APRA Brief 20: Policy Incentives and Agribusiness Investment in Ethiopia: Benefit or Deadweight

Written by, Seife Ayele, Gezahegn Ayele, Tebeje Nigussie and Jodie Thorpe

The importance of agriculture to the Ethiopian economy is underlined by the country’s forthright promotion of investment in agriculture since the turn of the century, but how effective has this investment really been? This brief summarises the findings and conclusions of the APRA study ‘Policy approaches to business investment in agricultural commercialisation in Ethiopia’. It then looks at the main drivers of agribusiness investment, usefulness of the tax privilege system, the effectiveness of agricultural growth programmes led by donors and non-profit organisations. The brief also addresses whether or not the enforcement of rules and closure of loopholes can prevent the misuse of tax privileges.

Ethiopia: revising the national rice research and development strategy

Ethiopia is reviewing its national rice research and development plan for the next ten years. The National Rice Research and Development Strategy of Ethiopia (NRRDSE) was developed in 2010 and has been guiding the efforts of the country’s rice sector development. The strategy had clear targets until December 2019, and an assessment of achievements in the last ten years indicates considerable changes, especially in relation to institutional innovation, including the establishment of a national rice research and training centre under the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR). However, the increase in domestic production was far lower than domestic consumption, forcing the country to import over 300,000 tons.  

As a key stakeholder, the Ethiopia APRA team has been member of the revising taskforce, and their research outputs are used as an important input for the revision process. In addition, the Ethiopia APRA team participated in the national stakeholders’ meeting that was held on September 9 2019 in Adama, adding further to the revision process. Two subsequent stakeholders’ meetings are planned for October and November in collaboration with CARD (Coalition for African Rice Development). The Ethiopia APRA team will be contributing to the discussions based on their research undertakings.

For further reading, please see APRA Brief 16, ‘A Historical Analysis of Rice Commercialisation in Ethiopia: The Case of the Fogera Plain’, which can be found here

Promoting Agribusiness Investment in Ghana: Rethinking Policy Incentives

Agriculture is a major economic activity in Ghana, contributing 20 per cent to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In recognition that increased investment can help transform the largely subsistence-based agricultural sector, the government of Ghana and its development partners have implemented a number of programmes, including fiscal incentives, to attract private investors into the sector. As a way of finding out if such incentives are achieving desirable results, a study was conducted among business leaders, state officials and some NGOs to understand how investors respond to various policy incentives. This blog presents the findings of the study which indicate that although tax incentives are beneficial to farmers, they do not really stimulate investments in the agriculture sector. The government can promote investment in the agricultural sector by addressing tenure insecurity challenges, ensuring access to finance and enhancing infrastructure in rural areas.

Incentives Created to attract Investments in the Agricultural Sector


Firms can enjoy corporate tax holidays, which adds up to five years for cash crops and livestock production as well as companies involved in processing of agricultural products. After the maximum years of tax concession, businesses engaged in agro-processing benefit from reduced tax rates based on location. Agro-processing businesses registered with the Ghana Free Zone Authority are exempt from income tax on their profits for a period of ten years. Companies registered with the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre and Free Zones Authority are entitled to a 0% import duty on the importation of equipment. Other incentives gained by those who invest in the Ghanaian agriculture sector include: export promotion drive; full repatriation of dividends; and protection of investments.

Which factors drive Investments in the Agricultural Sector of Ghana?


The findings of the study shows that the factors that shape investment decisions in the agricultural sector can be categorised into three groups, in order of importance as follows:


First order factors


The most important (first order) drivers of investments are from a personal passion or interest of the business leaders, potential for higher profits, access to markets, and political stability. The passion for agriculture was a key driver of investment among Ghanaian individual agribusiness leaders. For instance, a female CEO of a large Ghanaian farm developed her passion for food and agriculture because of her training in food and nutrition and involvement in gardening when she was young. The potential for high profits was also a key driver of investments for both Ghanaian agribusiness leaders and foreign firms operating in Ghana. For example, a fertiliser distribution company was established in Ghana because of the realisation that there was a huge potential to increase demand for fertilisers and associated profits.

Access to market was also a key determinant of investments. While demographic factors created the required market for some of the agricultural products, such as maize and rice, a number of farmers have invested in the fruit production sector as a result of enhanced access to international markets, enabled by trade partnership agreements between the government of Ghana and other countries.  The foreign owned companies reported that they came to invest in Ghana because of the country’s track record of rule of law, political stability and public security. These findings highlight the importance of Ghana’s non-fiscal incentives such as guarantee of investment against nationalisation and expropriation.

Secondary Drivers of Investments in the Agricultural Sector  

Favourable climate and existence of fertile soils for the production of a variety of crops has moderate influence on the decision of some of the business leaders to invest in crop production in Ghana. For instance, a representative of the biofuel producing company explained that the company came to invest in Ghana because of the tropical climate and forest soils were conducive for the production of jatropha. Though access to land also has a limited influence on investments in the agricultural sector, many agribusiness leaders and state officials complained about the difficulties in acquiring land from traditional authorities and land conflicts.


While access to finance is important for investors, many of the business leaders in the agricultural sector cannot access adequate credit from the banks because of several factors including lack of collateral security, high interest rates and unfavourable terms of loan repayment, such as the requirement to start repayment of loan before even harvesting crops. One investor noted: “If you are a farmer taking a loan from the bank and you are paying 27 to 30% interest annually…assuming someone is planting mango which might take four to five years to bear fruits, by the time the mango bears fruit, the money would have tripled or quadrupled. So it is just not possible”.


In order to deal with the challenges of accessing loans, the government of Ghana has implemented a few initiatives to provide financial and technical support to Ghanaian farmers. A number of the large-scale Ghanaian owned businesses reported that they responded positively to donor grants. Some of the large-scale agribusiness leaders reported that although they do not qualify to get subsidised fertilisers, the smallholder outgrowers they work with benefit from the subsidy programmes, reducing the cost of production.


However, some agribusiness leaders complained that subsidies affect private investment, whereas others reported the quality of fertilisers supplied through the subsidy programme as being poor. Many business leaders also responded positively to training and support in the form of agricultural machinery. Despite government officials’ reports of state investment in infrastructure, especially in the construction of feeder roads and electrification in rural areas as incentives, investors in Ghana report an inadequate infrastructure system. For example, many of the businesses leaders said that the poor roads and lack of electricity were deterrents.


Third Order Drivers of Investments: Fiscal Incentives


Although some business leaders benefited from fiscal incentives, these per se did not influence their investment decisions. Complex bureaucratic procedures created an extra challenge, which occasionally forced business leaders to pay bribes before accessing tax concessions that they are entitled to, such as import duties. In effect, many of the business leaders do not think that tax incentives in general, even those associated with free zones, are adequate to influence their investment decisions. They argued that other elements of the business environment, such as access to finance, infrastructure and access to market are more important than mere tax incentives.


Conclusions


The most important factors that influence investments in the agricultural sector of Ghana are access to market, potential for higher profit, passion or interest of the business leader and political stability. Tax incentives alone cannot account for the lack of infrastructure and other faults in the country’s investment environment. In order to promote private investment in the agricultural sector, the government and its development partners should invest in infrastructure development, especially in rural areas. The government should also work with traditional authorities to address land acquisition and tenure insecurity challenges. The government should better coordinate with development partners and financial institutions to provide loans to agribusinesses at appropriate interest rates and terms which obligate farmers to start servicing such loans only when they start harvesting crops.

Written by Joseph Kofi Teye

The full research note, on which this blog is based, can be found here

Photo credit: Francesco Veronesi
Photo caption: Cocoa bean drying in a village near Kakum National Park, Ghana

APRA Malawi engages Media on agriculture commercialisation

The APRA research team in Malawi engaged with the media on agriculture commercialisation on 31st August 2019 at Ufulu Gardens in Lilongwe. We invited 22 journalists from the print and electronic sectors of the Malawian media. In addition, there was a representation from the Ministry of Agriculture as well as an official responsible for the Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture.

The aim of the workshop was to create awareness of the APRA project in Malawi, 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 we have established a relationship with the media, allowing us to amplify and systematically communicate our project outcomes to farmers and policy makers.

Some of the participants had these reflections to share on the workshop:

“…this workshop is a new learning experience for me, and this will improve my reporting skills and I will reach out to the targeted audience…” Gregory Gondwe, a freelance journalist from Blantyre. He joined the profession in 1993 and specifically reports on agriculture related stories. He found the workshop very beneficial and an eye opener, especially on political economy perspectives when reporting stories.

“…I have learnt that before I write a story I should be conversant with policy that relates to the stories and I should be able to build links with the stakeholders. I should write stories that should have impact and shake the authorities…” Gladys Kamakanda, Malawi News Agency Reporter. She observed that journalists are often invited to launches of strategic policies, but do not follow up after the initial report: “We [journalists] need however to take further steps to keep understandig the policy context, its implementation and results.” She further urged the organisers to offer training workshop on political economy and policy influence on a regulary basis to enhance practical learning.

From the feedback we received, the training workshop was very relevant to the journalists in attendance; they were introduced to the APRA project scope and objectives and become more familiar with connecting their stories to policy influence with added political economy perspectives. The platform of sharing information on agriculture commercialisation has been created and will help to foster collaboration amongst the media, APRA and other relevant stakeholders.

This post was written by Mirriam Matita and Hawa Munganya

Mirriam is a member of APRA Malawi research team. Hawa is a postgraduate [masters] student at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Robert Mugabe: a complex legacy

Robert Mugabe died on September 6th in Singapore after a long illness, and the press has been full of commentary about his legacy. There is a deep fascination with him in the UK. Despite the drama of Brexit, his death was top news across the papers and TV channels. I was taken aback  when I saw his image on a massive news screen at King’s Cross station in London announcing his death. Once feted by the Queen, now almost universally reviled, what is it about the dramatic tragedy in the narrative of a transition from ‘hero’ to ‘villain’ that so captivates people, but also blinds us to the complexities of history?

This complexity, and the importance of a deeper history, comes across in some of the better reflections on his death. There is much that’s already been written, but there are a few articles that have stood out for me. The piece ‘Mugabe: a man of more than one story’, for example, highlights the multiple threads of a complex narrative, as does Alex Magaisa’s BSR piece, which urges us not to forget the victims of Mugabe’s regime. Perhaps surprisingly, but like many Zimbabweans of his age, Tendai Biti, once tortured by the regime, says ‘I don’t feel bitterness. I feel indebtedness’. The missed opportunities of the liberation are reflected on in many pieces, including by Fadzayi Mahere, who argues that he ‘killed the freedoms he had worked so hard for’. Roger Southall, meanwhile, reflects on his legacy alongside other liberation party leaders in the region, pointing out that he is ‘as divisive in death as he was in life’. A typically quirky take comes from Percy Zvomuya focusing on deeper family backgrounds and historical contingencies in the piece, Robert Mugabe: the leader who shouldn’t have been. And my favourite of all is the 2017 article by Everjoice Win, widely recirculated in the past days, which captured the moment around the ‘coup’, but seems even more apposite today, and reflects the feelings of many.

Why has Mugabe’s passing attracted so much attention, particularly internationally? Some while ago, Miles Tendi, a Zimbabwean scholar and professor at Oxford University, pointed to the roots of the media fascination with Mugabe in the UK:

“Mugabe is the British media’s bogeyman for everything that is wrong with Africa and one can never escape the naked reality that the fallout from ZANU-PF’s violent eviction of white farmers in Zimbabwe from 2000 onwards, many of whom were British descendants, continues to attract a disproportionate amount of international focus compared to other more severe crises…”

In a similar vein, back in 2008, the renowned Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani pointed out in his controversial essay for the London Review of Books:

“It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator…. There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters…. [but this] gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved”.

Mugabe’s death reminded me of the screening of Simon Bright’s film, Robert Mugabe… What Happened? at Sussex some years ago. An earlier blog observed that it is a powerful documentary, using fascinating archival footage, together with interviews with key figures in the opposition movement in Zimbabwe. It tells a sympathetic, historically-informed, but still highly critical, story about the man. With Mugabe gone, it is well worth watching again.

It is considerably more nuanced than much of the mainstream commentary that has emerged following his death. This typically follows the hero-to-villain storyline, often attached to the positive then evil influence of his two wives, Sally and Grace. Land reform in 2000 is often marked as the turning point, with the story of land reform being given the usual, misinformed gloss of disaster, turning Zimbabwe from ‘breadbasket to basket case’, the result of party cronies being given the land, and poorly qualified poor farmers making matters worse. I have largely ceased to engage with these narratives, coming from many who really should know much better by now, and I am not going to rehearse the argument again that these views are grossly misinformed here. There are now 360 blogs on Zimbabweland, and many more research articles besides, which together give a more nuanced story.

Too often in mainstream accounts, the role of the British in the Mugabe story is glossed over. Yet the British government’s complicity – for example in the silence about the massacres by the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland in the 1980s – was significant. The failure of the British to push a more complete settlement at Lancaster House in 1979, and of course the diplomatic gaffe of the infamous ‘Clare Short letter’ in 1997, are all part of the picture. The resentments and hostility rose to a head in the late 1990s, as Mugabe and Blair locked horns. And, while commentaries are critical of white Rhodesia and Ian Smith’s UDI rule, they often do not explore the failure of a more complete reconciliation and integration of whites in the new Zimbabwe following Independence.

At our film screening panel discussion back in 2012, this was an issue tackled by Denis Norman, who served in Mugabe’s cabinet after Independence, and came from being the head of the white Commercial Farmers’ Union. He conceded that more could have been done back then, especially on land reform. There was an unwritten political contract between white farmers and the new state that whites could farm and make money, but not be involved in opposition politics, and land reform, despite the liberation war rhetoric, was parked. This fell apart with the launch of the MDC, and the support of white farmers of an opposition movement. The failure of the donor-brokered land conference in 1998 was a key moment, as no side was willing to compromise. The land invasions that followed were then perhaps inevitable.

As a number of the more sophisticated commentaries highlight, countering the hero-to-villain narrative means emphasising the continuities in the way politics have been played out in Zimbabwe since Independence, with Mugabe at the centre. A lack of tolerance of alternative views, violence and oppression have all been a consistent pattern, and stretch into the the pre-Independence period and the nationalist struggle (and indeed in particular the ‘struggles within the struggle’). A transition from militarised, violent liberation war struggle to peaceful, democratic governance did not happen.

It is not a question of seeing a golden age of the 1980s to contrast with the period since 2000. While there have been important changes, there are also repeated patterns. This is why the much-hailed 2017 ‘coup’ was doomed to failure, and perhaps no surprise that the Mnangagwa regime has seen much continuity, notably in violent repression of opposition forces. This is of course why a democratic transition, with a strong constitutional base, remains so critical; to shed once and for all this violent history.

In assessing Mugabe’s complex legacy, the positive legacies of massively improved education and health services for all in the 1980s and land redistribution to smallholders, especially post-2000, have to balanced against the persistent use of violence, gross economic mismanagement and the failure to develop a democratic state. As opposition politician, Tendai Biti, noted on his death, Mugabe was a ‘coalition of controversies’.

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

Photo credit: President of Zimbabwe Addresses UN General Assembly, 25 Sep 2009. UN Photo/Marco Castro. www.unmultimedia.org/photo/ via flickr)

Value Chain Participants in Smallholder Commercialisation in Mvurwi: Emerging Business Relations

Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector has experienced radical transformation following a series of land reform programs and an economic meltdown that started in 2000. The implementation of the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP) led to widespread disruptions in the sophisticated input supply system, altered agrarian relations and generally caused changes in the functioning of input and commodity markets (Scoones, et al., 2018). Severe macroeconomic instability  ̶  characterised by high interest rates, shortages of foreign currency and hyperinflation  ̶  created an unfavourable environment for private sector participation in the input markets (Mano, Sukume and Rugube, 2003). While the government has attempted to solve problems in the input supply sector through several support and financial packages (Gono, 2008, RBZ 2006), the interventions generally lacked sustainability and most of the smallholder farmers still failed to access the critical inputs. Smallholder farmers have often faced challenges in accessing agricultural inputs such as improved seed, chemical fertilisers, veterinary drugs, agricultural mechanisation equipment as well as agrochemicals such as herbicides and pesticides. These challenges lead to low produce quality, poor yields and general reduction in the area cultivated. Agricultural commodity marketing challenges have also affected the viability of agricultural intensification and limited prospects for agricultural commercialisation among smallholder farmers.

