Communication, Media, and Development Policy

Talk with the People!

Forget the platitudes. When it comes to a choice between the scientifically gathered/developed knowledge of a group of academics in a [so-called] developed country University or company lab and the locally gathered/developed knowledge of a group of peasant farmers in a [so-called] developing country, no book-maker anywhere in the world would even offer odds. Sorry, no bets on this one. The Uni and Lab academics win by even more than the proverbial country mile.

Which, as any development communicator knows, would be a very big mistake. The problem is that there is very little provable information to back up the assertion that consistently overlooking local knowledge in development planning is a big mistake. We all have oodles of anecdotal stories. But a good provable story on an important development issue can be hard to find.

As someone who is new-technology challenged and runs a new-technology dependent process, I try to read some of the relevant literature. And there in the pages of Wired magazine [November 2004] was a great story of the little guy with no education winning over the [so-called] scientifically savvy. Sadly, no story is perfect. Many will argue that in this little parable the wrong people are winning. The peasant poppy growers in Colombia are hardly mythical heroes but some of them do appear to be outsmarting the international anti-drug forces.

When looked at from a communication perspective this story makes for an even more compelling case to drop the platitudes and pay serious and significant attention to local knowledge. If a network of local farmers under very serious pressure from all directions - druglords to keep supplying [the Drugs Trade] and international agencies to stop supplying [the War on Drugs] - can draw on traditional and local knowledge, communicated and refined down the generations, to keep growing coca even though their lands have been "fumigated" with a powerful herbicide, then surely local knowledge all over the world can be more effectively incorporated for positive development goals.

So, what happened? According to the Wired article - and we have no reason to doubt it - Colombia's government and it’s European and North American partners have been using glysophate, an herbicide, to extensively spray, as part of the "War on Drugs", the coca crops grown by so many small-time Colombian farmers. Over the last three years a new strain of coca began to appear - one with more leaves and full resistance to glysophate. In the article, they refer to its various names - supercoca, la millonaria, Boliviana negra. This resistance ensures that no amount of spraying will kill the crop. It is immune to a major strategic component of the "War on Drugs".

Of course the key question is "how did this happen?" The author - Joshua Davis - highlights two possibilities.

Either:

"The coca plant may have been genetically modified in a lab."

Or:

"The farmers of the region may have used selective breeding to develop a hardier strain of coca. If a plant happened to demonstrate herbicide resistance, it would be more widely cultivated and clippings would be either sold or, in many cases, given away or even stolen by other farmers. Such a peer-to-peer network could, over time, result in a coca crop that can withstand large scale aerial spraying campaigns."

I have already given away the plot...

Following his exhaustive [and somewhat dangerous] enquiry, Joshua Davis concludes that it was the latter: "...the farmers decentralized system of disseminating coca cuttings has been amazingly effective - more so than genetic engineering could hope to be." Farmer networks, the passing of knowledge [grafting, selective breeding, etc] from generation-to-generation and amongst farmers of the same generation, peer support to review and improve the relevant knowledge and skills, dialogue and debate about the best ways forward given the new circumstance [glysophate killing their crops], innovation and creativity, all at the local level, based on local knowledge and communication processes, have significantly challenged the might of the "War on Drugs" infrastructure and power.

The rights and wrongs of that are for another day. Our focus is on how this reveals, in a very stark and impactful manner, the power and role of local knowledge for effective development communication processes. In this provable and demonstrable case it is coca that is the subject of attention. But, we have seen similar instances from wife inheritance and thigh sex related to HIV/AIDS to mushroom selection and pastoral practices in agriculture. Local knowledge is crucial.

As one of the farmers quoted in the article said, "They [us - those involved in development] do not talk to the people who live here. We are the ones who are sprayed. We are the ones who live with the plants." It is possible to take any development issue that you might want to select and substitute the appropriate words for "sprayed" and "plants" and voila! - a mantra for effective development communication, and by extension effective development practice, would be revealed.

"We are the ones who..."


"We are the ones who live with..."

Science will only get you so far. You gotta talk with the people!

Warren Feek
wfeek@comminit.com
February 17 2005

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