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Chapter 5: Conclusion
Summary of research findings
The previous era of Green Revolution was an ideal one for investment in HAE and, in a sense, a dangerous one institutionally as it created an illusion of an ever- growing need for graduates of a certain profile entering a resistant market secured by the public sector. Support from donors was generous and production agriculture reacted positively to a combination of science, investment and education with huge productivity gains registered in many parts of the globe. In too many instances contentment set in. However, high input-high output production agriculture, despite its success in overcoming the danger of mass hunger and famine, began to have negative impacts on the environment and increasing demands for natural resources, especially forests and water, raised questions about the planet’s capacity to continue to support a growing and resource-hungry population.
The era of environmental conservation and natural resources management (NRM) is born and drives a paradigm-shift not only in agriculture, but also in higher agricultural education. Many HAE entities were slow in reacting to this new concern and a large amount of the funding made available by donors and international organizations found its way to other parts of the education system. Falvey (1996) observes that transition to environmental courses has not always been smooth and, in fact, has only just begun. While many HAE institutions are struggling with survival and with catching up to the NRM/Environment movement a new challenge has emerged: rural development (RD). Those advocating change in agricultural education
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agreed with the observation that HAE must go beyond a focus on production-agriculture. This, despite the concern of many in HAE institutions, does not mean the end of agricultural education but it does mean that agricultural education will have to reinvent itself and be seen as part of a larger education concern for rural development and food security. Despite visible successes in producing more food, scientists are concerned about stagnation of yield growth rates and yield declines and the unpredictability of climate change and environmental degradation.
This research revealed many important aspects concerning the current need of going beyond higher agricultural education in order to adjust to the current field requests, and could answer the research questions established at the beginning of the study.
Implications of this research
Firstly, this research has proved that currently there is a paradigm-shift in agriculture and so is it in Higher agricultural Education. It shows that there are very few problems in today’s world that can be solved by knowledge from only one discipline. In the case of HAE, the challenge is to have strong disciplinary departments, while at the same time engaging them in collaborative endeavors.
Johnson and Bently (1992), (Atchoarena & Gasperini, 2003) suggest that the important point is that higher agricultural educational institutes have gone far beyond the earliest and most urgent mission of teaching individuals, and are teaching almost exclusively about production agriculture. Added, most often the non-teaching aspects of knowledge generation and dissemination (research and extension) are needed in the service of society for the solution of its problems: first the domestic ones and then
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those reflecting the interdependence of the modern world. If higher agricultural education is to play an active and constructive role in rural development, it will have to adjust its programs to new and nontraditional topics, new teaching and learning models, new partnerships with academia, research organizations and rural space stakeholders, expanded representation in governance and continuous dialogue with policy-makers.
Secondly, according to Bently and Mbithi (1976), cited in (Atchoarena &
Gasperini, 2003), the incentive for rural development – and by implication for the types of educational opportunities that are needed – must spring from the people themselves. This transformation of the individual is essentially what education for rural development is all about. In contrast to the conventional notion that equates education with schooling, education should be equated with learning as a lifelong process involving a great variety of experiences. This can also be linked with further studies in Peace Education (for example in Betty Reardon works). However, to shift from the narrow school view of education to this wide lifelong view requires a change of focus that is extremely difficult for anyone whose thinking has been conditioned by very traditional formal education programs.
Finally, this work has exposed the potential of higher agricultural education for current and future international development, and this was the main ambition of the researcher. It is then pertinent to go back to the wise vision of scholar Anderson in 1984: non-reforming higher agricultural education cost is very high. Indeed, one of the issues locking agricultural development today is denying the fact that agricultural education is “THE” key opening the door for long-lasting benefits for developing
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nations. These will improve their contribution not only to their own society, but also to the world (Anderson, 1984).
