Abstract

Entitled: Mutational  Commitment and Doctrine of Extension  for   Sustainable Agriculture Development  in Third Millennium

Authors:Sharifi Moghadam, Mohammad

(Executor and Coordinator of Iran's IPM/FFS   Nation project)

This article, by making use of practical experiences and lessons learned from national projects of "Farmers participation in sustainable agriculture development in Iran", tries to introduce a extensional  model in communication process for sustainable agriculture development in local community  in  developing countries  as iran  that  called IPCM. This project has been implemented in collaboration with international organizations such as FAO, UNDP and APO since 2002 in more than 400 pilot sites (villages) in 22 provinces of Iran. The outstanding results and effectiveness of the project, in three aspects of social, economic and agro-ecosystem, made extension department in  Iran's ministry of Jihad-e-Agriculture to approve this model and develop as a general guideline to be implemented as a national plan across 31 provinces of the country in 2008 .This article tries to provide the conceptual and practical framework, indicators and practical elements of the model. It should be noted that this model emphasizes on communicational mechanism in agriculture. One of the important models in sustainable development process is communication cycle, especially in technology and new findings transfer process at local and farmer level. After green revolution and industrial development in agricultural sector when chemical products, new seed varieties, new irrigation technologies and modern machineries were introduced, till now that making use of genetically modified crops, chemical hormones and synthesized chemicals publicized, the role of this model became more obvious.In agricultural development process the principals and main resources of communication are called agricultural information system. This system consists of 4 elements including research, extension, education and farmer.

A survey on development approaches and models since 1950's  showed that till 1980's the communication process has been mostly
top-down and based on a one-way technology transfer mechanism . This kind of insight towards communication, particularly in developing countries like Iran that most of the farming systems were formed in rural areas and more than 80% of the production system were based on this system, made the most of the technology and findings transfer efforts unsuccessful. Another survey on some development models based on this framework showed that developing programs and plans base on this insight was a mere  waste of time and money and these programs were not led to a sustainable development . Moreover they caused some new crisis in environment, natural resources and ecology of the target area. Making use of these outdated communication mechanism in some developing countries resulted in distrust among farmers, refusing findings and technologies as well as simple advises from experts. Today making use of communication models based on top-down mechanism for transferring technologies and research findings could not be successful, since current agriculture is affected from agro-ecological factors as well as market indicators and global trades.