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This Case Study forms part of a series which the Development Support Communication Branch, of FAO's Information Division, is preparing. It will be used as background material for an Expert Consultation on development Communication which FAO plans to hold in 1987, as well as for general information and briefing on communication activities in the field which seem to be of special interest and potential value to rural development and communication specialists.
The FAO and the author wish to express their gratitude to the Peruvian authorities, and in particular to the staff of CESPAC, for the invaluable assistance and support they provided during the drafting stages of this paper. Any errors or misrepresentations that may remain are the fault of the author, who is Colin Fraser of Agrisystems, Vie B. Croce 143, Rome, Italy.
Rome, January 1987.
The attitudes, knowledge, and skills of rural people are major factors in development, especially in the poorer areas of the Third World. Through no fault of their own, rural people often lack the basic education and the understanding of concepts, the confidence and self-esteem, that would allow them to set about modifying their reality; and it is hardly surprising, therefore, that they often seem to fall back on fatalism as a refuge from their own incapacity.
It follows that grassroot-level training is a sine qua non of rural development. The problem is in finding ways of carrying out such training effectively and economically on the massive scale required. In theory, it is the task of the extension services in most countries, but it i' a sad fact that, for the most part, extension services have not been able to measure up to the needs. Too often, extension cervices are understaffed, undertrained, and unsupported by the facilities they need, such as transport.
It was in the quest for solutions to the problems of grassroot information and training that Peru, in the mid-1970s, embarked on a course that led to the most extensive experience yet in the use of video in rural areas of a Third World country. More than 1,000 video programmes of about 20-minutes' duration each have been made, and they have been used with more than 150,000 farmers. More than 150 Peruvians have been trained in the production and use of video programmes for rural development, and a further 200 have been trained in the use only of the programmes.
These achievements were not realized easily: they are the fruit of arduous work, of vision, and of tenacity -- some would say stubborness -- in the face of aversion, opposition, and setbacks over the years. The very survival of the initiative was at stake on many occasions, and never has the Project had the support it really needed in terms of resources, not to mention the moral support that was often lacking too.
However, the greatest testimony to the pioneering work done in Peru is that a number of other countries have embarked on similar projects to use video in rural areas for information and training. Many of these countries have received technical assistance from Peruvians in launching such activities; for the Peruvian Project has established procedures and methods that ensure the constructive use of video for rural development, and help to avoid the mistakes so often made with the medium - mistakes which lead to valuable equipment gathering dust in cupboards, or broken down for want of a small repair.
The Peruvian Project in question is known as CESPAC (Centro de Servicios de Pedagogia Audiovisual para la Capacitacion). This, like other names in Spanish invented by the Project, cannot be precisely translated into English, a problem which will be discussed later. However, in broad terms, it means, "Centre for Audio-Visual Services for Training".
Whatever the problems of translating its name properly, CESPAC has made a- vital contribution to communication for rural development. Nowadays, the use of video for information and training in rural areas is a widely accepted proposition, and more and more governments and development agencies are becoming involved in using it. Ten years ago, this was certainly not so; the work of CESPAC has been instrumental in changing the situation.
This Case Study sets out to document the origins of CESPAC, its methodology, and its operations, reporting as objectively as possible on its strengths and weaknesses.
I would like to comment on the way the information in this Case Study will be presented. The activities that ultimately developed into CESPAC began some 12 years ago. Obviously, such a long-lived project must go through many different phases in its development. For example, its institutional framework may change, as may the approach and methodology, the equipment used, and so on. In fact, changes. in all these areas have taken place since Peru first began to use video in rural areas.
I could either present the large amount of information in chronological order, a" a history of this period of time in which the video-based rural training activities were developed, or I could present the material by subject-matter, e.g. the training of national staff, the equipment used, the institutional framework, etc.
The Case Study might make easier reading if it were written as a history, a blow-by-blow account of what happened from year 1 up to the present, but I consider that if this Study is to have usefulness as a work of reference, it is preferable to present the CESPAC experience by subject-matter divisions. This will make it possible for anyone interested in a specific aspect of the project, e.g. the equipment used, to' find the information required in one section rather than to have to delve through the whole document in search of all the references to equipment.
