Adoption of new technologies is not an end in itself for agricultural researchers, policymakers, or people who employ them in farming or managing natural resources. Rather the outcome of technological change should be evaluated in terms of their contribution to broader goals of sustainable development (Knox et al. 2002b). Although there may be trade- offs between agricultural productivity growth, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability, all are necessary and interlinked.
The potential of agroforestry to rehabilitate degraded land, and to conserve soil and water on the working lands of the tropics, has long been recognized. For example, Izac (2003) points out that soil nutrients and trees are part of natural capital, and natural capital generates ecosystem services which are the processes ensuring productivity, integrity, maintenance and resilience of ecosystems. Ecosystem services generated by soil nutrients include enhancement of nutrient cycles, soil fertility, plant nutrition and carbon sequestration. The ecosystem services generated by agroforestry trees include, for instance, erosion control, water cycling, pest and disease control, and biodiversity. While farmers may be quite indifferent to some of these benefits or ecosystem services, other members of society do value sustainability of food production and biodiversity and there is an international market for sequestered carbon. These environmental externalities associated with agroforestry systems and soil nutrients indicate that what is an optimal level of adoption of agroforestry practices from the viewpoint of farmers is a sub-optimal level of adoption from the perspective of national and global society. Therefore, the extent of agroforestry practices voluntarily adopted by farmers will almost certainly be inferior to that which is socially optimal. Izac (2003) continues by saying that it will not be optimal or effective or equitable to expect resource-poor small-scale farmers in tropical countries to bear the full costs of adoption, while national and global societies receive significant benefits from this adoption. The same argument is voiced by Garrity (2004) who highlights that it cannot be assumed that conservation investments will be attractive to farmers simply because they are known to protect their resource base. The challenge is to make them profitable to adopt. According to Knox et al. (2002), this is possible through the appreciation of less tangible economic and social dynamics, which broadens the scope of technologies deemed to be productivity- improving so that they are less biased toward concepts of efficiency that consider only physical inputs and a narrow range of outputs. Izac (2003) argues that policy measures will be needed to bridge the gap between individual and societal benefits and between individual costs and societal benefits.
Box 2-1: Summary of Fundamentals of Diffusion and Adoption
The objective of our literature review on fundamentals of diffusion and adoption was to obtain a better understanding of the dynamics of adoption and the critical factors that determine whether farmers accept, do not accept, or partially accept innovations. The review permitted us to focus our further investigation on key issues that are likely to affect adoption of the proposed agroforestry technologies by resource-poor farmers in our study sites.
Adoption can be described as an innovation-decision process, consisting of five stages: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation, leading to a decision to make full use of an innovation. The most common way of measuring adoption is through the use of binary variables indicating current presence or not of the technology on a farm. Sometimes it may be sufficient to report on the proportion of farmers using the technology, whereas in other cases quantifying the level of adoption is necessary. It may also be useful to incorporate evidence of prior expansion or farmers’ willingness to expand the technology in addition to current use.
Adoption follows a S-shaped curve in which there is slow initial growth of the new technology, followed by a more rapid increase and then a slowing down as the cumulative proportion of adoption approaches its maximum. This in fact reflects a learning process. There is variation in the slope of the ‘S’ from innovation to innovation. Some ideas diffuse relatively rapidly, in which case the S-curve is rather steep. The rate of adoption can be explained by (1) perceived attributes of innovations (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, triability and observability); (2) type of innovation-decisions (optional, collective or authority); (3) communication channels; (4) nature of the social system; and (5) extent of change agents’ promotion efforts.
Factors affecting adoption of agroforestry practices can be grouped in three categories: (1) characteristics of potential adopters, (2) the nature of the innovation and (3) the way in which the innovation is communicated.
We identified a number of characteristics of potential adopters as key factors to agroforestry technology adoption in the literature. Labour, both the amount and the timing, is often a bottleneck in the adoption of agroforestry technologies. Although they are crucial to adoption - particularly when the proposed technology is complex due to its composite nature, the new tasks it introduces and its multiple outputs - intra-household dimensions and gender-aspects are often overlooked. The mistake that is often made here is to consider women as a homogenous group, whereas there are clear differences in autonomy of decision making between for example single women and female heads that are married. Lack of secure property rights, and unclear or overlapping land tenure are also important barriers to adoption, particularly for long-term investments. In addition, rights to trees and their products may be held separately form the land they grow on and also depend on how the
although it is obvious that farmers with control over substantial resources (esp. land and labour) and less constrained by food insecurity are able to bear risks associated with trying out new technologies and will place a higher value on medium and long-term benefits. Because adoption of new technologies often requires high investment costs, access to credit has been a key determinant in the rate and success of technology adoption in many cases. More generally, access to rural financial services can provide important incentives to invest in improved land-use practices; both directly through availability of liquidity and indirectly through reduced uncertainty. Finally, the adoption of innovations seems to be higher for farmers belonging to farmer associations. This is because farmer associations disseminate information and serve as a forum for exchange and learning. Group agroforestry plots can also serve as demonstration units to members. Moreover, adoption of technologies that require lumpy investments can be facilitated by collective action, whereas some natural resource management practices require farmers to make joint decisions and cooperate in implementing them.
The first and foremost requirement for an innovation is that it should be economically and financially superior to the current farming system. However, whilst yield per hectare is the best index of productivity where land is the most limiting factor, technologies that give higher returns to labour will have greater perceived advantage in labour-scarce economies. Unfortunately, profitability of many agroforestry technologies is limited by high up-front costs and benefits that only occur some time in future. Moreover, part of the agroforestry benefits stem from reductions in resource degradation (e.g. soil erosion) or other such indirect benefits, which reduces the observability. Several studies have demonstrated the importance of compatibility of agroforestry innovations with existing land-use systems. Their adoption is further enhanced when they build on indigenous knowledge and existing practices. Another predictor of agroforestry adoption is simplicity of the technology in terms of management and number of components. The complexity of a technology will reduce the quality of implementation by farmers, which in turn, decreases the effectiveness.
Finally, the way in which the innovation is communicated considerably affects adoption. Existing literature states that agroforestry extension is rarely included in government programmes, whereas NGOs do not share extension material and strategies with researchers, nor do they give feedback or reasons for failure or success. Farmer-to-farmer dissemination is usually highly effective, but careful selection of farmers as change agents and trainers is critical. In other cases, inappropriate policy discourages farmers from planting trees or adopting natural resource management practices.
At last, adoption of new technologies is not an end in itself, but should be evaluated in terms of their contribution to broader goals of sustainable development. One crucial aspect of agroforestry is its potential to rehabilitate degraded land, and to conserve soil and water. On the other hand, because farmers are usually quite indifferent to some of these ecosystem services, their spontaneous level of adoption will almost certainly be lower to that which is socially optimal. It would, however, not be fair to expect resource-poor farmers in tropical countries to bear the full costs of adoption, while national and global societies receive significant benefits from this adoption. Therefore, policy measures will be needed to bridge this gap.