Christina H. Gladwin, “A View of the Plan Puebla: An Application of Hierarchical Decision Models,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 58, no. 5 (Dec. 1976), 881-887.

Notes

• 881 – “The results, summarized here, of a study of farmers’ decisions regarding the recommendations of the Plan Puebla should begin to answer this question. The Plan Puebla is an agricultural development project that was started by Centro Internacional de Majoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (CIMMYT) in 1967 and is now run by the secretariat of agriculture in Puebla, Mexico. Its aim is to increase yields of maize on rainfed farms. Initially, the project’s breeding program attempted to find improvised maize varieties or hybrids that performed appreciably better than the local variety (criollo). When the program found none, the project focused on deriving recommendations about fertilizer use and timing and plant population for the local variety (CIMMYT).”

• “The aim of this study was to view the Plan Puebla through the eyes of the proposed adopters of the new technology — the farmers. The study focused on the decision-making processes of a small sample of farmers in one village concerning the recommendations of the plan in order to identify the factors limiting the adoption of the recommendations.”

• “The recommendations for the village in 1973-1974 were to get credit for fertilizer, to increase plant population, to increase the number of fertilizer applications, and to use a recommended level of fertilizer per hectare.”
• “Recently, social scientists have argued that people, in choosing one alternative over other available alternatives, do not make complex calculations of the overall utility of each alternative. Rather, people tend to use procedures that simplify their decision-making calculations.”
• 885-6 – “The question initially posed about the usefulness of a decision study can now be answered. Only a study of farmers’ adoption decisions can pinpoint the critical factors or intervention points in the decision process that policy makers can affect. Clearly, knowledge of the main factors limiting adoption is a necessary but not sufficient condition for speeding up the adoption process. The two aims of a decision study should be to identify decision factors amenable to policy variation and to recommend changes that will speed up adoption of a project’s recommendations.”
• 886 – “Because a decision model with profit, risk, capital, and knowledge as decision criteria was built for each recommendation of Plan Puebla, this study was able to pinpoint a critical node or main factor limiting adoption of each recommendation in the village.”
  • When economists of diffusion consider knowledge as a variable they invariably assume the “acquisition of knowledge” to be synonymous with the acquisition of the scientific knowledge being proffered by development agents.
  • The village under scrutiny is never named — indicative of the belief that the specific village is irrelevant, the study is reproducible in any village
• “The study presented here was undertaken ex post. Ideally, within the context of policy planning, this type of decision study should be undertaken at an earlier stage in the design of a project, e.g., after the pretest or first trial of an innovation on farmers’ fields. At that stage, one can look at the decision processes of early adopters with the aim of speeding up the diffusion process.”
• “Another possible direction for future research lies in broadening the base of a decision study from the village to a regional level. Although the results from this study are not generalizable to the region, it should be possible to conduct a similar type of study on a regional basis.”
  • Ignoring the differences in decision-making between villages in the region, relying upon the reduction of motives of farmers to cost-benefit analyses as “rational actors” whose behavior can be “rationally modeled.”