Material for this Case Study has been drawn from a rich documentation. Firstly, when there was still widespread criticism of the Project's methodology, FAO's Development Support Communication Branch, which was backstopping the Project from Rome, organized a Technical Analysis that was carried out by independent consultants in 1978. They reported on the training of Peruvian staff in the use of the video-based methodology, on the appropriateness or otherwise of the communication technology being used, and on the usefulness of the methodology among the rural communities who were supposed to benefit from it. Their findings were very positive overall, and this helped to silence the opposition and let the Project continue to develop its methodology and operations.
In 1980, a Feasibility Study of the Project was prepared to assist the Government to decide whether to make it into a Special Investment Project. This Feasibility Study is in 6 volumes and totals over 580 pages. Then, in 1984, an analysis of the Project's activities, and future projections for it (totalling some 200 pages) was prepared as a basis for possible international loan financing. Furthermore, there have also been two Project Mid-Term Reviews, and I was fortunate to participate in both. Then there are all the Project Director's Progress Reports, and the regular Government/UNDP/FAO Tripartite Review Reports. And finally, there were two evaluations sponsored by Swiss bilateral aid (COTESU) in 1985 and 1986.
In fact, the main problem facing me in writing this Case Study was what to leave out. In the interest of readability and usefulness, I have attempted a ruthless synthesis of the information, and I have not provided reference sources since they are almost exclusively the documentation mentioned above.
A point should be made about the name of the Project: it began operations within the Communication Department of an agrarian reform institution, and it we. later named CEPAC, before becoming CESPAC, as it is today. The background to these change" will be explained in the section of this study dealing with the institutional framework. However, for the sake of simplicity, the activities will be described simply as the Project, or CESPAC, regardless of the time in CESPAC'. history that is being covered.
In order to understand the context of CESPAC's origins and work, we have to examine briefly the physical and human geography of Peru, and the social, economic, and political realities of the country.
Peru, which has existed as an independent state since 1824, covers a land area of 1,285,215 sq. kms. (This makes it more than twice the size of France -- 551,000 sq. kms). It has a population of about l9 million. It is estimated that about 45% of these people are pure Indian, and that over 85% of the population has some Indian blood.
Some 5.5 million people live in Lima, and it is estimated that, overall, more than 60% of the population now lives in urban agglomerations. This strong tendency towards urbanization is likely to continue.
The country i. divided into three distinct geographical zones: the Costa, the Sierra, and the Selva. The Costa is made up of the coastal plain. It is a desert area with lest rain than most of the Sahara, and 80 it can only produce crops under irrigation. The water for this comes from the rivers that flow down from the Andes to the east and cross the Costa on their way to the Pacific Ocean.
Despite its aridity, the Costa (with the capital, Lima) is the main population, economic, and agricultural area of the country. There were, until relatively recently, come very large latifundia belonging to wealthy families who were often conspicuous by their absence; they spent much of their time and money in capital. of the world that offered a better climate and more amusement than Lima.
The Sierra consists of the Andean chain that runs like a backbone down the country. The jumble of ridges end valleys that make up the foothills, at an altitude of up to about 3,500 metres, provides climatic conditions that are reasonably favorable to agriculture; and the soils, many of which are of volcanic origin, are fertile. The Andean Indians who live here cultivate maize, potatoes, fruits and vegetable., but of course there are erosion problems on the elopes.
During the days of the Incan civilisation, there were extensive systems of terraces, but these have fallen into disrepair. Ecologically, it is a fragile environment, and it provides only a meagre living for its inhabitants.
The Altiplano -- the High Plateau -- of the Andes, at an altitude of about 4,000 metres and more, has been called the "roof of the world". Here, under a sky made crystal by the rarefied atmosphere, where the blinding sun caste black shadows and sears with its heat, while the air is still bitingly cold, lies an immense landscape of melancholy beauty. The Indians, hunched in their ponchos to protect them from the piercing winds that flatten the grass as they sweep across the treeless expanse, tend their flocks of llamas and alpacas, and wrest some lean crops from the unhelpful land.
