Empowerment of Farmers at the Center of Agricultural Development

Abstract: This multiple case study investigates how technology choice and market access, as components of agricultural extension services, contribute to the empowerment of farmers in the Banke District of Nepal and in the state of Virginia in the United States. My ‘empowerment’ analytical framework is inspired by Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom concept. The research methodology is rooted in qualitative inquiry and review of secondary literature. The fieldwork included semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with farmers, a questionnaire with NGO community extension agents in Nepal, as well as semi-structured interviews with state extension agents in the United States. In Nepal, agricultural extension provided by the NGO Practical Action stresses technologies that rely on outside inputs, which create an element of disempowerment. The focus on market access and linking farmers to various local marketplaces empowers farmers. Training Local Resource Persons as extension agents to bridge the gap between the weak state extension system and the poor communities is the right approach for empowering farming communities. In the US, it is troubling to see that the state extension service’s resource, the land grand university, works closely with those companies who greatly profit financially from the high-input technologies, which have come to dominate the agricultural sector. Farmers are tied to these input technologies and they have become disempowered through the technology treadmill and the increasing global market, over which they have little control. With the goal of empowerment of farmers in mind, policies and intervention can be created and instilled in the institutional structures of organizations that will promote a more holistic agriculture in the future.