In the Field Programme List

(Monica Janowski: Natural Resources Institute)

Programme 1 The Buabeng - Fiema Monkey Sanctuary

This programme demonstrates the way in which culture and beliefs influence the way in which people access and utilise natural resources, and their relevance to supporting the sustainability of resources. It also demonstrates the potential for effective collaboration between local people and government. It focuses on an initiative started by a villager in Ghana, Daniel Kwaku Akowuah, to set up a protected forest area, the Buabeng-Fiema monkey sanctuary. This was achieved through negotiation with government representatives, and the sanctuary has formal protected area status. Through an interview with Mr. Akowuah, we see how the belief system of the local villagers is consistent with and indeed supports the longer-term sustainability of the livelihood system of the village, involving both farming and the use of wild resources for medicines, food and for sale. This is contrasted to the short-term commercial interest of loggers in the forest, which leads to rapid reduction ; Mr. Akowuah tells us how he successfully fined a logger for attempting to bribe him to allow the logger to take trees from the protected area. Villagers from a neighbouring community tell us how they too would like to set up an initiative to protect their remaining forest, believing that retaining some forest is beneficial to farming as well as being spiritually important.
BBC World Service

Programme 2 Tree Pods - a New Way of Feeding Goats

This programme focuses on how changes in access to natural assets have affected the livelihoods of the poor in a context of urban development. It looks at peri-urban livelihoods in the town of Kumasi in Ghana, where a recent DFID-funded project has been working to assist the poor to maintain sustainable livelihoods. In Kumasi, there are increasing constraints on access to both land for agriculture and to water. Local people tell us how urbanization has led to encroachment by others on these resources. New sources of competition have appeared for the use of land, the most basic physical asset required for agriculture, and these need to be addressed through policy initiatives.
BBC World Service

Programme 3 The Need for Agricultural Land in the City

We see in this programme how important small stock such as goats are to poor people's livelihoods. In Rajasthan in India the better off have cattle but the poor keep goats. For the poor, goats are important within their livelihoods both because they generate cash through their sale and because they are used for subsistence - their milk is an important source of food, especially for children. However goats usually forage for themselves - they are a `lightly managed' resource. A project funded by DFID has been working to enable local people to manage goats more effectively, through collecting and storing the edible pods from a common tree so that the goats can be fed during the dry season to enable them to produce more kids for sale. Female participants in the project tell us how they have achieved this, and also how they started feeding lactating goats the pods too, underlining the importance of the production of milk for subsistence.
BBC World Service

Programme 4 Stepping Off the Pesticides Treadmill

In this programme we look at how vulnerability can be increased through reliance on a single cash crop, and at ways of tackling this problem. In India, poor people in many areas rely on cotton as their most important cash crop, the sale of which brings in cash to allow them to buy essential goods and to pay school fees and taxes. However, we hear poor local farmers tell us how cotton has in recent years been treated with more and more insecticide, which has become less and less effective, creating a vicious circle. Poor farming families have gone into debt in order to buy insecticide, which in turn has increased vulnerability and sometimes led to financial ruin - farmers tell us about a number of suicides. A DFID funded project has been working to tackle this problem, developing ways of dealing with insect pests which integrate different methods of control in order to reduce the use of insecticide. Villagers tell us how successful this has been and how much benefit they have derived in terms of reduced financial vulnerability.
BBC World Service

Programme 5 Vegetable Gardens in the City

This is another programme looking at peri-urban livelihoods - this time in Harare in Zimbabwe. Here, where a research project has been investigating the livelihoods of the poor, we find out about the importance of diversity in livelihood strategies to reduce vulnerability. Here, where many people have found themselves displaced and having to create livelihoods from nothing, poor local women tell us how they spread risk by relying not only on wage employment but also on agriculture. They also tell us how they see the exchange of vegetables with neighbours as an important way of maintaining social capital through these relationships.
BBC World Service

