eignty comes the responsibility of conserving those unique
and irreplaceable natural resources, not only for the welfare
and agricultural development of the country but also for
humanity as a whole, which must rely on them to feed future
generations.
At the national level, this responsibility implies every
government’s duty to invest in its national agricultural research
institutions so they have the basic resources needed to
compile, maintain, characterize, and utilize their genetic resources,
both native and imported, to meet the needs of their
people and confront the problems of national, regional, and
global agriculture. At the regional and international level,
it would be advisable for all countries to become affiliated
with the multilateral system for accessing and sharing the
benefits associated with vegetable resources through FAO’s
2004 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for
Food and Agriculture.
2.4.3 Soils
AKST system advances regarding soils have gone through
several historical and mutually interrelated stages in LAC
that have made it possible to advance and systematize
knowledge about edapho-biodiversity. Before the 1960s,
regional research focused on aspects of taxonomy, fertility,
and valuation for cadastral purposes. Then there was a
turn toward fertility, management, and conservation studies.
During the 1980s, experts introduced research at the
watershed level for land use management purposes, with
the subsequent development of Landscape Ecology Theory
(LET), leading to ecological-economic zoning. In the 1990s,
research regarding plant nutrition moved toward the impact
of applying fertilizers and pesticides to the soil, their
effects on microbial biomass, and their dynamics. At present
a great deal of work is being carried out in soil biology
based on molecular techniques and working with DNA and
RNA to inventory mezzo-organisms and microorganisms
Another field of activity relates to ethnotaxonomies and
traditional soil-management techniques, an outstanding example
being the case of the Pacha Mama, or Mother Earth,
ritual in the Andes.
2.4.4 The social variable
From the 1950s until the end of the 1970s, AKST systems
directed their efforts at boosting agricultural productivity in
response to the need to produce more food at a lower cost.
This was accomplished through the development of technology
packages that, due to their characteristics, achieved
their best results in large landholdings but provided few
benefits to poor farmers with lower levels of organization,
or to Afro-American and indigenous communities (Piñeiro
and Trigo, 1983).
The need to respond effectively to local demands, mainly
from farmers who benefited the least from the technology
transfer models that characterized the agricultural modernization
phase described in the previous section, led to the
first attempts to regionalize AKST (Piñeiro and Florentino,
1977; Trigo et al., 1982). This reflects a changing perception
of the role and effects of technology on the economic organization
of society (Valdés et al., 1979; Gilbert et al., 1980;
Norman, 1980; Trigo et al., 1981).
Later, in the 1980s and especially from the nineties
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onward, the social changes that occurred as a result of urban
growth required the agricultural sector to develop new
technologies associated with more advanced linkages of
the production chain such as postharvest handling and
storage, improving the quality of the final product and
the strengthening the industrialization of agricultural producers.
To respond to these new demands, AKST system
institutes began to rethink their objectives. However, according
to Lindarte (1997), NARIs and extension services
have not achieved significant results in this respect, possibly
due to constraints in the development model, the interests
that govern institutional structures, or a lack of conceptual
clarity regarding the direction and implementation of the
necessary changes.
Lindarte (1997) also emphasizes the importance of incorporating
different stakeholders involved in the process
of technology generation. This is evident in the growing involvement
of private sector representatives and those from
producers’ organizations, foundations, and NGOs in national
research institutes, and also in the development of
technology transfer programs such as Cambio Rural, implemented
by INTA in Argentina, and other experiences carried
out by EMBRAPA in Brazil and INIA in Chile (Cetrángolo,
1992). The limitations of this new approach are mostly due
to the lack of new and appropriate forms of social and cultural
integration (Lindarte, 1997).
2.4.5 Policies
The performance of AKST systems, the focus of research
and, in particular, the incorporation of innovations, are
conditioned by the general public policy context, and are
not only limited to specific aspects of AKST. In most LAC
countries, the relatively high contribution of agriculture to
GNP and employment generation in the second half of the
20th century pushed production, rural development, and
food self-sufficiency policies toward the top of the agendas
of governments, cooperation programs and international
development agencies. From the 1950s to the 1980s, these
agendas contemplated a broad range of rural development
policies and programs with active participation by governments
in financing production and the physical infrastructure
needed to support both production and marketing.
Governments also implemented policies on land-use and
irrigation, intervened in commodity and input markets, introduced
measures to protect agricultural trade (through
the application of tariffs and other quantitative limits on
imports), and implemented initiatives to support research
and development.
During that period, public policies emphasized the generation
and transfer of technology, strengthening the human
and financial resources of specialized public institutions and
paving the way for the creation of NARIs. In some countries,
particularly the larger ones, the activities undertaken
by these institutions and the favorable policy context played
a significant role in boosting productivity and agricultural
production in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. However, they
did not have a similar affect on reducing rural poverty, nor
did they pay much attention to the conservation of natural
resources and the environment.
Ample evidence suggests that the sustained and sustainable
growth of agricultural production and, in consequence,
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