New marketing modalities have emerged in the smallholder sector, helping farmers to access inputs in a timely manner and guaranteeing access to markets for their produce. Rural agro-dealers have played an important role in the input chains, enhancing the availability of essential inputs at the local level. These dealers and informal buyers have become major economic drivers in rural farming communities. However, the emergence of contract farming has seen agribusiness firms entering into contractual arrangements with smallholders, where the firms provide inputs and extension support as well as guaranteed markets for agricultural produce to the farmers (Scoones, et al., 2018). These innovations have the potential to effectively lower transaction costs faced by smallholder farmers in both input and commodity markets. Following the land reform and resettlement programs, the population in the area has been increasing with large numbers of new farmers having moved into the surrounding farms. As a result, there has been proliferation of businesses to serve the growing clientele.

Mvurwi and Concession have a good mix of agro-dealers serving the resettled farmers and the generality of the farming community. The agro-dealers vary in size of business operation and range of products offered, such as fertilisers and seeds; livestock inputs, such as veterinary injections, dips and block salts; agrochemicals like pesticides and herbicides; production equipment, for example knapsack sprayers, hoes and ox ploughs; as well as hardware, such as door frames and asbestos roofing sheets. Agro-dealers also offer flexibility to farmers and help them to lower transportation costs. However, one main challenge is that they mostly operate on a cash and carry basis, and therefore do not extend credit to farmers. In addition, most of the agro-dealers reported that they have limited financing, hence restricting their product range in stock, in contrast to contracting firms, who offer input packages and credit for farmers to guarantee the production of good quality produce to meet their raw material requirements.

Another key player in the smallholder value chain is the network of agribusiness firms, providing an important source of inputs and agricultural finance for smallholder farmers through contract farming. Agribusiness firms have increasingly engaged with smallholder farmers to produce agricultural commodities in order to guarantee supplies of their raw materials in sufficient quantities and quality. However, there have been mixed reviews on the successes and effectiveness of the contract farming schemes in the country, one example being Vordesale, a firm involved in the tobacco sector, whose management revealed that they only met 75% of the targeted crop output during the 2018-2019 farming season due to a combination of poor rains and rising incidences of side-selling of the contracted crop. Farmers, however, often complain over the unequal power relations, which can leave them at the mercy of contractors.

The viability and sustainability of agricultural commercialisation initiatives depend upon the availability and accessibility of agricultural inputs such as improved seeds, fertilisers, agro-chemicals (pesticides, herbicides), veterinary medicines and agricultural mechanisation. Agro-dealers and contractors are crucial to agricultural production, capital-led agricultural intensification and commercialisation in general as they ensure availability of critical inputs at the local level. Changes in the agrarian landscape following the land reform program brought about new changes in the established input supply chains and distribution networks. So, there have been new entrants in the form of agro-dealers networks and contract farming initiatives that have offered more opportunities for farmers to access essential agricultural inputs and credit, which is crucial for agricultural productivity.

Written by: Vine Mutyasira

Photo credit: Walter Mushaiwa and Tanaka Murimbarimba

Photo caption: A snapshot of Farm Shop in Mvurwi, showing range of products stocked

The full research note, on which this blog is based, can be found here

Research Note: Value Chain Participants in Smallholder Commercialisation in Mvurwi: Emerging Business Relations

Written by, Vine Mutyasira, Tanaka Murimbarimba and Walter Mushayiwa

Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector has experienced radical transformation following a series of land reform programs and an economic meltdown that started in 2000. The implementation of the Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP) led to widespread disruptions in the sophisticated input supply system, altered agrarian relations and generally caused changes in the functioning of input and commodity markets (Scoones et al., 2018). Severe macroeconomic instability – characterised by high interest rates, shortages of foreign currency and hyperinflation – created an unfavourable environment for private sector participation in the input markets (Mano, Sukume and Rugube, 2003). While the government has attempted to solve problems in the input supply sector through several support and financial packages (Gono, 2008; RBZ 2006), the interventions generally lacked sustainability and the majority of the smallholder farmers still failed to access the critical inputs. Smallholder farmers have often faced challenges in accessing agricultural inputs such as improved seed, chemical fertilisers, veterinary drugs, agricultural mechanisation equipment, as well as agrochemicals such as herbicides and pesticides. These challenges lead to low produce quality, poor yields and general reduction in the area cultivated. Agricultural commodity marketing challenges have also affected the viability of agricultural intensification and limited prospects for agricultural commercialisation among smallholder farmers.

Social Dynamics of Agricultural Commercialisation: What are the Community Perceptions?

Agricultural commercialisation is seen by smallholder farmers as a potent means of improving their livelihoods and transforming rural communities. However, the commercialisation-induced rural transformation has the potential to alter both social relations and gender-based power dynamics within rural communities.

As communities commercialise and realign production practices with the demands of the markets, they increasingly embrace to new technologies and venture into hitherto unchartered value chains, which may at odds with traditional, religious and cultural practices.

For instance, the greater participation of women in agricultural commercialisation processes results in both empowerment and economic independence, and thus shifts intra-household gender power dynamics. Traditionally women have been perceived as passive participants in agriculture and their role in commercialisation mostly limited to mere ‘helping out’ through subsidiary roles – such as tobacco grading. However, interactions with communities in Mvurwi and Concession show that women have taken ownership in the commercialisation process.

Case study: Mrs Kaseke, Mvurwi

One such instance is the case of Mrs Kaseke, an A1 farmer in the Forrester K scheme in Mvurwi. Due to her husband’s advanced age, Mrs Kaseke has become the de-facto plot manager, making most of the production and marketing decisions for her household. Like most plot-holders in the scheme, the family has ventured in tobacco production, with Mrs Kaseke managing all the processes from the field activities right through the marketing of the tobacco crop through the auction floors.

However, Mrs Kaseke explained that “it is not an easy task to venture into a field that is predominantly male dominated, worse still how the locals view it when a woman becomes the dominant voice when the man is still there.” It is quite fascinating how Mrs Kaseke has managed to weather social perceptions to become a very successful tobacco farmer, a crop that is often gender-stereotyped as a man’s domain. As a champion of her household’s quest for commercialisation, Mrs Kaseke has also managed to use incomes from tobacco sales to diversify their farm business and venture into poultry layers production.  

Mrs Kaseke showing a vibrant poultry layers project

Remaining constraints for women’s participation

Engagement in commercialisation activities by women has helped challenge the patriarchal assumption that women cannot profitably manage farm businesses. However, while participation in agricultural commercialisation is helping improve their economic status, women explained in focus group discussions that their effective participation is still limited by several constraints.

First, women do not own land and the household plots are usually registered in the husband’s name. As a result, they find it hard to access credit lines to finance their agro-enterprises due to lack of collateral. Second, women tend to take the back seat when it comes to marketing of produce since men are considered to have an edge in bargaining for better prices with potential buyers. Thirdly, since commercial crop production has generally been perceived as a predominantly male domain, the available technologies, particularly mechanisation are often targeted at men, at the expense of women farmers. Fourth, women’s involvement in commercial agriculture does not excuse them from their housework and childcare responsibilities.

A woman farmer showcasing her groundnut harvest in Ardura, Concession.

Social dynamics and community perceptions can alter the course of agricultural commercialisation. Besides the evident gender power dimensions, farmers in Mvurwi and Concession also noted how religion has also played a role in influencing pathways to agricultural commercialisation. It was reported in focus group discussions that some religious groups, particularly the apostolic sects, could not venture into tobacco production despite its apparent economic potential because of their religious beliefs.

However, social relations and networks have also played catalyst to agricultural commercialisation processes among smallholder farmers. The A1 beneficiaries of the country’s land reform are generally resource-constrained, and the worsening economic situation has compounded their access to inputs and farm equipment. As a result, farmers have increasingly relied on their social networks to access tillage equipment, transportation for harvests and processing facilities through community sharing arrangements.

Conclusion

Overall, women’s participation in agricultural commercialisation has challenged the dominance of men in agriculture. Intra- and inter-household gender relations are shifting, with women increasingly participating in crucial household and community decision-making processes. Clearly, agricultural commercialisation has the potential to uplift the economic status of women in rural communities. It is therefore important to progressively empower women to participate in the commercialisation process effectively.

Written by: Vine Mutyasira

Photo credit: Walter Mushaiwa and Tanaka Murimbarimba

APRA Brief 19: Agribusiness Investment in Agricultural Commercialisation in Ghana: Rethinking Policy Incentives

Written by Joseph Teye

Ghana’s recent image as a peaceful and stable country has provided an attractive environment for foreign investors to do business in, reflected by numerous programmes implemented by Ghana and its partners which aim to strengthen foreign investment, particularly in the agricultural sector. However, there is still a lack of understanding of how Ghanaian businesses respond to such incentive packages, as well as the detrimental effect of the barriers to investment. This APRA brief examines the most important factors behind investment in the Ghanaian agricultural sector, the limits of financial incentives and provides a series of recommendations for the government in Ghana to address.

African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) 2019 – Accra, Ghana, 3-6 September


“AGRF is the world’s premier forum for African agriculture, pulling together stakeholders in the agricultural landscape to discuss and commit to programs, investments, and policies to achieve an inclusive and sustainable agricultural transformation across the continent.”

AGRF is upon us again, with this year’s theme of “Grow Digital: Leveraging Digital Transformation to Drive Sustainable Food Systems in Africa”.

On the first day of the AGRF – at 11.30 on Tuesday, 3 September – APRA will be represented by Professor Thom Jayne of Michigan State University, who will be moderating and presenting in a session “Megatrends Driving Agrifood System Transformation in Africa:  The Evolving Role of Locally-led Policy Analysis Capacity”.

“The purpose of this session is to explore the evolving capacity development challenges and ways of responding to these challenges within the context of rapid agri-food systems transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. The side event will disseminate high-level messages for continued targeted capacity building for the African governments and other stakeholders.”

Professor Adebayo Aromolaran will also be providing a presentation onThe Rise of Medium-Scale Farms in Africa”, which will be based APRA research on medium-scale farms in Nigeria.

A policy brief related to Professor Adebayo’s presentation will be made available at the session and will be published online.

Download the full AGRF 2019 programme here.

APRA policy briefs can be downloaded here.

6th International Conference of African Association of Agricultural Economists 2019, Abuja, Nigeria

“Rising to meet new challenges: Africa’s agricultural development beyond 2020 Vision” is the theme for the 6th  African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE) triennial conference, which will take place on the 23-26th September 2019 at the Sheraton Hotel in Abuja, Nigeria.

The AAAE have stated that “the conference will explore the recent developments in agricultural systems across Africa. Key drivers of change include population growth, rapid urbanisation, productivity-enhancing innovation, climate change, the rise of agripreneurship, land reform, as well as policy and investment priorities by governments and development partners.”

APRA Nigeria and Ghana researchers will be involved in a session on: “Insights into Agricultural Commercialisation in Africa:  New Research Evidence and Implications for Policy”. This session will highlight evidence on pathways into agricultural commercialisation in sub-Saharan Africa and include presentations based on APRA research on medium-scale farms in Nigeria and the development of cocoa in Ghana and Nigeria. Participants will include researchers, private sector practitioners, government workers, and students.

Session organisers:

  • Nigerian Association of Agricultural Economists (NAAE)
  • APRA-Nigeria

Moderators:   

  • Olajide O. Adeola, Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Discussants:

  • Prof Job Nmadu, President, Nigerian Association of Agricultural Economists
  • Janice Olawoye/ Seun Olutayo, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

•             Kojo Amanor, University of Ghana

APRA papers to be presented:

1.            Medium-scale farming as a pathway into smallholder agricultural commercialisation: Evidence from Nigeria

Authors: Milu Muyanga, Adebayo Aromolaran, TS Jayne, Saweda Liverpool-Tasie, Thomas Jayne, Titus Awokuse

2.            Livelihood Trajectories in Nigeria’s Cocoa Economy: Evidence from South-West Nigeria

Authors: Olajide O. Adeola, Kehinde Thomas, Seun Olutayo, Tayo Adeyemo and Tosin Oyedele

3.            The History of Cocoa Commercialisation in Ghana

Authors: Kojo Amanor and Joseph Teye

Non-APRA papers: 3 papers will be selected from NAAE members

APRA publications can be found here.

A new framework for thinking about technological change

Global development is all about creating change for the better.  One thing is certain:  if we want to address the climate breakdown while achieving a high quality of life for all of the Earth’s citizens, it will take a transformation of the way we all live. Technological change will surely be an important part of this transformation.

This implies that understanding change processes should be near the heart of everything development professionals and scholars do.  How to stimulate change, how to shape it equitably and steer it democratically, how to monitor it and make sense of it.  Unfortunately, the standard approaches to these questions are woefully inadequate.

Rethinking technological change

In a new Open Access paper, IDS researchers Dominic Glover, James Sumberg and Giel Ton have teamed up with two collaborators from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), Jens Andersson and Lone Badstue to try and ‘rethink’ how technological change occurs in small-scale agriculture (see article).

In a previous paper, three of us argued that the conventional concept of ‘adoption’ – as in “she has adopted the new technology” – is an inadequate guide to what happens when people change their technological practices.  We called for the development of a new framework, which should draw on a rich body of social science literature that sheds light on technology, innovation and technological change as human and social practices.  We suggested that the agency of technology practitioners should be at the centre of attention, rather than the gadgets and machines around which adoption studies usually turn.  The new paper proposes such a framework.

Our new framework breaks the technological change process into four aspects:  propositions, encounters, dispositions, and responses.  The article describes each of these elements and how they relate to one another.  The new framework is designed to overcome the limitations of ‘adoption,’ which has dominated conventional approaches to the design and evaluation of programmes that aim to spread new technology into society.  The adoption model’s key strengths are clarity and simplicity, but we argue that these apparent virtues are illusions that mislead more than they illuminate.

However, if the new conceptual framework is to become equally popular and easy to use, it needs to be operationalised in a very accessible way.  In the coming months, we want to explore how the new framework could be translated into practical tools and methods for designing, implementing and managing programmes of technological change.

The new article – ‘Rethinking Technological Change in Small-scale Agriculture’ – is available to download, free of charge, from the publisher’s website.

Written by: Dominic Glover

Photo credit: Georgina Smith / CIAT2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Bibliographic details:

Glover, D., Sumberg, J., Ton, G., Andersson, J. and Badstue, L. (2019 [online]) Rethinking technological change in smallholder agriculture. Outlook on Agriculture online first. DOI: 10.1177/0030727019864978

A recap of the JPS Annual Summer Writeshop in Critical Agrarian Studies in Beijing

What are the structural barriers that hinder the growth of vibrant, well-networked Global South young researchers working in critical agrarian studies along scholar-activist tradition? Can a global network of Global South young researchers working in critical agrarian studies and along scholar-activist tradition contribute to overcoming such barriers? If so, how?

These were the questions that guided our group work on the last day of a weeklong writeshop initiated by the Journal of Peasant Studies, the College of Humanities and Development Studies of China Agricultural University, the Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies, Future Agricultures and Young African Researchers in Agriculture. It brought together in dialogue young researchers from Ghana, South Africa, Colombia, Brazil, Mozambique, Laos, China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Turkey, Madagascar, Egypt, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Uganda, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh.

On the last day, as we reflected on the questions above, we began by acknowledging that the Global South is not homogenous. Scholars are differentiated by gender, race and theoretical traditions. Some come from universities that are as well-resourced as those in the North, and others not. Many of the universities represented at our discussion do not even have subscriptions to major international academic journals. In our group we also talked about lack of funding for scholars from the Global South. This includes funds to conduct field research, attend international conferences that come with prohibitively high costs and often happen in the North, networking and exchange visits between young researchers. Other costs that global South scholars have to carry when engaging in English (a language that is sometimes our third, fourth or fifth) involve copy editing. In other words, the dominance and exclusivity of English in highly read and cited journals can be a barrier. Is it ‘is’ or ‘are’, ‘they’ or ‘them’, past or present continuous tense, ‘in’, ‘on’ or ‘at’? We get confused all the time, and journal editors and peer reviewers may not have the degree of patience for bad grammar, and worse, they might equate it to lack of rigor. This is obviously not the case as debates about agrarian politics are alive and rigorous in our countries, making our work relevant and timely.

