Indigenous Agriculture

Indigenous agriculture encompasses agricultural practices and techniques that are unique to a given culture and society and has evolved from place-bound tradition. In practice, it is often more diverse, complex, and risk-prone than both industrialized and green revolution agriculture. The concept may refer to the agricultural practices of groups that claim status as indigenous people, but it is not usually so restricted. While farmers often experiment and innovate, the invention of new agricultural implements and the domestication of new cultivars are not very common occurrences, and successful innovations are often diffused widely. “Indigenous” may thus refer more to local control over knowledge and technology than to origin. The debate on the virtues and relevance of indigenous agriculture focuses on the developing world and is related to a wider debate on indigenous knowledge and its relevance in development. There is also a question of how indigenous agriculture, which has not been the focus of science-based advances in agriculture, can be best assisted. Furthermore, there is considerable interest in indigenous agriculture as a basis for an alternative development that is environmentally sound, less dependent on external input, and locally controlled. While research has documented a range of practices and techniques, differing views on indigenous agriculture persist among scientists and peasant groups.

Under the dominant modernization paradigm, smallholder agricultural practice in the tropics is seen as traditional and static. Today, the objective is to transform or replace the practice of resource-poor “traditional agriculture” with “modern agriculture” through standardized green revolution packages of monoculture, including hybrid seed, agrochemicals, mechanization, and irrigation. In the transformation approach, this dichotomy is emphasized, and tradition in agriculture is seen mainly as a problem to be overcome through technology transfer. Resource poverty, and the lack of capital investment and inputs, leads to poor efficiency in agriculture, and the lack of innovation is seen as a key problem. The Green Revolution from the 1960s onward has led to substantial increases in the output of [Page 1556]rice and wheat, for instance, in India. However, criticisms have focused on environmental sustainability, resilience, increased dependence on inputs, and social impacts. The focus on increasing yield per acre for a few selected crops has resulted in significantly less research being carried out on other crops and on more complex and diverse farming systems.

Locals water beds as they implement new farming methods near Andranolava, Madagascar, on December 14, 2007. Much of the land on the edge of the rain forests has been ruined through slash-and-burn agriculture techniques.

Source: AP Photo/Joana Coutinho, Mantadia Corridor Restoration and Conservation Project.

An alternative outlook emerged in the 1980s, when indigenous agriculture was viewed more as an underused resource and less as an obstacle to rural development. Inspiration was drawn from cultural ecology and from agrarian populism. Paul Richards, drawing on research in West Africa, argued that cultivators’ reluctance to adopt modern scientific advice should not be viewed as a stubborn refusal to change but rather as an unwillingness to accept inappropriate methods. He argued that while technology transfer through dramatic modernization had a poor track record in the region, the most successful innovations in food crop production had indigenous roots. In cases where he found that scientific advice had often failed and peasant farmers were often successful, this was explained through a positive, inquisitive, and experimental approach on the part of the indigenous peasant rather than through an unchanging inherited knowledge base. The peasants were better able to estimate the simultaneous effect of several variables and [Page 1557]to adopt and adapt technology selectively. D. Michael Warren, David Brokensha, and other researchers have sought to document and disseminate indigenous knowledge in agriculture as taxonomies, techniques, and farmers’ innovations in order to mobilize an underused resource in development. Under the “farmer first” paradigm, Robert Chambers and colleagues called for increased learning from smallholder practice in diverse and risk-prone resource-poor agriculture and a more creative interaction between scientists and farmers in the development of agriculture. This approach would involve a reversal of the learning process inherent in technology transfer to better serve the needs of complex, risk-prone, and diverse farming systems.

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