The "Smorgasbord Strategy"

The "Smorgasbord Strategy"

This "official" start of the project was preceded, late in 1986, by a visit to Cameroon by Larry Murdock, together with Russell Freed - then Deputy 	Director of the Bean/Cowpea CRSP - and Professor Anthony Hall of the University of California, Riverside.  CRSP project strategy to deal with cowpea weevil pests of stored cowpeas in northern Cameroon evolved from that visit.  Murdock recognized that the problem, simple on the face of it, was in fact complex.  He knew there were more than 20 ethnic groups in the area, and suspected that these divergent peoples had different approaches to dealing with cowpea storage.  He recognized that there were multiple economic levels of growers/storers of cowpeas, so some groups might be able to afford certain technologies that others could not afford.  He saw that different people had different reasons for growing cowpeas. Some grew them only for cash, others for food only, others for both.  He suspected that there were many ways people handled their grain after harvest, e.g., threshed and sold immediately, others kept the grain in pods for a variable period of time, some long, some short, certainly there were many different types of mudpot granaries evident even to the casual observer.  For these reasons, from the outset he knew we would never create a single magic bullet to knock out cowpea weevil problems forever. He also believed that farmers in northern Cameroon were smart people, and knew far better than he did what might work best for them. Accordingly, in consultations with many stakeholders, the CRSP team decided to create, instead, a smorgasbord strategy.  The idea was this:  we would create a variety of technologies to deal with cowpea weevil pests of stored cowpeas, make them widely available to people, and let them choose the technology(ies) best suited to their needs and constraints.

Our technologies were to:  (1) be simple, (2) be low-cost, (3) use readily available materials, and (4) be effective.

• Who Grows Cowpea? • The Cowpea Weevil Problem. • The "Smorgasbord Strategy". • Technologies in Hand

• Who Grows Cowpea? • The Cowpea Weevil Problem.
• The "Smorgasbord Strategy". • Technologies in Hand