Knowledge production, then, is political and contested, and young researchers from the global South often enter the terrain from a disadvantaged position, lacking the cultural and social capital that is a currency in the publishing world. Top scholars in our field are mainly white, very often male , and (with a few exceptions) from the global North. This makes the need to amplify global South scholarship and Southern epistemologies even more urgent. To achieve that, we ought to be doing many things, including the need to be more deliberate about reading, crediting, teaching and publishing scholars from the Global South, women in particular or else we perpetuate the existing inequalities in knowledge production.

The Writeshop participants concluded that the international academic publishing situation in critical agrarian studies reminds us that it is not a level playing field, especially for young researchers from the global South. Can we change this? We concluded that while this not an easy task, we can.

Originally published on PLAAS website.

Written by: Stha Yeni

Stha Yeni is a PhD candidate at PLAAS.

Photo credit: PLAAS

The Future of Cocoa Production in Nigeria: An Account of Adegeye’s Extensive Research Experiences

Cocoa farming is a profitable cash crop due to its economically diverse value chain products, as well as the international acceptance of that. Players and actors in cocoa value chain are the direct beneficiaries of this venture.  Nonetheless, Nigerian cocoa farmers have not fully utilized its inherent potentials, as majority of farmers concentrate only on the sale of cocoa beans, while neglecting other value-added products such as cocoa butter, cocoa powder and cocoa liquor. Also, cocoa enterprises are lucrative and relatively easy to manage compared to other agricultural product, depending on farmers’ readiness to search for knowledge to improve their production.

Post-Millennium record shows that Côte d’Ivoire is the leading cocoa producing nation, at one million tons, compared to Ghana and Nigeria’s 600,000 tons and 300,000 tons, respectively. Some of the reasons for such low production are:

  • Most of the cocoa trees are old
  • Dominant active cocoa farmers are old
  • Failure to update obsolete methods of farming and adopt improved methods
  • Inappropriate use of chemicals.

Nigerian cocoa farming – a thing of the past?

In 20 years, if nothing is done to change this trend, cocoa production might become a thing of the past in Nigeria. Hence, the future of cocoa production lies in the actions taken by the various stakeholders.

A well podded short cocoa tree

Professor Adegeye retired from the Department of Agricultural Economics, at the University of Ibadan, where he taught and extensively researched cocoa, among other things, for close to four decades. In an interview granted to our team, he shared his experience and research knowledge on the production of cocoa.  According to him, “we are still not far from the traditional methods adopted by our great-grandfathers in growing cocoa and that there is a large margin between where we are and where we ought to be”. In his research he found that cocoa tree can produce fruits all year round if there is enough water available, irrespective of the varieties, which also includes our own local varieties. He pointed out that most of our local farmers do not know this and, instead, they believe that cocoa fruiting is seasonal, based on their knowledge and experience gained from old practices over the years, without updating their knowledge and practice.

Another old practice that needs to be abolished to secure the future of cocoa in Nigeria is the misconception about the correct height of cocoa trees.  Professor Adegeye pointed out that cocoa trees do not have to grow too tall as farmers can control the height of trees by pruning and the nutrient can then be focused on producing more cocoa pods.  Short cocoa trees can evidently carry lots of cocoa pods, as shown by Image 1.

Professor Adegeye also advised that the old cocoa trees should be replaced with new ones, which should have been well groomed at the nursery. Cocoa seedlings should be grown in nutrient rich soil (use of local manure is encouraged), they should be well shaded and kept insect-free, so as to have a healthy tree. Professor Adegeye’s account of a healthy tree is one that gives, on average, three kilograms of cocoa beans, which means 1,000 cocoa trees will give an average of three tons of cocoa beans, compared to what is obtainable on most old cocoa trees.

A well-nourished cocoa nursery

In conclusion, the future of cocoa farming in Nigeria is dependent on discarding old production practices and embrace new technology, encouraging younger generations into the cocoa enterprise and the promotion of cocoa value addition at its grass root.

Written by: WS2-Team

Photo credit: Tom CoadyAttribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

In memory of Professor Ephraim Wadonda Chirwa

Professor Ephraim Chirwa, the Director of Research-Africa of the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) Programme and a founding member of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC), passed away after a sudden illness on the morning of 15 July 2019.

An economist by training (with degrees from the Universities of Malawi, Cambridge and East Anglia), his work covered a range of interconnected themes over the past 30 years, including research on agricultural marketing systems, agricultural commercialisation at different scales, the role of farmer organisations, agriculture and social protection, and agricultural policy analysis.

As Director of Research-Africa of the APRA Programme, he oversaw the design and implementation of a four-country comparative panel study of the differential outcomes of various agricultural commercialisation pathways on local livelihoods and rural economies. He also supported longitudinal studies on agricultural commercialisation and agrarian change in six countries. One of those countries was Malawi, where he and the APRA country team were involved in a sophisticated ‘tracker’ study of groundnut commercialisation, tracing the livelihood trajectories of individuals who were interviewed in an earlier household study more than 12 years ago. Findings from those APRA studies will be published in 2020.

As part of Future Agricultures, Professor Chirwa worked for more than a decade with Professor Andrew Dorward of the School of Oriental and African Studies to assess the economic and social impacts of Malawi’s Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP). That research led to the highly influential Oxford University Press book, Agricultural Input Subsidies: The Recent Malawi Experience. He also assisted leading civil society organisations working on agricultural development issues to use his findings to inform and influence policy changes related to FISP.

In addition to his APRA and FAC work, Professor Chirwa was the lead analyst in the drafting of the Agricultural Development Programme in Malawi, which formed the basis for the Agriculture Sector Wide Approach (ASWAp). As Professor of Economics at the University of Malawi, he spent over 23 years teaching undergraduate and post-graduate students in agricultural economics and mentoring multi-country teams to use mixed-methods, interdisciplinary research to analyse the changing dynamics of smallholder agriculture.

Alongside his many scholarly pursuits, Professor Chirwa ran a successful consultancy company, Wadonda Consult, which undertook large survey-based research projects for the Government of Malawi and international organisations, including the UK Department for International Development and many others.

We will remember Ephraim’s extensive contributions to advancing our understanding of African agricultural development, but also his deep and abiding commitment to supporting the farming communities of Malawi. They were always his central concern and motivated his actions throughout his long and distinguished career. We will also recall his love of music and dance and his joy of life. We will miss his intellectual leadership, his generous spirit and the twinkle in his eye.

May he rest in peace.

John Thompson – CEO, APRA

“Prof Chirwa mentored a lot of young and upcoming researchers selflessly, including myself, to always strive for academic excellence and venture into publication not just for its own sake but for the greater good of humanity, especially impoverished and marginalised Malawian farmers.

He urged us to always find a way of transforming theoretical complexities into strategic insights that can yield recommendations with considerable practical policy impact on the day-to-day livelihoods of ordinary farmers.

May his soul rest in eternal peace.”

Blessings Chisinga – friend, collaborator and APRA Malawi Country Co-lead

“I am a beneficiary of Prof Chirwa’s generosity in supporting young people; he was always available to answer any questions I had and to pick his brains. His mentorship and support opened a world of possibilities for my professional life. I will miss him dearly.”

Mirriam Matita – friend, collaborator and APRA Malawi Country Co-lead

“Together with myself and others, Ephraim was a founding member of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC), established in 2005. Since then his contributions to our many workshops have always combined his intellectual clarity, good humour – and of course his dancing at the workshop parties. His work with Andrew Dorward on agricultural subsidies challenged conventional wisdoms, asserting an important role for state-led coordination in agricultural development. This work is his great legacy: a sane, grounded agricultural economics for Africa. He will be deeply missed.”

Ian Scoones (co-director of FAC, 2005-14; professorial fellow, IDS, Sussex)

“Prof Ephraim will be ever remembered by APRA Team for his guidance, as a Great Thinker and the best facilitator who willingly shared his knowledge always to make APRA record successes.”

Dr. Kizito Kayanda Mwajombe. Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania

“As a compatriot and colleague, I’ve known for some time, Ephraim was also a teacher who instilled hope in us (in the diaspora) to aim higher and achieve our dreams. He’s one of the people who inspired me to work in international development and for that, I shall always treasure his advice. May his family find comfort in God and those around them at this very difficult time.”

Wezi Mwangulube, IDS, University of Sussex

“The world has really lost a great scholar. May his soul rest in perfect peace.”

Prof. Joseph Teye, Director, Centre for Migration Studies. University of Ghana

“As a personality, I found Ephraim to be quite private, but straightforward and candid, and loyal to his friends. His opinions were realistic, sometimes downbeat, but always more objective than cynical.

I particularly admired Ephraim’s commitment to his country and the people he came from. He had many opportunities to work as a staff member of international development agencies, all of which he turned down. Likewise, I know he declined political positions, despite one or two highly credible offers.

I had the privilege of meeting his mother, a retired primary school teacher and then full-time smallholder farmer at her home. She was a one-person example of a range of farming best practices and, for me, this spoke volumes about the values Ephraim was exposed to as a young person.”

Jonathan Kydd – friend, collaborator, Chair of the IDS Board of Trustees and ex-officio member of the APRA International Advisory Board

“Ephraim was a great Malawian, colleague and friend. I first knew Ephraim through our mutual friend, Jonathan Kydd, but I got to know him well when we worked together on the Malawi Farm Input Subsidy Programme from 2006 until my sudden illness in late 2014. He was a man of ability and integrity whom I could always rely on. In 2013 we wrote a book together about the Malawi FISP. 

Despite his busy schedule, he and Ireen together ran a happy family home with the two girls and Ireen’s mother. They were very hospitable when I visited. 

He helped me personally many times, sometimes at considerable cost in terms of time or other resources, and he was very generous. This taught me that he thought about others. He was also both very appreciative and highly critical of different aspects of Malawian culture, sometimes at considerable personal cost. In all things he was consistent across different parts of his life. 

He will be missed by many and his passing is a loss to Malawi.”

Andrew Dorward – friend, collaborator, SOAS researcher till 2014.

SONY DSC

WRENmedia and former APRA colleague, Beatrice Ouma, pays a touching tribute to Ephraim in her blog here

What are ‘appropriate technologies’? Pathways for mechanising African agriculture.

Capital goods are essential for agriculture, whether for tillage, irrigation or threshing. Mechanisation of agriculture is therefore seen as a core aim for agricultural development, and is widely pushed as a route to increasing production and efficiency. But what scale of technology is appropriate? Where can farmers find the right sort of technology to meet their needs? Does trade in capital goods respond to market demands? Do aid projects help or hinder?

These are the sort of questions we have been puzzling over in Zimbabwe as we’ve been looking at the role of various types of capital goods used in agriculture in land reform areas. Capital goods range from large tractors to small pumps, and these are being used across farms of different sizes, from A1 resettlement farms, with typically under 5 hectares of cultivated land, to much larger A2 medium scale resettlement farms. Size matters, both of the technology but also of land areas and the scale of operation, but so also does capacity, flexibility, maintenance requirements and politics.

Tractors: the symbol of mechanisation

Tractors have always been the symbol of mechanisation in agriculture. From Soviet mass production under Stalin to aid projects across Africa. As a previous blog discussed, the promotion of tractors has a long history in Zimbabwe too. While there was a healthy trade in the large-scale commercial sector, with imports from different parts of the world, the record of tractor projects in the small-scale farming areas was dismal. But land reform from 2000 has changed the dynamic. The large-scale sector is much diminished, replaced by a mix of medium-scale A2 farms and a larger number of smaller A1 farms, where dynamics of ‘accumulation from below’ are evident. This has generated a new demand for tractors.

As part of a wider study on mechanisation and commercial agriculture in Africa under the APRA programme, new work from Mvurwi area, a high-potential tobacco growing area north of Harare, has shown how tractor use has been expanding. Despite various projects, including the Brazilian More Food International programme, much of this has been based on a private market. Official figures suggest that tractor numbers increased nearly six-fold between 2011 and 2017, mostly in the medium-scale farming areas, and predominantly through a second-hand market of machines originally imported for former large-scale farms. These figures may be an underestimate, however, as survey data show that in the small-scale A1 resettlement areas tractor hiring has increased significantly, as tobacco successful small-scale farmers invest in tractors and hire them out.

The Brazilian tractor cooperatives have contributed to this, but are only a very partial element of a bigger story. Large four-wheel tractors are expensive items and only some are able to buy them, even when old, battered and repaired for a second-hand market. Collective ownership through the Brazilian coops potentially open access to others, but the politics of coops are notorious, and the ones in Mvurwi have become embroiled in turf-wars over control, with coop leaders fending off attempts at political capture by party officials. Tractors of course are always political.,

Tractors in Mvurwi these days are therefore a mix of very old machines imported several decades ago (usually ancient Massey Ferguson and John Deere models), and more recent Chinese models (imported in the flurry of investment under the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe programmes of the mid-2000s) and a few new Brazilian models (as in the picture above). Perhaps surprisingly, it is the older ones that are the most common and the most likely to continue to function, as there are both the skills to mend them, and a (declining) second-hand spares market. For any mechanisation programme, the ability to repair and reconstruct is essential, and often forgotten in the eagerness to bring in new, shiny machines that support a domestic industry (in China, Brazil, Belarus, India, Iran or wherever) through an aid programme.

Small-scale pumps: opportunities for farmer-led irrigation

The tractor story contrasts with that of small-scale irrigation pumps, which have expanded massively in recent years across the new resettlement areas. As discussed in a recent paper, focused on sites in Masvingo, small, cheap, Chinese-made pumps, together with flexible plastic piping, have transformed the capacity for farmer-led irrigation in a dramatic fashion. This process has largely been ignored by policy-makers and aid agencies alike.

The process is being driven by an agile private market, involving a network of players that link importers with retailers with a growing cottage industry in repairs. Gone are the days when you could only buy a pump set if you were seriously rich or the beneficiary of an NGO project in a ‘group garden’. Costing only US$250, virtually anyone can get one, and start irrigating from rivers, streams, dams and vlei ponds. This has expanded the opportunities to many, including young people without land. The onward links to horticultural markets and processing opportunities in turn all generate employment and local economic growth.

It is both the characteristic of the technology (small, mobile, flexible etc.), but also the market context, that allows small-scale pump irrigation to thrive, and makes the technology ‘appropriate’. Upgrading and scaling up is possible too. Some choose to buy more small pumps to maintain flexibility, while others buy larger, fixed pumps and dig boreholes to expand irrigation.

There are therefore many pathways of innovation and mechanisation. These must suit different people’s social and economic conditions, as access to cash, technology, land and labour is managed together. Appropriate technologies are always socio-technologies, with technical, social and political lives intimately linked.

Rethinking agricultural mechanisation policy

Mechanisation of agriculture is occurring apace in Zimbabwe, but not as the planners would wish it. The irrigation engineers remain sceptical about the small-scale pump revolution, fixated as they often are with ordered, regularised irrigation schemes with fixed, large-scale pump technologies. Meanwhile, the engineers in the mechanisation departments dream of bigger tractors, with more horsepower and linked to drillers, seeders, combines and the rest, in order to create a vision of commercial agriculture derived from the textbooks. Aid programmes, such as the Brazilian coops, often replicate such visions, as technicians import a perspective from their own context of what ‘tropical technology’ should be, without thinking about need and context.

However, under the noses of the technicians and planners things are happening. These are largely private ‘below-the-radar’ initiatives, linked to locally-embedded markets, and with entrepreneurship not only linked to supplying the kit, but also adapting, maintaining and repairing it. For tractors, the second-hand market is thriving allowing more timely tillage of larger areas, and with small-scale pumps, the cheap, flexible sets have transformed irrigation.

