14pgs, The World Health Organization (WHO) has used communication methods to promote the international ban of the agricultural pesticides paraquat, glyphosate and chlorpyrifos. This ban has led to misunderstanding among farmers who still use these chemicals, which may be available under different brand names. Communication with the non-scientific community is uncertain leading to miscommunication, especially where scientific language is used. Governments have banned the use of these agricultural chemicals. The scientific arguments are not necessarily understood by famers so they may ignore the prohibition and continue using them or other similar chemicals. This study uses story-telling and qualitative research methods where a questionnaire is combined with the content analytical technique. The quantitative research method was used to collect data in the field where 351 participants took part. Participatory action research is a method where community farmers engaged in self-reflection on the impact of chemicals on their fields, their health and the health of others. Their understanding of the non-chemical usage model and good agricultural practice farmers in the vicinity, especially as they were personally involved in the creation of the media from script preparation, to acting, filming, and evaluating the final docu-dramas. The findings of the docu–drama programmes of 5 GAP farmers are presented to identify the perception of how to avoid using chemicals and their solutions for tangerine farmers through a manual that is the media output from the project and the resulting findings suggesting that the factors related to the effectiveness of scientific communication are divided into pull factors and push factors.
This study presents an efficient version of test for the hypothesis that education plays a key role in influencing agricultural productivity based on a switching regression model. In the present setting, farmers’ ability to deal with disequilibria is allowed to change with education, which thereby provides a concrete evidence of the effect of education on selected East Asian production agriculture. The results suggest that there exists a threshold for education to be influential to agricultural productivity change when the selected East-Asian economies are categoried by their degree of economic development. Moreover, for the group of economies where education constitutes a major determinant of productivity growth in both the technological progression and/or stagnation/recession regimes, the effect of education is found to vary from economy to economy and from regime to regime. Generally speaking, however, those East-Asian economies tend to reach their turning point in short time despite of the mentioned differences. This result therefore leads to important policy implications concerning giving an impetus to human capital investment in the agriculture sector.