The Indians. here are miserably poor and malnourished. Their squat form in part result" from this malnutrition, and their barrel chests have developed to Meet the need for extra lung capacity in the thin air. These people stoically withstand the cold and misery that are the companions of their existence, and at the same time, they maintain an innate dignity which is untouched by their poverty.
The Selva is the Amazon basin to the east of the Andes. It is divided into two parts, the High Selva and the Low Selva. The High Selva is the part lying at an altitude of between about 350 and 1,000 metres. It is an area of high rainfall and abundant vegetation. The main crop. are rice, cocoa, coffee, maize and coca.
The Low Selva is made up of Amazon rain forest. More than 20 languages are spoken by the indigenous people, who live mainly by hunting, fishing, and some slash-and-burn agriculture. There is also some rubber production, and since the mid-70s, oil has been extracted. Forest exploitation is, of course, an important activity. (The vast forests of the Selva mainly account for the fact that well over half of Peru's land area is forested).
As a whole, the Selva is the great Peruvian frontier. Its isolation behind the barrier of the Andes, which cuts it off from the main urban centres, has kept it very sparsely populated. But it has abundant resources, and this has led to settlement programmes in recent years. However, as in so many tropical areas, the soils are lateritic and very fragile; they therefore need especially careful management if they are not to lose their limited fertility and erode.
The agricultural sector in Peru has been declining in the last decades. In 1961, it accounted for 25.6% of GNP and employed 52.8% of the labour force; by 1972, it wan producing only 15.2% of GNP and employing only 40.6% of the labour force, and the tendency continues. This, set against a population growth rate of about 2.5%, has led to a grave situation. For example, cultivated land per inhabitant was about 0.21 ha. ten years ago whereas today it is only about 0.16 ha. Peru, in fact, has one of the very lowest ratios of cultivated land to inhabitant in the whole of Latin America. Only about 2.9% of the country's total land area is under the plough.
Furthermore, nutritional levels. have declined seriously: in the city of Lima in 1972, the lowest income groups had a per capita daily calory intake of 1,934 (against an estimated requirement of 2,492 calories per day); by 1979, the daily calory intake among this same group had dropped to a mere 1,486. Protein intake per day for the same years dropped from 52.7 grammgrammeses per capita to 41.3 grammes (against an estimated requirement of 56.2 grammes).
Of course, nutritional levels do not depend only on the simple availability of food: money to buy it is just as important. But the figures do show a decrease in per capita agricultural production of about l.l% annually in recent years.
As mentioned earlier, until quite recent times, the main agricultural lands of the Costa were often in the hands of wealthy absentee landlords. Then, during the first presidency of Belaunde-Terry, from 1963 to 1968, a first agrarian reform law was passed. This set out to make more effective use of land and allowed the expropriation of unused or misused farms. By 1966, over 200,000 ha. had been distributed to farm labourers.
This agrarian reform initiative was given a strong boost after the Belaunde government was overthrown in 1968 by the military: Gen. Velasco Alvarado presided over a junta that began a vigorous programme of "combining public and private ownership of the economy", and it also introduced radical agrarian reform measures.
The large land holdings, especially in the Cotta, were taken over and turned into production cooperatives, with the original workers becoming the cooperative member. These members were asked to elect their managers, and quite frequently, they elected the person who had been the estate manager for the wealthy landlord. This is not as paradoxical as it may seem at first sight: the undertrained, often illiterate, workers realized that among their ranks there was no one with the managerial capacity to run the cooperative, so they chose the ex-manager, however much they might detest him.
In the Sierra, the basis for the reform we. the Sociedad Agraria di Interes Social, or SAIS, (roughly translated as Agrarian Company for Social Benefit). These were an amalgamation of what had been large estates with the traditional Indian communities (comunidades). They grouped small producers into forms of association that would be mutually beneficial. The managers of the SAIS were appointed by the State.
CESPAC had its distant origins in this energetic agrarian reform programme, as we shall see in the next section.