But there are limits. As the stock of tractors, and particularly spares, declines, there are challenges in meeting demand. Hiring businesses, including via cooperatives, are an alternative, and particularly important for small-scale production, where owning a large tractor just for yourself doesn’t make much sense. This is why the connections between A2 and A1 areas is important, and such coordination requires facilitation. For pumps, the semi-disposable pump sets are ideal for starting up, but upgrading is a big step, and borehole drilling remains very costly. Issues of ground and surface water access and management for sustainable use of course become important as pump use expands.

In the wider technological landscape there are gaps too. Two-wheeled tractors, for example, for use on small plots might have an advantage for some, while intermediate level pumps and cheaper drilling options may help upgrading. Investments in linking hiring options through online applications have emerged in some places, while support for training in repairing diverse types of equipment may encourage local businesses. With a better idea of the nature of what ‘appropriate technology’ means a role for coordination and facilitation by state or NGO players emerges, including encouraging south-south trade in capital goods.

Silent, hidden green revolutions

Despite the narrative of state-led, directed innovation and mechanisation, agricultural green revolutions rarely happen in this way. Much more common is a flexible bricolage of initiatives that emerge, based on pulling together options that fit. As Steve Biggs and Scott Justice argue for the Asian experience:

“In regions where smaller-scale mechanization has taken place, there has also been a growth of rural industries and strong linkages with the broader national economy. Whether by design or not, it appears that markedly different patterns of smaller-scale rural mechanization over time have led not only to agricultural production increases but also to broad-based rural and economic development…. It is our hope that there will be increasing interest in the “silent and hidden” revolutions of the spread of smaller-scale equipment and that broad-based rural development, such as worthwhile rural employment and careful and intensive use of water and energy sources, will again become important goals of economic development. There is now empirical evidence on a grand scale that shows it can be done”.

This empirical evidence is emerging in Zimbabwe too, and a wider recognition, along with selective coordination and facilitation by state and aid players, is essential if Zimbabwe’s agriculture is to transform in the post-land reform setting.

Written by: Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland.

Photo credit: Ian Scoones

Analysing the dynamics of change: Using longitudinal, panel and cross-sectional studies to investigate complex social, environmental and technological issues

Due to financial and capacity limitations, a great deal of development-related research involves conducting single studies at one point in time. These ‘snapshots’ can provide useful insights into the people and conditions examined and the impacts of particular processes and interventions. But they often present a rather static picture of these contexts and fail to present a deeper understanding of the critical factors influencing the trajectories of change and transformation. This lecture will introduce three types of studies that can be used to assess dynamic social, environmental and technological change over time at individual, household and community levels: longitudinal, panel and cross-sectional studies. It will draw insights from studies led by the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC) and its ‘Agricultural Policy Research in Africa’ (APRA) Programme and discuss the benefits of collaborative, multi-country, mixed-methods research. The analytical strengths and weaknesses of these long-term studies will be reviewed and, if time allows, a short (fun) group ‘quiz’ will end the discussion.

#DynamicsChange

Date: Tuesday, 30 July 2019

Time:  13h00-14h00

Venue: PLAAS Boardroom, 2nd Floor Main Hall, University of the Western Cape

For more information, contact: Joy van Dieman

Tel: 021 959 3754 or Email: jvandieman@plaas.org.za

[slideshare id=161530933&doc=thompsonlongitudinalpanelandcross-sectionalstudiesindevelopmentresearchv3plaasjul19-190806111931]

Rethinking technological change in smallholder agriculture

Written by, Dominic Glover, James Sumberg, Giel Ton, Jens Andersson and Lone Badstue.

The concept of technology adoption (along with its companions, diffusion and scaling) is commonly used to design development interventions, to frame impact evaluations and to inform decision-making about new investments in development-oriented agricultural research. However, adoption simplifies and mischaracterises what happens during processes of technological change. In all but the very simplest cases, it is likely to be inadequate to capture the complex reconfiguration of social and technical components of a technological practice or system. We review the insights of a large and expanding literature, from various disciplines, which has deepened understanding of technological change as an intricate and complex sociotechnical reconfiguration, situated in time and space. We explain the problems arising from the inappropriate use of adoption as a framing concept and propose an alternative conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating technological change. The new approach breaks down technology change programmes into four aspects: propositions, encounters, dispositions and responses. We begin to sketch out how this new framework could be operationalised

APRA at the EEA Conference: Analysing the Importance of Rice to the Ethiopian Economy

APRA engagement at the 17th Ethiopian Economics Association (EEA) Conference on the Ethiopian Economy

The Ethiopia Team of the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) Programme of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC) participated in the 17th International Conference of the Ethiopian Economics Association (EEA) on the Ethiopian Economy. The conference was held from July 18 to 20, 2019 at the EEA’s Multi-Purpose Building Conference Hall in Addis Ababa. The conference was attended by senior government officials and more than 1,000 members of the EEA, as well as representatives of numerous international research and development organisations. There were five plenary sessions and multiple panel sessions, covering 56 presentations.

The second day plenary session was devoted to APRA research in Ethiopia with the title, The Importance of Rice, its Commercialisation and Future Perspectives. The plenary was organised into three presentations, which was followed by a lively panel discussion with active engagement of participants. This blog aims to highlight some of the key messages of the three presentations and summary of issues discussed during the panel discussion.

The three presentations were: (i) The Importance of the Rice Sector in Ethiopia: Commercialisation, Emerging Challenges and Opportunities; (ii) Trends and Prospects of Rice Commercialisation and the Changing Labour Market: The Case of the Fogera Plain in Ethiopia; and (iii), Rice Commercialisation and Agrarian Change in the Fogera Plain of Ethiopia.

The first presentation was made by John Thompson and the key messages were:

  • Ethiopia is endowed with huge potential for rice production – both rain-fed and irrigated conditions.
  • However, demand for rice is growing rapidly and outstripping domestic supply forcing the country to import.
  • Farmers can respond to these market opportunities – i.e. to ”step up” and ”step out” – with the right investments and technical support though the rate of increase in domestic production is lower by far than imports.
  • Thus, Ethiopia will have to continue to rely on imported rice to fill the “gap” for the near future – which currently costs the economy roughly US$ 200 million per year.
  • There is an urgent need to strengthen R&D capacity to transform the rice value chain – improving productivity, access to finance and inputs, and processing to produce quality rice in greater quantities
  • Building partnerships with other rice producing countries Africa and Asia – South-South exchanges – and key international organisations can accelerate this process.
  • The pursuit of rice self-sufficiency should be viewed as part of a larger goal of achieving food and nutrition security through a diversified and integrated food and agricultural strategy.

[slideshare id=156950110&doc=ppt-importanceofriceinethiopiathompsonandalemufinal19jul19-190722102634]

The second presentation on rice commercialisation and the changing labour market in the Fogera Plain was made by Agajie Tesfaye, who argued that:

  • Expansion of rice production and the growth of the labour market in Fogera are interdependent.
  • The increased commercialisation of rice has contributed to the emergence of dynamic labour market in creating job opportunities and increasing livelihood security in the area, particularly for unemployed and under-employed youth plus resource-poor households.
  • The availability of abundant agricultural labour has also allowed rice farmers to intensify their production and expand their operations, as most tasks – planting, weeding, harvesting, threshing – are still done by hand. It has also allowed them to diversify their production into pulses and horticultural crops for market, thus improving their incomes.
  • The rice commercialisation and the labour market are expected to co-exist in the short run. However, it is anticipated that the labour availability will decline over the next two decades as labourers opt for urban/industrial employment.
  • This calls for investments in the development of labour-saving technologies to compensate the shortage and/or increased labour cost.
  • Significant research and extension efforts will be required to identify, test and support the use of appropriate rice mechanisation technology and services.
  • Technical training and advisory support will also need to be provided to youth groups or other private actors to enable them to provide rice mechanisation services to local farmers for planting, weeding, harvesting and threshing.

[slideshare id=156949528&doc=ppt-ricelabormarkettesfayeetalfinal19jul19-190722101921]

The third presentation was made by Dawit Alemu who made the following observations:

  • Five main agrarian changes in Fogera linked with rice commercialisation were identified by APRA researchers: (i) dynamics in farming systems; (ii) land tenure changes; (iii) the emergence of labour market facilitating job opportunities; (iv) dynamism in rural–urban linkages and the emergence of a growing rice processing industry; and, (v) changes in consumption patterns and dietary diversity.
  • For Ethiopia, rice is not only about food security but also import substitution and economic opportunities (from “hanging-in” to “stepping-up” and “stepping-out”).
  • The observed agrarian changes were not induced by external interventions from public programmes or outside actors, but mainly driven by farmer-led innovations.
  • Key challenges were: (i) increased rice mono-cropping – affecting soil fertility and its management; (ii) higher pressure on the livestock sector given the expansion of rice production into former grazing lands; and, (iii) the inefficiency of the processing technology limiting the competitiveness of domestic rice to imports.
  • Thus, it will be important to: (i) ensure the sustainable production system including shift from extensive to intensive livestock production; (ii) integration of rice with livestock production, particularly in the former grazing areas; and, (iii) the scaling out of rice production to other potential areas of the country.

[slideshare id=156949828&doc=ppt-riceandagrarianchange-alemuetalfinal19jul19-190722102318]

The key questions raised by conference participants during the panel discussion were:

  • The decline in the importance of the livestock sector – especially the Fogera cattle breed, due to competition with rice production – is an important challenge. This implies the need for a shift from extensive livestock production system to a more intensive one (e.g. zero grazing). What is required to shift to intensive livestock production?
  • What are the impacts of increased rice consumption and the change of farming systems on the nutritional status of the farming communities?
  • Promotion of commercial rice farming in Ethiopia has been there since the colonial era but all these initiatives were not successful. What are the main reasons behind these past failures and what lessons can be learnt from these?
  • What are the critical factors behind the successful expansion of rice on the Fogera Plain, which has transformed the area from a food insecure region into one with relatively high levels of production, increasingly secure livelihoods and a vibrant local economy?
  • Although Ethiopia has a national rice research and development strategy, what are the key activities on the ground that are being promoted, especially in the area of extension and technical support and increasing investment?
  • How is the seasonality of labour linked with the increased labour market in the Fogera Plain?
  • How can the poor quality of domestic rice be improved to ensure its competitiveness with imported rice?

The Q&A session ended with a clear agreement that rice is an understudied, but an increasingly important staple crop and strategic commodity for Ethiopia. Participants expressed their support for the increasing investments that the government and its national and international partners are planning in rice research and development. Participants then expressed encouragement that the APRA team to continue their research into the changing dynamics, challenges and opportunities facing the rice sector in the country.

Written by: Dawit Alemu, John Thompson and Agajie Tesfaye

Photo credit: John Thompson

Can smallholders farm themselves into commercialised agriculture?

This blog is based on Working Paper 26.

Smallholder farmers form the bulk of agricultural producers in sub-Saharan Africa, constituting more than 90 percent of the farming community in this region, but they are mostly poor and face food insecurity. Reducing poverty and hunger among smallholder farmers has been a critical policy concern in sub-Saharan African countries for the past half-century and, for at least that long, governments and development agencies have experimented with a series of alternative approaches for addressing poverty. Nevertheless, poverty and food insecurity remains pervasive.

A major lesson for sub-Saharan Africa from the experience of smallholder-led Asia is that if we want agricultural growth to reduce poverty, it must be inclusive such that a large percentage of the rural smallholder population is able to participate in the process. A fundamental element of the structural transformation process is commercialisation – a transition from subsistence to market-oriented patterns of production and input use.

Medium-scale revival

However, sub-Saharan African has witnessed a rise in the number of commercialised medium-scale farmers (5-100 hectares) in many countries over the last decade. This group has little in common with large-scale commercial farmers in terms of farm size, access to finance, input application rates, and farm management strategies. In Zambia for example, while the overall population of smallholders has increased by 33.5 percent, the number of medium-scale farmers has grown by 103 percent (Sitko and Jayne, 2014).

Understanding the factors driving the growth of this class of medium-scale farmers has never been more important as many African countries seek to modernise their agricultural sector by transitioning from a subsistence-based to market-driven rural economies.

Ongoing work under APRA-Nigeria shows that slightly more than half of the medium-scale farmers in Ogun and Kaduna states used incomes generated outside of farming to enter this size. From a sample of 1,010 medium-scale farms, 47 percent of them started as small-scale farms and graduated into medium-scale farming status, whereas farms that grew organically from small-scale into medium-scale status were not typical smallholders. While most rural farm households operated about two hectares of land when they started farming, those who transitioned into medium-scale status owned about four hectares of land when they started. Less than ten percent of them owned below one hectare of land. Most of them (52 percent) owned between two and five hectares while about 28 percent had over five hectares, even though they farmed less.  Similar analysis in Kenya using medium-scale farms data collected by Tegemeo Institute and Michigan State University show that only about six percent of current medium-scale farms started out owning less that one hectare. This figure emphasises the difficulty for farmers, starting with small landholding sizes, to expand their scale of production, and eventually graduate into medium-scale and more commercialised systems of farming. Landholding size is a critical policy issue given that a majority of smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa own or control less than one hectare of land.  Land availability and access to capital are among the most important factors that enabled transition from small to medium-scale farming.

Population restraints

While earlier models of smallholder agricultural transformation assumed land is abundant and not expensive to acquire in sub-Saharan Africa, literature is now emerging showing that land has become a binding constraint in agricultural production in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Even in countries where land was previously considered to be abundant, land sizes are swiftly declining due to mounting human population pressure. With increasing population pressures and shrinking farm sizes, access to community land and through intra-family transfers is no longer not guaranteed.  Yamano et al (2009) report that 25 percent of rural-born Kenyans inherit no land and must rely on other means to access land for farming.  Clearly, it is not realistic to expect that the next generation of rural-born youth can easily inherit land.  

Land markets are becoming a major conduit for the next generation to acquire land for farming.  However, the function of these may be thwarted by credit market imperfections, high transaction costs, government regulations, and ethnicity and culturally related constraints. These factors may lead to skewed land transfers from the land-constrained smallholders to the already land-abundant farmers. The rise of land rental markets may provide some potential for land constrained households to access land, but because renting land involves paying rents amounting to one-third or more of the value of the crops produced on the rented land, tenants must be very efficient to make a reasonable livelihood by renting land (Jin and Jayne, 2013).

The youth and young adults interested in farming are more likely to be affected by land scarcity given that they lack financial resources to participate in land markets.  The APRA-Nigeria study reports that less than one percent of youths (persons aged 15-24 years) and about 14 percent of young adults (persons aged 25-34 years) are engaged in medium-scale farming in Kaduna and Ogun States.

Alternatives to land access

Political economy models may also clarify other possible ways of land access. Socio-economic and political capital are important factors explaining access to land in certain situations. Access to the remaining public (community) land or ability to navigate through bureaucratic land market systems is concentrated in the hands of those with high socio-political capital. For example, Jayne et al. (2008) show that households in which the male head is related by blood to the local headman have significantly more land than other households in Zambia’s smallholder farming sector. In Kenya, the pre-and post-independence settlement schemes meant to settle the landless benefitted political elites such as public servants, provincial administrators, politicians, and their associates.

Smallholder-led agricultural transformation is uncertain  

Is a smallholder-led agricultural transformation viable in sub-Saharan Africa with ever-shrinking farm sizes without incurring diminishing returns and diseconomies of scale (opposite of economies of scale)? Can typical smallholders transform their land into medium-scale and more commercialised systems of farming? Are farms “too small” to generate meaningful production surpluses and participate in broad-based inclusive agricultural growth processes given existing on-shelf production technologies? In a number of recent applied studies, agricultural intensification is found to rise with population density up to a point; beyond this threshold, rising population density is associated with sharp declines in output per unit of land (Muyanga and Jayne, 2014; Ricker-Gilbert et al., 2014; Josephson, et al., 2014). These unsustainable agricultural productivity trends are being attributed to factors such as shortened fallows, deterioration in soil quality, and land fragmentation. Willy et al., (2018) find presence of a ‘silent’ form of soil degradation as a result of dwindling soil organic carbon and critical soil micronutrients as well as increased soil acidity due to continued use of inorganic fertilisers on tiny pieces of land. Thus, the smallholder-led agricultural transformation process is unlikely to occur, and structural transformation will require sources of vigour that can generate money flows in rural areas, enabling smallholder households to find viable employment in off-farm activities.  Medium-scale farms may be one of the important sources of rural dynamism. 

