ABSTRACT
The links of modern scientific knowledge with wealth, power and prestige condition outsiders to despise and ignore rural people's own knowledge. Priorities in crop, livestock and forestry research reflect biases against what matters to poor rural people. Rural people's knowledge is often superior to that of outsiders. The association of outsider's modern scientific knowledge with wealth, power and prestige generates and sustains beliefs in its universal superiority, indeed beliefs that it is the only knowledge of any significance. Development then entails disseminating this modern, scientific, and sophisticated knowledge to inform and uplift the rural masses. Knowledge flows in one direction only downwards from those who are strong, educated and enlightened, towards those who are weak, ignorant and in darkness. In rural development, the centre-periphery biases of outsider's knowledge are reflected in the concentration of research, publication, training and extension on what is exotic rather than indigenous, mechanical rather than human, chemical rather than organic, and marketed rather than consumed.
