Discovery learning about cocoa. An inspirational guide for training facilitators.
Abstract
Pests, including diseases, continue to place important constraints on production of cocoa worldwide, and are likely to grow more severe through further spread of aggressive pathogens. Integrated Pest Management strategies are now widely recognised as key corner stones of sustainable and environmentally sound approaches to crop production. Farmer participatory approaches are fast gaining acceptance to build farmers' capacities to make informed crop management decisions, based on a better understanding of the agro-ecology in their own fields. With farmer participatory approaches, the role of extension becomes one of a facilitator of a learning process by the farmer community. This manual is a resource for such facilitators of farmer participatory cocoa IPM programmes. It contains illustrated pest datasheets extracted from scientific databases, and field exercises that contribute to discovery based learning. The manual is expected to function as a source of inspiration for further cocoa IPM training curriculum development.
The manual consists of three major parts: Part I provides a general introduction to the crop. Part II covers the technical background on the biology and management of some major key pests, linked to a set of farmer participatory exercises in Part III. Many of these exercises have been field-tested for cocoa.
The manual is also available in French and in Vietnamese (split into 3 files), see 'view documents' above.
Citation
CABI Bioscience, Egham, UK, 122 pp.