Written by: Milu Muyanga & TS Jayne    

Photo credit: Emmanuel Eden

APRA Contributes to a Pivotal International Conference on the State of the Ethiopian Economy

The Ethiopia Team of the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) Programme of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC) is preparing for their participation in the 17th International Conference of the Ethiopian Economics Association (EEA) on the Ethiopian Economy (https://www.eeaecon.org/), which will be held from 18-20 July 2019 at the EEA Multi-Purpose Building Conference Hall in Addis Ababa.

EEA holds one of the largest annual economic conferences in Africa and serves to advance Ethiopia’s economic development through the sharing of policy-relevant research and analysis.  The APRA Ethiopia team, consisting of Dawit Alemu (Ethio-Netherlands Effort for Food, Income, and Trade Partnership program, BENEFIT), Agajie Tesfaye (Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, EIAR), Abebaw Assaye (EIAR), Shewaye Lakew (EIAR), Marco Carreras (Institute of Development Studies, IDS), Rachel Sabates-Wheeler (IDS) and John Thompson (IDS), will present their research findings on the changing dynamics of rice commercialisation and agrarian change in Ethiopia at this year’s event. During the plenary session on the morning of Friday, 19 July, they will give three presentations on the theme, ‘The Importance of Rice, Its Commercialisation and Future Perspectives’:

  •  The Importance of the Rice Sector in Ethiopia: Commercialisation, Emerging Challenges and Opportunities – John Thompson
  •  Trends and Prospects of Rice Commercialisation and the Changing Labour Market: The Case of the Fogera Plain in Ethiopia  – Agajie Tesfaye
  • Rice Commercialisation and Agrarian Change in the Fogera Plain of Ethiopia – Dawit Alemi

The presentations, along with a blog on the event, will be available on the APRA website soon (www.future-agricultures.org/apra).

EEA organises an annual conference on the state of the Ethiopian economy, the contents of which focus on emerging issues that are important for national economic development. The event will be attended by senior government ministers and state ministers, as well as numerous national organisations (universities, research institutes, NGOs) and international organisations, including representatives of ECA, EDRI, IDRC, IFPRI, IGC, UNDP and USAID.

The Association is a non-profit making, non-political and non-religious professional organisation established with a view to advancing the following objectives:

  • contribute to the economic policy formulation capability and broadly to the economic advancement of Ethiopia
  • promote the professional interests of economists
  • promote the study of economics in the country’s educational institutions
  • promote economic research and assist in the dissemination of the findings of such research in Ethiopia
  • provide fora for the discussion of economic issues
  • promote professional contacts between Ethiopian economists and those of other countries

The Future Agricultures Consortium (www.future-agricultures.org) is an alliance of African and UK-based research organisations seeking to provide timely, high-quality and independent information and advice to improve agricultural policy and practice in Sub-Saharan Africa. APRA is a five-year research programme of FAC which aims to generate new evidence and understanding of pathways to agricultural commercialisation and their differential impacts on livelihoods and rural economies in eight countries in the region, including Ethiopia.

Working Paper 26: Changing farm structure and agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria

Written by, Milu Muyanga, Adebayo Aromolaran, Thomas Jayne, Saweda Liverpool-Tasie, Titus Awokuse andAdesoji Adelaja

Evidence is mounting that the rise of medium-scale investor farms and associated changes in the distribution of farm sizes are occurring in many African countries. These changes in the distribution of farm sizes are creating important and wide-ranging impacts at all stages of agricultural value chains. However, these effects remain poorly understood and only examined in a small number of countries to date. A better understanding of the effects of changing farm size distributions are urgently needed to guide policies aimed at achieving agricultural commercialisation and broader economic transformation objectives. This paper provides improved evidence for policies designed to support equitable and poverty-reducing agricultural commercialisation in Nigeria.

Collective Action within Poor Farming Communities in Western Ghana

Attempts to improve rural livelihoods tend to emphasise private sector and informal economic arrangements or social protection mechanisms, in the hope that these would spur local self-help initiatives among the poor. Underlying such thinking is the assumption that success in these initiatives would mobilise the rural poor towards the solution of larger collective action problems. However, preliminary findings from our study of five oil palm producing communities in Ghana’s Western Region lead us to question the optimism of this perspective.

Our study

The study involved a mapping of the key actors in the oil palm economy. We interviewed and conducted focus group discussions with farmers and their dependents, farm workers, small-scale processors, agents, large oil processing companies, local authorities in the communities and district agricultural officers. However, the complexities we observed defy the easy classifications of the above categories, indicating rich interconnections, multiple allegiances and unstable alliances. In this context, strong ties did not always translate into social capital.

Some farmers sell their produce directly to the oil palm companies (OPCs), but many also do so through purchasing agents. Over time, relations between farmers and OPCs have become distant and formal. On the other hand, agents try to forge very close relations with the farmers who supply them with palm fruits; employing strategies that include giving small gifts to the farmers, pre-financing harvesting for cash-strapped farmers, or even joining the harvesting gangs themselves.

However, there are limits to the cordiality of such informal relations. Mistrust prevails amongst the key actors in the industry. Take the pricing of fruits, for example; prices are determined by the OPCs; agents, who are the largest suppliers of fruits to the OPCs, are seen to be capturing most of the value of this price. The agents determine the farm-gate price after deducting the costs of labour and transportation, then mark it up from what is offered by the OPCs. This arrangement results in suspicion among dissatisfied farmers, who accuse agents of unfairly lowering farmers’ prices. Their suspicion is further exacerbated by the agents’ practice of rigging their scales.

A well-run farmers’ organisation can help overcome many of these problems, for instance, by collectively bargaining the price of fruits with the OPCs or investing in palm oil processing, which could fetch them higher prices than what they get selling raw palm fruits. However, the diversity of interests among farmers, many of which being incompatible, undercuts the ability of these communities to engage in sustained collective action. The short-term costs of collective action are unevenly shared among group members and poorer farmers are likely to bear the brunt. Thus, without some form of inducement or safety net, the short-term material costs may prove too prohibitive for them. On the other hand, wealthier farmers, who can absorb higher costs, do not have the motivation to join these kinds of actions as they are not affected to the same degree as less resourced farmers, or they can find alternative solutions.

In addition, farmers’ associations are also burdened with serious internal problems. There is as much suspicion among the farmers who belong to these associations as there is between farmers and the other actors in the industry. Members accuse association leaders of incompetence, non-responsiveness, and malfeasance. Farmers recounted an instance where an association leader colluded with an agricultural extension officer to misappropriate resources the association had received from government; and, when this was discovered and an investigation was launched, the official committed suicide.

Our preliminary findings, therefore, point to the need to re-examine livelihood improvement schemes which place undue faith in informal or self-help arrangements. Self-help schemes may place heavy burdens on the poorest or most vulnerable. The implication is that a certain welfare threshold needs to have already been crossed before the poor can meaningfully participate in such collective self-help schemes.

Written by: Kofi Takyi Asante, Dorothy Takyiakwaa and Prince Selorm Tetteh

Photo credit: Esther Naa Dodua Darku

Why radical land reform is needed in the UK

Half of the land is owned by 1% of the people. Getting information on who owns what land it is nigh on impossible. Tax arrangements favour land speculation. Ordinary people cannot get access to land to grow food.

Where is this place? Not a settler country in southern Africa, but England/England and Wales/the UK. With the publication of a landmark report for the UK Labour Party, Land for the Many, at last equality of land access in Britain is on the political agenda (article/video summary here and here).

Typically, the right-wing press have got into a frenzy of indignation. George Monbiot (the lead author, working with a wider team) is going to take your land, destroy farming and tax your front garden. Middle England outrage does not respond to facts and arguments, but promotes misleading tropes. The spectre of Zimbabwe (and Venezuela) was raised in an absurdly ill-informed piece in the UK Daily Mail, which frothed: “What Labour is determined on is a new age of collectivism. Well, we know how disastrously that worked out in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere – famine and starvation”.

Pointing out hidden and stark privilege always raises hackles amongst the ruling class – and its media supporters. Look at the controversies around the Scottish land debate covered on this blog before, where land inequality is especially extreme. Aristocrats, corporations, the crown, Oxbridge colleges are all big owners, as well as some nouveau-riche speculative investors. In the arcane system of land taxation, inheritance rules and so on, huge amounts of wealth are tied up by this tiny group.

Suggesting a more democratic, equitable alternative, overturning the accepted status quo, is seen as an assault, even if it makes absolute sense. The outrage that has met the arguments for land reform in Zimbabwe have been voluble, vicious and intense (I know from experience). And again, wildly ill-informed. Just like the Daily Mail, facts are irrelevant when privilege is to be protected. And all this, despite wide acknowledgement that the massively skewed colonial inheritance ran against economic, political and social sense, and that smallholder-led agrarian transformation can generate many gains (although not without challenges, as described many, many times on this blog).

The report is radical yet practical. There is a welter of suggestions for policy change. Some are very specific to the UK setting, but there is much else in the report that will have resonance elsewhere. A number of themes grabbed my attention.

  • The lack of public transparency – and so accountability – around land ownership is highlighted. You have to pay to view each deed in the land registry, and that means it would cost millions to find out who owns the land in Britain, as the system was privatised, and has to cover its costs. This suits elite landowners, but it doesn’t help those who want to get access to land, as it’s impossible to find out where land is available, and it’s opaque how it is priced. Those who own the land control the system and, with the support of the Daily Mail, they want to keep it that way. Opening up data though helps the democratisation of land ownership, and ensuring citizens are active in the process of deciding how the nation’s land is used.
  • The report recommends that public land – including that owned by local councils – should be put to better use, and prevent it being sold off to speculative investors, especially near urban areas. Such areas could, the report argues, provide the basis for food-growing and employment and the development of local economies, aiming for a more sustainable, local food system, reinvigorating the ‘county farm’ system. An important element of this proposal, includes a focus on rural workers. If the UK leaves the EU, gaining access to labour for farm production will become a big issue, so making the countryside attractive for a range of workers, and ensuring that conditions and rights are assured, and rural work becomes an attractive proposition for younger people.
  • The history of capitalism in Britain (as elsewhere) is one of enclosure. Karl Marx observed long ago that “Land grabbing on a great scale [. . .] is the first step in creating a field for the establishment of agriculture on a great scale. Hence this subversion of agriculture puts on, at first, more the appearance of a political revolution”. Land grabbing and privatisation of land through narrow property titling systems is also a phenomenon across Africa, supported by western corporations and donors. The report suggests that reclaiming the commons, and the spirit of community-based land use, offers many possibilities. Community trusts could own land for their own use or for protecting landscapes, watersheds and other environmental values. And opening up land for community growing in allotments is seen as a priority.
  • There are many interesting proposals around the implications of redistributing land wealth on housing. Addressing inflated land values can help to release areas for building for the poor, and reduce prices of housing. In the UK a huge proportion of the value of housing is in the land, and this continues to increase making housing more expensive, and incentives to capture land for speculative investment rises and rises. Through new forms of land ownership, this could radically change the housing access, shifting where value is held.
  • Tax is talked about a lot in the report. Land taxes – taxes on extreme wealth – can be a highly progressive move, and are long overdue. Addressing issues of underutilisation of land or housing stock is essential in the UK, as it is in Zimbabwe, currently preventing those who could productively use land from doing so. With the financialisation of land and resources, distortions occur and result in rampant speculation as land becomes an ‘asset class’, rather than a collective resource.

Hopefully, once a Labour-led administration is in power in the UK, connections might be forged between the UK and other places where land inequality is constraining a flourishing economy and society. Maybe successful resettlement farmers from Zimbabwe can come to the UK to advise on and learn about ways of putting land to better use. As the report argues, land must be for the many, not the few.

Written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on his blog Zimbabweland.

Picture credit: Ian Scoones

Responding to uncertainty: who are the experts?

Uncertainties are everywhere, part of life. But how to respond? Who are the experts? These are questions that we are debating this week at an ESRC STEPS Centre symposium. But they are also questions very pertinent to daily life in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere in the world.

Everyday uncertainties

For example, last week in Zimbabwe, a new currency arrangement was announced overnight. The multi-currency regime disappeared and all monetary transactions within the country had to take place in the Zimbabwe dollar. No-one expected this to happen so suddenly.

This year too farmers have confronted uncertainties in their farming practices, with a widespread drought. An El Nino event was predicted, but what impact this would have, where on cropping and livestock production was unknown. Farmers and herders have had to adapt and innovate.

Many of those who received plots as part of the land reform after 2000 are still awaiting confirmation of the status of their holdings. Offer letters have been issued by multiple authorities and sometimes to different people. Many with medium-scale A2 farms were promised leases, but their issuing has been painfully slow. Securing finance has therefore become very uncertain.

Agricultural markets have always been uncertain, as prices supply with both local and global demand. But selling tobacco, for example, has become more tricky today. Contracting arrangements are fragile, and auction sales are subject to all sorts of mediation making prices unclear. Even getting your crop to the sales floors can be subject to uncertainties, as police extract bribes at roadblocks.

In the past two decades, the economy as a whole has been informalised. Secure, stable jobs are rare. Instead, many must make a living in a highly precarious setting. The kukiya-kiya economy – improving and making do – is the norm. This provides opportunities, but also challenges. Traders in an urban setting selling vegetables can have their businesses closed down at a stroke, as some ‘planning’ law is invoked by the local state. This has devastating consequences for traders, and their farmer suppliers.

Improvised responses, remembered pasts

These are just some examples; there are many more. Zimbabweans have become experts at responding to uncertainty. The old certainties of the past, based on stable, agreed plans, rules and regulations have gone. Informality means that transactions across numerous players have expanded.

And, added to this, people must respond to the wider global challenges of climate changedisease outbreak and volatility in financial markets, for example. Layered uncertainties intersect in an increasingly complex setting. Improvisation, experimentation, adaptation, negotiation are the watchwords in the performance of responding to intersecting uncertainties.

This can generate anxiety and stress. Confronting these challenges is not easy when you are having to make a living. Life depends on navigating a whole array of uncertainties. Coping takes many forms. When formal systems don’t exist or are not trusted, gossip, rumour and informal networks become important. Who knows what the parallel market rate is? Where is the best place to market a product? What time of day or night is it safe to travel on the road and avoid costly extortion? All these questions are regularly asked by Zimbabwe farmers (and others), with responses exchanged via Whatsapp. When the stresses of responding to uncertainty increase, humour is a good release. Jokes, stories, satire and songs are all very Zimbabwean outlets.

Some dream of the past, conjuring up a vision of when things were all apparently OK. Some even refer back to the colonial past when order and stability were features. Back then, so the narratives go, you knew where you stood; the system worked; a contract meant a firm agreement; the local currency was strong. Of course, nostalgic memories of the past are part of how the challenges of today are coped with too.

Yet, these constructed pasts of course don’t reflect the reality. Stability and order were created in favour of a certain elite and arbitrary intervention – removal of land, arrest for dissent, forcing of conservation measures on agricultural land and so on – were part of this regime of control. The past is not the answer to the future, even when the present is especially challenging.

Uncertainty: a sign of the times

It’s not only Zimbabweans who must confront the challenges of the new contexts of turbulence, complexity and uncertainty. This is a global phenomenon as the old systems fail to contain and control. Whether it’s climate chaos, the collapse of financial systems, mass migrations, epidemic disease outbreaks or the unravelling of political settlements, uncertainties are everywhere. And the old systems of control and order – what James Scott called ‘seeing like a state’ – no longer function. Our institutions are not geared up to respond to complexity and uncertainty of the sort seen today. They are failing on all fronts, and new alternatives are needed.

This is the topic of the symposium this week organised by the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex, which I co-direct. With participants examining everything from crime to volcanoes, we are aiming to unpack the politics of uncertainty, and explore the implications. I don’t think we will nail it in two days, but the event has attracted much interest from very diverse fields. We have participants focusing on finance and insurance, as well as disaster risk management and disease preparedness. Others have been researching new technologies – from driverless cars to CRISPR genetic tech – while others are concerned with global migration and expanding cities.