Recommendations
A concerted effort from the agricultural education community is needed in moving agricultural education forward. Scholar Maguire (2007) suggests two levels of recommendations:
1) At macro level: An “agricultural education forum” should be established. This task force of the professionals in agricultural education should assume first the responsibility to develop a national plan for agricultural education, where there is an active involvement of agricultural educators, policy makers, private sectors, farmers, and government/non-government development personnel. Secondly, these stakeholders will also be in charge of analyzing the manpower demands in agriculture leading to a master plan of manpower supply in the agricultural sector.
Thirdly, they will formulate a strategic plan for agricultural education where a set of policy measures and key performance indicators should be defined. Finally, the most important, they will determine key channels and mechanisms for mobilizing the plan into action.
2- At micro/institutional level: Strengthening of formal agricultural education is recommended at every level. In the particular case of higher education, well-established colleges of agriculture in major universities should take the lead in reforming the degree programs in agricultural sciences to be more responsive to the needs of the society. Keeping the “balance” is the key concept, some of which are suggested below:
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• Balance of mission (teaching, research and outreach). A strong sense of mission must be improved in the system of professional promotion and rewarding for faculty members. Sustainable linkage with Ministry of Agriculture must be strengthened in research and extension, particularly when dealing with small-scale farmers.
• Balance of disciplinary orientation. For agricultural sciences to be most relevant to the needs of the country, balance in the content must be considered in such aspects as “specialized/integrated knowledge,” “import-based technology/local-based technology,” “mainstream agriculture/alternative agriculture,” and “conventional agriculture/hybrid agriculture.”
• Balance of program diversity and quality. A quality forum should be set up to establish and anticipate guiding principles and minimum standards to be imposed on degree curricula. The standards, however, should allow flexibility for program diversity among universities with different backgrounds.
• Balance of “academic/social- driven” and “market-driven” models of education. The proposed quality forum should assume an active role keeping the balance on this aspect. Restructuring of resource management is needed for adaptation of quality programs. Furthermore, the profession must communicate explicitly to policy makers that higher agricultural education runs the risk of losing the balance if unit- cost budgeting is strictly imposed without appropriate measures.
• Balance of competition-cooperation. Horizontal as well as vertical networking of educational institutions should be strongly encouraged with a viable
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implementing channel. Area-based networking of institutions should be strengthened (Maguire, 2007)
Currently, in ASEAN while there is a growing number of ASEAN-related courses and some programs, there is a lack of ASEAN centeredness in any ASEAN university. This can be attributed to the highly competitive global higher education market and the competition within ASEAN universities for students, funding and global recognition mainly in terms of global rankings. Today, there is not an ASEAN university or institution focused on conducting research on ASEAN-related issues such as agriculture and the challenges and opportunities brought about by the establishment of an ASEAN Community. Furthermore, there is no authoritative institution that serves as a foundation of ASEAN-related knowledge or serves as a think-tank focused on the current and future challenges of the ASEAN and its member states. That is why, is important to suggest the idea of an ASEAN University to promote ASEAN-ness among its regional population, as well as regional collaboration and integration, but also create new knowledge on ASEAN agricultural and development challenges, and serve as an authority on ASEAN topics.
Finally, the agriculture-for-development agenda cannot be realized without more and better international commitments. The global agricultural agenda has a variety of dimensions: establishing fair rules for international trade, conserving the world’s biodiversity, and mitigating and adapting to climate change. Current international organizations –largely defined in the 1950s in an extremely different world– are weakly prepared for this new agenda, and institutional reforms and innovations are needed to rebuild capacity in agriculture and facilitate greater coordination across international agencies and with the new actors in the global arena,
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including civil society, the business sector and academia.
The main recommendation for further contributing to this research, is the fact that a field-study is important to see the details of this changing paradigm in agriculture field related with higher agricultural institutions’ adjustment in ASEAN.
The researcher also implies that a higher agricultural institution as the former focus for this research case-study: The Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), with regional scope, should be transparent and willing to share essential information about its activities’ impact in the region. Only in this way, good-agricultural practices in ASEAN will be promoted and will be able to be applied in other regions of the world facing similar problems.
Although, the current importance of this research’s topic, it is disappointing to see that collaboration and shared knowledge from some institutions still depend on short-term economical/political interests
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