Investment in agricultural extension, as well as its design and practice, are usually based on the assumption that agricultural science generates technology (“applied science“), which extension experts transfer to “users“. This model negates local knowledge and creativity, ignores farmers' self-confidence and social energy as important sources of change, and, in its most linear expression, does not pay attention to information from and about farmers as a condition for anticipating utilization.In practice, farmers rely on knowledge developed by farmers, reinvent ideas brought (...) from outside and actively integrate them into complex farming decisions. Effective extension seems based on checks and balances that match intervention power with farmers' countervailing power, and mobilize farmers' creativity and participation in technology development and exchange.Alternative models for informing extension investment, design, and practice stress adult learning and its facilitation. The farmer is seen as an expert and farm development as driven by farmers' energy and communication. The article is a case study of a rare large scale attempt to use such an alternative model. It suggests that a shift to knowledgeintensive sustainable practices requires a learning process based on participation and empowerment. (shrink)

The paper investigates the characteristics of the global restructuring of the agricultural and food system that has occurred in recent years. Emphasis is placed on the emergence of the “Food and Natural Resource Question” and its relation to the “Agrarian Question.” It is argued that rather than being separate issues, these are two aspects of a unified process occurring at the global level. Moreover, it is argued that the transnational unity of the agrarian question and the food question mandates a (...) reconstruction of the arena within which production takes place. This phenomenon in turn generates a set of limits to domestic political institutions and locally generated social demands. The implications of the emergence of the international arena as locus of political action is discussed vis-a-vis the local level of socio-political action. (shrink)