A central feature of these discussions is the distinction between uncertainty (where we don’t know the likelihoods of outcomes) and risk (where likelihoods are known, or can reliably be estimated). This is important, because how you respond must differ. With risk, clear control-based management is possible. Models, designs and plans all provide support for a rational, directed response. With uncertainty, you cannot predict, and different responses must follow. As Andy Stirling – the other co-director of the Centre – points out in this short video, there are other dimensions of incertitude too; and taking these seriously is essential.

In advance of the symposium – and as part of the background work for our PASTRES project on pastoralism and uncertainty – I produced a (rather long and quite dense) working paper called ‘What is Uncertainty and Why does it Matter?’. You can read it here. It is an attempt to grapple with the vast literature on risk and uncertainty. You can judge for yourself whether I was successful; it wasn’t an easy task!

Taking uncertainty seriously, I argue, is essential for addressing complexity, turbulence and contexts where knowledge about what the future holds are unclear. But this also requires a radical rethinking of how we go about everything from technological assessment to disaster preparedness to infrastructure design to the management of financial and market networks. In other words, it means a fundamental rethinking of what we once thought of as ‘development’.

This is a rather big, perhaps overambitious, argument, but I think it’s important. I was lucky enough to be invited to Copenhagen University recently to receive this year’s Ester Boserup prize for development research. I was very pleased to accept, especially as I am a big fan of Ester Boserup’s work, as it was always thoroughly empirically-based, challenging of conventional wisdoms and radically interdisciplinary, and often not accepted by the mainstream. My talk (35 min talk in video also below) tried to lay out these arguments, of why embracing uncertainty means a radical rethinking of development.

Who are the real experts?

The uncertainty working paper and the Copenhagen talk lay out the bigger arguments, but we must recognise that there are those, by both necessity and choice, who are already living with and off uncertainty, from whom we can learn.

This includes the pastoralists we are researching with in Amdo Tibet in China, southern Ethiopia, western India, northern Kenya, Sardinia and southern Tunisia as part of the PASTRES project, who have for millennia have made a living in highly variable environments.

Zimbabweans too are experts in uncertainty – perhaps especially so, given the turbulence of the political and economic setting over the past two decades. Zimbabweans have been learning the skills and aptitudes, and managing the stress and anxiety, that an uncertain world requires.

Nostalgic dreaming of an imagined past is not the answer, but inventing new practices and institutions that make the informal, networked, volatile, uncertain world possible – less a source of stress and anxiety, but supported and facilitated – is a crucial challenge for us all.

The experts who can radically transform both thinking and practice in development must therefore include Zimbabwe’s farmers and traders, along with pastoralists, front-line health officials dealing with disease outbreaks, brokers in complex, volatile, financial markets, and reliability professionals in critical infrastructures – and the many, many others. All of whom, in different, dispersed ways, are inventing a future (in ways as yet often unrecognised) that matches the huge challenge of uncertainty.

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

Working Paper 25: Building Livelihoods: Young People and Agricultural Commercialisation in Africa: Zimbabwe Country Study

Written by Easther Chigumira

This paper is concerned with how young people in the Mvurwi Farming Area in Zimbabwe engage with or are affected by agricultural commercialisation. Mvurwi’s commercialised rural economy offers opportunities for young people to engage in a range of activities as producers, on-farm and off-farm wage workers, and/or as business operators, which allows them to accumulate a range of assets including residential plots, investment in education, household goods, vehicles, and business operations. The study findings show an agile and determined group of young men and women who have consciously turned to the rural economy for a myriad of economic activities to augment revenue streams. Nevertheless, their livelihood opportunities are vulnerable to a number of hazards and, as a result, young people adopt a ‘ducking and diving’ approach to navigate the structural, physical, and individual hurdles or hazards that they encounter in a bid to forge a living within this vibrant rural economy.

Evidence uptake and use to transform Africa: Lessons from the “Utafiti Sera” model

APRA members from Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and Nigeria attended a two-day convening meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, which was organised by Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR). The main objective of the meeting was to bring together 120 participants from 20 countries and diverse disciplines (including practitioners, researchers, scientists, activists, government officials and policy makers) to share and learn from unique different approaches to Evidence Informed Decision Making (EIDM). EIDM would help to build on various efforts in which researchers have worked with policy actors, decision makers and other stakeholders to advance policy formulation and action in Africa.

The use of scientific evidence to inform policy decision-making in is crucial due to the transformation sweeping across Africa. However, there is recognition that Africa is still lagging when it comes to evidence use to inform policy and program processes. One of the reasons that have been documented to this lack of evidence use is a lack of capacity to do so. To deal with this challenge, PASGR has partnered with Africa Platform for Social Protection (APSP, Kenya), Centre for African Bio-Entrepreneurship (CABE, Kenya), Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR, Rwanda) LEAP Africa (Nigeria) and Pamoja Trust (Kenya) to implement a model to bridge the gap between evidence and policy processes. The model is called “Utafiti Sera,” a Swahili word for “research policy.” The Utafiti Sera model builds a community of researchers and policy actors working together to ensure that appropriate and negotiated policy actions and uptake occur around issues for which evidence has been provided.

In his remarks, Professor Tade Aina, the executive director of PASGR stressed that this whole idea of EIDM has come with the growing recognition that there are a lot of people that are doing research work to inform policy, young researchers are on the rise, many universities have good data, but how evidence and data is being used to inform policy remains a big question. In addition, uptake of evidence in Africa has been slow and most of the initiatives promoted are without evidence that they will work. The executive director further explained that the Utafiti Sera model is a means of sharing research evidence with policy makers, since evidence is very important to bring political and social leaders to the table for negotiations.

The meeting was organised in such a way that there was a keynote address, plenary discussions, as well as breakout sessions. The main topics of discussion were tackling youth unemployment through technical and vocational training and the role of research evidence; innovative approaches to evidence uptake in Africa; and political economy plus political cultures’ influence and impact on evidence uptake. Some of the notable points during the discussions were that mobilisation of knowledge is not just technical but also political and social. What this definition means is that producing technical knowledge or evidence to inform policy is not enough, there is also the need to consider the political ramifications and social relations that exist where the evidence is to be disseminated and used. With this in mind, researchers will be producing evidence and packaging it to suit the political and social environment, hence improving the relevance of the evidence produced.

Regarding innovative approaches, the discussions were around what do we mean by innovation, and what makes something innovative. Here the main argument was that something innovative must be about new creations or new ways of combing existing elements in ways to address the current and/or future challenges. It is also thinking about people at the centre of policy processes and bringing them together to dialogue and provide solutions.  This is where Utafiti Sera comes in. From an economic perspective, Utafiti Sera is like a market of evidence and ideas and research; it creates space, a market place or a forum for evidence produced; and, it also helps to create an environment where all parties are treated equally, acknowledging their importance and not looking at one party, say an academic one, as more important. Some of the innovative approaches discussed included: communication, dialogue, engagements, use of champions, institutionalised transformation for sustainability, and capacity building to embrace evidence uptake. This non-linear policy process was emphasised by Dr. Hannington Odame, Executive Director of CABE, based in Kenya, in his presentation, ‘Charting the path for a youth apprenticeship policy: lessons from Utafiti Sera house on youth employment creation in agriculture and agro-processing in Kenya’.

What was clear from the discussions was that there is a growing understanding that evidence is available, but this does not translate to implementation of policy and initiatives informed by that evidence. This lack of translation is because there is disconnect between the evidence produced and what is being implemented. The meeting tried to identify where the problem lies: is it the part of the evidence producers, the evidence translators or the evidence users? My analysis is that, along the whole chain, something needs to be done. On the part of knowledge-producers, they must produce evidence and package it with the audience in mind, since as customers, the audience need to be convinced beyond doubt that the evidence is important. The knowledge brokers need to simplify the evidence even further to suit the environment in which they are to be used or considered. Evidence users also have a lot to do, starting from building their capacity, to being able to understand the evidence produced, as well as making efforts to use the evidence as much as possible in policy formulation and the planning of different initiatives.

As APRA, the meeting was very important for us to build on our policy engagement plan that we have developed through Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) and Accompanied Learning for Relevance and Effectiveness (ALRE) exercises. We have mapped the main stakeholders to engage through these exercises, to influence uptake of evidence generated from our policy researches and it was important for us to learn how other organisations are managing this, especially from the Utafiti Sera model.

Written by: Loveness Msofi and the APRA team (viz. Olajide Adeola, Blessings Chinsinga, Dawit Alemu and Hannington Odame)

Photo credit: Dawit Alemu

Youth engagement with commercialisation hotspots in Zimbabwe

My interest in youth and agriculture commercialisation stemmed from two pivotal moments in the past decade. One from an ‘accidental finding’ from a 10-year longitudinal study of land beneficiaries of the Fast Track Land Reform (FTLRP) in Sanyati District, Zimbabwe for my doctoral study. Here, young people (children of the first settlers and those from surrounding urban areas) had made deliberate decisions to stay in or step into agriculture production and/or actively engage with the broader rural agrarian economy.  The other pivotal moment came from a meeting with both government and civil society, in which the policy narrative on the developmental challenges of young people in Zimbabwe centred on their disinterest in the agrarian economy and in finding income-earning opportunities that seemed to have an industrialisation and urban focus. This viewpoint and my ‘accidental finding’ called me to question and interrogate the broader narrative on how to relate to the youth challenge and the theory that the rural economy – built around agriculture but encompassing much more – will be able to provide employment opportunities for many millions of young people into the near future.

The theory is that rural areas, where such transformational processes take root, will provide more diverse and better remunerated on- and off-farm employment opportunities for young people. However, to date there has been little research that looks specifically at how rural young people in Africa engage with, or are affected by, two processes closely associated with rural transformation – agricultural intensification and agricultural commercialisation.

Research

The proposition that underpins the APRA Youth Policy Study is that important insights about rural youth and commercialisation can be gained from studying existing commercialisation hotspots. In recent research in the Mvurwi farming area in the Mazowe District, Zimbabwe, we examined steps and pathways with which groups of young people in rural Zimbabwe seek to construct livelihoods in or around areas of significant agricultural commercialisation, and the outcomes associated with these efforts.  In-depth interviews of 40 young people between the ages of 15 to 35 were undertaken.

We identified four possible modes of engagement within commercialisation hotspots: (1) on-farm production, (2) on-farm wage labour, (3) off-farm-wage labour, and (4) business operation. Within each of these modes of engagement there are a range of income-generating activities; for example, on-farm production might entail production of cereal, horticultural or commercial crops (like maize and tobacco); while off-farm wage labour might involve working as a vegetable vendor, shopping assistant or selling clothes or hardware in a flea market. Between and within these different modes of engagement, there are different resource, knowledge and social barriers to entry, and it is these differences that have important implications for those who are able to take advantage of particular opportunities.

The study reveals that, while many young people had not initially placed farming as an aspiration whilst in school, there was disappointment around education and financial need, whereas for others opportunities created by the FTLRP were key motivations for entering the rural economy. Our findings show an agile and determined group of young men and women who have consciously decided to make good on their early setbacks and have turned to the rural economy for a myriad of economic activities to augment their revenue streams. Even though many of the activities engaged with have low barrier to entry, most interviewees still required some form of support from social networks or families to start and maintain their economic activities or to access resources in the form of land, capital and inputs. Engagement in agricultural activities enabled these young people to accumulate a range of assets including residential plots, investment into their own education and that of their children, household goods, vehicles and business operations. Accumulation of these assets reflects the combination of a relatively dynamic rural economy, enabling social relations, plus hard work and determination. 

However, what is of concern is that the livelihood activities of these young people are vulnerable to hazards, which can destroy any economic gains made from their multiple economic activities. The hazards described include drought and unreliable rain, the unstable macro-economic environment, price distortions due to interference by middlemen, ill-health and demand for money to meet obligations of the extended family. Hazards such as these are part of daily life and may necessitate the liquidation of hard-won assets.  As such, young people adopt a ducking and diving approach to navigate the structural, physical and individual hurdles or hazards that they encounter in a bid to forge a living and future within this vibrant rural economy.

The overall conclusion of the study is that an area of intensive agricultural commercialisation, compared to one with limited commercialisation, provides opportunities for young people across the different modes of engagement. It shows that the experiences of these youths in efforts to build their livelihoods deserves policy attention and a shift in the developmental narrative on youth and agriculture.

Recommendations

These findings have two key implications for strategies that seek to promote employment for Africa’s youth who reside in rural areas. Firstly, policy options, for young people in Zimbabwe’s rural economy, need to first acknowledge that the rural economy presents opportunities for young people across the different modes of engagement. Second, policy and existing programmes ought to protect young people’s accumulated gains from hazards in the rural environment. One way to do this is through social protection programmes to support initiatives emerging from within the rural economies themselves, such as the expansion of access to resources under a government subsidy programme, not limited to ownership of land. There may also be opportunities to use programmes to make it less likely that key assets would need to be liquidated in order to meet unexpected or emergency expenses. The findings also have relevance with the need to address issues around quality, completion and outcomes associated with rural people’s education.

Written by: Easther Chigumira

Photo credit: Easther Chigumira

Are African youth innovative?

This is the question that we address in a new article published in the Journal of Rural Studies. Entitled ‘Are African rural youth innovative? Claims, evidence and implications’, the paper is open access and free to download.

Our interest in this question is rooted in the fact that claims about the innovative behaviour of African youth, and their propensity to adopt new technology, have become integral to much policy discourse around youth, agriculture and employment. Because innovation and innovative behaviour are so tightly linked to economic growth, the claim that African youth are innovative – or are particularly innovative – sets the stage for a ‘smart economics’ justification for governments and development organisations investing in them. Simply put, the smart economics argument goes like this: invest in youth because they are innovative and that it is good for economic growth, and specifically it will help deliver the much heralded ‘demographic dividend’.

Claims and arguments like this really matter because they influence resource allocation and choice of development interventions.

The problem is that we could identify no direct or indirect evidence to support the claim that African youth – as a whole – are innovative, or are more innovative than the older generation. Indeed the extensive literature from the North on the relationships between age and innovative behaviour in the work place, or creativity, does not support the proposition that these relations are simple, linear or direct.

These findings do not call into question the urgent need to invest in youth, but they do suggest that alternative framings and justifications for such investment are badly needed. Instead of smart economics, a strong justification could be built around young people’s – indeed everyone’s – right to decent work, and this would open up new perspectives on both policy and intervention.

This article was originally published on the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) site.

Written by: James Sumberg & Stephen Hunt

A lever for agricultural commercialisation? A critical look at the agricultural extension system in Malawi.

In this assessment, we ask the question: is the extension services system in Malawi doing enough to facilitate agricultural commercialisation among smallholder farmers? This question arrives amidst concerns that commercial agriculture in Malawi, especially among small-scale farmers, has not really taken off as farmers struggle to produce and sell their produce. That situation occurred despite the fact the transition from subsistence farming to commercial farming is seen as one of the critical ingredients to economic growth and improvement in peoples’ livelihoods. In addition, there has been extensive government and donor support to the agricultural extension sector to provide the much-needed extension services, to foster agricultural commercialisation among farmers. Here we learn three things: (1) what the system is doing, (2) what it is not doing, and (3), what the system can do.

What the extension system is doing

The assessment draws from a study (the forthcoming APRA study, ‘Livelihood trajectories of households participating in groundnut commercialisation in Malawi’)  in which we asked opinions and experiences of farmers about the role of extension in commercial agriculture, in terms of messages they were getting, sources of information, approaches used and their general view on agricultural extension’s role. We wanted to find out how these have changed over time, from the 1980s to the present. Findings indicate there have been changes in sources of agricultural information overtime. Farmers no longer exclusively rely on government extension officers, but also on extension services provided by other players, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

To some extent this reliance has been beneficial, as it has somehow relieved the government of the cost of reaching out to the growing population of farmers. Furthermore, the pluralist nature of the contemporary extension system has helped the extension system to have a wide range of extension service providers to respond to the demands of farmers which are coming in partly due to attempts to shift from subsistence to commercial farming. The critical question remains: are smallholder farmers in Malawi receiving adequate services to help them commercialise? Some commentators (Masangano and Mthinda, 2012) have argued that with pluralism the provision of extension services is undermined by issues of coordination, often resulting in duplication of effort as well as confusion among the farmers because the extension messages offered by different stakeholders tend to be contradictory.

