What farmers don't know can't help them: The strengths and weaknesses of indigenous technical knowledge in Honduras

Jeffery Bentley

Agriculture and Human Values, 1989, vol. 6, issue 3, 25-31

Abstract: Traditional Central American peasant farmers know more about some aspects of the local agroecosystem than about others. In general farmers know more about plants, less about insects, and less still about plant pathology. Without discounting economic factors, ease of observability must explain part of this difference. Certain local beliefs may affect what farmers observe and know. For example, a belief in spontaneous generation may lead people to fail to observe insect reproduction. The implications of the gaps in farmer knowledge are discussed in terms of the sustainable agriculture movement. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989

Date: 1989
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF02217666 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:6:y:1989:i:3:p:25-31

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10460

DOI: 10.1007/BF02217666

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture and Human Values is currently edited by Harvey S. James Jr.

More articles in Agriculture and Human Values from Springer, The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().