Follies and Sanity of Farming Systems Research

I will now pick up the story of FSR at the point where I left it in Chapter 4. FSR was the first movement in the post-colonial era which argued that research should support the development of existing peasant agriculture, rather than trying to replace it as soon as possible by farming models from the west. It has had an enormous influence, not only on agricultural research but on agricultural development generally and, through its offshoots, on practically every other branch of development as well. So it is worth further examining how it developed and eventually became corrupted, in spite of its essential sanity.