When the populist government of General Velasco took power and launched its sweeping agrarian reform in 1969, it was realized that the breaking up of large holdings, and the creation of cooperatives, would require follow-up and support. Otherwise, agricultural production- would drop, a. had happened following unsupported agrarian reform programmes in other countries.
One step in the support process was to create a Centro Nacional de Capacitacion y Investicacion pare la Reforma Agraria (CENCIRA), which can be translated as National Training and Research Centre for Agrarian Reform. The Government was interested in obtaining technical assistance for agrarian reform, and an FAO agrarian reform specialist, who was working in Chile, helped in the fomulation of both CENCIRA itself and of a UNDP/FAO project to support it.
This project, PER/71/544, began operation. in 1971. It was a project of broad institutional support to CENCIRA, and it included advisers in such areas as research, rural socioeconomics, and marketing.
But it also included a component for development communication, for it was clear that there we. an enormous orientation and training task to be accomplished if the beneficiaries of the agrarian reform programme were to take beat advantage of the opportunities offered. For in human terms, the agrarian reform programme brought with it enormous changes: farm workers of generally rather low educational level, accustomed only to obeying orders, were being expected to play a part in the running and working of the cooperatives of which they were now members. Their perception of their own role in the economic life of the country would need to change, and they would have to acquire new levels of knowledge and skills. The Communication Department of CENCIRA, and the component of the UNDP/FAO project designed to strengthen it, were created to play a part in the orientation, mobilization, and training of rural people.
Initially, there were two FAO communication specialists attached to CENCIRA. One was to advise in the area of communication planning, while the other was primarily a film specialist, but with broad experience in other audio-visual media too.
At about the same time that PER/71/544 was setting under way, a similiar project in Chile wee providing assistance to ICIRA, the Chilean equivalent of CENCIRA.
ICIRA, under the Allende government in Chile, was also seized of the importance of communication within agrarian reform programmes and was preparing to try video recording a. a medium likely to prove useful in the communication process. The idea was that video could be used to transfer ideas and information in a multiplicity of directions. For example, if the Government was considering a development scheme in an area, portable video could record the ideas and opinion. of the local population regarding such an initiative; or Government ideas and proposals could be conveyed to the area first. At whichever end the communication flow began, a feedback could be assured by video, and thus a dialogue could be engaged. {Such feedback processes are of course the essential difference between information and communication). It was also reasoned that video could be used to transfer information and successful experience horizontally between communities, as well as for orientation and training.
Nor should it be forgotten that this was shortly after the famous Fogo Island experience in Canada. In that experience, the Challenge for Change unit of the Canadian National Film Board, and the Extension Department of Memorial University, St John's, Newfoundland, used firstly film and then video to help stimulate a remarkable community revival.
A series of films and video tapes were made with the local population to show problems and prospects as seen through the eyes of the people themselves.
The films were shown to meetings all over the Island as a starting point for discussions. They proved to be a great stimulus, and they helped people to a clearer realization of the issues facing them, and of their options and alternatives. As a result, and with the assistance of community development workers, they decided on, and carried through, an action plan which revived the community.
Such open-ended, or non-manipulative, use of media for participatory research and planning is the heady dream which all dedicated development communicators hold in the back of their minds as the ultimate goal. However, it does require a political environment which will guarantee a sympathetic hearing from the authorities once the messages begin to arrive from the community level.
While ICIRA was researching, formulating its ideas and plans and awaiting its video equipment, the FAO international Project Manager of CENCIRA visited Chile and learned of the video initiative. He was impressed with the thinking behind it and asked whether some CENCIRA-staff could participate in the first training course that ICIRA was going to run to train Chilean staff in the use of video. Thus, 1O Peruvians attended that first course in Chile.
The first head of CENCIRA, Col. Dante Castro, was mainly interested in using video for what is called institutional communication, that is to say for information, orientation, and training within or between institutions. Thus a first order for video equipment was placed in late 1974. But it was Col. Dante Castro's successor, Col. Max Velarde, who began the recruitment of personnel and organized the availability of a building and an operational budget to launch Peru on its path towards pioneering the use of video for rural development.
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