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Participatory Technology Development and Selection with Farmers:Exploring its Role to Enhance Improved Rice Variety Adoption in Ethiopia

Adane Melak Beyene and Ayele Tesfahun Gashu

Growing dissatisfaction with agricultural technology adoption rate in resource-constrained farming systems has been observed in recent years. This low adoption rate is partially attributable to gaps in farmer engagement in technology development, where Participatory Technology Development (PTD) is assumed to be a solution. This mix of review and research articles attempts to explore the influence of participatory technology development and selection approaches on rice variety adoption. It uses both primary and secondary data. Direct matrix ranking was used to analyse primary data collected from farmers in an experiment to identify farmers’ variety preferences, while the critical review method
was used to analyse secondary data. Accordingly, our research results show that when a rice variety is being developed, breeders habitually control all steps of the technology development process, and there is little input from farmers. The levels of farmers’ participation in most of the research undertaken by the national rice program were characterized by passive participation, despite the functional participation of farmers also observed in the Variety Verification Trial (VVT) and variety validation trials. This study also reveals that practicing the PVS approach with rice varieties that are assumed to be the best performers in breeders’ eyes helps to choose highly acceptable varieties in farmers’ eyes under their complex farming system. PVS approach also backed up the limitations of the Conventional Technology Development (CTD) approach used by rice program for so long. Therefore, engaging farmers at the required position and expected level in the cycle of rice breeding stages is suggested as a promising way to accelerate rice variety adoption.