LES SAVOIRS PAYSANS: NATURE ET FONCTIONNALITES CONTRIBUTION AU DEBAT SUR L'UTILITE DES SAVOIRS LOCAUX

Aurokiatou Traoré (1)

1 SNV - Organisation néerlandaise de développement - Burkina

The recognition of farmers' knowledge and skills is today a shared fact, but their nature and usefulness are yet to be clearly determined as they tend to impact on existing standards. There is a range of contrasting views on the issue of farmers' knowledge and skills. They usually deal with the relationships that exist between modern science and local knowledge and skills; the nature of local knowledge and skills and whether they should be preserved and promoted or not. Indeed, some authors think that local knowledge and skills are not suitable resources and underline the need to support farmers themselves in order to encourage new knowledge generation. On the other hand, other researchers consider local knowledge as very sound resources. This study is a contribution to the debate on the usefulness of local knowledge. It proposes to revisit local knowledge based on an evaluation of farmers' perceptions on plants (namely pesticides plants) in Burkina. To achieve our goal, qualitative and participative surveys were conducted in the western cotton growing areas of Burkina: we analyzed the nature and functionalities of taking into consideration various opposing theories on the issue. We then evaluated the usefulness of local knowledge through a study of farmers' perceptions on pesticide plants before making a proposition for integration of scientific knowledge and local knowledge.

Mots clés: Farmers' knowledge; functionalities; actors; integration; Burkina Faso

Domaines: Agriculture, économie et politique

Aurokiatou Traoré. LES SAVOIRS PAYSANS: NATURE ET FONCTIONNALITES CONTRIBUTION AU DEBAT SUR L'UTILITE DES SAVOIRS LOCAUX. ISDA 2010, Jun 2010, Montpellier, France. 10 p. ⟨hal-00525542⟩