The findings also show that messages being delivered to farmers have evolved overtime, whilst the extension system is trying to respond to the changing needs of farmers and the emerging developments in the agricultural sector. There is a general consensus that there has been some significant change, from extension messages as production-oriented to market-oriented, to assist farmers in their quest to commercialise. This has mainly been observed regarding the NGOs, who have tried to promote farming as a business, often through their project approach that target specific areas within a specific timeframe. This positive change in the orientation of extension messages has been replicated in the government’s extension delivery efforts. This change has seen the introduction of the agribusiness sub-sector in the extension system designed to teach agribusiness skills among farmers, advise them on market research, train them to conduct gross margin analyses, and link them to markets – including other support services, such as credit and input supply. 

The study also found that there has been a shift from individual approaches of contacting farmers to group approaches coupled with mass communication approaches, especially with the use of radios and mobile phones. These shifts have been made to improve coverage, as well as to help farmers benefit meeting as a group. Group formation has been an important part of the process of commercial farming, as farmers benefit from sharing ideas, learning from each other’s experiences, accessing other services such as loans, buying inputs in bulk and also selling as a group (collective marketing), which helps in accessing better markets and negotiating prices.

What the extension system is not doing

These positive developments notwithstanding smallholder farmers expressed dissatisfaction with the role the extension system is playing in promoting agricultural commercialization, particularly in relation to markets. Farmers acknowledged that access to extension services has helped them change their mindset, to take farming as a business, but they are not happy with the buyers or the prices they are offering. They are concerned that that there is lack of regulation of the informal sector within the marketing of produce, especially groundnuts, which gives the buyers an opportunity to exploit them. Further improvement in the extension system is required, especially in emphasising the primary role of agricultural extension, which include, but is not limited to: changing farmers knowledge; improving farmers skills; persuading farmers to adopt technologies; changing attitudes and perceptions; and facilitating linkages with markets, research and other support services, such as credit, value addition and inputs.

What the extension system needs to do

The extension system must do more to equip farmers with knowledge on what, when and how to produce, so as to match with the consumer demands. In addition, information will empower them to access good markets for their produce. There is need to train farmers in a wide range of skills such as business planning, gross margin analysis, record keeping, negotiation skills which are crucial for commercial farming. This need is in addition to conventional production skills, in terms of recommended agricultural husbandry practices and climate smart agricultural practices. Smallholder farmers should also be exposed to ICT technologies – such as radios and mobile phones – that can help them access production and marketing information. Smallholder farmers must be challenged to take risks and reduce the syndrome of deeply entrenched dependency, plus more needs to be done linking farmers to lucrative markets, as well as promoting value addition in order to improve quality of products which will improve prices at the markets.

Conclusion

There is a need for government and donor commitments to providing funds for agricultural extension services and implementation of the enabling policies so that quality delivery of extension services to farmers can be ensured.

Written by: Loveness Msofi Mgalamadzi, Blessings Chinsinga and Miriam Matita

Photo credit: One Acre Fund, Malawi

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative: what’s in it for Africa?

The huge Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Forum recently concluded in Beijing. 37 heads of state attended, along with droves of policy advisors and numerous thinktanks and research institutes, including IDS where I work. Monica Mutsvanga, Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services, attended on behalf of the Zimbabwe government. By all accounts it was a lavish affair, with grand speeches and big commitments totalling $64 billion. But what to make of it all from an African perspective?

As discussed on this blog several times before (see herehere and here), while Chinese engagements with Africa can be framed in terms of ‘new imperialism’ or part of a benign process of ‘mutual learning’, in practice a more nuanced perspective is needed. African states have agency in the process of negotiation, and the Chinese always adopt an incremental and adaptive approach to policy, in Africa as in China. There is no single top-down plan to be forced on unwilling recipients.

As our studies of Chinese (and Brazilian) investments in African agriculture (in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe – reported in an open access World Development issue) showed, what emerges varies from country to country, project to project, depending on how negotiations play out. And this very much depends on which Chinese state owned company, from which province in China, is involved, and how African states and officials negotiate. Sometimes the outcomes are disastrous – inappropriate technologies and failed projects – but sometimes positive dynamics unfold. No surprises here: Chinese engagements are very similar to aid from Denmark, the UK or the US, just more focused on productive infrastructure and perhaps more honest and straightforward.

Beyond the BRI rhetoric

At the BRI Forum there was grand talk of mutual benefit, inclusive approaches and green and sustainable development. Just as with western aid, forget the rhetoric, and look at the practice. Chinese geopolitical and commercial ambitions are clear. The BRI is certainly about regional, even global, political influence, especially through trade. With coal mines and power stations being opened under its banner, forget the green credentials for now. As a strategic player, who plays the (often very) long game, the benefits to China of all the roads, ports and other infrastructure being built are obvious.

This does not mean though that such investments are disadvantageous to host countries and regions, just because China benefits too. The TAZARA railway built between Tanzania and Zambia in the early 1970s still provides an important trade link, assisting economic integration. New investments may too – but only if designed in the right way, and subject to careful deliberation and negotiation at a local level. Being too eager (or desperate) to receive Chinese investment could be dangerous.

Minister Mutsvanga’s speech in Beijing had a hint of this. Repeating the ED ‘mantra’ (her term) that Zimbabwe is ‘open for business’, she continued:

Zimbabwe has fertile soils and a favourable climate for farming and agro-industry. It is a treasure trove of much desired mineral wealth. Zimbabwe has gold, diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones. There is the diverse energy offering of hydroelectric power, thermal and coking coal, methane gas. For new and green energy there is, platinum, lithium, uranium and abundant solar. Base metals galore include chrome, nickel, vanadium, tin, rare earths and scores of others.

This sounds more than being open for bilateral negotiations around mutually beneficial investment; more an invitation to a resource grab. The Chinese are not immune to this, as the sorry tale of diamond mining in Marange shows. But it needn’t be this way: being open for business doesn’t mean open for any business on any terms.

Waving the flag, the state-run newspapers in Zimbabwe hailed the minister’s visit, and the prospects for Zimbabwe. But the list of supposed BRI projects – such as the new parliament – were planned long before, and nothing to do with building a corridor for trade. To link with the BRI hype in Beijing, the Chinese Ambassador to Zimbabwe opened a BRI art exchange exhibition, demonstrating how the two countries were connected. Cultural exchange is certainly a good thing, but Minister Mutsvanga, I think, was looking for more.

Corridors for development?

So what might a corridor development look like that has wider benefits for development, and is not simply a route to facilitating extractivism? A recent study carried out along the eastern seaboard of Africa – in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique – has looked at four very different corridors, all notionally connected to the BRI – LAPSSET, SAGCOT, Nacala and Beira. All involve major port and road/rail developments, linked to a variety of energy and agricultural investments of varying scales (see the earlier blog on Mozambique).

Our research contrasted corridors constructed as ‘tunnels’, conducting valuable resources out of a country and importing goods to metropolitan centres, and ‘networks’, that allow linkages to rural hinterlands and a dynamic of development associated with the investments. Each of our case studies showed elements of both at play.

Corridors, as Euclides Gonsalves explains for Mozambique, are about ‘acts of demonstration’, linking political ambitions to local development. The grand, stylised performances at the BRI Forum in Beijing also play out in villages and project sites in African rural areas. Enlisting and enrolling actors, and material artefacts (grain siloes, extension centres, new roads and so on), are part of the game. Enacting corridors has political and material effects, as some people are included and some excluded, and certain political interests are promoted. The net benefits may be positive, but the performative aspect is key, he argues.

Many corridors are about constructing imaginaries, and creating an economy of expectations, Ngala Chome argues for LAPSSET in Kenya. The corridor has been long planned, and while port facilities are being built in Lamu, many follow-on investments have not yet materialised. Anticipation, expectation and speculation create a new political economy around prospective corridor sites, as we see in the pastoral rangelands of Isiolo where the pipeline and road is expected to traverse. As our work under the PASTRES project shows, pastoralists in these areas complain this has resulted in a massive growth in speculative land deals.

A struggle over development and its directions is unleashed by corridor developments. Everyone has been crying out for investment, but when it comes, the terms of incorporation are inevitably uneven. As Emmanuel Sulle shows for the sugar and rice plantations in the SAGCOT corridor area of Tanzania, processes of displacement and disenfranchisement unfold. And this is even with ‘inclusive’ business models, such as outgrower schemes, heavily promoted by agricultural investors across the corridors.

Networks not tunnels

What are the policy recommendations from our APRA corridors research? Here are the highlights:

  • Policy appraisal must include political economy analysis to explore the potential winners and losers. External capital/infrastructure investment mobilises local interests, including local capital and the state, creating new patterns of differentiation. This means appraisal must go beyond the standard economic assessment to a wider social and political analysis.
  • The design of a corridor – and the associated business models promoting agricultural investment – make a big difference. Opportunities for a more networked organisation, avoiding the limitations of a ‘tunnel’ design, need to be explored, especially around the design of transport infrastructure that can benefit local economies.
  • Terms of inclusion and exclusion in corridors are mediated through a range of local institutional and political processes. For example, land speculation and the revitalisation of older conflicts over resources may occur as a result of corridor development. Benefits may be unevenly shared in already unequal societies, with women and poorer households missing out.
  • Processes for negotiating corridor outcomes require the mobilisation of less empowered actors – including women and poorer people – and their organisation around clear guidelines – such as those within the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on land tenure – that ensure terms of incorporation into corridor investments are not disadvantageous.
  • Support for legal literacy and advocacy, as well as the organisation of disadvantaged groups, will help people to be able to articulate demands. This requires building on local organisations and networks to help counter the power of appropriation of local elites in alliance with the state and investment capital.

All these are relevant for any investor, and for any corridor-style investment. I hope Minister Mutsvanga and the BRI planners take note, and avoid the rush to invest and take a more patient, deliberate approach that creates networks not tunnels.

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

Photo credit: Ian Scoones, Nampula, Mozambique

Challenging desertification myths

Tales of desertification across the world’s drylands are a recurrent theme in policy. This week’s blog reviews an excellent book that takes issue with many of the assumptions around desertification – The End of Desertification? Disputing Environmental Change in the Drylands. It was edited by Roy Behnke, an anthropologist with deep knowledge of pastoral areas in North and Southern Africa, West Asia and more, and Michael Mortimore, sadly now late, a development geographer, who knew a huge amount about the drylands of Africa, and particularly northern Nigeria.

The full review is available in the excellent open access journal, Pastoralism. You can download the full pdf here. In this blog, we reproduce a slightly abridged version.

Insights from non-equilibrium ecology

Myths of desertification have a long history. Ideas of desiccation and desert advance were framed by colonial science and informed by the narratives of the ‘dust bowl’ in the USA, as discussed by Diana Davis in her chapter on the history of desertification thinking. Yet, whether from long-term environmental monitoring, aerial and satellite photography, ecological modelling or local knowledge and field observation, the standard narratives have been found severely wanting, and, as Stephen Prince argues, basic definitions and systematic mapping are absent.

Challenges to desertification myths, and simplistic equilibrium approaches to rangeland dynamics based on Clementsian succession ecology, have of course long been made, as Roy Behnke and Michael Mortimore discuss in the opening chapter. For example, Jeremy Swift and Andrew Warren wrote classic papers in 1977 for the UN Conference on Desertification, but both were ignored.

Stephen Sandford’s important 1983 book on pastoralism made many similar points, based on a mountain of evidence. Building on the insights of Jim Ellis and the research team working in Turkana, Kenya, the Woburn conferences in the early 1990s resulted in two books that made the case for a new paradigm for African rangeland management (Range Ecology at Disequilibrium in 1993 and Living with Uncertainty in 1994, both of which I had a hand in).

This consolidation of empirical data within a new conceptual frame provoked lots of new work. For example, the science of remote sensing and the application of geographical information systems, supported by long-term ecological monitoring, have enhanced spatial understandings of environmental change massively, reinforcing the argument against a linear view of desertification and a more dynamic view, as illustrated in excellent chapters by Stefanie Hermann and Tene Kwetche Hop, as well as Pierre Hiernaux and colleagues.

As Alessandra Giannini outlines, 40 years of climate modelling in the Sahel generates a complex picture of drought and desertification, challenging the standard media narratives discussed by Mike Shanahan. As the case studies in the latter part of the book show – from southern Ethiopia to Patagonia to the Bolivian Andes to China – degradation of elements of dryland landscapes certainly occurs, but it is a complex and variegated process, not amenable to simple intervention or sweeping policy.

Science and the politics of policy

Unfortunately, much of this accumulated evidence has been ignored, and the narratives of desertification persist. Why is this? The relationship between science and policy is not linear: new data leading to a transformation of scientific paradigms does not necessarily result in a change in policy and practice. Evidence and policy, despite the rhetoric around evidence-based policymaking, are not neatly linked.

Why is it that, even when scientific evidence is seemingly incontrovertible, shifts in policy discourse and practice do not happen? As Lynn Huntsinger shows from the USA, a lot is to do with the power and stickiness of narratives – and so the politics of knowledge in policy. Other forces are at play, beyond the slow, patient and rigorous accumulation of knowledge.

From the 1990s, there were some in policy and practice circles who accepted the non-equilibrium view, questioning the simplistic versions of desertification across the drylands. But this was sometimes a naïve advocacy for ‘indigenous’ systems – valorising transhumance or nomadism in a simplistic, romantic way. Ignoring challenges of land management, and inventing an ideal ‘tradition’, is not the answer. Mainstream institutions and policy, while often playing lip service to changes in the growing critiques of the desertification framing, did not take the argument for rethinking seriously though. Paradigms may have shifted in science, but not in policy.

Even today, and despite fantastic books like this one, it is amazing how often you see projects, documents, statements and plans repeating the same old story, as if debates in science over decades had never happened. The annual ‘World Desertification Day’ is an occasion for repeating myths, while signatories to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification regurgitate the arguments in every national submission.

So why do things not change? One reason is that new ways of thinking only permeate through slowly via training, curriculum revisions and generational change in professions. Incumbent power also resists change. This reflects the conservative nature of institutions and professions. While the science of rangelands has shifted, old ideas stick among field-level departments, aid agencies and their officials. It is perhaps not surprising when there is fast turnover of staff, poor resourcing, and institutional inertia and limited learning.

But it is not only inertia. There is also a more active politics of resistance. ‘Seeing like a state’, rather than a pastoralist or dryland farmer, has many consequences, as states attempt to control, manage and discipline such marginal areas. Programmes of sedentarisation, fixed water points and often draconian environmental measures to combat desertification are regularly promoted, supported by international aid agencies, as Camilla Toulmin and Karen Brock explain for the Sahel.

As Mike Mortimore and Yamba Boubacar explain in their chapters, a more decentralised people-centred approach that has its focus on livelihoods and poverty, not environmental control, has much more likelihood of success. An alternative science of the drylands however is too often a long way from the discussion. Many interventions are about the exertion of state power and control, and the persistent and insidious power of incumbent institutions, hooked into a narrative that will not budge, and continues to be supported by international agencies.

In my view, one of the most mistaken moves in this field in the last 25 years was the creation of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. As a concession to African states in the post-Rio deal, it has not had the traction of the conventions on biodiversity or climate change. The desertification narrative suited many purposes, and the critiques first raised in UN circles in 1977 were not heeded.

The rhetoric is more sophisticated these days – participation, inclusion, cooperation, local knowledge and a wider view of land degradation are all part of the mix. But the fundamental frame remains. Many comment pieces, policy briefs and communiques repeat those tired and long-disputed statistics on land degradation or nutrient deficits. Too often, it is spurious science and economics presented as fact, supporting a narrative that we thought had been dismissed decades ago.

Embracing uncertainty, working with variability

As science over many decades has shown, and this book emphasises again, non-equilibrium ecology is a useful way of thinking about complex, highly variable dryland ecosystems – especially in the context of climate change. In particular, it provides a useful basis for challenging simplistic, linear desertification narratives.

