Shaping co-innovation for more effective farmer engagement by farming systems scientists: an illustration from Latin America

Smallholders in emerging economies such as those in Latin America who are producing for markets are easily caught in a vicious cycle of unsustainability. Decreasing prices of agricultural products and rising prices of inputs caused declines in family income over the past two decades. The typical farmers’ response was to increase the intensity of production by increasing input application and share of cash crops, and by taking up farming on marginal parts of their land. This intensification used substantial inputs of labor and capital and often resulted in resource base degradation which in turn negatively impacted on productivity. A major cause of this downward spiral we argue is that the adaptation of farmers to changing conditions is mostly incremental, short-term oriented and only rarely involves strategic re-design of their rural livelihood strategies as a whole. As a result, livelihoods become locked-in on unsustainable development tracks. Alternative developmental tracks are possible when socio-economic improvements are combined with improved natural resource use. Systems thinking provides the means to explore consequences of changes in systems management to reveal conflicts between alternatives and to provide directions for promising development tracks. To date, only few positive experiences have been reported where systems approaches have directly supported strategic farmer decision processes. Economically and agro-ecologically diversified livelihood options do not come as validated technology packages waiting to be adopted by farmers. Researchers can play a role in supporting the innovativeness of resource users. Researchers themselves learn by being able to analyze the many experiments that farm practices represent. This collective learning process, we argue needs to be embedded in project design, and monitoring and evaluation tools should be mobilized and developed to allow continuous adjustments in project activities. (Complex) systems approaches, continuous project monitoring and learning facilitation are the key constituents of a ‘co-innovation’ approach developed in the European-Latin American Co-innovation of Agricultural Systems (EULACIAS; INCO-CT-2006-032387) project. Here we describe the approach and its constituents, based on experiences in ongoing case studies in Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay.