Zimbabwe’s land reform areas twenty years on (2)

Posted on May 18, 2020 by - FAC blog

This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland. 
What happened in the ‘self-contained’ A1 resettlement sites


This blog focuses on the ‘self-contained’ A1 farms, with a sample size now of 78. These are found in two sites in Gutu and Masvingo districts, and are in many ways the most successful in our sample. The number of exits is relatively small (only three since our first survey), and households have held onto the farms, very often with women taking over from husbands who have passed on. Currently there are nearly 30% of all households where women are the household head, many of whom have their own business (30% of all households with a female-run business contributing to household incomes), while 23% of households include women who are part of organised groups, and 18% have women who are in leadership positions. On our visit to Clare farm in Gutu district, we met Mrs BB. She explained how they had built up the farm:

When we came we had one scotch cart, one plough and we brought one heifer. My husband was working at that time. In 2005, we bought a pump from his salary and started developing our gardens, selling tomatoes to local boarding schools. Cattle multiplied and by 2007, we had 13. We also had more kids to help us on the farm too! My last child was born in 2012, and I have five. Now we have three pumps, although one is broken, and also a sprinkler and a large water storage tank. In 2016, we drilled a new borehole and aim to put in a submersible pump. In 2018, we bought a truck, which I can drive (she demonstrated, see below). All of this is from selling vegetables, as well as maize, and we sold five beasts for university and school fees. The kids are now getting older. One has banking and finance degree, and another has his own plot in a nearby resettlement and is doing well. The younger ones are in boarding schools. Our kids’ education was paid for by the farm, as well as a fine white wedding for our first-born in 2015. We also relocated our homestead to be nearer the horticulture plots and built new houses, buying a sofa, beds, wardrobes and a fridge.

Mrs BB

Some self-contained farms were favoured by influential figures during the land invasions and 28% of all households are occupied by former war veterans. Many residents came from urban jobs, with 72% previously having jobs off-farm. This is now down to 54%, but links to off-farm employment are important. Overall, the population is relatively well-educated (59% having continued in schooling beyond Form II) and 27% of household heads have been trained in the Master Farming Certificate.

The average age of household heads in these farms is 52, and 46% of households have grown-up children aged between 21 and 30, a fifth of whom are out of the country, while 14% are now farming, very often on subdivisions of parents’ plots. Remittance income is received by about a quarter of households, but for most it is agricultural production that is the core of livelihoods. On average, 6.6 hectares is cultivated in a farm averaging 35.1 hectares in total. There is some rental of land in the area, but this is not significant. As one of our informants explained, “there is no space here now, and we are holding onto the land…. We may rent out a little to teachers and others who need a small plot, but otherwise it’s for the family”.

On average, households in these areas produce about two tonnes of maize and sell between 600-900 kg in the period between 2017 and 2019 (although with large variations in output and sales). Half of all households produced more than one tonne of maize, which is sufficient to feed a family. This is relatively intensive production, with between 65% and 80% applying inorganic fertiliser, and nearly all applying manure from the growing livestock populations. Given the poor sandy soils in the area, and despite the high level of tree cover still present, additional work to maintain soil fertility is important, especially in the Clare farm area, and a quarter of households had invested in soil conservation works on their farms in the past five years.

Although there is differentiation across households, a significant number are ‘accumulating from below’, and reinvesting surplus in agricultural production, including the hiring of labour. 44% of households have permanent male labour living and working on their farms (only 8% have permanent female labour), while around a third regularly hire temporary labour. Agricultural production focused on maize is complemented with horticulture, making use of the rivers that run through these sites, with around a third regularly producing for market, with an average income of US$1200 across all households (again highly differentiated). Cattle production is important – both for sale (38% of households sold in the past year) and for draft power (68% used their own cattle for draft in 2019). Quite a few households specialise, linking production to market. There are some who stick to maize, and other field crops, while others have invested in intensive irrigated horticultural production, some with contracts to supermarkets and with traders. Large church gatherings, notably the annual event at Serima Mission, are important marketing opportunities.

Mr and Mrs M from Wondedzo Extension showed us round their impressive horticulture farm, recently the site of a field day organised by a private sector company, and attended by extension workers and others. Mr M had been a bus driver before, and had chucked in his job in 2015, investing in a borehole on his farm. Today nearly two hectares are irrigated, with a huge range of vegetables, from beetroot to butternut, with an attempt to capture the higher value markets in Masvingo. We continued to Mr and Mrs MV who explained the story of their farm:

We came from Bikita with six cattle. They increased to 30 or more as there’s plenty of grazing here. We cleared a large area of land – up to 15 hectares – and grew and sold maize for many years. We bought a truck from selling. We also sold cattle – for example, last year we sold cattle and paid for a 50m borehole near the home, plus building the pump house and fencing. It cost US$4000. We currently have four pumps, and cultivate about two hectares near the Mtirikwi river. It is very profitable, and we are now down-sizing our maize production area, as prices change all the time and it’s difficult to plan. From profits from farming we bought a plot in Rujeko C in Masvingo. It has been a long project since 2006, but is now complete, and we have just bought barbed wire to fence the plot.

Mr and Mrs MV

Mr MV is a local head teacher, and he says he wants to retire soon. “Farming pays much better”, he says. “But it needs time and commitment… We lost 5000 cabbages last year from cattle wandering into the field, as we were not supervising well. You also have to focus on workers. We employ a number, but they soon leave. Their aims to buy a mobile phone, then they go”. Given the level of production they achieve, they frequently send food regularly to the communal areas, and their home in Bikita, supporting a wider network of relatives beyond the immediate family. “This isn’t just ordinary farming: it’s commercial farming!”, Mr MV exclaims.

Across our sample, other common income sources include milk sales (17% of households), goat sales (15%), poultry sales (29%), trading (13% – mostly of vegetables to local towns) and house rental (14%), as a number of farmers have bought plots in nearby towns following good crop sales. These diverse income sources are added to by occasional examples of natural resource based harvesting and crafts, and are highly differentiated among households and by gender. Very few rely on institutional credit/loan finance, although around 18% had managed to secure command agriculture finance for seed/fertiliser, while only one farmer had a private contract for crop growing, so inputs and investment are derived from farm surpluses or off-farm work.

Increasingly in these areas a local economy is developing. Mr MV from Wondedzo Extension observed: “We no longer go to town… there are others who supply things. The Vapostori (members of the Apostolic church) have many businesses. They are very entrepreneurial. They can fix things, supply things. They have such big families, so have much labour for farming and other activities”.

Investments in the past five years included the purchase of ploughs (31% of households), carts (26%), cattle (22%), pumps (28%), solar panels (53%) and transport, notably cars (24%). By 2019, 74% had built a protected well near their homestead and 82% had a Blair-type latrine with a roof, and all had improved housing, with electricity for lighting supplied by solar and battery combinations in nearly all. Many also had multiple dwellings with cross-generational families living on the plots, with farms supporting growing numbers.

Overall, conditions are good in these areas, and people comment on how their lives have improved significantly. Mrs BB from Clare farm commented:

Nearly everyone here has cars – except for a few, such as the civil servants with jobs that don’t pay. Those who say farming doesn’t pay are talking rubbish! Even the graduates are coming back to farm. My husband has a local government post and is paid very little. I don’t worry about his small money. He has to borrow money from me. I am the farmer! My husband earns US$80 a month, but I can earn US$800 a day!

Mrs BB from Clare farm

The main complaints focus on conflicts with those who come from nearby communal and A1 areas to poach graze, harvest wood and steal fencing. The governance arrangements retain the old ‘Committee of Seven’, established during the period of invasion, but this is combined with more formal systems, including councillors and other post holders. Struggles over chieftaincy boundaries have plagued the new resettlements, and our sites are no exception. The lack of infrastructure development in these areas reflects the absence of the state. Informal roads criss-cross the area, and people have to walk long distances to get a bus. As one informant from Wondedzo complained: “We had a grader come for our road, but only once. We have to maintain it ourselves. The government supports the schools and local clinic, and we do see the extension officer and the vet occasionally, and some receive support from Command or the Presidential Scheme, but we are mostly on our own!” For some, this absence of state involvement is seen as an advantage. One informant commented on the recent visit by an audit team: “It was a waste of time, they came to collect information, but I said at the meeting, just look around, we are doing well!”

While there is a clear pattern of differentiation emerging both within these areas and between the self-contained schemes and others, the self-contained farms are by-and-large booming, with regular maize harvests – some very significant; the highest across the four years we collected data for in this round (2016-2019) was 20 tonnes, with 16 tonnes sold, combined with an important focus on intensive horticultural production.

Since the farms are self-contained, with less than a quarter of the area cultivated and the rest grazing, and because of the haphazard nature of bush roads, for those visiting for the first time, they might assume that these areas are under-used and of low productivity. But this would be wrong. There is significant investment, including in relatively luxury goods like cars and trucks, and the housing stock is impressive across the areas, even if scattered in what some would deem ‘just bush’. As MV from Wondedzo Extension commented:

We expect great riches in 20 years’ time. The future is definitely irrigated horticulture. If we sink more boreholes and diversify and intensify our production, people will be rich and lives will improve, even from the next generation, as you only need a few hectares. One of my sons has a plot here and is growing sugar beans, very successfully.

MV from Wondedzo Extension

Those who are accumulating from below – probably over a half of all households – are investing in the farm, and are employing others in the area (although most employment comes from nearby communal and A1 areas). Such households also have an eye on the longer term, with purchases of plots in nearby towns and the building of rental houses. Some with older children who have not gone out of the country to seek jobs, are accommodating them on the farm, as land is subdivided a generation on from land reform. Those who are doing well are employing others (although most employment comes from nearby communal and A1 areas), as a future of intensive, commercial, market-oriented production is envisaged for these farms.


Led by Felix Murimbarimba, the Masvingo team is: Moses Mutoko, Thandiwe Shoko, Tanaka Murimbarimba, Liberty Tavagwisa, Tongai Murimbarimba, Vimbai Museva, Jacob Mahenehene, Tafadzwa Mavedzenge (data entry) and Shingirai, the driver. Thanks to the research team, ministry of agriculture officials and the many farmers who have supported the work over the years.


All photos credit: Ian Scoones

APRA Brief 25: Does rice commercialisation enhance or impair household food security among rice producing households in Mngeta Division, Kilombero District, Tanzania?

Posted on May 15, 2020 by - APRA Briefs

Written by, Ntengua Mdoe, Gilead Mlay, Aida Isinika, Gideon Boniface, Christopher Magomba, John Jeckonia and Devotha Mosha

The Tanzanian government has identified rice as a priority crop and has been implementing the National Rice Development Strategy (NRDS) since 2009 to commercialise rice farming (United Republic of Tanzania 2019). The implementation of the NRDS is expected to ensure food security and improve incomes of rice producers and other actors in the value chain.
This policy brief examines the impact of rice commercialisation on the food security status of rice-producing households in Mngeta Division of Kilombero District, Tanzania.

APRA Brief 24: The white gold of Wereta: A city raised on rice

Posted on May 15, 2020 by - APRA Briefs

Written by, Tilahun Taddesse, Dawit Alemu and Abebaw Assaye.

Wereta – the administrative capital of Fogera district – is an example of one of the fastest growing urban areas in the Fogera plain. Its rapid development is strongly connected with the development of the rice industry, which has had a spillover effect in the development of diverse services, including hospitality, wholesale and retail businesses, and banking. This brief examines the role of rice commercialisation in the development of Wereta City Administration and concludes with some pointers for scaling experiences that may be applicable to other areas suitable for enhancing rice production and processing.

Essentialist vs interconnected: how to grow and sustain youth and women-led agribusinesses

Posted on May 14, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

This blog refers to the discussions at a key note panel on youth and women in agribusiness at the Agricultural Industry Forum (AIF), 3-5 March 2020. The forum was hosted by the Agriculture Industry Network, and in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture Livestock and Fisheries and Cooperatives, the Council of Governors and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). The APRA team based at CABE in Nairobi participated in the inauguration and planning of the event. The central theme of the forum was “Rethinking Agribusiness: Enhancing Effectiveness in Public-Private Partnerships.”

Written by Hannington Odame


While members of my policy team were busy drafting the AIF 2020 Conference Communique on 4th March 2020, I attended an interesting panel discussion on ‘strategies for sustaining Youth and Women-led agribusinesses.’’

The discussion took contrasting perspectives: essentialist versus interconnected.

All youth, because of their age, have certain characteristics, and women, because of their own altruistic, caring-and environmentally aware characteristics, should both be targets for investment in agribusiness. Being young or a woman is not a qualification for success or failure in the agribusiness, but it is about innovativeness and entrepreneurship of people in general.[1]

Essentialist perspective


Rodgers Kirwa, popularly referred to as ‘Mr Agriculture’, is an award-winning agronomist. Kirwa, 28 from Kenya’s Rift Valley, empowers youths by encouraging them engage in agribusiness, conveying to them that agriculture is profitable and a profession not only meant for the older generation.

He does this through his organisation, iAgribiz Africa, which deals with advocacy on agriculture, trainings, consultancy and mentorships. Mr. Kirwa’s presentation on a best practice of youth and agribusiness was consistent the ‘essentialist perspective’.

The average age of a farmer in Kenya is 61. In a country where nearly 75 per cent of the total population is below 35, youth unemployment has remained at nearly 20 per cent for the last ten years. For many of Kenya’s unemployed youth, agriculture presents a viable business opportunity to create a long-lasting livelihood. The agriculture sector, however, remains largely unattractive to the youth and their participation is hindered mostly by lack of access to land, finance, and markets.

He argues that women play a crucial role in agriculture as producers, traders and processors. However, while women have a big role in production, their participation in agribusiness is often limited to low-profit production. One of the key constraints for women in agribusiness is that of care. Women’s disproportionate responsibility in supporting children and elders can substantially impact their productivity by reducing the number of hours they have to dedicate to income-generating activities.

In this context, farm mechanisation has huge potential for increasing agricultural production and transforming rural families’ livelihoods by reducing drudgery in the field, enhancing sustainable intensification, more efficient use of farm inputs as well as making food-growing activities more “climate-smart”. In many African countries, including Kenya, where farmers are part of an ageing community, agricultural mechanisation can play a powerful role in attracting youth and transforming them into active players in the agriculture and food sectors, and along the value chain.

James Shikwati (L) and Rodgers Kirwa (R) during a panel at the AIF. Photo credit: Micky Abachi, CABE/ APRA, and AIN photographer
Interconnected perspective


Mr James Shikwati, Director of Inter Region Economic Network, argued for a more nuanced approach that challenges the essentialist perspective in supporting youth and women in agribusiness.

To Mr Shikwati, there was a need to take a dynamic view of Kenya’s economy in general, and the agricultural economy in particular.

Photo credit: Micky Abachi, CABE/ APRA, and AIN photographer

‘’Let’s pay attention to trends in the economy and work on how to connect agriculture sector with other rapidly growing sectors (e.g. hospitality industry) which is generating huge national incomes and employment opportunities’’

James Shikwati


The age divide of ‘young-old’ farmers may be helpful in a given context. We should recognise that the 60-year-old farmer of the 1970s is not the same as his age counterpart today, who may be a retired agricultural professional with knowledge, networks and resources.

Similarly, the youth of the 1970s is not the same as the youth of today. On leaving school or college in 1970s, the youth aspired to have permanent jobs and property. On the contrary, modern youth are more mobile and may not aspire to have a permanent job or own land. Such youth are often attracted to places where jobs are paying well no matter how temporary they may be.

One older delegate supported this view by saying that ‘’if you give a young person a piece of land and expect him to farm, you would be shocked when he opts to sell the land, and spend the money or invest it in something else’’.

Mr Shikwati concluded that focusing on youth or women alone, we are putting people back into ‘silos’ (men-women, or old-young) rather than addressing the interconnectedness of people (their knowledge and resources) to harness their social capital (knowledge, resources, competences, networks).

He emphasised that we should aim to connect technologically minded, and innovation-led younger people with the essential experience of older farmers, who also have access to more financial resources as well as owning their own land. The two would be connected through mentoring or apprenticeship arrangements in order grow and sustain youth, and women-led, agribusinesses.

[1] For more on the topic, read Sumberg, James, and Stephen Hunt. “Are African rural youth innovative? Claims, evidence and implications.” Journal of Rural Studies 69 (2019): 130–136. Access it for free, here.

Dr. Hannington Odame (PhD) is the founder and current Executive Director, Centre for African Bio-Entrepreneurship (CABE). He is also the Regional Hub Coordinator, APRA-East Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on agricultural policy and research.


Cover photo credit: Ollivier Girard/CIFOR on Flickr

Zimbabwe’s land reform areas twenty years on (1): A blog series

Posted on May 11, 2020 by - FAC blog

This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland


Twenty years ago the news was filled with stories about land invasions in Zimbabwe. Since then, a group of us have been working in Masvingo province in particular (but also now in Mazowe in Mashonaland Central and Matobo in Matabeleland South) attempting to offer research-based reflections on what happened to people’s livelihoods. Since 2008, this blog has been dedicated to an informed discussion of the ramifications of the land reform, aiming to counter some of the misinformed debate that sadly is still evident, even 20 years on.

The research has been based on long-term field studies in a number of sites. We have been collecting crop production data on many sites continuously, and this has been complemented with more detailed census surveys, exploring demography, land use, asset ownership, labour practices, and off-farm income earning, amongst a whole host of questions. We have also carried out focused enquires on themes that have emerged, like young people’s livelihoods, medium-scale farms, changing land tenure governance, rural towns, small-scale irrigation, amongst much more. As a recent blog series documented, we have also been exploring the comparisons between resettlement and communal areas, testing the assumption that redistributing more land has resulted in improved livelihoods (by and large it has). We have tried to draw out of this research some overarching policy conclusions, and attempted to relay them to government, donors and other researchers through various fora.

Over time, we have tried to share our results in various forms. At last count there were 18 journal articles published from our research, and our 2010 book – Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities– remains a key text. Since then two books – Debating Zimbabwe’s Land Reformand Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Challenges for Policy– have been published that pull together a number of blogs into themes, with short introductions to the issues. Aimed at disseminating in our field sites (see picture below), we have also produced several booklets (in English and Shona) and two video series. The Conversationhas published a few overviews of research over time, including a set in early 2018 aimed at informing the new land reform policy debates emerging then.

This post introduces a new blog series, based on new data that have just been analysed. The series examines how people are faring in our Masvingo province land reform area study sites, based on a census survey during 2019 that repeated earlier rounds in 2006-7 and 2011-12. The survey was followed up by extensive qualitative discussions with various informants across the sites. To conclude the study, at the end of last year, we visited many of our land reform sites across Masvingo province to catch up with people there. They were fascinating visits, as we have been working in these areas since the early 2000s, soon after they were settled following the ‘fast-track’ land reform of 2000.

There are 16 sites, stretching from Gutu in the north to Mwenezi in the south, covering A2 (medium-scale) and A1 farms, including originally over 400 households. The A1 farms include those that are ‘self-contained’ (more like small A2 farms really) and the more common ‘villagised’ arrangements, including those that are well-established in Gutu and Masvingo districts and those that are more ‘informal’ (some without ‘offer letters’, permits to occupy the land) in Chiredzi and Mwenezi districts.

This blog series reflects on our preliminary findings, both from the quantitative survey and the qualitative interviews, focusing on each resettlement category. The series concludes with a very provisional reflection on how things have changed over time, with some ideas about the future. The analysis is only very tentative, and the material deserves more time to go into depth. While there are important changes and nuances to the land reform story, the ‘myths’ about Zimbabwe’s land reform that we challenged in our first book in 2010 remain myths, and there is a much more complex reality.

A number of important themes emerge across the blogs, with implications for the future. In all sites there is deepening social differentiation, with some being able to accumulate while others are struggling. This is creating new labour relations, as some become wage labourers for others. Changing environmental conditions are mentioned frequently, as climate change impacts intensify, making the diversifications into small-scale irrigation vital. This is especially important for women and young people, especially those who cannot gain access to land and have few opportunities for off-farm employment given the state of the Zimbabwean economy. Despite the clear challenges of farming, successes are concentrated in the A1 schemes, with most A2 farms struggling due to lack of financing. Successful A1 agriculture is driving local growth and investment, especially in rural towns. The story is diverse and complex,  and will become more so as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Zimbabwe (again) contemplates a new land policy, and undertakes wider assessments through the Zimbabwe Land Commission, having data to inform interventions now remains important.

Led by Felix Murimbarimba, the Masvingo team is: Moses Mutoko, Thandiwe Shoko, Tanaka Murimbarimba, Liberty Tavagwisa, Tongai Murimbarimba, Vimbai Museva, Jacob Mahenehene, Tafadzwa Mavedzenge (data entry) and Shingirai, the driver. Thanks to the research team, ministry of agriculture officials and the many farmers who have supported the work over the years.

Credit for all photos: Ian Scoones

Agricultural commercialisation and food security in rural communities: Insights from Zimbabwe

Posted on May 7, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Written by Vine Mutyasira


The debate over the effects of export-led commercialisation of agriculture on household food security has been ongoing for years. Tobacco has become the most commonly grown export crop in Zimbabwe, with an estimated 145,000 growers producing the “golden leaf” during the 2018/19 farming season (TIMB, 2020). Yet, there are still knowledge gaps in terms of the effects of the ‘tobacco boom’ and export-led commercialisation on household food and nutrition security. Many of the existing studies have remained largely inconclusive.

An optimists’ view on agricultural commercialisation and household food security emphasises that high value cash crops are associated with higher farm incomes, which gives farmers greater purchasing power, and thus enhances their participation in food markets. The increased income also enable farmers to purchase inputs such as inorganic fertilisers, crop protection chemicals and improved seeds, which enhances crop productivity of both the cash crops and the food crops though spillover effects. Such synergies were witnessed by earlier studies in the cotton sub-sector in Zimbabwe.

On the other hand, there are concerns that as production systems become more commercially oriented, farmers increasingly allocate more land to high value cash crops such as cotton and tobacco, at the expense of traditional food crops such as maize. Cash crops such as tobacco tend to be labour- and management-intensive labour, which leaves farmers with limited time to cultivate traditional crops such as maize, groundnuts or beans. Also, the production calendar of tobacco is such that farmers can only break from tobacco around July, leaving them with very little time to prepare their land for food crops in time for our November rains.

Tobacco farm in Mvurwi, Zimbabwe. Credit: Toendepi Shonhe


APRA involvement

The APRA research team in Zimbabwe is trying to contribute to the debate on the food security-related outcomes of tobacco-led agricultural commercialisation in smallholder farming communities. Using cross-sectional data covering 647 smallholder farm households in the Mvurwi and Concession areas of Mazowe District in Zimbabwe, we examine how tobacco-led commercialisation can potentially influence food security outcomes through changes in crop portfolios, agricultural inputs use and crop productivity. We also explore the possibility of synergies between tobacco and food crop production by examining whether incomes from tobacco sales are invested in food crop production to enhance productivity of these crops. We compare crop productivity levels between two possible commercialisation pathways:  tobacco-led pathway (growing tobacco, food and other cash crops) and food-based pathway (growing food and other cash crops, but not tobacco).

Findings

Our study has produced two sets of results. Firstly, we found that input-use intensity was higher among households pursuing tobacco-based commercialisation than those on the food-based commercialisation pathway. The incomes from tobacco production enabled households to invest more in critical inputs such as inorganic fertilisers, improved seeds, hired labour, and agrochemicals such as pesticides and herbicides. We also found that maize yields were significantly higher on the tobacco-based pathway compared to food-based commercialisation, suggesting some potential spillover effects where maize benefits from the tobacco crop. This has important implications for the food versus cash crops debate. If the loss in maize area due to tobacco production can be compensated by increased productivity, then the food security effects of the expansion of tobacco should not be as detrimental as is often feared.

Finally, we found that the likelihood of pursuing tobacco-led commercialisation increases with household size, wealth levels and access to hired labour and inorganic fertilisers. We also noted that access to contract farming arrangements plays a crucial role in easing the barriers to entry into the capital-intensive tobacco value chain, and thus encourages smallholder farmers to pursue tobacco-led agricultural commercialisation. On the other hand, we found that households with greater access to tractor tillage services were more likely to pursue food-based commercialisation, rather than embarking on a tobacco-based pathway. One possible explanation for this is that tractors allow households to cultivate more land for food crops, which are mostly land intensive.

Summary

There are potential synergies between tobacco-led commercialisation and food crop productivity, with two main takeaway points to consider. Firstly, our results suggest a transmission from higher incomes obtained from tobacco sales to higher productivity among food crops. Investing tobacco incomes in purchasing agricultural inputs for food crops is crucial to compensate for the loss in total area allocated to food crops. As such, the availability of critical farm inputs will be crucial to moderating the food versus cash debate. Secondly, the debate on the impacts of tobacco-led commercialisation on household food security should not be solely informed by the limited view that tends to equate food security to self-sufficiency. Higher incomes from tobacco sales could still enable households to acquire food from the markets and achieve higher nutritional outcomes.

For further APRA research on Zimbabwe, see the recently published Working Paper 32: Intra-Household Gender Differentials in Smallholder Agriculture Productivity in Food and Non-Food Crop Commercialisation Pathways: Evidence from Zimbabwe

Cover image: A tobacco warehouse in Mvurwi, Tanzania. Credit: Toendepi Shonhe


Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on agricultural policy and research.

Five lessons from past global influenza outbreaks for COVID-19

Posted on May 4, 2020 by - FAC blog

Written by Ian Scoones. This blog first appeared on the STEPS website.


The COVID-19 pandemic is a rare event in its scale and spread. But in responding to it, people have been looking at lessons from other outbreaks of infectious disease. What are the patterns in the ways that governments and people respond, and why have some widely-known lessons been ignored again and again?

One source of insight is the global outbreak of avian influenza (H5N1) in 2004-2006. In 2007, Paul Forster and I, with support from the FAO/DFID and the ESRC STEPS Centre, set out to explore the implications of that outbreak. We were joined by Sophal Ear, Rachel Safman and Tuong Vu, and together we looked at the national responses in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, alongside the array of global initiatives.

In 2009, in the midst of another global pandemic – this time of swine flu (H1N1) – we wrote it all up as a book, Avian Influenza: Science, Policy and Politics, aiming to draw lessons for the future. Many saw the avian and then swine influenza as the ‘dress rehearsal’ for the major pandemic that everyone knew would come sometime. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are now at that point. I re-read the book recently in preparation for an IDS Between the Lines podcast. The parallels with today are striking.

Back then, thankfully, the avian flu outbreaks did not turn out to be the long-expected ‘big one’, and in the end only a few hundred deaths were recorded. But, as the H5N1 virus began to spread between people in 2004, people’s minds turned to the spectre of the 1918 flu pandemic – as they are doing today. During the avian influenza outbreak, dire warnings were spelled out of the potential death tolls: up to 150 million people, according to one estimate from WHO. The interventions to stop spread, particularly through poultry populations, were extreme, combined with major movement restrictions on animals and people.

Avian flu was highly virulent among poultry and wild bird populations, but it did not catch hold in the human population. Although it spread further, the later H1N1 swine flu virus similarly failed to take hold among people. But, as biologists reminded us, we were only one genetic reassortment away from the lethal, fast-spreading flu virus. Today we are confronting a different virus – a coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 – which has just these qualities. This virus comes from a different source, with different epidemiological dynamics, but also causes respiratory disease.

The final sentence of the 2010 avian influenza book is telling. We urged the world to “waste no time” in learning the lessons. In the intervening decade since the book was published, did the world take heed? The short answer is, no. In the closing chapter, we outline the important challenges for policy and practice. Of course every epidemic is distinct, with different contests over science, different policies and different politics, as the country cases in the book show. But there were some striking common themes that emerged from across our studies.

Lessons from the past

Five lessons are startlingly relevant to what also needs to happen after COVID-19, and they are summarised here.

1) Go beyond a focus on outbreaks to address changing disease ecologies

We only wake up to disease threats when there is a big outbreak. Most recently for influenza, this was in 1968, 1976 in the US, 1997 in Hong Kong, and then 2004-6 and 2009 for avian and swine flu respectively. During these periods, funds are mobilised (usually late), experts are consulted (usually selectively) and governments invest (if they can afford it). The international machinery grinds slowly into action, and encourages global action. Then, when it’s over, things stop and go back to normal.

But it’s the intervening years between outbreaks that are actually the important ones. This is the period when viruses that might jump from wild animal populations are circulating. Most diseases that become epidemic (subject to outbreaks) start out as endemic (just part of the normal disease environment). Unless we know more about disease ecologies, by tracking viruses, examining their genetics and phylogenies and exploring vectors and hosts, we will not be able to spot pending outbreaks.

Over the past three decades or so, over 30 new human pathogens have been detected, three-quarters of which have originated in animals. This means zoonotic spillover is very common, and sometimes the consequences are serious for human populations. Just as with influenza viruses, coronaviruses can cause human disease – SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was one and COVID-19 is another. But there are plenty more, and viruses change fast under selection pressure, so there are always possibilities of new ones.

As environments alter – through climate change, intensification of agriculture or rapid urbanisation, for example – we need to be on top of the game. For COVID-19, we weren’t; just as we weren’t for avian and swine flu.

2) Address the political economy and ecology of food systems

Most transfers from wild populations to humans occur in the context of agriculture and food production. For avian influenza, it was most likely due to the rapid industrialisation of poultry production in parts of southeast Asia and China, spurred by the growing demand for meat. Poultry products were increasingly being supplied by medium-scale industrial units, frequently with poor biosecurity. For swine flu, it was pig farms in the southern US and Mexico owned by large corporates that were the source of outbreaks. For COVID-19, the initial transfer seems to have been traced to a so-called ‘wet market’ in Wuhan that sold wild animal products.

In each case, however, there is a wider story of changing agri-food systems behind the outbreak.

As Rob Wallace argues, big farms create big flu and the increasing concentration of animal production, and the role of powerful corporate players in the food chain, is important. For COVID-19 the story is a bit different. Many are now blaming Chinese ‘wet markets’, but simply banning them will simply drive markets underground, with even less biosecurity and greater risk, and would be a ‘terrible mistake’.

In exploring the disease history of COVID-19, we have to look at the wider political ecology of production, and how wild animals are increasingly harvested further and further into still-remaining forest areas. Here, viruses circulating in wild populations may come into contact with humans for the first time, causing infections. So it is disturbance of the wider ecosystem and its consequences for agri-food systems that is important; not just the market where – following a long chain – the outbreak started.

3) Take livelihoods, equity and access seriously

Very often, measures to stop a disease can be highly damaging to vulnerable populations. In the avian influenza outbreak, control efforts focused on so-called ‘backyard chicken’ producers, and their poultry was slaughtered compulsorily in huge numbers. This caused devastating impacts on livelihoods across southeast Asia, with governments insisting that producers ‘upgrade’ to biosecure facilities. This was of course out of reach of many people, and the opportunity of the disaster was captured by those with capital and political influence.

Just as with the quarantine measures for COVID-19, it was poor and marginal groups that were the worst hit by disease control efforts. These were the same groups who had least access to healthcare support if they got the disease. While viruses can affect everyone, their impacts – both of the disease and the control measures that follow an outbreak – are unevenly felt across diverse and unequal societies.

The rhetoric that ‘we are all in this together’ in a global outbreak forgets issues of equity, and the ‘structural violence’ that diseases deliver. In the avian influenza case, the focus on ‘at source’ extermination of poultry flocks to protect ‘global’ business and western populations illustrated the uneven nature of what was portrayed as a unified international response.

4) Embrace uncertainty and surprise and rethink approaches to policy advice

Despite the experience of previous major influenza outbreaks, the spread of avian influenza from 2004 took the world by surprise. It did again in 2009 with H1N1, and it has today with COVID-19. We will never know when a new disease will emerge, and how it will spread, but it will certainly happen.

After the avian influenza outbreaks, much effort was focused on poultry in southeast Asia, but the next outbreak came from the Americas and was in pigs. Despite the vast investment in pandemic preparedness and epidemiological disease modelling, we can never predict what will happen and when. Even when an outbreak occurs, there are so many uncertain parameters in any model that predictions of what will happen is simply guesswork, even if well-informed.

The warning that perhaps 150 million could die from H5N1 in the mid-2000s was thankfully way off the mark. The influential models published in Nature and Science in 2005 – including by modellers now heavily engaged with the COVID-19 response – were subsequently found wanting. They tried to offer certainty where there was none, and misled policy-makers by giving a false sense of predictive security.

As we argued in the 2010 book (and many times since), embracing uncertainty and surprise requires a different approach: a more plural perspective on modelling and sources of knowledge, including linking to local understandings and experiences. The COVID-19 experience shows a similarly dangerous reliance on necessarily imperfect models, and thus an unhealthy reliance in science-policy circles on inevitably limited epidemiological information, without this being complemented by other sources of more diverse and locally-rooted expertise.

5) Develop institutions and organisations that foster adaptation, innovation and reliability

In our reflections on avian influenza, we concluded that the existing institutional and organisational architecture, constructed after the Second World War through the United Nations system, was not fit-for-purpose. It was top-down, cumbersome, lacked flexibility and was organised in disciplinary/sectoral siloes. This remains the case today.

The avian influenza episode prompted useful debate about a ‘One Health’ approach, which encouraged cross-working between medics, vets and ecologists, together (sometimes) with social scientists. But the incentives, funding flows and capacities to institutionalise this were absent, despite the flurry of interest. Subsequent work highlighted just how segmented networks of expertise were, and how challenging a One Health approach is for current systems in the UN and beyond.

To generate reliability in the face of uncertainty and ignorance and to offset damaging surprises, a totally different set of skills, capacities and organisational arrangements are required.

Where is the capacity in large organisations to learn from the ground, share innovations and shift course? Frequently missing. Where are the reliability professionals in health systems who can track between local contexts and wider scenarios, and facilitate real-time responses? Largely absent, or at least not recognised. Where is the built-in redundancy, system flexibility and adaptive capacity for facing times of crisis? Again, not evident – too often these are the first elements in any organisation to be cut due to ‘efficiency’ measures under austerity financing.

In top-down, crisis and emergency planning, such flexibility is usually eliminated, and people are left to innovate on their own, embedding their own practical knowledges into cultural repertoires and forms of collective action. This is what happened amongst poultry farmers in southeast Asia in the 2000s, as it is across the world in response to COVID-19. As we learned from Ebola in West Africa, it is these culturally- and socially-embedded responses that are key to ‘flattening the curve’ in any outbreak, but are only rarely incorporated into wider responses.

* * * *

These five lessons summarise what we learned from the avian influenza outbreaks in the mid-2000s. As you can see, they are all relevant to what we are facing now. Once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over, let’s hope that the lessons – adapted to the particular conditions of different places – will be learned this time, and the same mistakes will not be made in the future. COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic to confront humanity.

Find out more

COVID-19: Resources and research on epidemics and pandemics
Compilation of 13 years of work on epidemics and disease under the ESRC STEPS Centre, and its links to COVID-19.

Book on epidemics and One Health

You can buy the book on the avian influenza response and two companion volumes from the publisher, Routledge, at a 50% reduction using the code IDS50 until the end of May 2020.

Podcast: the social dynamics of pandemics

Melissa Leach, Hayley MacGregor, Annie Wilkinson and Ian Scoones discuss how we should learn from past epidemics and outbreaks and the need to understand social dynamics in order to respond to Covid-19.

LISTEN/SUBSCRIBE (IDS WEBSITE)

The ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre carries out interdisciplinary global research that unites development studies with science and technology studies.


Cover photo: Villagers in Makamie, Sierra Leone. Credit: Corporal Paul Shaw/MOD on Flickr.

Working Paper 32: Intra-Household Gender Differentials in Smallholder Agriculture Productivity in Food and Non-Food Crop Commercialisation Pathways: Evidence from Zimbabwe

Posted on May 1, 2020 by - Working Papers

Written by, Takesure Tozooneyi, Ephraim W. Chirwa, Vine Mutyasira and Chrispen Sukume.

This study contributes to the empirical evidence on gender differentials in smallholder agriculture productivity in Zimbabwe in two ways. First, the data allows households to be grouped into commercialisation pathways; secondly, intra-household resource allocation issues are considered by distinguishing female plot managers into two groups: female plot managers in female-headed households and female plot managers in male-headed households. We test the hypotheses that: a) there are no gender differences in productivity in female- and male-managed plots; b) there are no differences in productivity between female plot managers from male- and female-headed households and male plot managers; and c) gender productivity differentials do not depend on the commercialisation pathway chosen by the farming household.

Working Paper 31: Long-Term Change and Agricultural Commercialisation in Ghanaian Cocoa

Posted on May 1, 2020 by - Working Papers

Written by, Kojo S. Amanor, Joseph A. Yaro and Joseph K. Teye.

This study examines the processes of commercialisation in the cocoa sector in the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) framework. This study examines the different processes of transformation that have occurred and are occurring within the cocoa sector, and the extent to which as forested lands disappear, farmers are transitioning out of cocoa or adopting new technologies and ways of producing cocoa. It also examines the extent to which the growing scarcity of land affects rural households and the changing terms on which people gain access to land, as it becomes a scarce commodity.

Working Paper 30: Does Rice Commercialisation Impact on Livelihood? Experience from Mngeta in Kilombero District, Tanzania

Posted on May 1, 2020 by - Working Papers

Written by, Aida Isinika, Gilead Mlay, Gideon Boniface, Ntengua Mdoe, Colin Poulton and Amrita Saha.

This paper discusses the livelihood impacts of rice commercialisation for farmers in Mngeta division in Kilombero district in Tanzania. Rice commercialisation occurs where more farmers engage in factor markets and product markets, buying more inputs and selling more farm produce through the market, as opposed to subsistence production. In the study area, rice commercialisation has been an ongoing process for a long time, but it seems to have been accelerating recently due to various factors. This paper outlines those factors in order to provide policy recommendations for enhancing the enabling factors for commercialisation, while addressing the inhibiting factors, particularly in relation to inclusive poverty reduction.

Cocoa commercialisation: findings from Osun state, Nigeria

Posted on April 30, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Written by Olubusayo Olorunkoya


Following on from our previous blog on the state of cocoa commercialisation in Ogun state, this blog examines the findings of APRA survey results in Nigeria’s 2nd largest producer of Cocoa: Osun state.

Surveying method

Taking place between 21st and 23rd of August, 2019, the APRA exploratory survey was conducted in two communities; Osu and Ilobe. Data was collected through Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) using the software “Insyt”, which marked a change from using pen and paper, as was the case previously. Although a challenge to begin with, some interviewers were using the software the first time, it was one they soon overcome and set them in good stead for future surveying.

After visiting community leaders to pay their respects and introduce the team, they then divided into sub-groups for key informant interviews, focus group discussions and questionnaire administration. The respondents for the survey were selected through a random sampling procedure.

APRA exploratory survey team introduce themselves and pay respects to HRM Festus Adekunle Adeyemi, Alakola of Ikola-Ijesha. Credit: APRA Nigeria


Some of the immediate findings include:

Land market

Farmers acquire their cocoa territory either by inheritance, rent, and lease, or through the payment of royalty – which involves a payment of an agreed sum of money or kind (farm produce) with the land owner, who can be an individual or a representative of a family called ‘olori-ebi’.

Farmers often use land for production through renting or leasing from others. In some cases, farmers act as produce buyers to fellow farmers, in order to increase their own ‘output’ and ultimately, income for the season. Tenure rights through inheritance are secure, particularly for locals in the community, but purchasing land, although practiced, is not common. Tenure right through leasehold – where farmer pays an agreed sum over a specified period – is fairly commonplace, but its sustainability depends on the goodwill of the owner.

Actors and family involvement

Generally, there are no gender-specific activities along the cocoa value chain in these communities.  Men and women are represented as the farmers, marketers and input dealers. Nor are there taboos and social beliefs associated with cocoa production in the communities. However, there are more individuals of higher socio-economic status among cocoa merchants (produce buyers or marketers) than cocoa farmers, and they tend to generate higher profits than the producers. In addition, women are major stakeholders among the cocoa production and marketing process in the communities. The children also help their parents in the process, especially during the holidays, joining their mothers in fetching water for their fathers during chemical praying, and are involved in harvesting and breaking of cocoa pods. 

Youth participation

Othertrades such as okada driving, bricklaying and petty trading are other common livelihood activities among the people in the communities, but youths and migrants from different states are more involved in cocoa commercialisation among these communities because of its high economic value. The APRA team found that there were number of the success stories, stories of which could be the driver for such high economic value. For example, a prominent member of the community said:

 “I have built about four good houses, sponsored children’s education to university levels, among other achievements – all from the cocoa enterprise”.

Cocoa Farmers Association Chairman of Atakumosa LGA, Osun state

Marketing

Cocoa beans are sold in bags or sacks but measured in kilograms. The main marketing outlets for cocoa in these communities include cocoa stores in Ilesha (the nearest city) as well as representatives of other cocoa commodity firms like SARO and OLAM. Other means of marketing include commodity buyers, who source cocoa directly from farmers and then buy and sell to cocoa processing companies and other actors.  A few farmers also sell in the open markets. However, processing among farmers is rare as a majority of them either went as far as producing the bean, or sold them after the fermentation and drying process.

Stakeholders’ meeting at Atakumosa West LGA. Credit: APRA Nigeria


The ‘chemical’ challenge

The lack of adequate finance to buy chemicals needed to deter insects and disease is a major challenge. The late purchase of chemicals, often due to financial constraints, usually leads to decaying and insect infestation of plantations – spraying has to be done at certain times otherwise a farm becomes vulnerable. Farmers explained that they had poor knowledge of quality agrochemicals and fall victim to ‘quack’ input suppliers. This has caused more damage to their farms and the products. Other related challenges are high cost of inputs, high humidity, lack of improved cocoa varieties and poor access to extension services.  This adversely affects the local economy, wellbeing, and heightens food insecurity in the region.

There is potential for poverty reduction these communities, but this can only be achieved when the efforts geared towards a regeneration program are supported by deliberate policies involving all stakeholders – crucially implemented by the government in partnership with the private sector.


Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on agricultural policy and research.

Cover photo: Cocoa beans being sun-dried. Credit: APRA Nigeria

Second image: Map showing Osun state within Nigeria. Credit: Himalayan Explorer based on work by Uwe Dedering, Wikipedia Commons

COVID-19 lockdown in Zimbabwe: a disaster for farmers

Posted on April 30, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Written by Ian Scoones


Over the last few weeks we have been tracking what’s been happening in our rural study sites in Zimbabwe as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown (see the earlier blog too). Last week, I caught up with a colleague in Masvingo who had been recently in touch with others in our team in Chatsworth, Chikombedzi, Hippo Valley, Matobo, Mvurwi and Wondedzo. This blog is a report on current conditions, summarising a long phone conversation.

The lockdown was first announced by the President Mnangagwa on 30 March, and was subsequently extended on 19 April for a further 14 days. As of April 26 there were 31 reported cases and 4 deaths, spread unevenly across the country. But of course the fear is that the disease will spread and strike hard. The lockdown measures have been heavily enforced and have caused massive hardship, particularly in the poorer urban areas, where informal traders in particular have been targeted. Farmers have suffered too due to movement restrictions and the collapse of markets.

As my conversation last week revealed, Zimbabwe’s experience, like elsewhere in Africa, raises questions as to the costs of a heavy-handed lockdown, particularly on the poor and marginalised, and whether there are alternative approaches both to confront the virus now and for different approaches to society and economy in the future.

How have movement restrictions affected people’s lives in the rural areas?

Massively. Although you can go to the local shops (between 9am and 3pm) and move about your area, you cannot move further without a permit, and have to prove that travel is essential. Security people can stop you at any moment. You can get a permit from Agritex (extension service) locally for agriculture-related movement, or from the councillor or police. But if you have to move further you have to go to the provincial level. It can take days. You can try your luck and negotiate at the road-blocks, but you will likely be turned back. There are so many police out – they’re everywhere! There is no public transport these days. If you travel in your private vehicle, you can only have two people. All the private Kombis and buses are grounded. ZUPCO (a government-owned company) operate buses, which are disinfected after each trip, but there are very few. This has had a disastrous effect on business, and farmers cannot get crops to market. Right now people need workers to help with the harvest, and although this is allowed as agriculture is essential, you can easily be stopped, and it makes getting help on the farm more difficult than before.

So what about agricultural produce markets?

It’s a disaster. All the main ones have been shut down. There was an outcry and they opened them again for a bit, but people crowded there. It was chaos, so they shut them again. This means for horticultural farmers in our study areas things are tough. Vegetables, especially cabbages and tomatoes, are rotting at their farms. In the south, huge number of melons have gone to waste. For some, vegetable-drying is possible, and people are creating ‘mufushwa’ in large quantities. But overall it’s a disaster. Some are selling individually, travelling to the ‘locations’ (high density suburbs) and selling from their pick-ups. Some can sell to the supermarkets if they have contracts, but demand has gone down. You can’t move from the location to town in Masvingo without permission, and so people just buy locally, informally. Other markets have also dried up. The boarding schools are closed, so are the universities, along with all hotels, restaurants and so on. These all used to be so important for horticulture markets, as well as for poultry. Income from these sources has ceased. Same too with the massive church gatherings, attended by thousands. In some of our sites, people had been growing for the Easter gatherings, but now they have had to dispose of the produce. It’s a disaster for farmers.

What about businesses more generally?

Most of these are closed. It means that as a farmer you can’t get your pump repaired, or a car fixed. You can’t go and buy key bits of equipment. Even if the shop opens for a short time, which some are allowed to, getting a permit to travel from you rural farm and ensuring you are there at the right time is impossible. A big problem is cash. This has been a problem for a time. The electronic RTGS Zim dollar is worth less than the Zimbabwe bond notes, but people are not keen to use cash notes as it might transfer the virus. Even if you have money in the bank, you cannot get it. They’ve opened banks only for forex, and for short periods, to allow remittances from the diaspora to be paid. This is vital for many of us, including farmers.

How are people surviving?

The rural people are on their own. There is a big chain reaction – without markets, producers, transporters, and all others suffer. And then there is no cash to buy food or other inputs. For example, there is a big theileriosis disease outbreak among cattle currently, but people have not been able to buy spray dip chemicals and cattle are dying in numbers. They cannot be driven to other places to avoid the ticks, so they just die. Of course people in the rural areas are in some way better off. It’s the beginning of the main harvest season and, although the season was bad, people at least have something. It’s much tougher in town. There’s subsidised mealie-meal, but a packet of 10kg that should be Z$70 it’s being sold for Z$90. Traders are exploiting the situation. Some are illegally doing business. In one study site the grinding mills open at night to allow people to get food. The money changers operate under cover and there is a growth of private business, from people’s homes, including brewing beer, baking and selling food. In the south, some are even risking crossing the border to get supplies for resale in South Africa. The danger is that they can smuggle the virus too.

What are some of the social issues emerging?

Certainly there are reports of increased domestic violence. People cannot go out, and tensions rise. Some are consuming illegal brews – including spirits made at home. This can be dangerous, just like we are seeing increased drug use among the youth. Normal life is disrupted. You cannot even bury the dead – you again need a permit, and a health worker has to be present to supervise the burial, and a maximum of 50 can attend, but following social distancing rules. Travelling to funerals is impossible if outside your area. Family relations – and life in general – are being challenged by this virus.

What about health services?

Yes the clinics and hospitals are open. The problem is that you have to get a permit to move. And then the nurses at a clinic may not see you. They don’t always have the full personal protective equipment (PPE) and are really scared. Even though there are no cases in Masvingo as yet, people may be dying of malaria or childbirth complications or whatever, because of the lockdown. It’s killing people. The government is investing seriously in the health service, even employing more health workers. They are creating emergency beds, even in the rural areas, but it may not be enough. We have seen what has happened in Europe and the US on the news.

What are people’s attitudes to COVID-19?

People ask, what disease is this? Where has it come from? It is such a shock! There are so many rumours. People say it’s God’s revenge; they blame the superpowers; they say it has been manufactured to kill us. But mostly people are just scared. They have seen the news. We know pandemics, we had HIV/AIDS, but this is worse. It’s the number 1 disease. With AIDS people died over a long time, but this is sudden. With HIV you knew how it was transmitted, and people changed their behaviour. It could be avoided. This is just meeting someone – it’s so contagious. Even thought he’s allowed, one of our colleagues who works with Agritex was moving around and was told in one village to go home – to ‘keep to your place’!

Who are the main people involved in the response?

There are so many. The government actually has organised quite well, it is doing something. Before they’d forgotten the health system – there was a freeze on health posts, people were paid badly and the hospitals and clinics were in a terrible state. Now they see the importance. This crisis has at last awakened the administration. For years we haven’t had an effective health service, but now something at least is happening. In each area there are COVID-19 task-forces – and mines, business people, well-off individuals and others are contributing resources. The universities and some business are making things – sanitiser, masks, PPE materials and so on. It’s a joint effort with government. The chiefs are involved too, and so are the spirit mediums who are seeking spiritual help to get through the crisis. The churches are doing the same; although they are not meeting, the church leaders, prophets and others are mobilising. Everyone is praying! There are WhatsApp groups giving advice on what to do, including some ideas for remedies. There seems to be a unified approach, and all the political parties are involved.

What next?

So far we haven’t suffered from the disease, only the lockdown. We have a few cases only. We accept that this lockdown period is for building the capacity of the health system to cope. Let’s hope that’s possible. It’s a Catch 22. We see what has happened in the UK, US and even South Africa. We don’t want this to happen here. But with lockdown most people are surviving hand-to-mouth. Life has become very, very difficult. There is mass suffering, and so far in Masvingo we haven’t had a single case recorded. Is it worth it? I don’t know, but everyone is very scared. Maybe there can be a process where kids can go to school, markets can open and we can move around because we cannot go on like this for long. There must be ways to make the places where lots of people gather safe – schools, transport hubs, markets, shops, religious gatherings and so on. Surely we can think of ways. Good hygiene, distancing and so on. Once the health service is adequate and built up things will be better; maybe there will be some anti-viral medicines too, like we have for HIV. Hopefully we can then live with the virus, and still survive.

What lessons can we draw from the experience so far?

We know that health services are important, and the government needs to invest. We know that farmers are essential and contribute to combatting a crisis, especially getting food to urban areas. We also know that lockdowns are really impossible – and they can kill. They may be worse than the virus! We also know that we can do things ourselves. Good diets bring immunity. There are traditional remedies that may help. And hygiene in the home and at work is always important. In the past we used to be self-reliant, making and selling things locally. There were often big crises, such as droughts, but our parents had granaries to tide them over. In future, we have to be prepared, we have to use our own resources. In the past we used to make things ourselves, not go to the shop to buy. Why are we importing so many things like face-masks? We can make them. We produce huge amounts of ethanol from sugar, so we can make sanitisers. We have forgotten self-reliance. We have been taught a very big lesson by this virus. We should not rely on the outside, and individuals and households have to take the responsibility ourselves.

This blog first appeared on Zimbabweland. It is a summary of a recorded conversation on 23 April 2020. Thanks to the whole team form across Zimbabwe for their contributions. Future posts will offer more updates and detailed cases from our field sites in Masvingo, Matabeleland South and Mashonaland Central provinces of Zimbabwe.

Child labour in cocoa from a European ‘doughnut’ perspective

Posted on April 27, 2020 by - FAC blog

This blog was written by Dorte Thorsen and James Sumberg, and first appeared on the ACHA website



Much attention is being given to how best to resurrect economic activity as the COVID-19 crisis subsides. The upheaval caused by the pandemic and the serious threat of climate change are drawing attention to new approaches to planning, economics and sustainability. With attention focusing on local and global issues, the question is at which scale these approaches can be applied?

According to the Guardian, politicians and planners in Amsterdam are set to embrace the so-called ‘doughnut’ model of a sustainable economy. The model suggests that a sustainable economy can be envisaged as a doughnut, the inner boundary of which represents the minimum needed for social sustainability, while the outer boundary represents the limit of ecological sustainability. The idea is that an economy that operates in the space between these boundaries will be both socially just and ecologically sustainable.

Amsterdam’s deputy mayor, Marieke van Doornick, believes that the transformations needed to move into this social and ecological safe operating space require the city not only to address local issues but also issues in the countries with which Amsterdam does business. For example, she suggests that the port of Amsterdam could refuse to accept or store any produce associated with exploitative labour practices.

As Amsterdam is the major point of entry for cocoa imports into Europe, this could significantly disrupt trade in this important commodity, as West African cocoa is regularly linked to child labour. But does such an ambitious approach to local economic transformation risk undermining the social and ecological sustainability of a larger, international doughnut? While, it is appealing to advocate for social justice everywhere, for the particular case of cocoa there are two issues that cast doubt on whether the approach being suggested for Amsterdam will truly achieve its objectives.

Labour, work and harm

First, the label ‘child labour’ is not as straightforward as it seems. The definition has evolved over the years; from including all productive activities to equating child labour with paid employment, and thus distinctly different from unpaid work within the family. Currently, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) delimits child labour as work that harms children’s and adolescents’ health and personal development or deprives them of schooling. Under certain conditions, some work outside school hours and during school holidays – at home, in a family business or for wages – is acknowledged by ILO as positive and is not considered as child labour.

It is however very difficult to assess what work is harmful and in what ways. Physical harm to a child’s health will depend on what tasks s/he is involved in, the frequency of specific tasks and exposure to chemical hazards such as pesticides, and on the age, size and strength of the child. Psychological and emotional harm is equally difficult to assess and will depend on the cultural values ascribed to work and the relationships between adults and working children.

Often conceptualisations of harm brim with cultural and moral notions of what a child should and should not do, which do not necessarily translate across borders. For example, advocacy to end child labour in cocoa regularly features photographs of children using a machete to crack open cocoa pods, with the suggestion that any such activity is hazardous. In West Africa, however, it is common for 12-15-year olds to work alongside their parents on the family farm using hoes, sickles and machetes. Many children will also farm a small plot of their own.

Assessing harm to a child’s personal development is equally problematic. Evidence shows that many children and adolescents take great pride in working to support themselves and to contribute to family welfare. Importantly, being banned from work does not necessarily bring children back into education but may actually prevent their re-entry if they were working to pay school fees or school-related expenses. The sense of obligation to help a parent, or the need to do so in the case of illness and death, may deprive an adolescent of schooling, but his or her work may help younger siblings to remain in school. Incidences of child labour thus need to be understood in the broader family and social contexts. A narrow focus on the presence children in cocoa production may instigate a ban regardless of whether the work is harmful or not, and without recognising that a ban potentially reduces children’s integration in local economic and social relations.

The need for a fair price

Second, plans for socially just societies cannot address exploitation narrowly in terms of exploitative labour practices: the effects of broader production and trade relations on labour practices must also be considered. For example, global cocoa prices fluctuate significantly and have remained below US$ 2700 per metric ton for the past two years. These prices fail to secure many cocoa farmers a living income – to do so, according to the Cocoa Barometer (pdf), the minimum farm gate price needs to be US$ 3116 per metric ton in Ghana and US$ 3166 in Côte d’Ivoire.

A study in Ghana by researchers at the University of Arkansas suggests that a 2.8 per cent increase in the cocoa price would almost eliminate what is usually deemed the worst forms of child labour, while the price would need to increase by almost 12 per cent to reduce children’s working hours in cocoa to the level deemed acceptable by the Ghanaian government.

Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire reveals that despite the declining incomes, farmers continue to grow cocoa in part because they obtain fertilisers and pesticides through the cocoa growers’ organisation, which they can then use on their food crops. Any ban of cocoa by the port of Amsterdam because it is the fruit of child labour or other exploitative labour relations would have wide and significant ramifications for poor farm households in West Africa. In addition to reducing their cocoa income, such a ban would also reduce the productivity in food crops.

Social justice and sustainability are complex, and single issues such as child labour cannot be addressed in a meaningful way by the actions of a city or country. Broader structural, trade and political transformations are required to allow everyone – chocolate consumers in Amsterdam and cocoa villages in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – to have a good life. From this perspective it is interesting and important to consider what the doughnut model of a sustainable economy might look like if the starting point were not Amsterdam, but a cocoa producing community in West Africa.



Cover photo: International Institute of Tropical Agriculture on Flickr.

The four immediate impacts of Covid-19 regulations on the Mozambican farmers

Posted on April 27, 2020 by - FAC blog

By Phillan Zamchiya, Clemente Ntauazi and Boaventura Monjane. This blog first appeared on the PLAAS website.


In order to guard against the spread of Covid-19, Mozambique declared a state of emergency for 30 days with effect from 1 April 2020. The government announced several regulations meant to limit the movement of people and goods in a decree. This was bound to affect different sectors of the economy and agriculture has not been an exception. Within the agrarian sector, some studies indicate that the peasantry constitutes 80% of the economically active population, producing 90% of food available in the country. How have the interventions affected this ‘invisible’ group in the marginal areas? This is in a context where peasant farmers are currently harvesting crops such as maize, peanuts and beans and are preparing for the second farming season.

Based on recent conversations with farmers and our field experience, we observed four immediate impacts.

First, the farmers are selling their products way below the market price as the supply chain has broken down. Due to restrictions on movement, most of the candongueiros (informal traders) who usually buy the products from the farmers are no longer able to go into the communities. To make matters worse, agricultural trade markets in rural areas have been stopped. As a result, there is a drop in the demand for products. The farmers have no option but to sell their products to the few available buyers for a song in order to meet their day-to-day needs. For example, in Lioma village (a sub-division under Gurué district), farmers sold beans at MZN 20 (7 ZAR) per kg but since the announcement of the state of emergency the price has decreased to MZN 14 (4 ZAR) per kg. Maize was MZN10 (3,55 ZAR) per kg and it has dropped to MZN 6 (2 ZAR) per kg. Peasants who might want to go and sell their own products to get fairer prices face transport constraints. The price of transport has increased. For instance, from Ruace (a highly productive zone) to Gurué, transport fare has increased from MZN 80 (28 ZAR) to MZN 100 (35 ZAR). While in Nacala (a cassava production region) transport has increased from MZN 250 (89 ZAR) to MZN 400 (141 ZAR).

Secondly, peasants are struggling to buy basic commodities due to reduced income from crop sales. While the peasants have been forced to reduce prices, local businesses have increased prices of products such as oil, milk, soap, salt, sugar and other items for household consumption. A survey of shops in Gurué shows that the prices of most products have increased by 50%. On the other hand, some small shops are closing as they fail to restock due to transportation problems. However, the problem extends to peri-urban and urban consumers. The candongueiros who are able to beat the regulations have increased prices for urban consumers. For example, a 50kg bag of cassava, which was at the price of MZN 50 (18 ZAR) before the pandemic, now sells at MZN 150 (53 ZAR). The intermediaries cite the increase in transport costs, but others have found an opportunity to make exorbitant profit. After all, they already buy at low prices from the vulnerable farmers. This has serious implications on food accessibility.

Thirdly, the regulations have affected the supply of agrarian labour in the rural areas. Farmers are finding it difficult to mobilise labour based on traditional kinship and social ties. This practise of mobilising labour is known as the Namuri system. In a normal situation a group of people—who could be relatives or neighbours—would assign particular days to work on each other’s field. Due to the pandemic, some families are now reluctant to gather in groups, and this is affecting the labour supply critical for the second planting season. The ganho-ganho system (hired labour) is also affected as mobility is constrained. With these dynamics, farmers have to rely on family labour for cultivating their plots. Relying on family labour may affect crop outputs as labour force is reduced. Costa Estevão, a peasant farmer in Nampula province, failed to hire labour as people thought it was risky to work on his field due to the pandemic. As a result, he is relying on his wife and two children.  It now takes the family more time to complete field tasks.

Fourth, the peasant associations are under pressure from the government to adopt genetically modified seeds in order to increase yields under the current crisis. This is more pronounced in areas where the last farming season was bad. For example, there were excessive rains in Gurué last year, which affected crop yields. Th government projects that most families in that area are going to run out of food by January 2021. The farmers’ hope was on maximising production during the second farming season. Now faced with the double burden of coronavirus, some government officials are arguing that the only way to maximise food production and avert a disaster is to immediately adopt genetically modified seeds. However, a civil society alliance coordinating Covid-19 responses in Mozambique has criticised the idea of introducing the genetically modified seeds under the pretext of mitigating the effects of natural disasters worsened by Covid-19. They argue that this will pose serious threats to biodiversity, food and economic sovereignty long after the crises.

Given these four impacts, the state, civil society and international donor agencies must forge an alliance and step in so that the peasant supply chain is not disrupted during this state of emergency. These three actors should support peasant communities at a district level with appropriate technologies to work the farmland at a time when traditional labour regimes are affected by social distancing regulations. For example, a tractor can be assigned for tilling the land in each of the districts that are engaged in production for the second agricultural season. In addition, the three actors should ensure availability and transportation of organic seeds and fertilizer to the rural areas during the emergency to rescue the second farming season. This is critical for future local and national food supplies. There is no need to use the pandemic outbreak as an excuse to secretly liberalise genetically modified seeds under the pretext of addressing productivity during the crisis. As for transportation and price inflation, the state should lead to ensure movement of food products from the rural communities to the market centres and to reign in swindlers. The peasants generate the bulk of their income from their harvests, and they need fair prices to sustain their livelihoods. Since smallholder farmers have already made losses, a disaster relief fund that captures the lowest caste is strongly recommended. However, to ensure compliance with important health safety regulations, the three actors must ensure provision of protective gear, sanitisers and promote social distancing along the supply chain. Such tailor-made interventions will assist in mitigating the negative impacts of regulations on the poor peasants, and at the same time help in curbing the spread of Covid-19.



Cover photo credit: Jeffrey Barbee/Thomson Reuters Foundation on Flickr.

Action on Children’s Harmful Work programme launches website

Posted on April 23, 2020 by - News

The Action on Children’s Harmful Work in African Agriculture (ACHA) have launched their website, which will act as the centre for the research and evidence coming out of the seven-year, DFID-funded research programme that started in January 2020.

The aim of the programme is to build evidence on:

  • The forms, drivers, and experiences of children’s harmful work in African agriculture.
  • Interventions that are effective in preventing harm that arises in the course of children’s work.

Creating an evidence base

The majority of children’s work in Africa is within the agricultural sector. However, there is insufficient evidence on the prevalence of harmful children’s work across different agricultural value chains, farming systems and agro-ecologies. Little is understood about the effects of different types of value chains and models of value chain coordination on the nature of harmful children’s work or the effectiveness of different interventions to address this type of labour. These issues are central to ACHA’s work.

Working with partners

ACHA is a collaborative programme led by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). ACHA is directed by Professor Rachel Sabates-Wheeler (r.sabates-wheeler@ids.ac.uk) and Dr James Sumberg (j.sumberg@ids.ac.uk).

The ACHA partnership includes African Rights Initiative International, University of Bath, University of Bristol, University of Development Studies in Legon, University of Ghana, University of Sussex, the Fairtrade Foundation, ISEAL Alliance, Rainforest Alliance, The Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (University At Buffalo), The International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) and The Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH).


Cover image credit: Menychle Meseret Abebe on Flickr.

How SRI technology and irrigation has transformed Anita’s life

Posted on April 23, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

This blog is closely linked to Working Paper 30: Does Rice Commercialisation Impact on Livelihood? Experience from Mngeta in Kilombero District, Tanzania. Access it, for free, here.

This blog was written by Aida Isinika and Ntengua Mdoe

Anita’s personal story

“SRI changed my life, now I see a brighter future ahead for me and my entire family.” 

Anita Israeli Mabena, a farmer from Njage village in Mchombe ward, Mngeta division in Kilombero district.

Anita is considered one among the best performing Sustainable Rice Intensification SRI farmers, not only in her village of Njage, but also in her entire district in Tanzania.   For this reason, she has been invited to participate in national and zonal agricultural shows to share her experience with other farmers.  She has also shared her experience and taught more than 100 other farmers in Njage and neighbouring Mkusi village regarding SRI practices that produce the best results in terms of yield.  She is always ready to help others to also succeed.  In the irrigation scheme where she is a member, some farmers simply observe and learn from her experience. 

Anita sits in her house.

Anita’s achievement has been a journey of more than ten years adapting improved rice agronomic practices.  Anita and her husband moved into Njage village in 1999 and purchased 2.5 acres (about 1 hectare) for rice production. 
   

Personal development through training

Anita first attended training on SRI technologies in 2010 from facilitators sponsored by the Kilombero Ramsar site.  The Kilombero Plantation Limited (KPL) farm provided similar training under SRI groups.  The key messages from both trainings included:

  • Seed selection (emphasising use of SARO – an improved high yielding rice variety);
  • Planting seedlings at 21 days and planting in line at a space of 25 by 25 centimetres or 20 by 20 cm depending on the variety. 

Anita’s paddy yield improved but a breakthrough came in 2016 after attending training at Ilonga research station in Kilosa district, where she received an updated menu of SRI technologies.  The most important practices were identified as;

  • Transplanting rice seedings at 8 days old;
  • Applying the first round of basal fertiliser at 14 days old 6 days after transplanting;
  • Applying herbicides before and after transplanting, when weeds are still small;
  • Using herbicides in combination to suppress both broad leafed and grass type weeds; 
  • Complimenting herbicides with timely hand weeding to remove stubborn weeds;
  • Applying the second round of fertiliser when the rice plant is at seed filling stage;
  • Minimising water use by controlling water in and out of the rice plots.

Using herbicides in combination with ox-plough and power tillers has made land preparation easier relying solely on the hand hoe.  Now, timely application of herbicides and water control in and out of the rice fields make complementary hand weeding quite light and manageable, and has enabled farmers to expand their farms more easily. 

Left: Optimum spacing (25 x 25cm). Right: High tillering rate. Credit: APRA Tanzania


Post-training

After receiving training in 2016, Anita practiced what she had learned. Initially,  her friends and family were baffled that she planted young rice seedlings at such a wide spacing – usually farmers plant rice at very close spacing to get more plants per unit area.  But Anita ignored the critics and chose an optimum spacing of 25 by 25 cm (as opposed to 30 by 30 or 20 by 20).  After the first year of implementing SRI technologies she harvested 45 bags of paddy per acre (equivalent to about 11 tons/ha).  Due to poor rainfall, in 2018 she only reaped 30 – 35 bags/acre (equivalent to about 7.5 – 9.6 tons/ha), but still above average.  To maintain such a high level of productivity, her family limits the planted area to only four acres so that farm operations are manageable.  They rent out the rest of their land to other villagers. 

“We have enough stock of paddy to even share with family and friends when we go to visit back in Njombe region or when they visit us.”

Anita

The role of irrigation

Anita and her family have benefited from increased food security, better education and expansion of their house and other businesses. Anita has benefited because she is part of an irrigation scheme, where SRI technologies are optimised, as water in and out of the rice plots can be controlled Her husband, Fredirik Ndikwege, is the current chairperson of the water user group at the Njage irrigation scheme.  He says that over 90% of the farmers in the scheme plant the improved SARO seed, previously shunned by farmers due to a low preference by traders. But higher yield outweighs lower prices offered at harvest.  The demand for SARO seed this year was so high that input suppliers ran out of seed.  More than 80% of the farmers at Njage have embraced at least one or more of the SRI technologies and the adoption rate is rising, as latecomers to the scheme observe their neighbours’ higher yields. 

According to Mr Ndikwege, the irrigation infrastructure began in 1987 as a traditional scheme  – a low cost irrigation structure made by smallholder farmers with little or no external support.  In 1992, the users established local distribution points.  Since 2005 the scheme has benefited from various funding sources to improve the canals. 

Through current World Bank financing, 11 kilometres of irrigation canal will be constructed, including 3 large canals, 7 kilometres of farm roads and 10 kilometres of feeder roads.  Once completed the scheme will irrigate 375 hectares, benefiting 350 farmers.  About 85% of the farmers in Njage village depend on this irrigation scheme.  Mr Ndikwege notes that 95% of farmers in the irrigation scheme plant SARO, 90% adopting line planting.  Spacing has a lower adoption rate, but this is increasing. Among irrigation schemes that are supported under the Expanded Rice Production Programme (ERPP), Njage ranks second in terms of resources invested and yield produced.  In 2018, scheme members achieved an average rice yield of 5.1 tons/ha.

Warehouse and milling facility under construction at Njage village. Credit: APRA Tanzania


Through World Bank financing, a warehouse, has also been constructed in the village, capable of storing up to 150,000 tons of paddy.  A rice mill, which was secured through a grant from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is awaiting installation.

Looking ahead

The future looks bright for Anita and other rice farmers in Njage village.  However, adequate preparation is required to ensure that strong institutional and management structures are in place before the upcoming harvest. The facilities at Njage will be competing with private millers within the village and from neighbouring villages for paddy storage and milling services.  It is important to learn from these private millers and improve upon their operational and management systems so that there will be incentives for farmers to choose this warehouse and mill facility rather than facilities of competitors in the neighbourhood.


For our blog on how Njage farmers are preparing to take rice commercialisation to the next level, click here.

Cover image: Rice paddy in Njage. Credit: APRA Tanzania.
Uncaptioned images are of Anita. Credit: APRA Tanzania.

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on agricultural policy and research.

Virtual sessions to cover agribusiness response to pandemic

Posted on April 20, 2020 by - News

The Commercial Agriculture for Smallholders and Agribusiness programme (CASA) programme  is utilising its Evidence and Learning Component to run an e-series on “Rethinking agribusiness investments through the pandemic”. The first of the four sessions will begin at 12 noon BST on Thursday Apr 30th and will draw on inputs from food retailers, international institutes, fellow donors, and the China Agricultural University. Speakers and panelists for the Apr 30th session include:

  • Mike Coupe CEO, Sainsburys plc;
  • Dr Shenggen Fan Chair professor, China Agricultural University and former Director-General of IFPRI;
  • Dr Bettina Prato Senior Coordinator, Smallholder and Agri-SME Finance and Investment Network (SAFIN), at IFAD;
  • Aviva Kutnick Division Chief for Markets and Finance at USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. 

It will cover:

  • What we know about how the crisis is affecting global food and crop systems;
  • The impact observed on agri-business in developing countries thus far;
  • The effects being observed on farming, food prices, food supply and agricultural livelihoods.

Subsequent sessions will cover: how agri-businesses and agri-business investors are adapting to survive and agri-business investment scenarios once the pandemic is contained.

Each one will be formed of a live session with speakers on a Thursday, a gap of 4 days to enable participants in different time-zones to access the recording and comment, and a wrap-up session the following Tuesday.

Overview of sessions


The series of virtual convenings is designed for investors, investment support stakeholders and commentators in agribusiness to share thinking and efforts to consolidate, innovate and adapt in light of the global pandemic. The virtual events are not expected to provide definitive answers but instead to provide a platform for structured sharing and reflection, in response to the issues exercising the investor community and agribusiness sector.

The e-conference series aims to:

  1. Identify the needs of SMEs ;
  2. Showcase tools and approaches to supporting agribusiness during the pandemic developed by various stakeholders;
  3. Identify evidence gaps and information needs for the CASA programme to support investors through and after the pandemic;
  4. Outline possible investment opportunities.

There will be four thematic ‘platforms’: 

  • Impact Platform: What is the current reality of the impact? (This will draw on data and analysis from the on-farm and off-farm enterprises across the food and crop systems to emerging issues and dynamics shaping performance.
  • Support Platform: How do we support businesses? (This will cover two dimensions: first, securing supply chains and cash flows through the crisis and second how to reconfigure business models to respond in the short term).
  • Sustainability Platform: How to manage the climate and health risks associated with ecological biodiversity loss for agri-business? (This will cover adaption of environmental sustainability standards for SMEs and investors to reduce the risk of human-animal interaction and mitigate similar crises. We will also look to opportunities this may present).
  • Futures Platform: What happens after the curve is flattened and the economy is rejuvenated (exploring scenarios and investment opportunities for post-COVID-19 in light of a potential global recession)?

Click here to register.

Click here for the session schedule.


Cover photo: Kenyan smallholders grow nutritious crops. Credit: USAID on Flickr.

Zimbabwe’s Covid-19 lockdown: Ensuring the right to food for the poor

Posted on April 20, 2020 by - FAC blog

By Phillan Zamchiya, Dewa Mavhinga, Thando Gwinji, Arnold Chamunogwa and Claris Madhuku

The Covid-19 global pandemic poses serious challenges to fragile countries such as Zimbabwe, which have weak health systems and constrained social assistance programmes. Such countries must formulate and implement measures to tackle the unfolding public health crisis without plunging millions of people into starvation. This is the challenge which Zimbabwe faces today – how can the country curb the spread of Covid-19 without disrupting food supply for its citizens, especially the vulnerable?

On March 30, 2020, Zimbabwe, like many countries, ordered a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The lockdown confined millions of people to their home; people who are dependent on informal economic activities. The government did not provide meaningful social assistance programmes to provide for their survival needs. A national lockdown is effective if it is enforced, not only through the law, but also through ensuring that the government discharges its obligation to provide food, water and health services to the vulnerable members of its community. Lockdown templates used by developed countries with formal food supply systems, and with the capacity to expand social assistance programmes are bound to be problematic if they are adopted by poorer countries, like Zimbabwe, without being adapted to local contexts.

Zimbabwe has the largest informal economy in Africa as a percentage to its economy, which, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is 60.6 percent. This makes it the second largest informal economy in the world after Bolivia. This might as well be defined as the new economy. Nothing suggests this is reversible in the next ten years or so. How can the government lockdown the informal sector without destroying the livelihoods of millions of people who depend on it?

Government statistics show that 76.9 percent of the rural households are poor. Within that context, extreme household poverty in rural areas increased from 22.9 percent in 2012 to 31.9 percent of households in 2017, well before the coronavirus outbreak. Again, nothing shows a reversal of this trend. In addition, Zimbabwe is facing a severe hunger crisis in 2020. According to the United Nations, 7.7 million people (60 percent of the population) are food insecure. Around 5.5 million of these people live in the rural areas and 2.2 million in urban areas. These people needed assistance even before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the national lockdown will likely worsen their food insecurity situation.

The lockdown will have far-reaching impacts on the farming sector in Zimbabwe. The restrictions on the movement of goods, people and services will likely affect food supply systems in significant ways. The family farm sector, dominated by women, produces 70 percent of staple foods, but it is highly vulnerable to external shocks such as the lockdown measures. The farmers do not produce in isolation. They rely on kin and social relationships to mobilise labour, inputs, among other things. Of importance is that most of these family farmers in the countryside source their food from subsistence farming. Therefore, they are critical to household food security. Not only that, they occasionally sell surplus food. They sell by the homestead veranda, under a tree, or by the roadside. In the farming areas, along the highway one can see farmers selling tomatoes, cabbages, onions, carrots, honey, milk, green maize, beans and a variety of fruits depending on the season. If one stops a car, they flock with dishes of fresh and organic vegetables. The prices are cheaper compared to big supermarkets. The carbon footprint is almost zero. Given their critical role in providing the rural population and urban areas with food, the government cannot simply lock them down.

The family farm sector, dominated by women, produces 70 percent of staple foods, but it is highly vulnerable to external shocks such as the lockdown measures.

The more affluent family farmers are connected in the loose urban value chains through informal agreements of exchange with supermarkets like Spar and OK Zimbabwe and other indigenous supermarkets in urban areas and growth points. Those supermarkets are certified to remain open during the lockdown. They also feed the urban population through informal markets and street vending. As early as 03:00 in the morning, the Mbare Musika market in Harare is buzzing with farmers from Chihota, Mutoko, Mrehwa, Goromonzi and surrounding farming communities.

Other farmers sell to the informal traders who own and control the markets at Mbare Musika. The same applies to many cities. The products are packaged in different sizes to fit different needs for different households. These supplies work for the urban poor who live from hand to mouth. They hustle in the day to buy a meal for the night. Unlike the rich, they cannot stock food supplies to last 21 days. Here, one can buy a cup of mealie meal, one piece of chicken, a teaspoon of salt, a small cup of cooking oil and make a meal for the day. Our trip to Epworth, a peri-urban informal settlement south east of Harare, showed that they called these small packages an emergency ‘katsaona’, or emergency relief. However, ‘katsaona’ is no longer an emergency but a way of life for many. To lock down the informal food traders is to let poor households die in the margins of the city.

The heavy-handed enforcement of the lockdown by the police and army raises questions on whether the government is fully aware of the adverse impacts of its Covid-19 response on food security. For instance, three days into the lockdown, the police raided the informal food traders at Sakubva Musika market in Mutare city, in the east of the country. Despite the majority struggling with access to food, the police confiscated and destroyed tonnes of fresh fruit and vegetables. There is little hope for the majority facing starvation. People talk of death. Either from hunger or from the coronavirus.

Despite the majority struggling with access to food, the police confiscated and destroyed tonnes of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Debrah Mukasa, an informal trader (a member of Bulawayo Vendors and Traders Association), told us that in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city, many informal traders living from hand-to-mouth were caught unprepared when the lockdown was announced amid severe maize-meal shortages. In the early days of the shutdown most informal traders in Bulawayo opened vending stalls at home placing them at risk of police brutality and getting the coronavirus. Though the government promised small and medium enterprises a grant to cushion them during the lockdown, the process has been very slow; halfway through the shutdown informal traders in Bulawayo still have not received any funds.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government should ensure that their Covid-19 responses are respecting rights, and guarantee access to basic necessities for the vulnerable. He has said that all the farmers and traders should continue to operate without disturbances. But he did not say how this can be done during these difficult times. We submit five recommendations:

  1. The government, with support from the private sector and international donors, should ensure that the smallholder farmers and informal food traders (including street food vendors) have protective equipment and sanitisers as recommended by medical experts so that they can safely continue to produce, distribute and sell food. Civil society can help in distribution.
  2. The state, private institutions and supermarkets should prioritise buying food from smallholder producers. They should relax the regulations that exclude the smallholder producers. Supermarkets can go an extra mile to guarantee shelf-space for their smallholder suppliers.
  3. The government should assist with transport for smallholder farmers to ferry their produce to markets. Public transport is hardly available during the lockdown. In each district, farmers can organise to ferry their products to a central place where the government provides transport to different designated markets within a reasonable distance. The transport logistics and delivery should ensure social distancing.
  4. Local authorities should set up new markets to prevent informal food traders over-crowding and ensure social distancing in traditional marketplaces like Mbare and Sakubva. Community halls and sports fields that are near residential areas can be used as food markets. Those urban poor who live hand to mouth need to gain access to food in nearby spaces. One can see a similar recommendation in South Africa by PLAAS (2020).
  5. The government needs to speedily compensate farmers and informal traders whose produce was confiscated and destroyed by the state during the lockdown. This will enable the farmers to rebuild their livelihoods, feed families and other citizens. On the other hand, the municipalities should waiver tax for the registered informal food traders during the lockdown period.

Our recommendations are a foundation to inspire national debate about how the government of Zimbabwe can help ensure access to food for all people during the Covid-19 lockdown. This becomes more important in a context where most countries have closed their borders making it difficult for the poor to import food. Zimbabwe should consider and implement measures to mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on the poor. Solutions to combat the coronavirus should be calibrated to ensure that all citizens always have access to food as a fundamental human right, and are able to maintain a healthy and coronavirus-free active life.

Authors: Phillan Zamchiya (PLAAS), Dewa Mavhinga (Human Rights Watch), Thando Gwinji (Youth for Innovation Trust), Arnold Chamunogwa (Oxfam) and Claris Madhuku (Platform for Youth and Community Development).

The views in the article are of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the organisations they are associated with.


Cover photo: Women grow vegetables in a communal nutrition garden as part of the Caritas Hwange Integrated Community Development Program in Zimbabwe. Credit: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade on Flickr.

The challenges of cocoa bean commercialisation in Ogun state, Nigeria

Posted on April 16, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on agricultural policy and research.


Written by Olubusayo Olorunkoya and Olajide O. Adeola


Reports from a study carried out by the APRA Nigeria team in 2019 on cocoa farming in Odeda local government in Ogun state revealed a significant decline in the yield and production of cocoa, affecting the commercialisation of the bean in the state. Farmers there explained that their cocoa beans are mainly sold in ‘kongos’ to local buyers, who then sell to cocoa store dealers. These store dealers repackage the beans and export them, but cocoa stores in Odeda local government no longer exist due to the low supply of cocoa bean in the community.

Land ownership


Acquisition of land in this community is mainly by inheritance as farmers own vast hectares of lands passed down to them by their parents. However, non – indigenes of this community buy land for the cultivation of cocoa and are allowed to pay in installments. Furthermore, the distance of farmland to the main road determines its price, as farmers disclosed that land in this community is sold for as low as N120,000 (£250) per acre. Low prices on land such as this needs to be at least 2 km from the main road for it to be cheap, perhaps implying that land close to the main road is gradually being purchased and owned by outsiders. It also signifies the changing pattern and structure of land ownership in the local government. According to some participants, the aged population in rural communities and the lack of interest by the younger generation are drivers of the land sales.

Farm labour


Labour used in this community is hired and they are paid three months at a time. Labourers are mostly from Benue, and are paid N25,000 (£50) for three months of work. Farmers also disclosed to the APRA team that labourers are scarce and their demands are often high. Seasonal labourers, for example often demand final payments in the form of new motorcycles at the end of the season, on top of the provision of accommodation and the payment of monthly feeding allowances which the farmers must make. These labourers often live in the farmer’s house, or in a room shared with his family or other labourers. Farmers try to build relationships with them by augmenting these provisions with extras such as “garri” on a monthly basis. The idea is to reduce the risk of losing the labourer(s) to someone else.

Gender balance


There are more women in cocoa marketing (about 60 percent) than the men in Odeda local government. Most women engage in the buying and selling of cocoa beans at the local market, however, cocoa farmers explained that many of their wives do little or no farming as they engage in other trades such as hair making, tailoring, etc. In addition, cultural hindrances in the area do not favour women in cocoa production.  As wives or female children in a family, they are not entitled to inherit land, and there is a perception that Cocoa production is a ‘male’ enterprise, a factor that may be associated with its economic potential. The few women who do farm tend to cultivate cassava and partake fully in its value chain process.

Youth participation

There is a low participation of youths in cocoa farming in Odeda local government, the reasons for which can be seen in a recent APRA blog on youth cocoa farmers in south west Nigeria). Large numbers of the youths take on other livelihood activities such as motorcycle transport, popularly called ‘Okada’ or ‘Machine’. This is an attractive means of livelihood among youths, particularly in rural communities because the time required to learn the skills is short, the income is instant (little or no tax attached) and the roads are not as accessible to cars, particularly during the rainy season. Hence, there is a huge demand for alternative means of transportation for both goods and humans, and during critical periods exorbitant prices are often charged. Other reasons behind a lack of youth involvement in farming in this community include the seasonality of cocoa harvesting,  low market price of cocoa beans with little or no profit for farmers, a lack of infrastructure in rural areas, and land issues as a result of family structure (polygamous versus monogamous). Surprisingly, the Land Use Act of 1978, which stipulates that rural lands should be administered by the local government, was cited to APRA researchers as an additional deterrent to youths’ involvement in cocoa farming.

An okada waits outside a market in Abeokuta, state capital of Ogun state. Credit: Carsten ten Brink on Flickr (photo has been cropped)

Other challenges


Cocoa farmers in this area face obstacles accessing agrochemicals for pests and diseases on their farms. Agro–dealers explained to APRA researchers that agrochemicals are available, although expensive, but that farmers would rather buy cheaper counterfeit chemicals that cause more damage to their crops. Also, the rate at which the youths in the community work in other livelihood activities such as trading (in fairly used clothes and shoes) instead of farming has left the older generation in cocoa farming, hence, the continuity and future of cocoa farming in this community uncertain. Other constraints encountered by cocoa farmers includes pests, black pod disease, early ripening of cocoa pods, high cost of labour, low number of extension agents, fire outbreak on cocoa farms, low water in dry season (see our recent blog on climate change and the future of cocoa in southwest Nigeria), lack of financial support from the government and low levels of sanitation on farms.

Despite the low production level of cocoa farming Odeda, cocoa farmers in this area are still optimistic that there is a future for cocoa farming in their community, but only if the challenges discussed above are addressed. 



Cover photo credit: UnconventionalEmma on Flickr.

Second photo: APRA team members Sayo (left) and Adeola (right, on bike) riding on an okada, a form of transportation popular among youth in Odeda. Credit: APRA Nigeria Workstream 2 team.



Mobile money services and rice commercialisation in Tanzania

Posted on April 9, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on agricultural policy and research.


Written by Aida Isinika & Ntengua Mdoe


Agricultural commercialisation is generally said to occur when an increasing number of farmers use more purchased inputs and they sell a larger share of their harvest.  In Mngeta division, Kilombero district, where rice is the main food and cash crop, production has been rising with time, facilitated by various factors, and so has the share of rice sold, hence rising commercialisation.  Both the rising purchase of production inputs and tools, and the purchase of paddy and rice after harvest means that lot of money changes hands, between traders and farmers after harvest, but also between input suppliers and farmers input suppliers during the planting season.  This is where mobile money services come in. 

In the past (prior to 2010), most of the transactions for goods and services related to rice production and marketing had to be done on a cash basis.  Rice traders in particular had to travel with large sums of cash, sometimes falling prey of unfaithful people during the duration of their stay.  Mchombe village, the headquarters of Mngeta division does not have any bank services to date.  But due to the increasing number and capacity of mobile money service providers, rice traders and other businesses now feel safer to undertake transactions related to buying paddy and milled rice.  Other traders who supply agricultural inputs and general merchandise also regularly use mobile money services.  They do not have to carry bank notes and their money is safe in their mobile phones, ready to use when it is required since mobile service providers are present in almost all villages.  These services are promoted by the government to improve financial inclusion, which stood at 65% in 2017, according to a FINSCOPE report, a nationally representative survey that provides an overview of the financial behavior of Tanzanian adults,16 years or older, on how they generate income and manage their money. 

The FINSCOPE report for 2017 shows that the proportion of Tanzanians who have access to financial services and use financial services in the country (mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar) increased from 58% in 2013 to 65% in 2017. The report indicates that 63% of adults in Tanzania own mobile phones and 80% live in a household with a mobile phone.  Meanwhile, 78% of adults live within a five kilometer radius from a formal financial access point such as a bank branch, Saving and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCOS) and mobile money agents.  Mobile money operators are categorised as non-bank financial institutions, standing out as a formal financial service with the widest reach, but also a service with the most frequent use; growing by 10% from 50% between 2013 and 2017. 

Mobile money service provider in Chita Village, Tanzania. Credit: APRA Tanzania.

What services do clients get and use?

When mobile money services were first introduced, in 2008, one could only transfer money (send or receive) to others using the same provider.  Money transfer across mobile phone companies was not possible.  Currently, mobile money services can be accessed from five mobile phone companies (MPESA, TigoPesa, Airtel Money, Halopesa, TTCL pesa).  Formal financial services such as banks have also quickly moved in, facilitating bank transactions at mobile money service providers.  Banks have also outsourced provision of mobile money (Fahari huduma from CRDB bank and NMB mobile money).  Services at the mobile outlets include sending, receiving, paying bills, buying airtime, credit etc. 

APRA findings

Data collected in 2017 from 537 households during the first wave of work stream one (WS1) of the APRA study in Mngeta division in Kilombero district shows that majority of respondents (94.1%) used the service for receiving money, followed by sending (88.3%).  Only 7.6% used mobile money for paying bills while 1.7% used it for other purposes such as savings like M-pawa and buying airtime.  In February 2020 when collecting data for the second wave of WS1, it was evident that the number of mobile money service providers had increased, a good indication that the number of clients and the volume of business has risen, and the trend appears to continue. 

According to one mobile money service provider in Chita village, transactions reach a peak during the period of harvesting paddy, when traders come from all over the country and even from neighbouring countries to buy rice.  Recently, business has also increased during the planting season due to the increasing use of agro-chemicals, especially herbicides and fertiliser.  Even the demand for improved rice seed (SARO5) has gone up such that this farming season (2019/20) suppliers run out of seed as more farmers adopt intensive rice production technologies.  Other traders of consumer goods and services that are purchased by farmers, and other people in the study, area also use mobile money services regularly. 

Financial inclusion through mobile money services is therefore another important factor facilitating agricultural commercialization, not only in Mngeta division but in Tanzania.  The main challenge related to these services include high transaction costs.  Hopefully such cost will go down as the technology improves and competition among service providers increases.


Cover image: Mobile money service provider in Chita Village, Tanzania. Credit: APRA Tanzania

APRA Brief 23: Does rice commercialisation in Mngeta, Kilombero, Tanzania impact livelihoods?

Posted on April 8, 2020 by - APRA Briefs

Written by, Aida Isinika, Ntengua Mdoe, John Jeckonia, Christopher Magomba, Gilead Mlay and Devotha Kilave

This policy brief draws from research on rice commercialisation in Mngeta division, Kilombero District. The study area was selected because it fits well with the government’s ambition, under the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania framework, for smallholder farmers to benefit from technology transfer and market linkage with large-scale farmers. The analysis was based on research conducted with a randomly-selected sample of farm households across ten villages located 30km from Kilombero Plantation Limited, a large-scale rice farm in Mngeta division.

Youth and a lack of involvement in cocoa production in southwest Nigeria

Posted on April 6, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on agricultural policy and research.


This blog was prepared by Olabanji T.Balogun and Olajide O. Adeola

Background of cocoa in West Africa

First introduced into Africa from South America, cocoa growing has thrived in West Africa due to favourable soil and climatic conditions, and has made the cash crop a huge success in countries in the region, accounting for almost 70% of global output. Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria are the major producers of cocoa in Africa today, and many wealthy farmers in these countries have attributed their wealth to cocoa. In Nigeria, the Cocoa House in Ibadan and Obafemi Awolowo University were built from foreign exchange generated from the sale of cocoa. With the discovery of oil in Nigeria, attention shifted away from agriculture, cocoa and the rich prospects it once had. The government made crude oil their main priority and paid less attention to agriculture, the former mainstay of the country’s economy. Agriculture also lost it appeal to the youth, as many of them preferred to work in the industries such as textile industries and bakeries or search for white collar jobs. The larger population of youth lost interest in the agricultural profession, thereby leaving it in the hands of the older generation, who had the expertise and experience but lacked the strength to progress the sector.

Chart showing the age range of cocoa farmers in APRA survey area of SW Nigeria.
Source: Exploratory survey 2018

APRA survey                                                                         

An exploratory survey of cocoa producing areas in the south west of Nigeria by APRA Nigeria Work Stream 2 showed that most of the cocoa farmers were an older generation: 8 out of every 10 farmers interviewed were 50 years and above. There are a number of reasons accounting for the disinterest amongst the youth in cocoa farming specifically, and agriculture in general. Some of the reasons gathered from the survey include:

  • The problem of erratic power supply or total absence of power supply altogether in the cocoa producing area.
  • Poor road network to access farms as well as bad roads lining farms and markets.
  • Low pricing of cocoa produce.
  • Rudimentary methods of production that are still in use, despite of the technological advancement in agriculture today.
  • Illegal land entry to carry out exploitation of some minerals in lands under the cultivation of cocoa by unknown person also exist.
Youth grant success stories

Fortunately for the agriculture profession, the incessant agro-preneural campaign is not falling on deaf ears, as increasing numbers of youth are beginning set-up agribusiness ventures. Different governments have created programmes that have attracted some Nigerian youth. One such example is the Agriculture Transformation Agenda, originally set up by President Goodluck Jonathan, where cassava was supposed to reduce the use of wheat in bread production by about 40%.  A number of youths saw an opportunity to make a living for themselves and entered the programme. The Federal Government in that period also initiated a programme called Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria (YouWiN!) which enabled youths to access to grants in order to start up personal businesses. Another scheme (which is still open to applications) is N-power, its objective is to empower youths most in the agricultural sector, or those who want to be a part of it. This brought about a section of the scheme called N-Agro. Youths in the programme cannot depend on the stipend, so many started private agribusiness ventures such as crop and animal production and agricultural processing.

Recommendations

More work needs to be done to attract younger people back into agriculture. We recommend that infrastructure, such as roads linking the farming communities to the market place and storage facilities such as warehouses that are well protected against pests, need to be provided to allow improved access to agricultural sites and improve the shelf life of excess cocoa beans. Processing facilities should be made available and electrification projects should be taken much more seriously. Those in power need to have the political will to go all the way and tackle corruption properly in order for other problems, such as electricity, to be resolved, or even reach the same level of infrastructure seen in neighbouring countries like Ghana. Finally, the state governments need to design agricultural policies that will favour farmers and ensure good pricing for their produce. With the necessary plans in place, the agricultural industry can thrive again and the youths will be the ones to drive it forward.


Photo credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture on Flickr.

Living with Coronavirus Uncertainties: Four Lessons from Pastoralists

Posted on April 6, 2020 by - FAC blog

Written by PASTRES project lead Ian Scoones and core researcher Michele Nori


Moments of surprise can expose deep uncertainties and even ignorance. They also uncover issues of contested politics, unequal social relations and the capacities of states and citizens. The unfolding coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is one such moment.

We don’t know what will happen where and when; our normal ways of doing things are massively disrupted, so we must adapt rapidly and radically. This is now life with the coronavirus. For those of us used to predictability and stability, with systems that function continuously and reliably, this sort of uncertainty – now being experienced the world over – is unsettling, provoking anxiety, stress, dislocation and sometimes panic.

But for many people, living in highly variable environments, where shocks of drought, flood, snowfall locust swarms or human and animal disease are regular occurrences, uncertainties are always part of everyday life. Indeed, uncertainties are not only lived with, but lived off, as variability, mobility, flexibility are a central part of livelihood systems.

A question we have been asking in our European Research Council-funded PASTRES programme (Pastoralism, Uncertainty, Resilience: Lessons from the Margins) is: Can we learn about how to address uncertainties within wider society – including around disease pandemics – from pastoralists who live with and from uncertainty? What are the logics, practices, strategies and social and political arrangements that allow for adaptive, flexible responses in the face of uncertainty, generating reliability in turbulent times?

Of course, the spread of a global pandemic virus of massively lethal potential is very different to the regular problems faced by pastoralists, whether in mountainous Tibet, lowland Ethiopia or the hills of Sardinia, but there are some themes that emerge from our research that offer pointers. Here we outline four of them.

1. Multiple Knowledges

In navigating uncertainties, pastoralists must engage with multiple sources of knowledge, triangulating between them.

This may involve engaging with expert, scientific knowledge, derived from, say, weather reports; or expert advice on pasture condition or animal disease. It may involve referring to local, embedded traditional knowledges, consulting local experts such as traditional healers, prophets and soothsayers — involving, for example, predictions around the seasons from signs in nature or messages from the spirit world. And it may involve informally-shared updates and locally-rooted practical knowledge from friends, neighbours, relatives and others – these days often via mobile phone through Facebook or WhatsApp groups. These may include information on the state of grazing, the availability of water in a well or the source and quality of forage, for example.

All these sources – formal, informal, real-time, predictive – are combined, reflected upon and, in turn, feed into action. No one source is relied upon alone. This sometimes frustrates development experts who spend huge amounts of money providing sophisticated forecasting systems or satellite monitoring, with user-friendly online mobile interfaces, such as those used in climate/weather forecasting, drought early warning or market information systems. Why is it that these are not used as expected?

It is the same with disease response systems: again, huge efforts are made to predict and prepare, and communicate expert advice. But this must be incorporated into local-embedded knowledges in order to become part of regular practice. Yes, we know that hand-washing and ‘social-distancing’ are important, but such changes only happen when other sources of knowledge and advice combine. Just relying on formal models and accredited expertise (‘the science’) is not enough, in the context of deep uncertainties. Reducing everything to directive risk management is insufficient, and is in fact misleading, as uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance must be embraced.  

Pastoralists know this when they hear a climate forecast and an early warning message from the government. Local experience and assessment is an essential complement to the official message. Only when such a message is fully trusted will it be accepted. Today, publics everywhere are grappling with how to respond to public health messages about the risks of COVID-19, along with orders to isolate and quarantine. In these situations, people’s personal, experienced, embodied uncertainties have to be addressed too. Accepting the existence of plural knowledges, even some that may be regarded as ‘unscientific’, is essential when navigating uncertainty and ignorance.

2. How Time is Experienced

Very often external interventions – whether around disease or drought – are constructed around the notion of an ‘event’ and a timeline around which a staged series of risk management measures are deployed.

Forecasts that assess the probabilities of something happening assume that, based on past experience or modelled futures, we can predict and manage people and things. So, whether it is the varying level of ‘early warning’ alert around a drought or the stages of a response in an unfolding epidemic, the planning system imagines time in a linear, ordered, managed way. The result is the sequential deployment of interventions, managed by emergency teams and ‘rapid response’ facilities.

But this isn’t the way most people experience time. The ordered, hierarchical administrative time of crisis and emergency management has to articulate with the more complex flows of lived-with time in everyday life.  Whether this is people responding to a pandemic disease in their family or neighbourhood, or a group of pastoralists managing highly variable grazing over far-flung territories with mobile herds, the experience of time may be quite different to those of preparedness planners and early warning system administrators.

How the present, the future and the past are experienced may vary dramatically. Memories of past droughts or disease outbreaks loom large, while expectations of the future are affected by current conditions, as well as deeper cosmologies. Futures are not just simply a linear extension of the present, as in the liberal modernist view, but are deeply intertwined with memories, experiences and histories. These will differ across class, gender, age and race, affecting how different people anticipate and respond. Everyday, unfolding time is therefore a flow, not an event.

For people responding to a disease, or managing mobility and seeking out pasture, time may therefore not be so obviously punctuated with distinct events, and responses may not appear in neat sequences. Instead, a host of other considerations apply – people’s lives, livelihoods, spiritual need, or mental states. All of these can affect what is done when, and by whom.

3. Reliable Systems

Uncertainties provide major challenges to standardised systems that assume stability. Following Emery Roe, we can understand pastoral systems as ‘critical infrastructures’, with the objective of reliably delivering desired outputs (milk, meat, hides, services and overall wellbeing) in the context of multiple uncertainties. Just as an energy supply system aims to keep the lights on, and a health system aims to provide effective healthcare, pastoralists also must generate reliability through a range of practices. And they seem to be quite good at it.

What are the features of this? Reliability emerges from an understanding of the wider system and its vulnerabilities, as well as insights into local contexts. Horizon scanning must combine with the day-to-day practices that allow rapid, adaptive responses. Herders and market traders must do this all the time, regularly checking on grass, water, prices and so on, while having a good sense of the overall system. They will not rely on an ‘expert decision system’ from outside, but they must build reliability through their own networks, among individuals, kin, age-groups and communities. Communication and deliberation is central, facilitated these days by mobile communications. When a disaster strikes, knowledge, resources and labour can be mobilised rapidly, and animals can be moved, fodder purchased or water supplied.

Most standard, engineered systems designed for stable conditions are poor at generating reliability under such variable conditions. A health system relies on a regular flow of patients with a standard set of ailments requiring a prescribed array of treatments. This is fine under ‘normal’ conditions, but when a disease outbreak occurs, such systems quickly become overwhelmed, and there is a need to think differently.

Part of this is basic capacity, particularly in systems that are under-funded, but it also relates to the capacities of the professionals involved. Very often it is the frontline workers – doctors, nurses, pharmacists – who are left to innovate, to create reliability on the move. Managing an intensive care unit in a hospital may be more similar than we think to the embedded skills, aptitudes and practices of pastoralists, who must make agile, sometimes difficult, choices when facing variability.

4. Collective Solidarities

If states cannot provide, businesses struggle and experts are overwhelmed, then what can we turn to?

Because externally-defined, top-down risk management based on predictive science is always insufficient under radical uncertainty and ignorance, we must also rely on ourselves – on community action and forms of solidarity and mutuality. Such initiatives are emerging during the coronavirus pandemic, including the explosion of locally-organised ‘mutual aid’ groups helping those in self-isolation and quarantine. Across Europe, a new, re-discovered moral economy is confronting the crisis.

How such arrangements work will, of course, depend on the setting and the challenge, but in pastoral areas, collective approaches to herd and flock management have always been vital in responding to variability. For example, a common tactic is to split a herd between young and vulnerable calves and milk cows who remain at home with additional fodder, and those that must migrate to distant pastures for the dry season. Mobility, flexibility and modular approaches to managing livestock and territory are the watchwords.  These responses only work if they can mobilise labour, and this requires reciprocal relationships across kin and age groups and across communities.

In the past, east African pastoralism was characterised by extensive redistributive practices, as livestock were shared, loaned and redistributed across multiple ownership arrangements, facilitated by segmentary lineage structures and age-groups with specific responsibilities. This allowed for horizontal redistribution, friendship alliances across territories and marriage contracts that allocated stock. While such arrangements have declined, due to the individualisation and commoditisation of pastoral production, the cultural values and embedded practices still remain, and are often remobilised in times of severe crisis.

The revival of community and neighbourhood solidarities around COVID-19 are an example of how such social relationships are crucial in responding to uncertainty. Even in the commercialised, individualised West, they can still re-emerge around a re-defined sense of collective responsibility. In tackling a pandemic, working across nations, individual and collective actions must combine, public and private interests must converge, and centralised and local decision-making must interact.

***

COVID-19 is changing everything: how we live, how we relate, how we engage with expertise and how states and citizens interact. Deep uncertainties and extensive ignorance, as well as contested ambiguities, necessarily reshape society and politics.

In Western countries, we are learning to adapt fast. In the future – for this will not be the first or last time such a shock emerges – perhaps we can learn from others, including pastoralists, who have long embraced uncertainty as part of life.  

Photo Credit: Kmojo Caravani

You can see more and follow the PASTRES project on Twitter and Instagram

Food in the time of the Coronavirus: Why we should be very, very afraid

Posted on April 2, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Written by Ruth Hall and other researchers at PLAAS


The social legitimacy of the ‘COVID-19 lockdown’ in South Africa, government’s regulations imposed to contain the spread of the virus, is most likely to run aground unless an urgent plan can be made to ensure that everyone in the country has access to sufficient food. And it’s not looking good.

Based on interviews, statements by various organisations and our own experience, here is our summary of the already-evident impacts of the lockdown on poor people’s access to food, and on the informal food economy – from small farmers to street vendors and spaza shops – that is so important in meeting people’s daily food needs.

What’s happened already and what’s coming soon

What are the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak, and the lockdown imposed from 27 March 2020? How is the lockdown being interpreted and enforced, and which parts of the food system are being closed down while others are able to continue operations? Here we discuss the immediate scenario of shortages and surpluses – where poor people as producers and traders are unable to continue to produce and sell, while at the same time poor people are unable to access sufficient nutritious food. We see crises on both sides.

  • Income losses: While the formal food system is for now relatively protected against supply shocks, enormous numbers of people (the working poor, those in the informal economy, those in precarious employment) will have suffered a sudden and long-term loss of income. The people who are losing their jobs are already some of the most precarious. Even if there is food on the shelves, they will not have access to it.
  • Social grants insufficient: For part of the population, social grants will therefore be even more important – it is heartening that these are being prioritised, and an immediate increase would be welcome. Social grants were already insufficient; often shared and redirected in households where there were other adults without income. People will be unable to buy very soon from formal retailers – a cash crisis for enormous numbers of people. These strains will increase, putting enormous strains on households, and likely leading to increases in gender-based violence.
  • Physical distance: Even those in the working class and in the township economy with some income will still be at significant disadvantage. Often far away from shopping malls and supermarkets, lacking transport, and lacking the middle class ability to stockpile and store, they are much less able to ‘socially distance’. Unnecessarily harsh restrictions on public transport and taxi operators exacerbate this situation. 
  • Risks: If people cannot get food, there is every likelihood of violent conflict, including widespread looting. If SAPS and the SANDF choose to use violent or repressive means to enforce lockdown or social distancing regulations, as has already happened in the last few days, this poses a risk that the legitimacy of the lockdown as such could come in question, with disastrous public health consequences. 

So what is happening with poor people’s access to food, and the livelihoods of those who supply their food?

Street traders are locked down

If there’s one thing to understand, it’s this: street food traders have been locked down and lost their markets. This is devastating to the livelihoods of the vast number of people involved in this economic activity: the sector supports an estimated 500,000 livelihoods nationally, and accounts for 40% of the informal township economy. It is also having an immediate and dramatic impact on what people buy and eat, with evidence from the past week suggesting a dramatic decline in fresh vegetables and fruit. A large proportion of food sold and consumed in townships is from street traders, surveys suggest that up to 70% of households usually source food from informal outlets. Surveys over the past week already show a change in food buying patterns, with women opting to reduce or entirely exclude meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables from their shopping in favour of staple foods and non-perishables – partly this is a cutting back to essential calorie-providing carbohydrates, but it is also because they can only get to one shop, rather than shopping around on the street and at various butcheries, to get the best deals and the greatest range of foods. Now it is a reduced food basket reduced in diversity and nutrition, typically from just one source. 

Spaza shop confusion and crackdown

Spaza shops are being closed down, with national regulations being unevenly interpreted by SAPS and the army. In some places, the police and army have ordered spaza shops owners to close while in others they have told them only to operate during certain times. Authorities have insisted that spaza shops may operate, as long as they do not sell alcohol or cigarettes – two of the primary reasons for people breaking lockdown regulations. But this is not how regulations are being enforced. The distinction drawn between registered and unregistered spaza shops is translating into xenophobic attempts to close down all foreign-owned spaza shops. Other shops owned by foreign nationals (eg. those selling imported and specialised food from other African countries) have also been forced to close down as part of the lockdown. Together with street traders being unable to operate, this means that the main ways in which poor people access food from small and informal enterprises – therefore supporting the township economy – are being closed down.

Supermarket bottlenecks

Attempts to enforce social distancing in and around supermarkets (limiting numbers of people in the shop, policing long queues) are not working, with people waiting for hours, only to have to return the next day. People cannot or will not comply with the rules and regulations, and this is already evident in clashes centering on township malls and supermarkets, as the remaining sources of food. This will only be aggravated as social grant payouts come around, and there’s no option but to spend them here. 

Small-scale farmers curtailed

The effects of the lockdown are felt further away, in fresh produce markets and among the often smaller farmers who supply them, and who are locked out of supply chains with supermarkets (An estimated 60% of the goods traded in the Johannesburg Fresh Produce Market sell into the informal township market.) So small-scale farmers are directly affected by the closure of street trading among the poor, as well as the loss of outlets to the rich – a double whammy for the most vulnerable producers. And while most food is produced by a relatively small number of commercial farms (about 20% of the 30,000 commercial farms produce about 80% of our food), there are far more black farmers than white. About 180,000 black farmers in South Africa are commercially-oriented. Reports from communal areas where many are located are that they cannot tend to their animals, and police have been imposing fines of up to R5,000 on farmers for grazing their animals. Those farmers growing vegetables in communal gardens are unable to access these to harvest their crops; anticipate that they will not be able to sell at SASSA pay points when grants are distributed; and therefore be unable to replant both because of losing their incomes and because nurseries where they could get seedlings are closed. Among urban and peri-urban or ‘township farmers’, many are involved in ‘niche’ supply chain arrangements with restaurants and hotels but many of the clients they usually sell to are closed for the time being. These farmers have lost their markets and are sitting with vegetables in the ground which they will not harvest without some chance to sell. They are afraid to continue to farm, cannot see how they can legally and safely transport their food to a market, and urgently need assurance that they will be allowed to continue to operate, and assistance to do so safely. 

Small-scale fishers are also stopping

Small-scale fishers in coastal communities are prohibited from selling and transporting their fish to locals directly, which is the established informal system that gets much-needed protein to poor and lower income communities. Thriving informal value chains – from poor coastal communities, male fishers, to women traders, to bakkie traders – have been broken. Confirming the right to fish is not enough; those involved in this extensive informal economy need to be able to transport and sell without constraint or harassment, and with appropriate social distancing measures. Without this, small-scale fishing on which so many coastal communities depend has been closed down. 

Farm workers at risk

Commercial farms are meant to be continuing production as normally as possible, workers and their families have in some places reported that they are no longer allowed to go to town to buy food, and instead have no option but to buy food from farm owners. A spike in urban hunger may well take the form of mass protest, and demand political attention. Less visible is the crisis of hunger in rural areas, where among those most at risk are people producing most of the country’s food: the approximately 700,000 farm workers and their families (towards 2.5 million people). Even before the virus, the research evidence has been alarming. Among seasonal farm workers in the Northern Cape, for instance, more than 80% experienced severe hunger for the off-season months April to August. While some will retain regular employment, the rise over the past 20 years of casual and off-farm employment means those whose labour is not needed right now are not on farms. Most concerning are questions about physical access to food, including in small towns where large numbers of evicted farm workers now live, where often even getting to a shop to buy food requires public transport that is no longer available. How are people to survive?

Food aid via supermarkets will reinforce exclusion 

We face a situation in which the informal economy is closed down – small-scale farmers and fishers, street vendors and many spaza shops. Unless this is reversed, government’s food aid interventions may serve only to concentrate the food system around a few corporate-dominated supply chains dominated by a handful of vertically-integrated agribusinesses and supermarkets. For instance, pushing public funds into a food voucher system redeemable only at supermarkets would only aggravate economic exclusion, further pushing poor people out of economic activity, and forcing people to congregate at supermarkets. This is dangerous from a public health perspective, but will also aggravate economic exclusion in a time of crisis. 

Already, supermarkets are expected to experience a surge in profits from the poor and the rich as a result of the lockdown. The wealthy and those with disposable who might otherwise support restaurants and fast food outlets are buying directly from supermarkets instead. Plus, with the disappearance of the informal, the poor have no alternative but to buy from formal outlets and, unless changes are urgently made, the proposed top-up in the child support grant (which would be a massive step forward) will go directly into supermarket profit margins. 

The situation is, in other words, one in which neither the market nor existing state provision is adequate. There is a need for enormous social provision outside and in addition to the market and the formal social protection system. Large-scale producers, processors and players are of course well placed to contribute here, in a situation where economies of scale and logistical capacity are of the utmost importance. There needs to be urgent intervention to ensure that supermarkets, food manufacturers and others in the large-scale formal sector play their role in ensuring accessible food supply. But this has to be balanced against the need to preserve livelihoods and employment of the most economically vulnerable sections of our population. 

Priority short-term interventions needed to mitigate impact

Smaller producers and farmers, and artisanal and small-scale fishers must be enabled to continue with production, transportation. Food hawkers and spaza shops which provide a vast proportion of the food consumed by poor people must similarly be allowed to continue to trade, and to do so safely. All this requires appropriate regulation to allow those small-scale operators in the production, transportation, and sale of food to operate, with provision of protective gear and where required, and where existing supply chains have been broken by the lockdown, with some logistical and transport assistance. 

The goal of the proposals below is to mitigate against both economic and physical concentration in the food system, especially in the large urban centres. At least two priorities need to be combined in the current crisis: (1) ensure that poor and food-insecure populations have sufficient access to food during the COVID-19 lockdown and beyond, while (2) ensuring that small-scale township farmers and small-scale fishers are able to continue to produce and to sell their produce in a secure and predictable way, including via the informal system of street vendors, so as to avoid a food system collapse.

Amend the lockdown regulations to allow any supplier of food items to operate. These measures would legalise certain exemptions to the lockdown for poor people – as small-scale farmers, fishers, street traders and spazas – to produce, transport and sell food. This must include spaza shops (not only those that are registered) plus a public clarification that no distinction is drawn between spazas operated by foreigners and citizens. Informal street vendors must be allowed to sell food and also to transport their produce. Small-scale farmers and small-scale fishers must be able to move to and from their farms and fishing sites and to transport their produce, and systems set up especially by large corporate players within their sector to make available the infrastructure that can help them to do so safely. 

Opt for cash instead of vouchers: Proposals for food vouchers should be replaced with straight cash transfers, to put decision making into people’s hands. The attempt to control what poor people buy is patronising and ineffectual, and there is evidence from elsewhere and in the past that food vouchers get sold for cash, at a discount. It is far better to protect and build up the buying power of poor people to survive. 

De-concentrate the food system spatially: How can informal street traders buy and sell their produce safely, and without aggravating the physical concentration of people in shopping malls and supermarkets? Here are some ideas. Since traditional selling areas have been transport hubs like taxi ranks and bus and railway stations that now lie still, new sites can be quickly set up using existing public infrastructure: school premises that have been closed, where there is shelter and water available, and sufficient space for social distancing to be safely practiced. Government should immediately make such spaces available for food vendors to trade from. Parking lots at shopping malls where all shops save a few are now closed could also be used, though this will not reduce foot traffic. 

Urgent help for small-scale food producers: The Solidarity Fund should provide cash injections to keep farm and fishing enterprises and other small-scale food enterprises going, and to provide appropriate protective equipment to enable them to continue with production. 

Aggregation of small-scale producers’ output: Small-scale farmers could establish depots where small-scale farmers can bring and aggregate their produce, for onward sale (for Cape Town, provisionally in Philippi and Khayelitsha), using existing WhatsApp groups to compile spreadsheets indicating the types and volumes of vegetables available for sale. Already the Philippi Economic Development Initiative (PEDI) and Food Flow are organising this. Similarly, small-scale fishers need centralised market points with cold storage facilities reasonably close to their main landing sites, for onward sale. Fishing companies can make available refrigerated vehicles to transport small-scale fishers’ catch, and make available protective gear for fish handling. Transportation of food – vegetables, fish, etc – by small-scale farmers must be allowed uninterrupted, including to fresh produce markets. Transport assistance including via out-of-work taxi drivers can be commandeered.   

Get supermarkets to adjust their procurement systems: Negotiate with supermarkets to buy from small-scale farmers, waiving their normal requirements of Global or even Local GAP certification (and advertise this produce separately within supermarkets) and carrying the cost of transportation to collect produce from small-scale farmers. Use government’s leverage with large formal retailers to require them to procure, stock and sell the vegetables of small-scale farmers, providing a back-up market for surpluses.

Get the corporate sector to repurpose its infrastructure: For delivery of food to the poor, whether for sale or food parcels, there will also be a need to access the logistics chains of supermarkets, or other major companies with massive distribution networks that reach every corner of the country (think: SAB Miller trucks and their clients distributing food supplies).

Procure from small-scale food producers: Government must use the provisions of the Disaster Management Act to short-circuit the constraints of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) to procure from small-scale farmers and fishers, paying cash upfront, to buy vegetables, fish and other food for public distribution.

Manage shopping expeditions: Mitigate the likelihood of large numbers of people converging on food outlets at the same time – especially immediately after disbursement of social grants – by allocating shopping days/hours to specific areas (eg. block-by-block). Releasing the informal food traders from the lockdown will also do a great deal to reduce the intensity of peak times at supermarkets. 

 Accept and work with the informal: Don’t try to get the informal sector to comply with registration requirements. It’s informal. Recognise this as a reality and a crucial part of the food economy. But immediately allowing all spaza shops to operate is not enough. Spaza shops are not adequate for households to do their main shopping – people shop around and usually go to spazas for small additional items. The informal sector must be restored, and augmented with new outlets in a more dispersed system.

Not a temporary food disaster

Access to food is obviously not only a matter of how much food is being produced, but about how and when it gets to people, and what it costs when it does. If just that one thing stays on the agenda, it will represent a huge shift in policy and programmes. 

We need a new conversation about the obligations of the state to ensure that everyone has enough food. It’s there in Section 27, and it is a right that everyone living in South Africa has – not only citizens. The state is ultimately responsible. And when the state removes the right to freedom of movement, this exposes the failures of ‘the market’ to deliver sufficient nutritious food to the majority in the world’s most unequal society. The lockdown is exposing the already intolerable situation. Now the failures of our food system become evident in sharp relief. Action is needed now. 

In the past weeks, the government has unquestioningly taken on the direct responsibility for ensuring that people have access to food, including oversight of how certain food prices are set. This is an enormous shift. The unspoken assumption is that the market will allocate food as it sees fit and that there is no direct role for the government. Under the lockdown regulations, however, it has simply been assumed that the state must take some of this responsibility in the interests of the greater common good. The next step is the need for political recognition that the everyday lives of the poor are a permanent food disaster.

Agricultural economists who ignore these realities yesterday argued that, because ‘people have to eat… food demand should hold’. We find this utterly unconvincing. Whatever levels of commercial production of food, the capacity of a large proportion of our population to buy it is being decimated in front of our eyes. The demand for food is a political matter, and already we are hearing permutations of slogans that threaten ‘no food, no lockdown’. 

Around the world, images of empty supermarket shelves have galvanised panic that soon there may simply not be enough food available because COVID-19 lockdowns have disrupted commercial supply chains. This is not the primary danger in South Africa. The spectre we face is full supermarket shelves and people outside unable to access them. 

There has within a week been a proliferation of efforts to provide food relief in various ways, sponsoring a family, buying a virtual bag of veggies, and so on. NGOs have stepped into this space with a plethora of soup kitchens and feeding plans to get food to children affected by the closure of feeding schemes at schools, Early Childhood Development facilities and creches. All these initiatives are good but none is sufficient. Over and above this outpouring of humanity and social solidarity is a need both to plan and deliver food at scale, and to recognise that the poor already produce, transport and sell a vast amount of food already. The very first thing that government can do to address the food crisis is to lift the lockdown on informal street traders who sell food and set up suitable places where they can operate. 

Beyond lockdown, what are the implications?

Long-range outcomes for the food system depend greatly on the development and course of the pandemic (which we believe is likely to be grim and long-lasting) and the longer-term economic impacts of the pandemic and control measures on the national and global economy (which are similarly likely to be dire). What happens to the food system will be merely one aspect of a much larger process of social change and restructuring, encompassing every aspect of South Africa’s distributional regime, growth path, and political settlement. 

We now face the prospect that the informal sector will suffer a massive setback, further pushing large numbers of people out of economic activity and into desperate poverty and lethal hunger, while further consolidating corporate domination in South Africa’s food system. The prospects of people returning to economic activity afterwards may be slim. 

One real and frightening possibility is that the stresses and strains of an out-of-control public health disaster stretch South Africa’s already fragile social contract to breaking point, leading to a new, much more nakedly elitist political fix, with state and military resources shoring up the interests of a small, urban middle class, and the abandonment of even the pretence of a pro-poor governing coalition. 

Acknowledgements

This article was written with contributions by Ruth Hall, Andries du Toit, Nkanyiso Gumede, Mafaniso Hara, Moenieba Isaacs, Boaventura Monjane, Farai Mtero and Sithandiwe Yeni. We acknowledge, with gratitude, information and insights from Grace Stead (Abalimi Bezekhaya), Tracy Ledger (PARI, Wits), Andy Newell (FoodFlow), Chris D’Aiuto (PEDI), Kim Bloch (Mthunzi), Julie Smith (PMBEJD), among others. 

Note: This document is a work-in-progress by PLAAS researchers, as a contribution to various government and civil society conversations about what is happening with poor people’s access to food in the context of the current pandemic and specifically the immediate context of the lockdown. We will be updating this and welcome your comments and suggestions as to how we can strengthen this analysis and set of proposals – please forward these to rhall@plaas.org.za.


Cover photo: Market in Johannesburg. Credit: Steven dosRemedios on Flickr.

Surviving COVID-19 in a fragile state: why social resilience is essential

Posted on April 2, 2020 by - FAC blog

The article below appeared on African Arguments’ Debating Ideas blog last Friday. As of 1 April there were 8 cases, and no further deaths. But there is little doubt that the impending situation in Zimbabwe is serious, and the government is unable to respond. The tragic death of Zororo Makamba was an early warning of what may be in store. While support from corporate philanthropists, such as Jack Ma and Strive Masiyiwa, is welcome, everyone needs to take action.  So don’t just read the blog, please do donate to the Citizens’ Initiative organised by Freeman Chari and others. It’s a legit outfit and gets money where it’s needed.

Zimbabwe had three confirmed cases and one recorded death of COVID-19 (coronavirus) as of 26 March, and a national disaster has been declared. So far suspected cases have been limited, but once the virus spreads through the population, it could be devastating.

In thinking about COVID-19 in Zimbabwe, and in Africa more broadly, three dimensions are important – fragility, resilience and inequality. It may be that obvious fragilities are counteracted to some extent by capacities to adapt and be resilient, but this depends on who you are and where you live.

Fragility

The conditions for rapid spread of COVID-19, certainly in townships in urban centres, are all there – crowded housing, poor sanitation, lack of water, immune-compromised populations due to HIV and lack of services. For pandemic preparedness planners, this is a recipe for a major disaster.

As people get sick, the ability of the health services to respond is seriously limited. The one infectious disease hospital (Wilkins in Harare) has limited capacity, and apparently no intensive-care ventilation facilities. There are supposedly only 16 ventilator machines in the country.

The medical profession is disillusioned and under-paid, and has recently been on a long strike, unheard of among committed doctors. Yesterday, nurses and some doctors walked out complaining of a lack of basic protective equipment. Many well-qualified doctors have left the country; even Cuban doctors, who have come to Zimbabwe’s aid in the past, may be fewer this time.

State neglect of the health service has been long-running, ever since the imposition of structural adjustment policies from 1991. In the past years it has got worse, and the public system has nearly collapsed. Private providers offer good services to the rich who can pay, but this is limited. And they are not geared up for a public health emergency.

The government’s response has been patchy so far. After ignoring warnings, an emergency declaration was made banning public gatherings and encouraging social distancing, but the President still proceeded with a rally the next day. Meanwhile, the defence minister caused an international sensation, and much opprobrium, by declaring that coronavirus had come from God to punish the West for imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe. The government distanced itself, but it rather highlights the dismal calibre of some at the highest level.

This current regime clearly doesn’t garner much trust. The political settlement has fallen apart. The state seems simply not to care. As Simukai Chigudu describes for the 2008 cholera outbreak a mixture of disdain and callous contempt is shown by the state. With the economy continuing to free-fall, Zimbabwe, by any indicator, is a ‘fragile state’ – and so one of the least able to respond to a pandemic.

Resilience

Yet, indicators of fragility tend to focus on the functioning of the state, assuming that states must replicate those in the West or China. In a crisis, however, well-ordered, functioning states are often unable to cope. They are not used to responding to surprise, high variability, random shocks and an inability to plan and predict. They do not have systems of reliability at their core.

While the Zimbabwean state is clearly highly fragile, given years of neglect and a serious lack of resources, there are other aspects of the Zimbabwe setting that give hope. Resilience – the ability to respond to and bounce back from shocks, even transforming the situation along the way – is built by people in networks, embedded in social relations, with values and commitments that go beyond narrow individualism. We see a lot of these characteristics in Zimbabwe; and people have had to learn these skills and practices the hard way.

Over twenty years of economic and political chaos has ensured that food is supplied through informal means, across multiple social networks, even as food emergencies are declared at a central level. The informalisation of life – the sense of getting by and living with uncertainty (débrouillardise in the Congolese rendition) – has affected all relations. If there is nothing in the shops or no fuel at the pumps, then look elsewhere, ring someone up, find an alternative. Something will happen, always. It is these capacities that are essential for surviving in a pandemic, and that those in the West are learning fast, as shops empty, people panic buy and services cease.

The painful lessons of the HIV/AIDS pandemic are imprinted on Zimbabwe’s consciousness: first it was a blame game – gays, foreigners, sex workers, truck drivers; and then everyone realised this was affecting everyone, and many friends and family were dying. Leadership from Timothy Stamps, the health minister, the commitment of front-line health workers and community changes in behaviour (along with the supply of cheap anti-retrovirals) turned the tide, and Zimbabwe was one of the first in the region to show declines in the disease. These lessons will be important now; just as in West Africa where the lessons from Ebola will be vital. Pointing the finger elsewhere doesn’t stop a virus, and everyone has to be committed to a collective response.

So now will be an important moment for rebuilding solidarities and forms of mutualism and moral economy that are at the heart of social resilience. With the UK Premier League cancelled, the WhatsApp groups dedicated to following Chelsea or Arsenal can be repurposed to helping each other, while churches will take on new meanings amongst congregations, even if not gathering physically. International connections are important too, although South Africa’s plan to build a fence on the Zimbabwe border to prevent illegal, ‘diseased’ migrants entering sends out a dismal signal. Networks of kin across the world, connected though remittances flows and Western Union, will be vital, just as messages (and good Zimbabwean jokes and memes) via social media will be important.

Even in the UK, so subsumed in an individualistic culture for generations, the importance of community, connection and solidarity are being rediscovered through ‘mutual aid’ groups. This will be much easier in Zimbabwe and, in the absent of a caring or competent state, will be essential.

Inequality

While at one level it’s true that viruses respect no borders and affect all people, the consequences are very unevenly felt. While we are all in it together, some are more exposed. Who is most likely to catch the disease? Who is most likely to become ill? Who is most likely to suffer from the failure of health services?

Some of this is to do with biology – it is the elderly, for example, who seem to get the worst symptoms – but a lot is to do with deep structural inequalities. The colonial shape of cities is one aspect: crowded townships (for black African workers), distant from places of work and the suburbs originally reserved for whites, require daily travel on crowded transport networks. This is the perfect setting for contagion.

Add to this the crowded nature of such ‘high-density’ townships (yes it’s in the name – blacks were not deemed to need space), and the decline in services, mean that ‘social-distancing’ is impossible. This was ruled out in the colonial era, and has been made worse by economic decline, where travelling for precarious work and endless queuing are part of daily life.

Meanwhile, the edicts of ‘hand-washing’, good hygiene and healthy food are impossible to follow if tap water doesn’t run, people share boreholes and poverty restricts what food can be bought. This is what Paul Farmer refers to as ‘structural violence’ – the violence of deep inequality that causes vulnerability and disease.

By contrast, those living in the low- or medium-density suburbs, and with resources, can distance themselves, and have resources to buy alternatives – privately pumped water, insurance for health care, money to buy things at inflated prices, or they’re even able skip the country if needs be.

Workers from the townships who service the city and offer labour in businesses and factories are those who are the most vulnerable to economic shutdown. They have experience of this, and many have already lost their formal jobs as the economy collapsed. They travel in to take up precarious, informal work, which can cease at a stroke without recompense.

Knee-jerk reactions by the state, in shallow attempts at asserting control, are often directed at the most vulnerable. Informal markets are closed because of notional hygiene concerns, for example. Those operating in recognised trading sites are taxed exorbitantly, even though this restricts access to toilets and washing facilities, especially for women. Extreme quarantine measures, in the context of a fragile state, may end up doing more harm than good, undermining social resilience.

It’s probably those in the rural areas who are the most resilient in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. Having food to eat or sell, and solid local networks to draw on, with limited expectations of the state anyway, many have successfully ridden out the roller-coaster ride that has been the Zimbabwean economy. Forms of collective action that can regrade roads in rural areas can surely also assist with pandemic response, in alliance with Zimbabwe’s many committed health care workers, community leaders and others.

Of course, as people become very critically ill, this is outside anyone’s ability to respond – and in Zimbabwe this includes the whole health system – so this is why enhancing the ability to stop the spread and building resilience is the essential challenge of the moment. As winter approaches, there is probably very little time.


This blog was written by Ian Scoones, and also appeared on Zimbabweland.

Cover photo: Women informal traders, Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Credit: Ian Scoones

Njage Farmers preparing to take rice commercialisation to the next level

Posted on March 30, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on #agricultural #policy and #research.

This is a tale of rice farmers in Njage village under CWAUNJA (Chama cha Wakulima wa Umwagiliaji Njage) literally meaning, An Association of Rice farmers under Irrigation Scheme. Speaking to members of the APRA research team in November 2019 – with the Njage River flowing down the slopes of Udzungwa mountain range in the background – Mr. Godwin Mgokele, chairperson of CWAUNJA, explained that the village was named after someone called Mwanjagila,who lived in the area. He was from the Hehe tribe, which is dominant in Iringa region.  Both the area around him (now a village) and the river were named after him by neighbours who would say, “I am going to Mwanjagila,” later abbreviated to “Njage.”  River Njage is the main source of water for the irrigation scheme in the village.

Efforts to improve rice productivity in Njage village have been ongoing for several years.  The system of rice intensification (SRI) technology was introduced in 2009 through the collective efforts of the district extension services, Kilombero Plantation Limited (KPL), USAID, and others.  The combined effect of using SRI technology and an improved rice variety (SARO 5) has improved rice productivity from around 10 bags per acre on average, to up to 35 – 40 bags (100 kg each) per acre (equivalent to 8600 – 9800 Kg/ha).  However, this accounts for only 60% of the potential productivity. Improved rice productivity in the area attracted the interest of more development agents including USDA, World bank and local NGOs to support Njage rice farmers under CWAUNJA in their efforts to improve irrigation, storage and processing infrastructure.

CWAUNJA members must be farmers, and a minimum of 18 years old.  They must also have farms within the area targeted by the irrigation scheme.  In addition, members must be willing to relinquish part of their farm without compensation, so that the land can be used for improving irrigation channels and constructing farm roads to ensure the scheme’s functionality. Moreover, under improved supervision, members will have to agree to abide by rice production practices such as seed selection, line planting and use of fertiliser as recommended by extension staff in order to attain improved productivity. The project was initially funded by Africa Development Bank (AfDB) and Africa Union (AU).  The World Bank has joined hand since 2015 to support development and complete the planned infrastructure.

The scheme under CWAUNJA will cover at least 400 hectares, which is about 20% of Njage’s rice arable land.  It also aims to serve about 40% of all rice farmers in the village. Already, 75% of the targeted irrigation scheme and farm roads have been developed, while construction of the warehouse is completed by 90%.  A rice milling and grading machine is ready for mounting as soon as electricity is connected to the building, which was being done in March. Rice value addition will also include packaging and labelling (branding) to get a higher product price and attract clients from new market outlets.

Rice milling and grading machine being mounted


Following the  improvement of infrastructure (irrigation, farm roads, storage and value addition facilities), it is expected that the efficiency of the rice value chain in Njage village will improve through increased productivity, and is expected reach 56 – 60 bags per acre (equivalent to 13,720 – 14,700 Kg/ha). This is following extended production to two or three cropping  seasons per year under irrigation, reduced crop loss due to improved storage facilities, controlled water movement and improved transportation of paddy from the field, and thereby reducing production cost. 

The storage facilities under construction will store 1500 tonnes, equivalent to 15,000 bags of rice.  This is almost double the current rice production level in Njage village. All these improvements are expected to significantly improve rice commercialisation during the next cropping season; the irrigation infrastructure is scheduled to be completed by September 2020. The whole infrastructure is expected to be commissioned by the World Bank through the Global Agriculture & Food Security Program (GAFSP) under the Ministry of Agriculture in Tanzania.    

Looking to the near future, the CWAUNJA Chairperson notes that the association requires support to establish a savings and credit association to enable CWAUNJA to lend money to farmers and to open an input shop to supply seed, fertiliser, pesticides and tools to serve farmers.  They also require training support on entrepreneurial skills and coordination so that farmers collectively follow the crop calendar.

The APRA Team looks forward to a brighter future for all rice farmers under CWAUNJA in their aspiration to take rice commercialisation to the next level of integration.

Written and prepared by: Kizito K. Mwajombe, Gideon Boniface and Aida Isinika. APRA Programme – Tanzania


Cover image: The 1,500 tonne capacity warehouse under construction     

APRA Brief 22: Enhancing production of quality rice in Ethiopia: Dis/incentives for rice processors

Posted on March 30, 2020 by - APRA Briefs

Written by, Abebaw Assaye and Dawit Alemu.

In order to reduce the import burden and contribute towards the country’s development plan through import substitution, it is critical to focus on increasing rice production and improving the quality of milled rice. Rice processors in Ethiopia play an important role in the rice sector, not only as service providers but also as buyers and sellers of rice. In general, however, there is a general disincentive for farmers to produce good quality paddy, and for processors to produce good quality milled rice. This brief examines the main disincentives and outlines key measures that need to be put in place to address these challenges.

APRA present at key conference on Nigerian cocoa industry

Posted on March 30, 2020 by - News

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on #agricultural #policy and #research.

As the highest cocoa producing state in Nigeria, Ondo State is crucial contributor to the Nigerian cocoa sector. It is no surprise, therefore, that it was chosen to host the latest roundtable conference organised by the Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria (CFAN). It is the latest in a series of events that aim to produce grassroots consensus on the adaptability of the Nigerian cocoa industry in the face of new challenges. 

These include:

  1. Lack of adequate irrigation facilities to complement the new 2-3 year maturing cocoa varieties that Federal and State governments are releasing at highly subsidised prices.
  2. Inadequate access to agrochemicals in terms of quantity and quality.
  3. Insecure tenure for cocoa farmers, who are often migrants from states different from where their farms are located.
  4. Poor quality dry cocoa beans, largely due to poor post-harvest handling and wet cocoa bean fermentation processes.
  5. Low percentage of youth engagement in cocoa plantation establishment and reluctance of older farmers to expand their farm areas to include more cocoa.
  6. Limited access to extension services for cocoa farmers, meaning that sector operators can’t keep track of standard practices in cocoa production and post-harvest handling.
  7. Ageing of cocoa trees together with low planting density.

The conferences were initiated to end the stagnation of the cocoa sector and in response to the failed government-led ‘Zero Oil Policy’ and 5-year cocoa transformation plan of 2016.

For more on the successful 2019 Ogun State conference, read our blog on tackling the challenges of the stagnating cocoa sector, here.

‘Repositioning the Nigerian cocoa industry for the prosperity of its farmers and production of quality cocoa beans across cocoa producing states in Nigeria’ was the theme for the Ondo State Cocoa Farmers’ roundtable conference, held on 19th March 2020 and attended by over 700 participants, who were mainly comprised of cocoa farmers and press covering the event. There was a sizeable representation from the four major cocoa producing states of Nigeria: Osun, Ekiti, Ogun and Edo.


APRA was represented by researcher Adebayo Aromolaran. As lead speaker, he informed participants of APRA’s work on commercial agriculture in Nigeria, also highlighting important findings that focused on commercial tree crops – cocoa being the major commercial tree crop in the Ondo State. He then shared important policy implications of those findings, which include:

  • The need for improvements in all-weather roads linking farms to markets.
  • Increased access to land markets.
  • More frequent access to extension services.
  • Increased access to agro-dealers.

Further details of findings will be included in the upcoming APRA working paper on “Determinants of land allocation to commercial tree crops in Nigeria.”.

The conference also enabled APRA to engage with policymakers and implementation agencies at state and federal levels on APRA research activities in Nigeria and share APRA’s findings on the causes of cocoa sector stagnation. 

Prof. Aromolaran addresses the conference

High level participants included:  the secretary to the Ondo state government (Mr Ifedayo Abegunde ) representing the state governor, the Ondo State commissioner for agriculture (Mr Gbenga Adefarati ), the Permanent Secretary , Ondo State Ministry of Agriculture (Mr Sanni) , MD, Harvestfield  Industries Ltd ( Mr Martins Awofisayo) , President Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria ( Comrade Adeola Adegoke) FAN the representative of Central Bank of Nigerian (Mr Christopher Oladokun) , the former Chairman, Ondo State Cocoa Revolution Project ( Dr Jibayo Oyebade) , the representative of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, traditional rulers etc.



Cover photo: A view of the panel at the CFAN conference.
All photo credit: Adebayo Aromolaran

Smallholder capacity for agricultural commercialisation

Posted on March 26, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on #agricultural #policy and #research.

Much of the agricultural economics literature has defined smallholder commercialisation as a virtuous cycle in which small-scale producers increasingly engage and integrate with markets, and as a result, raise their incomes and living standards. Yet, a significant proportion of these farmers face high risks that often result in rather short engagements with markets. Risks stem from the high costs of inputs and machinery, challenges of accessing output markets for sales and processing, and from price shocks or simply adjusting to new sales modalities. While some farmers can respond to these risks and continue to intensify and commercialise, others may respond by simply settling back into production for subsistence or even exit farming altogether. These differences point to the need for understanding the heterogeneity that characterises how smallholders respond to the risks from commercialisation.

In our forthcoming paper , we get to grips with the differences in smallholders’ ability to deal with risks from commercialisation. Using the basis that household incomes reveal the status of current living standards, and that their assets reflect both accumulated past wealth and security in the future – we hypothesise that the propensity of smallholders’ to commercialise depends on resource availability, reflected in income and assets. Household pathways of commercialisation will then be experienced differently depending on asset ownership and income poverty. In particular, we investigate whether the most resource constrained face significantly more challenges to commercialise than other households.

We capture these differences by identifying threshold asset levels (consisting of production equipment, consumer durables, land, and livestock as a bundle) required to

support the household above the income poverty line. Below this threshold, the poorest producers are unable to commercialise without facing higher risks, and above which better-off farmers are able to reap the benefits from high levels of commercialisation at low risk to their livelihoods.   

The data for this study are from household surveys conducted in 2017-2018 by the DFID-funded Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) Programme of the Future Agricultures Consortium. Using cross-sectional data for 2,375 smallholder farm households (with total land area cultivated between 0 to 5 hectares) across Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, we examine the concept of smallholder capacity for commercialisation in different contexts. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews carried out by a team of enumerators who were trained and supervised by the researchers. Use of a core set of questions in all four countries gives us relevant and comparable data on highly commercialised smallholder households from four different contexts (Chirwa, Sabates-Wheeler, and Saha 2018[as3] ).

The Ghanaian smallholder sample grows oil palm as a primary crop, such that households sell a substantial proportion of their production, while sample households in Tanzania grow rice as a main crop and, expectedly, also use rice for purposes of home consumption, gifts, payments, and other uses than immediate sales in the market. Our Nigerian smallholder sample, with linkages to medium-scale farmers, are growing and selling large proportions of maize as their primary crop. Finally, in Zimbabwe, smallholders grow tobacco and maize; both crops fetching commercial value in the markets.

We find that there are certain characteristics that differentiate higher-capacity households across all four countries, but there are also different factors affecting capacity across countries, likely owing to the differential nature of opportunities for commercialisation. We highlight four key findings below.

First, in all four countries, more educated and younger smallholder farmers with better access to roads, on average, have higher capacity for commercialising, are hiring more labour, and selling higher proportions of their produce. What is also clear is that capacity for commercialisation is a context-specific story, where ‘capacity’ is also linked to the main crops, namely oil palm, rice, maize or tobacco, grown by those farmers as well as location.

Second, higher-capacity households are predominantly male-headed on average, suggesting gender differences in terms of capacity. However, we find an exception to this in Ghana and Nigeria, where the gender of household head is not a statistically significant factor differentiating capacity.

Third, market access and access to tarmac roads have a differentiated story across the four APRA study countries. In Nigeria, road and market access is highly significant in explaining capacity, highlighting the linkages with medium-scale farmers that is a key characteristics of our sample. Road access makes a significant difference in explaining capacity also in Ghana, where oil palm as a key crop is dependent on transport linkages.

Finally, we find that the likelihood of being highly commercialised increases with household size and hired labour in all countries. For household size, we note a U-shaped relation such that the likelihood of high commercialisation appears to increase only for a certain size of the household in Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. One clear exception for hired labour is Ghana, where we find an inverted U-relationship such that beyond a certain number of labour days on average, the likelihood of being highly commercialised declines.

In summary, smallholder capacity, which is essentially a proxy for poverty, determines the ability to commercialise. Capacity is therefore a constraint to moving onto a commercialisation pathway and the obvious policy implications are that households with low assets and income are likely to need a significant boost to help them commercialise. This could be in the form of credit, targeted assets and training – depending on the crop and sector in which the commercialisation is happening. Also, given the role for demographic factors, targeted interventions to support farmers wishing to increase marketed output can be tailored to household types.


Written by Amrita Saha, Rachel-Sabates Wheeler and John Thompson

Photo: Harvesting cocoa at Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana. Credit: Carsten ten Brink on Flickr.

‘Donkey to the slaughter’: a classic case of short sighted economic planning

Posted on March 23, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Please note: During this time of uncertainty caused by the #COVID19 pandemic, as for many at this time, some of our APRA work may well be affected in coming weeks but we aim to continue to post regular blogs and news updates on #agricultural #policy and #research.


Dogs are traditionally known as “Man’s best friend” because of their long history of close relations, loyalty, and companionship to humans. I bet domestic donkeys [Equus asinus] would qualify for the second human’s best friend position.

Leaving the social and emotional aspects aside, in economic terms, donkeys are key assets for the rural poor, women in particular. They:

  1. Transport goods and people from farm to market and vice versa
  2. Pull the carts that carry the goods and the people
  3. Fetch water from distant places. According to archaeological evidence, this has been known for centuries.

The donkey abattoir

In Ethiopia a donkey slaughterhouse became operational in March 2017 at a cost of US$10 million.[1] It was located in Bishoftu 25 km southeast of Addis Ababa. In April 2017, the media reported its closure. One news outlet expressed:

“… It is puzzling how it all came about in the first place and what procedures might have been followed to approve the project.”

Addis Fortune

Slaughtering donkeys was found to be on a collision course with the cultural and religious values of Ethiopians. Donkey meat is prohibited in both Christianity and Islam. Although there was no plan to sell donkey meat on the domestic market, “[the] presence of donkey slaughter house shocked and angered Ethiopians but they were not able to demonstrate to vent out their anger and sense of humiliation as a country” [2] as the country was under state of emergency at the time. The Government finally decided to close the abattoir and it was put up for sale by the Chinese firm. The questions that remain unanswered are (i) why did the government allow it in the first place? ii) how can the public be sure that it won’t happen again?

There is a similar story from Kenya. It opened, or planned to open, three slaughterhouses following closure of facilities in Ethiopia. However, the scheme did not last long. Kenya announced it is banning donkey slaughtering, more for economic reasons than based on religion and culture. The Kenyan government suddenly woke up to the fact its donkey population is seriously depleted. There was also complaint from its neighbors that the smuggling of donkeys from Ethiopia to Kenya has increased dramatically.

Donkey carrying hay bales down a street in Addis Ababa. Credit: Tim & Anne Gulick on Flickr


Why did governments not foresee this when signing contracts with Chinese firms?

At a time when we have highly trained economic analysts and planners, it is unacceptable that projects worth millions of dollars cease to operate for cultural, spiritual, or ‘unforeseen’ economic reasons such as shortage of supply.[3] The Chinese firm in Ethiopia has claimed that local community was consulted prior to implementation, which points to the fact that politics (more than economics) had considerable part to play in the decision.

Where does donkey breeding research stand?

Depletion in donkey population (supply side constraint) is one of the reasons for closing down slaughterhouses in Kenya and probably in Ethiopia too. I am no expert on this topic but the literature suggests that donkey breeding is difficult and complex. I am tempted to ask what is being done to improve donkey breeding. If we can increase the supply of donkeys, then probably we don’t have to worry the Chinese slaughtering them as this generates income for the rural people engaged in donkey rearing. This leads me to my final question.

Could Chinese intervention be used as an opportunity to bring transformation for rural people?

All around the western and eastern world, the use of wheels, in one form or another, for moving goods and people is the norm. But in most parts of Africa, Ethiopia in particular, women still carry heavy goods on their backs. Donkeys reduce the burden on women but they are not the most efficient means of transport. It is time we transform the rural transport sector to reduce drudgery and increase efficiency. And let ‘donkeys to the slaughter’!

Written by Amdissa Teshome

Cover photo: Donkeys in Ethiopia. Credit: Steve Evans on Flickr

[1] China needs up to 5 million donkey skins a year for making ejiao – a gel believed to cure anything from cold to ageing. As there are an estimated 8.5 million donkeys in Ethiopia, it is not surprising that China is attracted to the Ethiopia market.

[2] See https://borkena.com/2017/04/21/donkey-slaughterhouse-ethiopia/(accessed 29.2.20)

[3] At 1000 donkeys a day, the Kenyan plant was built to slaughter five times that of Ethiopia https://str8talkmagazine.com/index.php/2017/09/17/chinese-donkey-abattoir-in-ethiopia-lodges-complaint-with-pm/ (accessed 29.2.20).

New farm size regulations in Zimbabwe: can they encourage land redistribution?

Posted on March 23, 2020 by - FAC blog

In mid-February, the Government of Zimbabwe issued a new set of farm size regulations, arguing that this would release new land for land reform. This announcement arrived out of the blue and came as a surprise to many. Was this a new attempt to rationalise land holdings following the 2000 land reform? Was this the implementation phase of the national audit starting? Was this a political move to deal with large holdings accumulated by the previous regime? Why now, and what impact would it have?

Despite the press claims that this was a big, bold new move, a closer look at the new regulations suggests that actually things haven’t changed that much. The 1999 regulations were marginally adjusted in 2000, and this was a further minimal, slightly random, adjustment, as the table below shows.

Natural region2000 regulations2020 regulations
I250250
II350/400 IIa/b500
III500700
IV15001000
V20002000

Within land policy, farm size regulations demonstrate a policy commitment to redistribution, avoiding massive consolidations and huge, under-utilised farms. In theory that is. As an administrative tool they are only as effective as the land administration system; and unfortunately in Zimbabwe this is not very effective.

In practice land allocations since land reform in 2000 have been ad hoc and at the discretion of land officers and committees at the district level. Exceptions are regularly made. In many respects, having such flexibility makes much sense. A simple centralised system cannot deal with local variations and contingencies. It can only be a guide. The problem comes when such flexibilities are exploited by those in power; maintaining large or multiple farms, for example, and so excluding others from access to land.

Prosper Matondi of Ruzivo Trust has provided a useful draft paper on the recent regulations, helpfully facilitating debate. He points out the huge variation in actual allocations as against the formal regulations (Table 4.1 in the paper), based on the government’s own audit data. In our sites, a similar story applies. There are 16 (of 817) A2 farms in Masvingo province that exceed the ceilings (12 in Mwenezi in Region V – all huge livestock/wildlife ranches – and 4 in Gutu/Masvingo districts in Region III/IV) and there are 11 (of 700) A2 farms over 500 ha in Mazowe district. How many might be deemed suitable for subdivision for (small-scale) agriculture is very unclear.

So will the new regulations really have any effect?

Land ceiling regulations are a very blunt instrument in land policy. They have been intensely controversial internationally over many decades. From the 1960s in India they were implemented across the country, aiming to break up the zamindari system of large holdings. Different states took different approaches, and outcomes were varied. Today, there are some who believe they have become a constraint, particularly for smaller farmers aiming to grow. Technological change in irrigation in particular has made the assumptions behind the original reforms problematic too.

In South Africa, an attempt to set land ceilings in 2017 through a new Bill fell by the way-side, and many were extremely critical of the process. Apartheid era legislation preventing farm subdivision extraordinarily is still in force, notionally protecting the ‘viability’ of large-scale farms. The 2019 land panel has argued strongly for a rethink, both on subdivision and a renewed effort to impose ceilings, linked to land taxation – with high levels beyond the ceilings to encourage the market-based release of land. Maybe this a route for Zimbabwe to follow too?

However, there is an even more basic question raised: what are the appropriate sizes for expropriation or taxation legislation? What sizes for what conditions make sense? This is the tricky part. In the colonial era, policy on land sizes also existed, but was racialized. The original assumption was that a white farmer needed land that would produce an income equivalent of a senior (white) civil servant in government. So-called Native Purchase Areas were established in the 1930s to create a yeoman class of African farmer, but were considerably smaller (averaging under 100 ha) than white commercial farms. Other blacks meanwhile were deemed to require less land – indeed land apportionment legislation was geared of course to ensuring that land was sufficiently small and poor in the ‘reserves’ that labour was released for the rest of the (white) economy.

What was deemed ‘viable’ was also influenced by the planning models on optimal production in different agroecological regions. This again linked to a bunch of assumptions, influenced by a particular idea of (white commercial) farming. The famous agroecological ‘Natural Region’ map, produced in 1961 by Vincent and Thomas, identifies what should be produced in each region. In the drier regions it was only extensive livestock, unless there was irrigation, for example. Of course there is plenty of cropping in Masvingo and Matabeleland provinces: it’s not ‘optimal’ as far as the assessment goes, but it’s necessary for the livelihoods of many.

As Ben Cousins and I showed in a paper a while back, ideas of ‘viability’ are therefore highly contested, conditioned by politics and assumptions about production, and (ideologically-inflected) visions of what a farm and farmer should be. What is viable for one type of farmer (say with off-farm income earning options) may not be viable for another. And ideas of what is optimal cannot be generalised either. Much depends on levels of investment (irrigation for example), land formation and topography (large areas with huge granite outcrops are not the same as large areas with levelled, high quality irrigable land), and how the land can be used (including market potential). Just saying that, in a region defined by average rainfall (what is that these days, with such variability anyway?), a maximum land size should be X really doesn’t make sense.

This is why local adaptations of national farm size regulations are essential, but they must be based on a sound and transparent administrative process. This is why building a wider land administration system in Zimbabwe is essential and just issuing edicts through new regulations will change little.

This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland

New APRA research published on ‘inclusive innovation’ and urban agriculture

Posted on March 23, 2020 by - News

A new article incorporating APRA research has recently been published online on the ScienceDirect  website. The role of technology in inclusive innovation of urban agriculture attempts to address how technology can provide benefits for marginalised groups, such as women food entrepreneurs.

Inclusive innovation describes the means by which new goods and services are developed for and/or by those who are usually excluded from development projects. These could include bottom of the pyramid urban farmers, who are growing crops in land scarce, densely populated, and polluted areas. Simple innovations, such as sack gardening – a garden created out of a perforated sack- is one such example.

In Kenya, there is a large community of urban farmers who are growing crops in land scarce, densely populated, and polluted areas. Outside of Kenya there are already projects catering for this group, such as in Uganda, where a project helping marginalised women to construct vertical farms in urban areas is well established. The writers make clear that if such marginalised groups are engaged with, then a joint-creation of knowledge can result in further inclusive innovations for urban agriculture.

Three solutions are offered to problems, explained in the article, linked to inclusive innovation projects that may surface in urban agriculture:

  1. Support to marginalised groups to organise into entrepreneur groups to improve their voice and power.
  2. Value, document and promote the unique knowledge and innovative practices of marginalised groups in using traditional and scientific knowledge.
  3. Facilitate inclusive business connections for marginalised groups to sustainably grow their businesses.

Therefore, these solutions are not just pertinent to an urban Kenyan setting but are applicable to urban environments across Africa, and perhaps further afield. This foresight by the authors, geared towards an ever-changing urban environment, provides a solid reason to give this article a read.

The article is co-edited by APRA’s Hannington Odame, along with his colleagues Janice Ghemoh Changeh and John Okoth Otieno from the Centre for African Bio-Entrepreneurship, and Jash Barack Okeyo-Owuor from the Victoria Institute for Research on Environment and Development.

The role of technology in inclusive innovation of urban agriculture is available to access as a PDF from here. Currently, access is available through a ScienceDirect account or access via your institution.

Cover photo: Sack farm in Nairobi’s Mathare urban settlement. Credit: Meena Kadri on Flickr.

The challenge of getting to Lukilikila village

Posted on March 18, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Luvilikila village is located within Mngeta division in Kilombero district, about 80km from Ifakala town, the district headquarters and just 13km south of Kilombero Plantation limited (KPL) – a large scale rice farm within Mngeta division. The Kilombero Ramsar site, a protected wetland lies to the south.  Luvilikila village is one among ten villages participating in the APRA consortium research work on rice commercialisation in Mngeta division, Kilombero district.

Rice production and marketing in Luvilikila village have benefited from its close proximity to KPL since 2010, especially from improvements of feeder roads connecting the village to the main road from Ifakara to Mlimba. The government initiatives under the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) framework is designed to link large agricultural investors with surrounding smallholder farmers and other value chain stakeholders through various institutional arrangements. It was expected that smallholder farmers would benefit through technology transfer, improvement in the infrastructure and market linkages.

Challenges for rice commercialisation in Luvilikila village

Luvilikia village is located 13 km from the main road and from KPL head office.  The feeder access road from the main road to the village partially passes the KPL farm – when the farm was still operational, the access road was well maintained by the company.  When the company ceased farm operations in 2018, maintenance of the feeder road leading to Luvilikila village also stopped, creating a serious challenge of accessing to Luvilikila during the rainy season. 


The road to Luvilikila February, 2020


Rice production potential at Luvilikila

Luvilikila village is known to be one of the leading rice production areas in Mngeta division.  It has a large concentration of medium scale farmers who cultivate up to 25 hectares of paddy.  The poor road condition has affected the performance of all farmers in this village in two aspects. 

  1. Inputs such as herbicides and fertiliser, which are widely used in rice production processes, sell at slightly higher prices in the village compared to prices in neighbouring villages, which are less than 15 kilometres away. 
  2. It is more expensive for farmers to ferry their paddy to milling centres.  Likewise, the few traders who manage to get to Luvilikila to buy paddy offer lower prices.   

For instance, during the last harvest season, most farmers in neighbouring villages including Mchombe, Mngeta, Nakaguru and Itongowa, sold their paddy on a kilogram basis due to big influx of traders they, fetching up to TZS 140,000 (GBP 50) per 100 kg bag of paddy.  This has overcome the problem of unfair pricing by traders who used to buy paddy based on volume instead weight. Most of this measuring equipment, such as tin and sacks, were overfilled or tampered with, leading to farmers being cheated and getting low prices.  In comparison, most farmers from Luvilikila village could only sell at TZS 100,000 (GBP 35) per 100 kg bag.


Bridges on the road connecting district headquarters and Luvilikila village washed away due to heavy rains, February 2020


Farmers in Luvilikila village also face floods, mainly caused by poor maintenance of the drainage systems which separates the farming plots and blocks. These drainage systems, which also maintain water flows between plots, were previously maintained by the KPL. The floods have further affected the roads and made farming by tractors impossible.   Therefore, most farmers rely on animal traction, the rental price has increased by 100% from TZS 50,000 (GBP 18) last year to TZS 100,000 (GBP 30) this season, and the price can be higher on muddy fields. Slow responses or lack of support to farmers in Luvilikila village increase the production costs for farmers and lower their profit hence undermining the rice commercialisation efforts.


KPL tractors assisting trucks to pass through bad road near Itongowa village


Hence, farmers in Luvilikila continue to pray and hope, sooner rather than later, that KPL or another investor will resume operations so that famers and traders will benefit from spill-over effects of their operations in the area. The discussion with the Luvilikila village chairman revealed that due to closure of KPL, some people, especially the youth and women, have lost the opportunities for casual employment which used to be a key source of income. The chairman insisted that loss of such livelihood opportunities from KPL employment to youth in the area have resulted in some youth being engaged crime, such as theft.  

In addition, the farmers in Luvilikila village are quite optimistic that the government will deliver on the promise of connection to the national electricity grid under the rural electrification programme, where every village in mainland Tanzania should be connected by 2021.  When power comes, they say, the government will surely collaborate with KPL and other development agencies to also improve their feeder road.  They know that improving their livelihoods largely depends on their increased participation in rice commercialisation.  While the farmers have a role to improve productivity and production, reaching their full potential depends on facilitation by the government and other development agencies to improve rural infrastructure, including the feeder road to Luvilikila and electricity.   These will enable more farmers to add value and sell rice instead of paddy, hence fetch higher prices. This effect has been evident from other villages where feeder roads and electricity infrastructure have been improved, where those in the private sector, including traders, have built the storage and processing facilities to help farmers store their paddy in order to sell it when prices are higher, or to process and then sell the rice.


Written by: John Jeckoniah and Aida Isinika


Cover photo: Vehicle stuck on the road to Luvilikila, February 2020.

Credit for all photos: John Jeckoniah

Political economy of agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria

Posted on March 16, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Background

The historical and contemporary importance and contributions of agriculture to industrialisation and human development cannot be over-emphasised. Although pre-colonial agriculture in Africa consisted of peasant agriculture, for better accumulation, colonialism brought about a market and export oriented agriculture to Africa. Agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria had roots in the colonial political economy, and is defined by mechanisation, large-scale agriculture and market production.

Agriculture fortunes in Nigeria’s political economy have varied over the years. The post-colonial state in Nigeria was founded, nurtured and sustained on peasant agricultural accumulation like its colonial predecessor. Though it also embraced agricultural commercialisation for rapid industrialisation and development, this was short-lived following the discovery of crude oil commercial quantities in 1958.  The oil political economy not only engendered a rentier state but, like other resource abundant economies, it produced the Dutch-disease with the destructive effects on other sectors of Nigeria’s economy.

Description of paper

The paper, on which this blog is based, examines the trajectory of agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria since 1999 till 2019.  The study deployed an eclectic theoretical framework anchored on the post-colonial state theory, the narrative-actor politics framework, in addition to political contexts and an incentives approach (that is political advantage and accruable benefits as basis for policy choices). These theoretical undercurrents are situated within the over-arching discourse of globalisation to provide an international dimension for the analysis.

Since independence, the Nigerian post-colonial state has played a central role in accumulation, while remaining economically dependent yet responding to the dictates of transnational capital; that is a capital with ownership in several nations. This has become more important now that the state has become entrenched in the globalisation accumulation process. 

The framework of analysis allows for a critical discussion of the Nigerian state as a basis of unravelling the discourse, power dynamics, social forces, accumulation propensity, incentives and interests that informs and conditions the policy choices of agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria. How the nexus between the crises of capitalist accumulation at the global level resonates in economic crisis in Nigeria is also explained. It is this dynamic interface which has fuelled agricultural commercialisation policies by the different administrations since 1999, complimented by the new scramble for transnational capital accumulation in Africa, and the survival of the dominant class coalition in Nigeria.

Following an analytical engagement with the political economy of Nigeria, as a basis of placing the discourse and problems found related to this study. How the political economy of agricultural commercialisation has played out in Nigeria was looked at and a brief review of agricultural commercialisation processes from 1966-1999 carried out.  What emerged was a highly dysfunctional and extractive state deployed by the dominant class and foreign capital as a mechanism for primitive capitalist accumulation.

Land Use Act & Capital accumulation

Capital accumulation is very important for the post-colonial state, particularly how it was fostered through national control over peasant land. The Land Use Act, enacted in 1978 with the purpose of providing standardised land administrations across Nigeria, in fact shuns the interests of Nigerian peasants in favour of dominant classes. The Act also solidified the alliance between the petty bourgeois and foreign capital in terms of their mutual interests in peasant land and accumulation.  Oil wealth, and the neglect of agriculture, weakened the ability of peasant farmers to organise resistance and made them politically irrelevant. 

Important factors to consider are the issues and implications of the post-colonial state governability, the attendant political narratives and actors that shape agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria, and different interests and incentives that drive the agricultural commercialisation pathways. The weak and non-hegemonic nature of the post-colonial state and its caretakers in Nigeria is a factor, a condition that engenders economic and political crises just as it promotes the intellectual hegemony of transnational capital in the policy domain. This fosters a policy regime oriented to agricultural commercialisation as a strategy for economy diversification, poverty eradication, wealth and development as championed by neoliberal globalisation.

Agricultural commercialisation serves the interest of the dominant classes to remain in power and provides avenue for primitive capital accumulation making it a preferred strategy by every administration since 1999. This has become more attractive following the global food and energy crises, which made agricultural business a source of transnational accumulation.

Conclusion

The dysfunctional post-colonial state and the mode of accumulation favoured by the Nigerian dominant classes is a curse rather than a blessing, and a fundamental departure from the prevailing agricultural commercialisation orientation is needed.  Among other things, for agricultural commercialisation to achieve its desired objectives in Nigeria it must empower the smallholders. This requires smallholders to be shielded against the forces of globalisation through increased capacity to access the global market. A more determined effort of combatting corruption is crucial. The orientation of the country to agro-business instead of agro-development, which entails valuing agriculture for itself rather than an escape and desperate economic crisis strategy is recommended. Thus, agricultural commercialisation must engender capital accumulation as opposed to primitive capital accumulation. The people must be at the heart of the nation’s development through a deliberate democratisation of development and mass empowerment.



This blog was written by Adelaja Odutola Odukoya.

To read Working Paper 29 : Political Economy of Agricultural Commercialisation in Nigeria, click here.

Cover image: Farmer operates his tractor outside Abuja. Credit: ©IFPRI/Milo Mitchell. Found on Flickr.

Kneejerk reactions to ending child labour don’t benefit children

Posted on March 16, 2020 by - FAC blog

Last week in the UK there was a flurry of media interest in two of the world’s coffee giants – Nespresso and Starbucks. A piece in The Guardian newspaper and a Channel 4 Dispatches programme, both focused on children as young as 11 and 12 allegedly working in the Nespresso and Starbucks supply chains in Guatemala. Both The Guardian and Dispatches quoted George Clooney – actor, human rights activist, and the public face of the Nespresso brand – saying: “having grown up working on a tobacco farm from the time I was 12, I’m uniquely aware of the complex issues regarding farming and child labour.”

The story of children working on coffee farms in Latin America is not new. Yet, it continues to cause a sensation, capturing the attention of middle- and high-income coffee drinkers, who by and large, hold a romantic view of childhood. In this view, childhood should be all about family, play, school and learning. Images of children working long hours for little reward has no place in this imaginary of childhood. It leaves a bitter taste. This largely explains the pledge by the coffee giants to ‘stamp out the problem’ that, via consumer outrage, threatens their profits.

From child labour to children’s work

Yet, it is worth reflecting on the meaning and implications of Mr Clooney’s reference to his own childhood work experience. It is precisely this awareness of the ‘complex issues regarding farming and child labour’ that led to the recent establishment of a large 7-year research programme – Action on Children’s Harmful Work in African Agriculture (ACHA). Funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and lead by the researchers at the Institute of Development Studies, the aim of ACHA is to build evidence on the forms, drivers, and experiences of children’s harmful work in African agriculture, and interventions that are effective in preventing harm that arises in the course of children’s work.

ACHA intends to step back from dominant, and often sensationalist, public and policy discourses around child labour. The idea is to examine how a reframing from child labour to children’s work might help us to understand better the complexities and realities of children’s work within agriculture.

What are the trade-offs for children’s work?

While we agree that children everywhere are entitled to a childhood free from harm and abuse, it only takes a moment to realise that the trade-off between benefit and harm from the work children do is seldom clear cut. Work is a normal part of childhood across the globe, and children’s positive experiences of work constitute the norm. Recognising that in the majority of cases the work children do is not harmful to them – in fact, it likely benefits them – is a critical and necessary step to a much-needed opening-up of policy dialogue in the otherwise closed ‘child labour’ space. The objective of this opening-up is to inform the design and implementation of a new generation of child-sensitive, and more successful, initiatives to address those situations in which children are actually harmed while working.

As well as being influenced by consumer preferences, the punitive actions taken by the coffee giants to terminate contracts with farms where child work rests on an assumption that adequate, quality education is available. If not – as is unfortunately still the case in many poorer agricultural communities – then the question arises as to the net effect of prioritising school attendance over participation in farm work, and the associated opportunities for learning and contributing to the household economy. These trade-offs are rarely contemplated by the average expresso, latte or mocha drinker:

These trade-offs can only really be understood when the perspectives of children and their households are brought in, and particularly in relation to how different kinds of harm are experienced (understood, managed, navigated, lived with). Our contention is that a nuanced understanding of these trade-offs, an understanding that fully integrates the perspectives of children and their households, must be central to all strategies – from corporate to community – to address children’s harmful work in agricultural supply chains.



This blog was written by Jim Sumberg and Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, and first appeared on the Institute for Development Studies website.

Cover photo: A boy works in a millet in a camp for internally displaced persons, in Gereida (South Darfur). Credit: Albert González Farran – UNAMID. Found on Flickr.

Herbicides: opportunities and challenges for commercial rice production in Kilombero Valley

Posted on March 12, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Herbicide application for rice production has risen to a new level, not only in Mngeta division but in the entire Kilombero valley, and is favoured by farmers as it replaces some manual and backbreaking farm implements, such as the hand hoe.  In 2017 when the first wave of data collection under work stream one (WS1) in Tanzania, about 58% of the farmers in the sample had applied herbicides, being the highest among all purchased inputs.  Discussions with farmers and extension agents during the second wave of data for WS1 in February this year indicate that virtually every farmer uses herbicides to control weeds in rice farms.

It was a common scene in most villages to find men and women carrying a knap sack sprayer on their back, on foot, by bicycle or motorcycle – either going to or returning from farms from their own farms or they provided services to other farmers.  Everybody agrees that herbicide application has greatly reduced the drudgery of land clearing and weeding using hand tools.

According to extension agents for Chita village in Mngeta division, a full dose of herbicide application begins with paraquat, a wide-spectrum herbicide that kills all types of weeds.  Usually, the field is ploughed using oxen, tractor or power tiller seven days after application.  This is followed by harrowing by hand, oxen or power tiller.  A farmer may wait for a few days before applying a pre-emergence herbicide, followed by transplanting seedlings in the prepared field.  Farmers who broadcast rice seed would do so before harrowing, followed by application of the pre-emergence herbicide.  The third stage of herbicide application is done two to four weeks after transplanting, when emerging weeds are still young.  Two herbicides are combined to suppress broad-leaved weeds and a selective herbicide for grass type weeds without affecting rice.  The total cost of a full herbicide application from land clearing is about TZS 80,000–100,000 (27-34 GBP) per acre during the 2019/2020 farming season.


The opportunities

There is general consensus that herbicide application has made rice production easier, maybe even cheaper.  Land clearing and weeding were very laborious and expensive if one used hired labour.  According to one farmer, before the labourers finished weeding a farm plot, new weeds had emerged, so one had to weed two or three times, even then, some weeds persisted.  The high demand for herbicides and herbicide application services has opened new opportunities.  Input suppliers contend that herbicides are the fastest moving between October and March. The demand for agro-chemicals during the dry season is lower.  Two types of services have emerged. 

  1. At village centres, there are rental services for knap sack sprayers going at TZS 2000 (0.7 GBP) per sprayer each day.  We visited one such entrepreneur at Chita village, who stocks up to 20 sprayers for renting.  By 9.00 am when we visited, 18 sprayers had been rented for the day. 
  2. Young peoples (mostly young men) who provide spraying services at about TZS 5,000 – 7,000 (1.7 – 2.4 GBP) per acre depending on the condition of the farm.  According to one young man, he can spray up to seven acres per day, earning up to TZS 35,000 (11.80 GBP) per day.
     


So, the business for herbicides and sprayers is booming and life has become easier for rice farmers.  The best proxy to gauge this trend is the number of registered input suppliers, which has increased by 128% within six years from 32 in 2014/15 to 73 in 2019/20 in Kilombero district (Figure 4). The number of operating input suppliers is probably higher since it is estimated that for every registered supplier there are about two or more who have not registered, sometimes operating between September and March when demand for farm inputs is highest.   

Increasing number of registered input suppliers


What happened to women and young men who used to dominate as laborers during weeding?  Even the women agree that they did that out of desperation but the task was too backbreaking, taking up their entire day.  Even with herbicides, some hand weeding is still required.  It is estimated that herbicides have replaced hand weeding by about 70 – 80 percent.  Employment opportunities exist, but the task is less laborious.  When the young men providing spraying services and others return from farm operations, they are tired and hungry and they need a place to eat.  So, food vending, particularly among women, is a growing business.

The challenges

In many cases, the farmers and providers of spraying services do not adhere to safety requirements for chemical application.  Some farmers did not have any protective gear (boots, coat and mask), most of them saying it is too expensive.  Some, however, do not use protective gear out of ignorance.  They dismiss instructions from agricultural extension agents and input suppliers, arguing that they live in a harsh environment anyway, their bodies are tough – they can endure any negative effects from the chemicals they handle.  Yet others say, “I will be careful or I will wash after applying.” 


It is also likely that many people who apply the herbicides cannot read and follow the manufacturer’s information on the recommended dosage, although majority of them seem to have knowledge on the best estimate of the herbicides per acre.   The damage due to careless handling of agricultural chemicals is already being felt.  According to the agricultural extension officer for Mchombe Ward, Mr. Lukas, incidences of skin rashes due to agricultural chemical application are becoming more common.  

Another negative consequence of continuing application of herbicides and other agro-chemicals is the effect of chemical levels in streams and rivers within Kilombero valley and for downstream users of Rufiji river basin.  Discussion with agricultural extension officers within Mlimba Local Government Authority under Kilombero District, the volume of agrochemicals (herbicides and insecticides) distributed for sale within Kilombero district has been increasing.

Meanwhile, there is no evidence of any institution monitoring the quality of water within Kilombero valley and downstream. This information is yet to be verified with the National Environmental Management Council (NEMC).  Even with the current increased use of agrochemicals in the valley, the application levels are still low compared to global rates.  However, it is important to monitor the levels of use and how they are reflected in water bodies that are used by humans and livestock in the Kilombero ecosystem, within which the Kilombero Ramsar site is located to maintain biodiversity.

Prepared and written by Aida Isinika, John Jeckoniah and Ntengua Mdoe



Cover photo: A knapsack sprayer riding a bike

APRA attends first national rice platform meeting in Ethiopia

Posted on March 10, 2020 by - News

The first National Rice stakeholders’ platform was held on March 9, 2020 with the main objective of formally establishing the stakeholders’ platform, which is expected to:

  1. Strengthen coordination and advocacy for rice sector development
  2. Facilitate the provision of policy, managerial and technical advisory services among actors engaged in rice value chain to enhance domestic rice production
  3. Facilitate Public-Private Partnership (PPP) for enhanced rice development
  4. Serve as a forum for stakeholders’ networking along the rice value chain

The establishment of the platform was initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture with the support of the National Rice Secretariat, EthioRice project, the National Rice Research and Training Center of the Ethiopian Institute of Agriculture (EIAR), and APRA Ethiopia.

Members of the platform are actors in the public and private sector, development partners, NGOs, and farmers’ organisations. In the long term, it is expected that the platform will become an independent National Rice Stakeholders’ Association (NRSA) and financed by the members with the main objective of pursuing comprehensive rice sector development in the country. In the short term, the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) will chair the platform alongside the National Rice Secretariat, which is supported by the Japanese Government through JICA.

Participants included representatives of federal, regional, zonal and woreda (district) offices of agriculture where rice is an important commodity. In addition, the event was attended by development partners and NGOs, including Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), APRA Ethiopia, SG 2000, private processors, processing machine importers, farmers organisations, and rice researchers from EIAR and regional agricultural research institutes.

Presentations were made by Mr Esayas Lema from MoA on the newly approved National Rice Development Strategy (2020 – 2030), Shewaye Abera of EIAR on their contribution to the development of rice sector in the country, and Mr Abebe Haile, a private rice seed producer on the experiences of his company in promoting rice in the West Omo zone of Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region. APRA’s Dawit Alemu delivered an overview of rice processors and their contribution to rice sector development, while Mekuria Yemer, gave a presentation on the experience of MEDA in rice promotion in Fogera plain. Finally, Amino Engineering PLC spoke about the role of the private sector in such development.

The panels were facilitated by Mr Germamae Garuma, Director General of agricultural extension directorate of the MoA. To conclude, there was presentation and discussion to allow for a better understanding of the current status of the rice sector in the country, calling for multifaceted engagement and interventions for the sector to develop and to ensure self-sufficiency.

Participants showed interest towards registering as members of the platform, and it was suggested that regular meetings should be held twice a year – before and after the production season. A committee was assigned to draft guidelines in order for the platform to be composed of public and private actors. The platform meetings will also provide a good opportunity for APRA Ethiopia to raise engagement and awareness towards their research outputs.

Written by Dawit Alemu

Cover photo: Dawit Alemu addresses participants at the meeting

Working Paper 29: Political Economy of Agricultural Commercialisation in Nigeria

Posted on March 9, 2020 by - Working Papers

Written by, Adelaja Odutola Odukoya.

This paper interrogates the trajectory of agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria since independence in 1960 – but with a particular focus on the period from 1999–2018 – vis-à-vis the interface of the pathologies of the post-colonial state, the political narratives by different actors, as well as the political interests and incentives behind agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria. These are, however, situated within the over-arching context of contemporary globalisation.

Working Paper 28: Agricultural Commercialisation Pathways, Input Use, and Crop Productivity: Evidence from Smallholder Farmers in Zimbabwe

Posted on March 9, 2020 by - Working Papers

Written by, Vine Mutyasira and Chrispen Sukume.

Agricultural commercialisation is increasingly seen as an effective instrument for transforming smallholder production systems and thus increasing the smallholder farmer’s incomes, food security, and other welfare outcomes such as women’s empowerment and rural poverty reduction. However, there is a paucity of studies explaining the different pathways of agricultural commercialisation that different types of farmers can pursue, and how the choice of pathway will influence input utilisation and crop productivity. This paper focuses on explaining how two commercialisation pathways, evident among smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe, influence levels of crop input utilisation and general crop productivity

Working Paper 27: Divergent Terms of Market Integration of Agro-Pastoralists: Marketisation and Distress Selling of Livestock in South Omo, Ethiopia

Posted on March 9, 2020 by - Working Papers

Written by, Fana Gebresenbet.

The increasing trend of livestock marketing and commercialisation, and its attendant socio-economic consequences, has attracted academic and policy interest. This study investigates the processes of linking pastoralists to the market and the drivers which shape pastoralists’ response to the market. It adopts a comparative perspective, examining the market characteristics of livestock trade and drivers linking pastoralists to the livestock market in Benna-Tsemay Woreda, characterised by decades of exposure to the market, and a higher number of livestock heads marketed; and Salamago Woreda with about a decade of exposure to the market, and a lower number of livestock heads marketed. The study, therefore, contributes to an understanding of the functioning of livestock markets in pastoral areas (relatively) weakly and recently integrated to the market.

APRA to present on rice commercialistion at international conference

Posted on March 9, 2020 by - News

Update: Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the conference has been postponed until further notice.

APRA researchers are continuing to spread awareness and engagement of their key research activities, this time at the 6th School of Social Sciences International Conference at the University of Ghana in Accra from 15-16 April, 2020.

Prof. John  Nshimba Jeckoniah, of Sokoine University of Agriculture,  has been invited to represent APRA and deliver a presentation on his paper, “Promotion of Rice Commercialisation in Kilombero District: Is it Inclusive and empowering?”.  As a member of the APRA Tanzania Work Stream 1 team, the conference will offer an opportunity to showcase the team’s work on the effects of different forms of rice commercialisation on women’s empowerment, food and nutrition security and poverty in Kilombero Valley. It will also provide a platform to engage with a wider audience of academics, researchers, policymakers and students.

The main theme of 6th School of Social Sciences International Conference is to link social science research to Africa’s transformational agenda, with the following sub-themes:

  • Governance and Elections
  • Economic Growth and Development
  • Gender, Social Inequalities and Vulnerabilities
  • Attitudes, Behaviours and Institutional Change
  • Natural Resource Development and Climate Change
  • Sexuality, Culture and Religion

For more information on the work of the APRA Tanzania team, see our recent news article on Ntengua Mdoe’s presentation at the 6th Annual Agricultural Policy Conference (AAPC).


Cover image: Salma Mkodo, Ndungu Ward Representative, stands in front of reclaimed land as part of the iAGRI-funded collaborative research project Cover image credit: iAGRI Tanzania on Flickr

Climate change and the future of cocoa in southwest Nigeria

Posted on March 9, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Cocoa, and products related to it, are an integral part towards the daily life of an average Nigerian. According to the National Bureau Statistics (NBS, 2019), exports of fermented cocoa bean in the first half of 2019 was estimated at N31 billion (£65 million), while raw cocoa beans exports worth N17.15 billion (£37 million) and natural cocoa butter at 2.26 billion naira (£4.8 million). In a report by Mr. Segun Awolowo, Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC),  Nigeria earned N103.8 billion (£222 million) from the cocoa in 2018 from exports by-products of cocoa, such as cocoa butter and fermented cocoa beans. This demonstrates the importance of this sector to all actors involved in the value chain process.

However, research indicates that Nigeria is not able to meet the global demands for cocoa. According to Awolowo, low production levels are a result of many factors, including poor grading and quality-related issues. Statistics from FAOSTAT show that in 2015, Nigeria had a production of 302,066 tons of cocoa bean, 298,029 tons in 2016, 328,263 tons in 2017. In 2018, the capacity of the nation’s cocoa bean production was around 245,000 metric tons.

APRA survey results

Cocoa farmers in selected areas of Ondo, Osun and Ogun states in Nigeria were interviewed during an exploratory survey carried out by APRA (Nigeria workstream 2). Responses from the cocoa farmers provided reasons for limitations of the sector, and the downward trend in production highlighted in the previous paragraph. Among issues such as land grabbing, aged trees, pests and diseases, many of the farmers blamed climate change on a reduction of their yearly cocoa production. They explained that they cannot prepare for such unpredictable weather patterns, causing them great challenges. In some areas, prolonged rainy seasons are experienced, while in others, long months of drought prevail, exposing cocoa farms to a high level of heat and leaving them vulnerable to fire outbreaks.

One of the farmers in Osun state revealed that, due to the very harsh conditions during the dry season, he lost part of his cocoa farm to fire, accentuated by the drought. According to him, it was really devastating, as he still has debts to pay as a result of the huge losses he incurred. However, reports differed in Ondo state, as cocoa farmers complained of a prolonged rainy season that meant they were unable to dry their cocoa bean causing mould, and meaning they could not meet market standards. The rain also led to black pod disease, reducing their harvest that season.

Coping with inconsistent weather patterns

Knowing that cocoa grows well under consistent periods of with minimal rain sustained throughout the season, the cocoa farmers expressed their fear about unpredictable weather. However, some in Osun state referred to the irrigation technologies that the federal government and other agricultural organisations provided farmers in northern states, such as Kano and Sokoto, to aid their production.

Among other irrigation technologies made available to farmers in the north is the recent introduction of the new pipe conveyance and distribution technology, which is a modern irrigation method in Kano State deployed by the Institute for Agricultural Research ,  Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in collaboration with the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation-Water Enabler Compact (TAAT). This technique was confirmed by Prof. Henry Igbadun, the TAAT Coordinator and Leader of the Irrigation Research Programme during a field work at Alkamawa community in Bunkure Local Government Area of Kano State in February, 2019 in a project sponsored by African Development Bank.

Cocoa farmers in Osun state hope that if such technology could be provided for them, it will reduce the impact of the long dry season on their production. However, there are no measures to contain or manage longer rainy seasons. Therefore, what happens if a prolonged rainy season is experienced this year? Is Nigeria prepared for more losses in the cocoa sector? Do our children stand a chance of having a future with beverages and other cocoa products not at their disposal?


Cover image: Cocoa farm razed by a fire in Idanre, Ondo state. Credit: Olorunkoya Olubusayo Abidemi.

This blog was written by Olajide O. Adeola.

Tanzania makes substantial progress towards meeting CAADP commitments

Posted on March 5, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) is an initiative of the African Union (AU) within the context of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). The CAADP provides a framework for African countries to achieve economic growth and food security through the transformation of the agricultural sector. It reflects the commitment of African leaders to a broad-based agricultural development by directing the necessary resources to the sector and involving a wide range of stakeholders, but with a strong African leadership.

CAADP was endorsed by the heads of state and government of the AU in the Maputo Declaration of July 2003. One of the major resolutions taken by the heads of state and government was to effect policy changes that would improve agricultural and rural development in Africa. These included African governments’ commitment in the allocation of at least 10 percent of national budgetary resources for agriculture and rural development. Since the endorsement of CAADP, various African countries have been attempting to align their programmes and implement targets set under the CAADP framework.

CAADP has increasingly recognised the importance of commercialisation alongside concerns about food security. This underscores the need for research to identify the opportunities and challenges that different pathways of agricultural commercialisation offer for poverty reduction, empowerment and improved food and nutrition security in different contexts.

APRA involvement

The relevance of APRA programme to CAADP is in providing research-based evidence to fill information gaps for CAADP’s monitoring framework.  APRA is undertaking in-depth research on the impact of ongoing and emerging processes of commercialisation in African agriculture.

