2. Debido Proceso en la justicia sin rostro
2.3 Respeto al juez natural del imputado
Streak Disease
Cassava BSD was first recognized in the SC/Mozambique project area in 1998, under the predecessor SC Title II emergency program, but the real magnitude of the problem was not fully understood until 1999. A number of BSD-tolerant varieties were discovered in Mozambique, which probably helped shorten the dissemination process, but testing them, multiplying them in project-run nurseries under controlled conditions, and distributing the cuttings to farmer groups for further multiplication and dissemination also took a number of years. But, by 2006, according to estimates provided in the SC final evaluation, up to 45,000 households in the SC project area were growing some BSD-tolerant varieties. Source: SC/Mozambique Final Evaluation (Sullivan and Selvester, 2006, pp. 9–12).
Latin America,74 explains how new ideas are spread
by different communication channels over time. Innovators in a community, who are likely to be leaders, are the first to try out a new technology or idea, followed by early adopters. Their early adoption can help pave the way for others in a community—poorer farmers, for example—that may be more reluctant to try out new practices because they have fewer assets and need additional assurances about the value of the new technologies. These innovations are perceived as risky; to
overcome this risk, most people seek other people like themselves that have already adopted the new idea.
According to the diffusion literature, the adoption of an innovation usually follows a normal, bell- shaped curve when plotted over time on a frequency basis (see Figure 4.2), with successive groups of farmers adopting the new technologies/practices and the cumulative number of adopters represented by the “S” curve. Not all innovations diffuse at the same rate over time, however. Some are more popular and diffuse more rapidly (producing a steeper “S” curve), and others diffuse more slowly.75
Professional change agents, agricultural extension agents, for example, also have a role to play in this process, especially in the earlier stages of the adoption process, and the extent of a change agent’s promotion efforts in diffusing an innovation affects the rate at which an innovation is adopted.
According to diffusion experts, relative advantage, which is a ratio of the expected benefits and costs from adopting an innovation, is one of the strongest predictors of the rate at which an innovation is adopted. “The greater the perceived relative advantage of an innovation, the more rapid its rate
74 A 1981 World Bank-sponsored survey of the literature
focusing on the adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries included a comment that the “volume of such published research is overwhelming” (Feder, 1981).
75 The rate of adoption is the relative speed with which an
innovation is adopted by members of a social system. It is generally measured as the number of individuals that adopt a new idea in a specified period, such as a year. So the rate of adoption is a numerical indicator of the steepness of the adoption curve for an innovation (Rogers, 2003, p. 221).
of adoption will be.”76 Economic profitability is
a key component of relative advantage, but low initial cost, a decrease in discomfort, social prestige, savings of time and effort, and the immediacy of award have also been shown to be important factors in getting people to change their behaviors (Rogers, 2003, p. 233). These factors help explain the speed of the uptake of the high-yielding varieties that were introduced as part of the Green Revolution in Asia that were adopted at exceptionally rapid rates in those areas where they were technically and economically superior to local varieties according to Ruttan (1977). According to Haggblade and Hazel, several case studies included in an IFPRI-supposed assessment of “Successes in African Agriculture” also “demonstrate that farmers can respond with alacrity when clearly superior new technology arrives together with financially attractive market outlets” (2010, p. 332).
The FAFSA-2 universe also includes a number of examples of new technologies and practices that
76 Other key characteristics of innovations, as perceived by
individuals, which help explain their differential rates of adoption include: compatibility, i.e., the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters; complexity, i.e., the degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to understand and use; trialability, i.e., the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis; and observability, i.e., the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others (Rogers, 2003).
Figure 4.2. Diffusion of Innovation
Innovators 2.5% Early Adoptors 13.5% Early Majority 34% Market share % Laggards 16% Late Majority 34% 100 75 50 25 0 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Rogers.
4-12 Agriculture, Natural Resource Management, Livelihoods, Income Generation
were adopted relatively quickly, including several that did not have a relative advantage when they were first introduced to the Title II clients. One example of the latter involved a number of Bolivian fruit growers that did not begin to adopt the improved technologies and practices that SC/Bolivia was promoting until SC introduced them to a new set of buyers that were willing to pay considerably higher prices for better-quality fruit. This changed the farmers’ calculations: the SC-promoted technologies and practices were profitable once farmers were able to sell into this new market, which led to a rapid increase in their adoption in a relatively short period of time (see Box 4.7 and Section 4.3.2.5 on “Marketing” and Section 4.5.1.1 on “Market-Driven Programs”).
Constraints to Technology Adoption
Providing farmers with information about new technologies and practices does not guarantee that they learn the messages, however, and knowing about these new technologies and practices does not mean that farmers are going to change their behaviors and start using them or continue to use them. Knowledge, in other words, is different from practice. Still, during the FAFSA-2 time period, most Awardees did not appear to be spending much time trying to understand why some practices that they were recommending were not adopted and others were.
Some of the more likely constraints to
technology adoption in the Title II programs are discussed next.77
77 A 1981 survey of the adoption of agricultural
innovations in developing countries focused on several potential constraints to adoption, including farm size, land tenure, labor availability, credit, risk and uncertainty, human capital, and sociological factors, finding conflicting conclusions across countries and regions along with methodological problems (Feder, 1981). A more recent survey of the adoption of agricultural technologies in developing countries focused on the role of market inefficiencies in input and output, land, labor, credit risk, and information markets, and recommended further research on the barriers to agricultural technology adoption using randomized control trials (Jack, 2011).