An Integrated Approach to Small Farmers' Development in the OECS Countries - The CARDATS Experience

CARDATS is an agricultural development project which offers a multi-disciplinary package of services to limited groups of small farmers in each of the OECS Member Stares within the Caribbean Community. The package of services includes assistance in farm planning, provision of inputs, production technology, and marketing. The modus operandi is based on the concept that sensible and effective coordination of all the links in the productivity chain - from planning, through production, to marketing - is essential for successful farming. Over the more than six years of its existence, the project's most persistent concern has been to improve the economic returns to the farmers with whom it has been associated. Since these farmers have, for the most part, been food crop growers, the production of vegetables and other root crops has received greatest attention in CARDATS' farm programming. CARDATS' programs, as described above, must obviously have an impact on associated rural communities. Similarly, rural situations influence, in some measure, the development processes undertaken in these programs. Within the CARDATS experience are many instances where farmer attitudes and responses to project initiatives are apparently conditioned by social and cultural influences. It is evident that these must be clearly understood and appreciated if meaningful and lasting small farmer development is to be achieved.