Sulawesi farmers strategies regarding cocoa pod borer USDA/CIRAD survey. Memo N° 1 : a need for participative research in CPB related extension programmes

After six or seven years of generalised infestation in Sulawesi, this level of losses has been reached despite a range of CPB control programmes launched by extension services in addition to specific projects. As a consequence, we believe that this major economic problem deserves strong investment in research in entomology, selection of planting material, but also in farm economics. What are Sulawesi smallholders' strategies with respect to the CPB and to cocoa farming in general? How can these strategies be taken into account in a global national strategy to control CPB and improve the sustainability of cocoa? These questions led the USDA/CIRAD to conduct a brief survey with the aim of contributing to a 'CPB research action plan' to be discussed with Indonesian partners in mid 2007. The outputs of this survey will be a few memos with qualitative findings and considerations and longer papers with a more detailed analysis. This first memo summarizes the very first qualitative results from a preliminary sample of 51-farms conducted in December 2006: 31 smallholders were interviewed in two villages in Bungku (Central Sulawesi), where the CPB started to infest part of the cocoa farms as recently as in 2005/06, and 20 smallholders were interviewed in three villages in Southern and Northern Palopo (South Sulawesi) where CPB has been active for at least seven years. Before conducting a complete analysis of these data, some preliminary results of the survey led us to draw provisional conclusions that may seem too strong at this stage but we believe it is useful to put them forward as hypotheses to be verified in the next steps of the survey. (Résumé d'auteur