Innovations to Promote Growth among Small-scale Irrigators in Africa: An Ethnographic and Knowledge-Exchange Approach

如果政策制定者要促进当今大多数发展中国家的经济增长（这些国家的经济仍然高度集中在农业上），他们必须在两个持续的趋势中选择支持哪一个。在撒哈拉以南非洲，选择尤其明显，那里适合种植的土地和水资源稀缺，气候变化正在进行中，加剧了人口膨胀造成的短缺。他们可以赞同新殖民主义的趋势，允许外国公司获得最好的土地和水，以便完全为了出口而大量持有。或者，它们可以培养现有社区的小农户和灌溉者的能力，使他们能够种植作物供家庭生存，同时生产剩余的作物，甚至其他特殊的经济作物，在国内和国际市场上销售。拟议的研究将试图通过鼓励创新来实现后者，这是一项新的努力，旨在加强当地的粮食安全，同时增加现金收入和促进市场增长。其目的是提高家庭和社区为这两个目的进行生产的能力，同时也适应气候变化，方法是推广提高基本资源、特别是水的利用效率的技术。这些技术包括“硬”和“软”类型，新的和旧的，已经被坦桑尼亚，马拉维和孟加拉国某些地区的农民采用，这些地区的动态灌溉社区将成为拟议的研究地点。这项研究将首先在三个选定的村庄从人种学的角度探讨这些地方适应措施，然后赞助一个在其用水群体之间进行相互知识交流的方案。通过后者，该项目将寻求扩大居住在每个地方的农民的选择，从而以无法预测但可以仔细观察的方式影响变革的方向和速度。这项研究本身具有很大价值，因为它是对适应新兴农村市场和气候变化的比较研究，还将在参与性发展领域开辟新天地。

If policy-makers are to foster growth in most developing countries today, where economies remain heavily focused on agriculture, they must choose which of two ongoing trends to support. The choice is especially clear in sub-Saharan Africa, where suitable land and water for cultivation are scarce and where climate change is underway, compounding the shortages caused by population expansion. They can endorse the neocolonial trend of allowing foreign corporations to acquire the best land and water in order to work large holdings entirely for export. Or they can nurture the capacity of small farmers and irrigators in existing communities to grow crops for household subsistence while also producing a surplus, or even other special cash crops, for sale in domestic and international markets. The proposed research would attempt to do the latter by encouraging innovation, in a novel effort to enhance local food security while increasing cash incomes and fostering market growth. The aim is to increase the capacity of households and communities to produce for both purposes while also adapting to climate change, by promoting technologies that improve the efficiency with which basic resources are utilized, particularly water. These technologies-including both 'hard' and 'soft' types, new ones as well as old-have been adopted by farmers in certain parts of Tanzania, Malawi, and Bangladesh, in dynamic irrigation communities that would be sites of the proposed research. The study would first explore these local adaptations ethnographically in three selected villages, and then sponsor a programme of reciprocal knowledge exchange between their water-user groups. By means of the latter, the project would seek to expand the options available to the farmers residing in each place, thereby influencing--in ways that cannot be predicted but can be carefully observed--the direction and pace of change. Of great value in its own right, as a comparative study of adaptations to emerging rural markets and to climate change, the research would also break new ground in the field of participatory development.