about a “farmer’s control,� the smallholder banana growers went out of their way to beat the scientists. Some farmers were able to site their control group on the land most recently cleared from the forest. All of the farmers were learning as they went along. Instead of lamely repeating their actions of the previous year, they adapted as they went along. They learned from the researchers’ treatments, and applied fungicides in the farmer control, and carefully removed the dead leaves from the plants.

The farmers had creatively incorporated new ideas immediately, in the first year of the experiment. As Paul Richards said years ago, agriculture is a performance. And a performance can be turned into a competition. In this case the researchers had some initial frustration when they saw the numbers going in unexpected directions, but in the end, everyone won, because they still grow bananas in the Chapare.

Further Reading

Bentley, Jeffery 2003 Desarrollo Participativo de Tecnología en el Trópico de Cochabamba. Report for Development Alternatives.