Programme 6 Farmers Who Don't Just Farm

This programme looks at the factors which affect poor rural people's ability to engage in economic activities outside farming, which are often vital as part of their livelihoods in order to reduce vulnerability. In Eastern Europe, after the `transition' from communism to a free market, there have been significant changes in the social, economic, institutional and policy environment in relation to the possibility of working outside agriculture. The majority of rural dwellers in many areas have become severely impoverished, but there is hope for involvement in non-farm activities which would help to strengthen their livelihoods. We hear poor villagers in Poland talking about the very different ways in which they have been affected by the transition and the new environment in which they now live, and at the kinds of non-farm activity in which they are currently involved and hope to become involved to support their families' livelihoods.
BBC World Service

Programme 7 Introducing Ethical Trade

This is the first of three programmes on ethical trade, we hear about what ethical trade and we listen to interviews with UK supermarket representatives talking about initiatives which have been set up to improve the social and environmental responsibility of their companies, and UK consumers talking about how they have responded to these. We see how UK people's livelihoods are necessarily bound up with the livelihoods of poor people in other parts of the world through their purchase of food produced in the South.
BBC World Service

Programme 8 Different Ways of Understanding Ethical Trade

In the second programme on ethical trade, we hear about the different things which ethical trade can mean to different people. We hear from smallholder farmers in Ghana how important it is for their children to earn money in the holidays so that they can go to school at all, and how important it is for the livelihood of the whole family that their children should help on the farm. For these farmers ethical trade means that others should buy what they produce through their labour and that of their children at a price which allows them and their children to be paid well. By contrast, we hear from commercial farmers and exporters who tell us that for buyers buying for Northern markets ethical trade means something quite different, which is in contradiction with the aims of the farmers - it is about not employing children. There are important policy implications with regard to what ethical trade should mean for donors and governments.
BBC World Service

Programme 9 Fighting the Rat Problem Using New Traps

This programme looks at the way in which pests can be a threat to livelihoods both in terms of stored crop loss and in terms of human health. However, there can in some instances be ways of tackling pests which can actually benefit livelihoods in more than one way. Rats in Mozambique are ubiquitous in poor rural households. Grain is stored in the house and rats swarm through it, eating the grain and often biting human residents while they sleep, transmitting many diseases. A DFID-funded project has been developing ways of tackling the problem by developing new ways of trapping rats. Local villagers tell us how this has benefited them in more than one way: it has reduced the amount of grain which the rats eat, it has meant that they are bitten less often, and finally they are able to eat the rats, which are valued as food.
BBC World Service

Programme 10 Alternatives to `Slash and Burn' Agriculture

We focus in this programme on a form of agriculture which has often had a bad press - swidden or slash-and-burn agriculture. In fact these terms cover more than one type of agriculture, some of which are quite sustainable because they are long fallow systems. However, in South America on the borders of the rain forest swidden agriculture is in many areas not sustainable as it is currently practised by smallholders there. A DFID-funded project has been working with poor villagers in one such area in Bolivia, developing new methods of utilising land which are more sustainable. We hear from local smallholders who tell us how the new methods have significantly reduced erosion and have meant that they can look forward to a more secure and sustainable livelihood.
BBC World Service

Programme 11 Trading Cocoa Fairly

In the last of the programmes on ethical trade, we look at how poor villagers in Ecuador, who harvest cocoa from the forest, have been helped to gain more reliable access to the market and better prices for what they sell through the efforts of an NGO and its charismatic leader. This demonstrates the importance of cash crops or harvested wild products gathered for sale within rural livelihoods, illustrates the institutional constraints that can prevent poor people from selling their crops at a good price and shows how these can be addressed.
BBC World Service

Programme 12 Training 'Barefoot Vets' to Treat Village Animals

This last programme in the series focuses on innovative ways of tackling animal health. We hear from researchers and villagers in Sulawesi, Indonesia, about a programme which has seen the introduction of paravets, who are based in villages rather than far away in towns. This has meant that farmers are able to maintain the health of their animals more cheaply and easily.
BBC World Service