FAO Support For Farmer Field Schools in Asia
The first IPM Farmer Field Schools were designed and managed in 1989 by experts working for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Indonesia. This was not, however, the first attempt made by FAO to extend IPM techniques to farmers in South East Asia.
The FAO Intercountry Programme for the Development and Application of Integrated Pest Control in Rice in South and South-East Asia started in 1980, building on the experience of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and Bureau of Plant Industry in the Philippines. Over the following two decades the Intercountry Programme (ICP) played a leading role in the promotion of rice IPM in Asia, giving rise to numerous other projects and programmes. By the time of completion in 2002, the ICP had a cumulative budget of $45 million, which had been spent on training activities in 12 countries (Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam).
The ICP was not the only IPM programme supported by FAO during this period. Essential to the development of the FFS was a National IPM Programme in Indonesia, which ran between 1989 and 2000, funded by the United States ($ 25 million grant), World Bank ($ 37 million loan) and the Government ($ 14 million) . FAO provided technical assistance to the National IPM Programme through a team of experts based in Indonesia, with back-stopping from the ICP. National projects were also developed and supported by FAO on a smaller scale in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China and Nepal. Additionally, the ICP launched ‘spin-off’ regional programmes focusing on IPM in cotton and vegetables. In total, during the 15-year period between 1989 and 2004, approximately $100 million in grants were allocated to IPM projects in Asia that used the FFS approach under the guidance of FAO
Read more about this topic: Farmer Field School
Famous quotes containing the words support, farmer, field, schools and/or asia:
“They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women ... [they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not “need” the power to limit the development of others.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“[N]o combination of dictator countries of Europe and Asia will halt us in the path we see ahead for ourselves and for democracy.... The people of the United States ... reject the doctrine of appeasement.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)