Ntengua Mdoe, on behalf of the APRA-Tanzania research team, visited the National CAADP Secretariat in Dodoma on 11th February 2020. The purpose of the visit was to create additional awareness of the APRA programme, and specifically, to brief the Secretariat on APRA research activities in Tanzania. Ntengua held talks with the leader of the Secretariat, Mrs Daines Phillip Mtei and shared APRA brochures (English and Swahili versions), and planned to share more information concerning research findings and policy briefs.

Following the briefing about the APRA programme research activities in Tanzania, Daines promised to collaborate with APRA researchers in the future, such as by inviting them to meetings to share their research findings with various stakeholders.

Tanzania Food Security Investment Plan (TAFSIP)

Daines emphasised that Tanzania has made efforts to comply with CAADP commitments since the signing of the CAADP Compact in July 2010. Subsequently, the TAFSIP was developed and launched in July 2011. The TAFSIP was designed to enhance the implementation of CAADP, mobilise financial resources and allocate them to different activities in the agricultural sector. The implementation of the CAADP process and framework in Tanzania is coordinated by a secretariat of four people in the ministry responsible for agriculture. They are supported by 20 individuals from ministries responsible for livestock, land issues, health, investment and representatives of non-state actors lead by the Agricultural Non-State Actors Forum (ANSAF) in Tanzania with working groups around investment areas in agriculture.

CAADP country reports

A country’s compliance with the CAADP commitments is assessed biannually, said Daines, using a report prepared by the country in question. The report covers seven themes with a total of 47 indicators. The themes are linked to the extent of the country’s commitment to the CAADP process including; investment finance in agriculture, access to agricultural inputs and technology, eradication of poverty through agriculture, intra-African trade in agriculture, resilience to climate change and mutual accountability for actions and results.

Tanzania’s progress

According to Daines, Tanzania has made substantial progress towards meeting her CAADP commitments. The country’s performance in achieving the required CAADP milestones has improved from 3.1 out of 10 points in 2017 to 5.2 out of 10 points in 2019. Despite the improvement, the score is below the benchmark of 6.66 which is the minimum score for a country to be on track. Only four (4) countries were above the benchmark during the 2019 assessment.

PICTURE WITH DAINES MTEI LOOKING AT CAADP RECORDS
Ntengua Mdoe is shown contents of the 2019 biannual report on the CAADP processes



Written by Ntengua Mdoe, PRA-Tanzania

Cover image: Tractor in Tanzania, from Flickr. Credit: Ed Hawkesworth/DFID

Zimbabwe’s economy goes from bad to worse

Posted on March 5, 2020 by - FAC blog

Zimbabwe’s economy continues to decline, with inflation spiralling and the new local currency losing value by the day. The IMF’s recent report makes grim reading, with negative growth recorded for last year, and an expectation of effectively no growth, growing inflation and a devaluing currency into 2020. The underlying macro-economic instability has been made worse by major climate impacts during 2019 – both the drought and cyclone Idai. The situation is bad, and getting worse.

With the failure of government to address the required reforms, the prospects of renewed external support with the necessary debt write-offs look minimal. The stand-off with the international community continues, with international sanctions and a lack of investment continuing. With external public debt rising to over 50% of GDP, much of it in arrears, there is little chance of the Zimbabwean state repaying. Bail-outs at some point will be required, and the scale of investment needed for basic infrastructure and services is estimated at US$16 billion. But instead of Zimbabwe, Somalia seems to be the focus of favourable terms, with Zimbabwe being left to decline further.

The embedded corruption at the heart of state failure becomes intensified as the economic chaos deepens. Those able to profit from parallel currency deals and leverage resource from state-led programmes are the elite few, connected to the political-military elite. And who suffers? Ordinary people, and especially the poor. The consequences of economic collapse are most felt in the urban areas, where safety nets are non-existent. While those in the rural areas have their own production to fall back on; even though this year the effects of drought have hit rural livelihoods hard too.

As the state tries to ameliorate the situation, things only get worse. For example, the Finance Minister announced the creation of ‘garrison shops’ so a restive army could buy goods on favourable terms. It was supposed to be financed by a levy on civil servants. But another parallel economy only creates opportunities for hoarding and profit, and punitive taxation on already struggling people causes resentment. Policy is being made on the hoof. Almost as soon as it was announced, it seems the tax was rescinded, or deemed voluntary, and so a big unbudgeted expenditure was added to the inflation pressures.

The uncovering of the massive rent-seeking in the milling industry, directly fuelled by state-sponsored grain buying for food relief, has exposed the problems. An apparently well-meaning policy is naively implemented, and those in the system exploit its benefits ruthlessly. In this case, with many alleged connections right to the top. The sense that those in charge are wholly out their depth or exploiting the system for their own benefit (or possibly both) is palpable. The IMF review team, in appropriately guarded language, clearly felt this.

Mentioned only obliquely was the cause celebre of this chaos – command agriculture. The corruption at the heart of this programme has been widely exposed, not least by the Public Accounts committee, chaired by opposition MP, Tendai Biti. Around US$3 billion is alleged to have been misused, through a complex web of government funding, private companies and military involvement. A recent ZDI report has highlighted the nexus of corruption at the heart of the party-state and military.

Under normal circumstances a public-private partnership for contract financing of commercial agriculture would have some credibility – just as would subsidised produce for the armed forces or state purchasing of grain through milling companies. But circumstances aren’t normal in Zimbabwe. Despite attempts at restructuring, the grip of corruption is so intense, and often led by networks close to those in power and running these initiatives, that these apparently sensible schemes become the basis for significant extraction, no matter what their worth.

No-one has quite got to the bottom of the command agriculture story as yet. The political economy is clear, but there have certainly been benefits. In our study areas for example, command agriculture resources have unquestionably resulted in boosts in production, especially on A2 farms. Repayments have been inconsistent, but many have been pursued rigorously. Not everyone can get away with just exploiting the system. But this is the point – it is just a few that continue to profit, getting massively rich while the rest suffer.

Is there a way out of this downward spiral? Attempts by the technocrats in the state to do what is required are foiled with each move it seems. Policies seem to be concocted at random, desperately responding to situation that is out of hand. One day it was illegal to sell fuel in US dollars to protect the local currency, the next day it is permitted across the country. Secret printing of money to offset US dollar losses in the mining industry solve one problem, but create many others.

The loss of trust in the government by key players – the IMF, western donor governments, even the Chinese – is clear. Sanctions (or other ‘restrictive measures’) are still in place, with influential players within and outside Zimbabwe arguing that they should remain until the regime changes. Investors are shying away, despite the occasional positive effort to rebuild key parts of the economy. Moves to create political coalitions across the divides are viewed with great scepticism given the experience of the Government of National Unity from 2009-13. It’s stale-mate. Some are holding out for an ‘uprising’ (usually those sitting in comfort firing off tweets), while others think it will have to get much worse before there is a change.

It is not a happy story, and given the dire food security situation this year, the consequences for livelihoods are severe. In agriculture, the glimmers of progress seen up to 2016 on the back of greater economy stability are fast being stamped out. Things are currently very fragile, and most farmers are holding back on investing further.

Today, like Somalia, Zimbabwe has a collapsed economy with vanishingly little state capacity, but, unlike Somalia, seems to be unable to convince the IMF, AfDB or other donors and investors to provide support. Another shock – whether further drought, the spread of coronavirus or something else – may create cascading, disastrous effects, with the elite being able to escape, while the poor (and this now includes a large portion of the population) will have to bear the brunt.

APRA Tanzania share findings on rice commercialisation and food security at conference

Posted on March 2, 2020 by - News

“Public and private sector investment for agricultural transformation in Tanzania”, was the theme for the 6th Annual Agricultural Policy Conference (AAPC), which took place 12-14 February 2020 at Dodoma Hotel in Dodoma, Tanzania. The conference was officially opened by the minister responsible for investment in the Prime Minister’s Office, Honourable Mrs Angelo Kariuki. The conference brought together over 250 participants from academia, research institutions, policy makers, farming community, advocacy groups, NGOs and development partners from Tanzania and in the East African region.

The AAPC was organised around seven policy thematic areas:

  • Agricultural sector policies
  • Trade policies
  • Private sector enabling environment
  • Land, natural resources and environment
  • Access to farm input and technology
  • Access to finance
  • Food security, nutrition and resilience

APRA presentation

APRA Tanzania was represented by Ntengua Mdoe, who presented on the paper ‘Does agricultural commercialisation enhance or impair food security? Insights from commercial rice producing households in Mngeta Division, Kilombero District, Tanzania.’ This highlighted evidence on the effect of rice commercialisation on household food using two indicators of food security at household level: household food security status (HFSS) and minimum dietary diversity for women (MDD-W).  Nine food insecurity situations were used to categorise households into food secure and insecure households. These included:

  • Worries about not having enough to eat because of lack of money
  • Household members unable to eat healthy and nutritious food because of lack of money.

Households facing five situations or more were classified as food insecure, while those facing less than five were marked as food secure. The proportion of food secure households increased from 44% for households which did not sell rice at all to almost 80% for households with a high rice commercialisation level. The rice commercialisation index (RCI) was computed as percentage of rice that was marketed out of what was produced during the 2016/17 farming season.

Meanwhile, MDD-Wwas measured using 20 food groups considered to provide the required nutrients for women. The food groups include: (i) cereals, (ii) roots, tubers and plantains, (iii) pulses, (iv) nuts and seeds, (v) milk and milk products, (vi) meat and poultry, (vii) fish and sea food, (viii) eggs, (ix) vegetable and (x) fruits. Households with women eating at least five food groups were classified as meeting MDD_W, whereas those eating less than five as not. The proportion of households that met the MDD-W increased from 8.5% for those who did not sell rice (zero RCI) during the 2016/17 farming season to 33% for medium RCI and surprisingly declined to 28% for high RCI.

Ntengua Mdoe delivering his presentation at the AAPC. Photo credit: Ms Judith Valerian


Cover image: Group of academics and researchers posing for a picture with Hon. Mrs Angela Kariuki, Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office responsible for investment, during the AAPC opening session. Photo credit: Ms Judith Valerian

For further details about this conference, please see our previous news post.

Oil palm good, rubber better: a tale from south-western Ghana

Posted on February 27, 2020 by - APRA blog, FAC blog

Cash crop production is widely considered vital for improved incomes in developing countries. In Ghana, the production of cash crops in the past few decades have assumed a greater proportion of farmers’ production in the south-western parts of the country, an area predominantly known for large cocoa, oil palm, coconut, and rubber plantations. These crops (specifically, cocoa, oil palm and rubber) attract demand on the international market, hence are associated with high export values.

APRA findings

We observed a striking phenomenon during the Round 2 data collection of the APRA Work Stream 1 study, which sets out to understand the channels of oil palm commercialisation in south-western Ghana. We saw farmers clearing the oil palm plantations for rubber cultivation. However, why would farmers substitute rubber for oil palm despite the potential for oil palm reduce poverty among farmers? Why are farmers stepping out of oil palm production? Indeed, the APRA Work Stream 1 data reveals that approximately 12% of 726 households in the baseline sample stepped out from oil palm production between 2017 and 2019.

An oil palm plantation at Butre (Credit: Francis Dompae)

On-farm interactions with farmers suggests several reasons for farmers stepping out of oil palm.

  1.  Ageing farmers who could no longer maintain their ageing oil palm plantations, therefore uprooting them and planting rubber.
  2. Land grabbing, caused by an influx of individuals and companies seeking space for rubber production, the landowners of some farmers are selling farmland, in some cases without the knowledge of farmers. Additionally, some farmers are voluntarily clearing their oil palm plantations to plant rubber, explaining that rubber cultivation is more economically rewarding and less involving in terms of input and labour costs.

Some farmers explained that incentives[1] provided by rubber-buying companies, such as Ghana Rubber Estates Limited (GREL), is the reason for their shift away from oil palm to rubber. Some farmers also feel cheated by the oil palm companies (OPCs) and their agents through adjustment of weighing scales to cheat farmers and low prices. Additionally, due to poor roads linking most oil palm producing communities, OPCs were sometimes unable to reach certain communities, resulting in oil palm bunches spoiling. This is particularly the case for farmers in New Akwidaa, one of APRA’s WS1 study communities.

Oil palm bunches ready for weighing on the Butre road (Credit: Louis Hodey)


Future of oil palm production in south-western Ghana

The performance of the competing cash crops in the international and local markets, in terms of supply, demand and price of output, will play a key role in the dynamics of the observed substitution of crops and, subsequently, determine their future. This will not be limited to the output of the crops, but the factors of production such as land and labour. Field accounts from oil palm farmers, for example, suggest labour constraints are further diminishing the production attractiveness among local farmers, especially the older generation made harder by the absence of hired labour. This serves as a disincentive to farmers without production and marketing incentives, including those already into oil palm production to sustain production, and thus substituting oil palm with other less labour-intensive cash crops such as rubber and cocoa.

The decision to convert or clear oil palm fields for other crops, or for alternative uses, is hastened by better incentives for producing different crops, labour constraints for oil palm production and the use of oil palm trees for the production of palm wine and akpeteshie (a locally produced alcoholic drink) after felling them. Whilst these issues point to a gloomy future for oil palm production, local palm oil producers in the communities who aspire to scale up production for bigger markets may raise demand for oil palm if they can sustain production and join the OPCs midstream in the value chain of the crop. Incentives offered by the market will determine the future of oil palm in the region, which will be relative to the performance of its competitors’ actors in the region and beyond. Competitive incentives from OPCs and other oil palm processing and marketing firms can reduce or eliminate the substitution of oil palm.

Oil palm processing at Butre (Credit: Francis Dompae)


Value-chain benefits to local economy: rubber versus palm

On the surface, at least, oil palm may be generating greater value-chain benefits to the local economy. This is partly because rubber is exported entirely raw, while oil palm is processed locally or exported as a semi-finished product, thereby ensuring enhanced local participation in the value chain and generating higher incomes to support livelihoods in the local economy.

Shift away from oil palm: effect on local food security  

Rubber production, like cocoa, has potential food insecurity concerns. First, rubber production does not permit intercropping with food crops, as is the case of oil palm. If smallholder farmers are giving up their land for rubber production in place of crops, the little food that makes it to the market will be more expensive to buy. This could pose a threat to the household’s food security in the short term. In the long term, however, some farmers may choose to revert to food crop production in response to a high demand, provided that land it still available.

Oil palm being weighed at Pretsea (Credit: Francis Dompae)

Further observations

Some oil palm farms are being purchased by miners as concessions[2]. This observation is particularly predominant in Awunakrom, one of APRA Ghana study communities. Farmers explained that, when traditional rulers designate land as a mining concession, they lose the right to cultivate that land, posing a threat to the survival of the oil palm industry in the area.



Written by Louis Hodey and Francis Dompae


Cover image: Oil palm farm cleared in preparation for planting rubber at Akwidaa Junction. Credit: Louis Hodey

[1] Rubber-buying companies in south-western Ghana provide inputs such as high quality seedlings, fertilisers, chemicals and tapping tools, guaranteed market, credit, and training on input use as well as new production techniques to improve production levels. Additionally, GREL for instance provides social infrastructure, such as school and clinics to the local communities in their areas of operation. For a detailed discussion on incentive schemes provided by rubber-buying companies in south-western Ghana, click here

[2] In Ghana, formal mining concessions are distributed by the Minerals Commission operating under the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources (MoLNR), but this coexists with informal concessions that are granted to small-scale miners by local authorities. For a detailed discussion, click here.

Can joint ventures and sub-letting unleash Zimbabwe’s agricultural potential?

Posted on February 24, 2020 by - FAC blog

The under-performance of parts of Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector continues. This mostly applies to large estates and some medium-scale farms that were reallocated under the fast-track land reform as A2 resettlement farms. Last year, as part of the economic reform agenda, the government has responded by approving measures that allow joint ventures (JVs) and sub-letting with the hope that this will encourage investment, foster skills, increase mechanisation and release finance for improving productivity.

A useful paper by Prosper Matondi of Ruzivo Trust came out recently that discusses the issues. Building on past practices of tenancy arrangements in large-scale commercial farms, ever since land reform, joint ventures with external investors, former white large-scale commercial farmers and others has been on-going, but frequently very much under-the-radar. Former president, Robert Mugabe, was very much against the idea, fearing that such arrangements would reverse the gains of land reform, allowing former farmers back onto the land. Selective agreements were made, notably with Chinese investors in tobacco, but otherwise deals had to be struck informally or at a local level with district approval but without wider publicity.

JVs on state farms: state assets for private gain?

In 2014, with state farms in crisis, the Agricultural Rural Development Authority (ARDA) was encouraged to lease out its land to private investors and broker joint ventures on all parastatal-held land. This now involves 24 farms across the country, all of which are now running as commercial ventures, with a variety of investors, based on 5-20 year partnership arrangements. The transparency of such deals has left much to be desired, however, and state assets have been deployed for private gain, with some particular firms, such as Trek Petroleum (which Trafigura/Sakunda has a stake in), having powerful political backers. This was a hidden land ‘reform’ on a large scale, and while hailed as a route to recapitalisation of state farms can also be seen a source of elite capture.

An earlier blog discussed this move, raising questions as to whether this is the appropriate use of parastatal resources and capacity. New public-private initiatives around strategic investments in sugar for biofuel are proposed for the areas around the new Tugwi Mukose dam in Masvingo province. This follows on from the Chisumbanje deal in the Save valley, involving the notorious ZANU-PF supporter, Billy Rautenbach, whose Green Fuels company took over around 10,000 hectares of ARDA land for a mix of estate and outgrower production of cane in 2009.

Partnership farming in land reform areas: boosting production on A2 farms

Perhaps more interesting than these large-scale state transfers, often to well-connected companies, are the smaller deals that can now unfold with land reform beneficiaries on resettlement land. While the Ruzivo paper notes correctly that the new arrangements open up opportunities for joint ventures or sub-leases on any type of land, this is most likely to happen on A2 land, as A1 smallholder areas are well utilised and often highly productive. It is in the A2 areas where investment has been lacking and there is a dire need for recapitalisation. To date, the lack of financing has been the major constraint to success in most A2 farms without external sources of capital.

Existing JVs show the potentials. In our study areas in Mvurwi, we have been following a number of arrangements, including six involving Chinese investments and several involving local investors. Chinese investors have usually come through the Chinese tobacco contracting company, Tianze, that operates widely in the area, or have made deals with banks who have taken control of properties due to non-payment of loans. They have clear contractual arrangements, usually over 20 years or more, for full management of the farm, including taking over all property, the workforce and so on. A wholly new operation is established, often with significant new investment in irrigation (centre pivots), mechanisation (tractors etc.) and processing facilities (rocket barns).

Very often they are employing consultants and farm managers who have worked in the tobacco industry for years to assist them, as the companies investing are often Chinese provincial companies with diverse portfolios often not involving tobacco. While the financial performance of such operations is of course not known, many comment that the prospect of turning a profit is remote in the initial period, and investors need deep pockets. Chinese company officials working on such farms comment that the business conditions in Zimbabwe are so bad that they wonder if they will survive, and some are diversifying into mining and other operations to spread risk.

Such JVs contrast with those established more informally, often involving a former white farmer or an urban business person going into partnership with an existing A2 land reform farmer. The farmer may still be resident and farm some of the area, in line with their means, while the investor takes over the larger portion of the land. When relationships are good and trust is built up, these seem to work well. They are still few and far between, but the potentials are significant, as many farms have spare land which could easily be sub-let. As noted on this blog before, there is much debate in Zimbabwe about the ‘under-utilisation’ of land, and certainly joint ventures can help reduce this, increasing capacity. However, contrary to the Ruzivo paper, which generally paints a rather dismal picture of post-land reform areas, there is certainly not as much as 60% of land available for use across A1 and A2 resettlement areas.

Another JV mentioned in the paper, but not seen so prominently in the areas we work, is seasonal short-term land sub-letting for a particular crop. Here, land across many farms is let for – say maize – and the company is in charge of inputs, marketing and providing equipment. This returns some of the scale advantages of large-scale farming but distributes risk across multiple producers, much as does contract farming, now familiar in cotton, tobacco and some other commodities. This may have potential for some crops in some places (mostly likely where there are large concentrations of A2 farms), but the management and logistics of operating multiple contracts over many farms is considerable, and current conditions certainly would make this a very difficult business proposition.

Navigating bureaucracy: practical risks of JVs

Perhaps the most interesting part of the paper for me was the discussion of the risk of joint ventures. You can see the economic rationale clearly. One party has an asset (land) and the other has another asset (finance – and/or skill, equipment etc.) and it seems like a win-win. Until you try and get the arrangement formalised that is. A neat diagram in the paper (Figure 2.1, page 7; see below) encapsulates the challenges, and multiple risks, involved in negotiating a joint venture. The complex bureaucracy of land administration, across national and district scales, combined with the multiple legal frameworks (discussed at length in the paper) make the prospect daunting to say the least. No wonder Chinese investors have gone to powerful individuals and negotiated directly, while other arrangements have remained hidden and informal.

If JVs are to be a feature of Zimbabwe’s agricultural landscape, building an administrative system fit for purpose and, through this, building trust that it can work efficiently, and without the risk of sudden reversals and political interference, is vital. The government can go on and on about the importance of ‘unlocking value’ and ‘facilitating investment’, but unless the system is easy to navigate and is transparent and accountable, then many will continue to shy away, and the opportunities to invest in agriculture will remain on paper, but seldom realised in practice.

This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland

APRA researchers showcase findings at two key conferences

Posted on February 20, 2020 by - News

February has been a very productive month for APRA. Already, researchers in Tanzania have kicked off the 2nd round of APRA surveys on commercialisation pathways for Tanzanian rice producers following the successful data collection training for enumerators at Sokaine University.

However, there has also been a high level of engagement activity, with researchers attending and delivering presentations at two key conferences in Africa concerning agricultural policy and the Nigerian cocoa industry.

Ntengua Mdoe presents at AAPC in Dodoma, Tanzania



The 6th Annual Agricultural Policy Conference (AAPC) in Dodoma, Tanzania from 12th – 14th February, 2020

Researcher, Milu Muyanga, presented APRA’s work on the changing farm structure and rural transformation in Africa, which is gaining traction among policymakers and researchers in Tanzania. For more on this subject, read APRA’s blog ‘the changing face of African agriculture: farm size distributions in sub-Saharan Africa’, here.

In addition, Ntengua Mdoe, also attended the conference and presented a paper on rice commercialisation and household food security.






Conference of Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria in Ile Ife, Nigeria on 13th February, 2020

Adebayo Aromolaran delivers key-note address at Conference of Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria

Nigeria-based APRA researcher, Adebayo Aromolaran, delivered the keynote address at this important conference, where the theme focused on re-positioning the Nigerian cocoa industry for the prosperity of cocoa farmers and the production of quality cocoa beans. APRA’s work on agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria was explained to participants and APRA brochures were distributed to attendees.


For more information on this subject, see the recent blog ‘Shaking off stagnation in the Nigeria cocoa sector, here.








Cover image: Milu Muyanga presents at AAPC conference in Dodoma, Tanzania

APRA Malawi successfully engages with the media

Posted on February 17, 2020 by - News

An engagement and training workshop held with the media in Malawi in 2019 has led to extensive coverage across online media, social media, radio, TV and newspapers.

On 31st August 2019, APRA Malawi held a one-day workshop with around 22 print and online journalists, especially members of the Agricultural Journalists Association. The aim of the workshop was to create awareness of the APRA Malawi project to explain its scope and describe its expected outcomes. This is part of influencing impact pathways for policy dissemination and uptake from the research project, where communication is an integral component for changes within agricultural commercialisation to be successful. Journalists who can converse with their audience on issues affecting the agricultural sector will play an important role in the future. If they are able to utilise a political economy perspective, then they can articulate the enablers and constrainers of commercialisation dynamics effectively.

Contents of the workshop included presentations that stimulated discussion about Malawi’s experience with commercialisation, focusing on an overview of the agricultural sector, policy influence and engagement, and how to coherently communicate agricultural research. Through this interaction APRA Malawi has established a relationship with the media, allowing the team to amplify and systematically communicate project outcomes to farmers and policymakers.

The workshop proved to be very successful with coverage across various media including:

Following visibility created by the journalist meeting, APRA Malawi were also invited into national policy dialogue forums. For example, a presentation was made at the National Youth Network on Climate Change conference Getting a place on the table: Youth and Agriculture in Malawi by Blessings Chinsinga on 24-26 September, 2019. The presentation encouraged debates about commercialisation of agriculture in Malawi and the role of the youth to take agribusiness opportunities.

APRA to participate in inaugural Agricultural Industry Forum

Posted on February 13, 2020 by - News

The APRA team based at CABE in Nairobi, Kenya, is participating in the planning and inauguration of the Agricultural Industry Forum. The agribusiness event is being hosted by the Agriculture Industry Network, and in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture Livestock and Fisheries and Cooperatives, the Council of Governors and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). It is scheduled to take place at the Nairobi Hospital Convention Centre from 3-5 March, 2020.

The central theme of the forum is “Rethinking Agribusiness: Enhancing Effectiveness in Public-Private Partnerships,”which will provide a platform for agribusiness leaders and other value chain actors to engage with national and county-level policymakers, academia and other key stakeholders to review the current business operating environment within the context of devolution. It will seek to unlock the bottlenecks facing the private sector and other agriculture industry players when engaging with national and county governments.  The Forum is expected to attract more than 500 delegates and 50 exhibitors from across the agriculture sector.

Dr. Hannington Odame, the APRA Regional Research and Engagement Coordinator (RREC) for Eastern Africa, has been participating in the Forum’s Programme Committee, enabling APRA to provide support to the Forum. The APRA team will also prepare framing notes, make presentations, moderate specific sessions and Offer the benefit of their knowledge and experience to attendees.

An outline of the programme for the event can be viewed on the Agriculture Industry Forum website here