The key lesson is that there is no simple, standardised solution to dryland development, especially with fast-changing climatic, economic and political contexts; flexibility, agility and adaptive management are key – lessons that seem to have been long learned in Australia, as Mark Stafford-Smith explains in the final chapter.

Particularly worrying in the last ten years has been how the desertification narrative has been reinforced by debates about climate change. Again, against much evidence, climate change is simply taken to mean a secular shift, and so increasing desiccation, leading to land degradation, desertification and conflict. In fact, much climate science points to processes of increasing variability and uncertainty, not secular change. As Tor Benjaminsen shows, the link between climate change and conflict is not straightforward. The satellite image data shows ‘deserts’ expanding and contracting over time in a complex patchwork, and not simply advancing, as various chapters discuss.

A focus on non-equilibrium, dynamic systems points to a different response – one centred on flexibility, adaptive management, responsive care and resilience, not control and technocratic intervention. The desertification narrative promotes a control-oriented response – with destocking, ‘green belts’, forest planting and engineering solutions dominating – rather than one that embraces uncertainty, and makes productive use of variability, as in the non-equilibrium paradigm. But of course, realising the alternative paradigm is difficult. Institutional biases, procedures and routines reinforce control, especially when funding agencies and governments have fewer and fewer people in the field, connecting with the real world of the drylands.

So will this book make a difference? I hope so, but it will require connecting the evidence so well laid out in this book to a wider debate and shifting the underlying politics of knowledge and practice that underpin the desertification narrative. Evidence, as we have seen, is not enough. A new, practical narrative realised in action on the ground is required – translating the science of 25 years or more into new ways of doing things.

As Mark Stafford-Smith urges, in the last sentence of the book, ‘Let us find a positive narrative for the drylands’. This book is an important part of this project, but only a first step. Let us hope its contents are widely read by all those policymakers and donors stuck in the old paradigm.

This blog was originally posted in PASTRES’ (Pastoralism, Uncertainty, Resilience) blog.

Written by: Ian Scoones, University of Sussex.

Image credit: Martina de Angeli

Seeing Conflict at the Margins: understanding community experiences through social research and digital narrative in Kenya and Madagascar.

This month a new website is being launched for a project called ‘Seeing Conflict at the Margins: understanding community experiences through social research and digital narrative in Kenya and Madagascar.’

Their activities and some links are introduced below – for further details, visit them at: http://seeingconflict.org

They will be announcing their new website on social media (twitter.com/SeeingConflict) in the first two weeks of May.

Abstract:

Interdisciplinary methods to generate new insights on conflict

This project bridges the social sciences (social anthropology and human geography), the humanities (history, digital arts, film and visual inquiry) and community-based participatory research to examine how different ‘communities’ of actors ‘see’ and experience resource conflicts.

Since 2017, interdisciplinary UK-Kenya-Madagascar research/facilitation teams have used stakeholder analysis and qualitative fieldwork techniques, alongside facilitating a variety of participatory visual and audio methods with members of communities living adjacent and near to sites of largescale resource investments.

The teams are co-producing and contextualising multimedia narratives from the perspectives of local residents, private sector, civil society and state actors around four focal resource conflict settings. These include the largest geothermal and wind power sites in sub-Saharan Africa (in Kenya); and mining operations, agricultural land grabs and displacement from forests in the south of Madagascar.

Global investment, local struggles

Following the global commodities boom, global investment has poured into large extractive, green energy and other land-based projects around the world. Many of these are in the rural margins – places geographically but also politically distant from the centres of economic power.

In many places, tensions, struggles and conflict have arisen around land takes, compensation mechanisms, contracts and work opportunities, as well as environmental and cultural change.

States and investors often ‘see’ conflict at the margins narrowly as disruptive insurgency or volatility to be overcome with greater state and/or private security presence or through localised development projects.

Yet, residents at the margins experience, perceive and talk about conflict in ways that differ, sometimes radically, both from the dominant state security and investor narratives.

A major research and policy challenge is how to listen, help amplify and respond to the great variety of ways that people encounter and experience both development and conflict, and conceive their own security and insecurities.

Videos, blogs and more:

Beyond Despair

https://seeingconflict.org/publications-blog/2019/3/29/film-beyond-despair
Video exploring the experiences of residents of RAPland, a resettlement village established by the Kenya Electricity Generation company for Maasai displaced by new geothermal infrastructure.

(Facebook version: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=321262601912834)

Blog post: Scramble for steam: the hard story of power and displacement in Kenya’s Rift Valley

https://seeingconflict.org/publications-blog/2019/3/29/scramble-for-steam-hard-story-power-displacement-kenya-rift-valley
by Daniel Salau

Green Dreams, Local Struggles

Captioned slideshow about renewable energy in Kenya: https://seeingconflict.org/publications-blog/2018/12/7/gallery-green-dreams-local-struggles by Jeremy Lind

For updates follow @SeeingConflict on Twitter.

APRA involved at the event: Towards a Pan-African Transformation: Innovative Approaches to Evidence uptake and use in Africa.

Date: 02 May 2019 – 03 May 2019

CABE Africa (https://www.cabe-africa.org/) are hosting Utafiti Sera, a policy research community of practice, via PASGR (Partnership for African Social & Governance Research).

Hannigton Odame of APRA is conducting a presentation: “Charting the Path for a Youth Apprenticeship Policy: Lessons from Utafiti Sera House on Youth Employment Creation in Agriculture in Kenya”.

APRA team members Blessings Chinsinga, Dawit Alemu, Loveness Msofi Mgalamadzi, Olajide O. Adeola have also attended.

The five APRA team members in attendance will also be writing a blog on the event – keep your eyes peeled!

Abstract:

There is growing consensus within a widening network of policy actors and researchers about the value of identifying evidence gaps that are inhibiting the development and implementation of effective and responsive policies. Additionally, increased collaboration is being seen as beneficial both to those who generate and those who use evidence. Recognizing the importance of a well-grounded approach to EIPM, PASGR and partners have since 2015 implemented a model for bridging the gap in evidence and policy processes known as Utafiti Sera. Utafiti sera is informed by the growing body of evidence that suggest that Evidence Informed Policy (EIP) stakeholder relations based on linear type of relation between research and policy needs are ineffective in dealing with ‘policy messiness’.

Instead, Utafiti sera approaches EIP through the institutionalisation of negotiated and strong governance relationships between policy actors. Utafiti Sera is a ‘process’, ‘place’, ‘forum’, platform’, or ‘vehicle’ that facilitates the building of a community of stakeholders working together to ensure that appropriate and negotiated civic actions and policy uptake occur around a particular public problem for which there is research evidence.

Further details about the programme can be obtained here: http://www.pasgr.org/what-we-do/research/utafiti-sera/.

It is impossible to commercialise agriculture in Malawi: A quick political economy audit

Introduction

Agriculture is the mainstay of Malawi’s economy; it contributes between 30 to 40 % of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP); employs 85 % of the workforce; accounts for about 60 % of rural income; and, contributes about 90 % of total export earnings.

The main challenge however, is that the agricultural sector is not fully utilised. While the sector employs so much of the workforce yet contributes proportionally less to GDP, it is important to note that few countries have ever achieved fundamental structural transformation without revolutionising their agricultural sector.

Agricultural commercialisation is vital to spearheading the transformation of the agricultural sector on a sustainable basis. Such commercialisation entails farmers intensifying the use of productivity enhancing technologies, achieving greater output per unit of land used, producing larger farm surpluses, expanding their participation in markets, and so ultimately raising their living standards.

Using different political economy lenses, we argue that despite concerted efforts over the last three decades, Malawi will find it difficult to commercialise its agriculture, especially through smallholder farmers, because of four interrelated factors: (1) excessive rent seeking; (2) persistent food insecurity; (3) unresolved land question; and, (4) predatory markets.

Political Economy Lenses

The tendency of governing elites is to frame development interventions, as well as their implementation, in a manner that would keep them in power. These interests are not, however, static. Changes in the political landscape often alter the underlying interests of the networks and coalitions behind those interests, with potentially different development, programme and policy implementation outcomes:

1 – Excessive rent seeking

There has been massive investment in the agricultural sector in the last 15 years, especially through the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP). For instance, between 2005 and 2016 the budgetary allocation to the agricultural sector averaged between 12.7 % and 18.8 %.

An examination of the implementation of FISP shows a disproportionate share of the resources is captured by elites through administrative overheads and through inflated contracts, especially in transport and procurement of inputs. The agricultural sector has essentially been captured as a transfer, largely pumping resources to politically connected constituents.

2 – Persistent food insecurity

Food insecurity entrenches the perpetual failure to implement potentially robust policies designed to engineer fundamental structural transformation in the agricultural sector. Surveys – such as Afrobarometer, conducted since 1999 – show that food insecurity remains a major concern for Malawians in both urban and rural areas.

Food insecurity invariably transformed FISP into an electoral tool, rather than an agricultural productivity-enhancing one, forcing governments from incorporating proposals into its design and implementation that would have otherwise greatly enhanced programme effectiveness and beneficiary graduation. Major policy documents such as the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS I,II,II), National Agricultural Policy and the Green Belt Initiative (GBI) do prioritise large- to medium-scale agriculture as the surest route to fundamental and sustainable agricultural transformation. But, despite these policy statements, a disproportionate share of resources in the sector continues to find its way into FISP.

3 – Unresolved land question

Large-scale agriculture as a reliable pathway to achieving agricultural transformation cannot be realised as long as the land question remains unresolved. Most of the estimates of existing land that can be devoted to large-scale farming are erroneous; they include customary land that is essentially owned and transferred through family lineage. Consequently, mobilizing smallholders for large-scale agriculture might require strategically managing the underlying local level politics, since they are likely not to let it go without a fight.

For example, it is planned that roughly 200,000 hectares of land will be released for the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, but it is difficult to verify the existence of this land empirically. So, as long as if the land question remains unresolved, it is almost impossible for the government and other stakeholders to promote agriculture commercialisation through the large-scale agriculture route.

4 – Predatory markets

The Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (ADMARC) no longer provides a stable, predictable and lucrative market for smallholder farmers. The produce market is not only dominated by vendors, but it also has been captured by politicians advancing their own selfish interests. For instance, in the 2017/18 growing season government made money available for the purchase of farmers’ produce way past the time the maize market kicks off in April or May, meaning that vendors would be the ones to supply this market. By this time, smallholder farmers had already sold their maize to vendors at very low prices.

These dynamics make it almost impossible for smallholder farmers to cobble together a viable pathway out of poverty, even in the context of yearly subsidies, which means that commercialisation cannot take off and be sustained unless the growing of maize, which is a dominant crop, leads the way. Instead, maize is caught up in the trail of rent seeking activities. Maize markets are being used to exploit hardworking farmers who find it extremely difficult to earn a decent livelihood depending exclusively on returns from farming – making agricultural commercialisation almost impossible.

Conclusion

The challenges that stand in the way of agricultural commercialisation are deeply rooted in political settlement; precisely, in the way that power is acquired, shared, exercised and maintained within the framework of country’s governance processes.

A country’s political settlement shapes and drives incentives for development especially among the elites. The challenge for Malawi is that “maize politics” lie at the heart of the country’s political settlement. Strategies aimed at promoting agricultural commercialisation that do not pay attention to altering the contours of the country’s political settlement are bound to be less successful.

Written by: Blessings Chinsinga and Mirriam Matita

Photo credit: Neil Palmer / CIAT(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Twitter photo credit: A .Eitzinger / CIAT (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Cyclone Idai hits Agriculture in Beira Corridor: Preparing for the Future

ESA: “This Copernicus Sentinel-1 image indicates where the flood waters are finally beginning to recede west of the port city of Beira in Mozambique. The image merges three separate satellite radar images from before the storm on 13 March, from one of the days when the floods were at their worst on 19 March, and as the waters are beginning to drain away on 25 March. The blue-purple colour indicates where floodwater is receding, while areas shown in red are still underwater.”

On 14 March, Cyclone Idai made landfall at the Mozambique port city of Beira. Strong winds, torrential rain and flooding generated mass devastation in the city while the cyclone travelled inland along the Beira Corridor to wreak further damage across central Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The Government of Mozambique confirmed the deaths of 598 people in that country alone, and a cholera outbreak has since been announced.

The region is well known to APRA researchers, as it is the site of the Beira Agricultural Growth Corridor (BAGC), a public–private initiative that has been studied as part of our workstream on agricultural corridor investments in Africa. Over the past decade, a range of private firms and donor agencies have planned and launched initiatives in the Beira region to promote commercial, often export-oriented agriculture, in what proponents say could be the breadbasket of Mozambique. Investments include PROIRRI (‘Project Irrigation’), financed by the World Bank; the USAID-funded ‘Resilient Agricultural Markets Activity’ programme; a US$ 40 million rural development programme ‘SUSTENTA’ launched by the national government; and a range of private-sector agricultural enterprises. Research for the United Nations University has found that the Beira region has become the most concentrated area of large-scale farms in Mozambique, in some cases benefiting from the insecure land tenure of local communities.  

There has also been significant investment in transport infrastructure along the corridor. Leveraging an up-country mining boom, the government has raised finance to rehabilitate railways, roads like the EN6 highway, and facilities at Beira port – all in the name of agricultural development.

Cyclone Idai is surely a grave setback. Parts of Beira port were severely damaged, impeding delivery of fuel, wheat and other goods; roads and bridges have been washed away; and businesses in Zimbabwe have suffered from the breakdown in imports and exports along the inland corridor. The World Bank has estimated that US$ 2 billion in recovery costs will be needed in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to address the infrastructure and livelihood impacts.

Zambezia and Sofala, where Beira city is located, and the hinterland province of Manica have long been identified as vulnerable to extreme climate-related events. Officials in Beira report that preventive measures had been taken to minimise the impact of Cyclone Idai and, after a two-week blockage, the port and main transport corridor have reopened.

The Beira crisis highlights the increasing importance of exports and regional and cross-border trade to African economies, and the reliance of landlocked countries like Malawi and Zimbabwe on efficient transport and port infrastructure. But the crisis is also a reminder of the vulnerability of many agriculture-based livelihoods in the Beira corridor, and the need for systematic, sustained investment in rural areas. While large farms have increased in number, smallholder farming remains the dominant agricultural system in central Mozambique. According to FAO, Cyclone Idai has destroyed more than 500,000 hectares of crops, as well as sweeping away livestock and damaging grain stores. Small-scale farmers now face grave challenges in planting for the September harvest season.

Mozambique is prone to extremes of storms as well as drought, and climate change is only going to continue to intensify such events – in late April, an even larger cyclone, Cyclone Kenneth, hit the northern province of Cabo Delgado. Smallholders and businesses along the Beira corridor are very familiar with floods from overflowing regional rivers such as the Metuchira. These rivers are what give the corridor its agricultural potential – but in the absence of infrastructure that potential becomes a risk.

Through APRA research conducted over the past two years, we have been considering how small-scale farmers in Africa can ensure that large-scale infrastructure and investment projects, such as BAGC, will meet small-scale farmers’ needs and increase their resilience to climatic and economic shocks. That could include continued investment in climate-resilient agriculture suited to small-scale farming contexts, such as measures to prevent soil erosion. Our research also suggests that corridor infrastructural improvements must extend to rural feeder roads. A Mozambican stakeholder told us:

“We still lack infrastructure, roads, storehouses and we need to organise smallholders into associations… the truth is that the EN6 road has little impact for smallholders. We need tertiary roads. Seventy percent of the cost of some products is due to transport costs in the poor road conditions we have.”

Investment in farmer-friendly infrastructure, too, can be done with climate change in mind; in the southern province of Gaza, for example, a pilot was conducted to pave rural feeder roads using geocell technology so that the roads can better withstand future flood damage by distributing road stresses.

One observer has suggested that public spending on infrastructure and incentives for foreign investors have impeded the Mozambican state’s ability to respond to Cyclone Idai. Certainly, not only governments, but also donors and investors must strike a difficult balance when planning for climate resilience, agricultural development and infrastructural investments. Nevertheless, it is vital that those who are most affected – small farmers and businesses – have a say in how those plans are made.  

Written by: Rebecca Smalley and Euclides Goncalves on behalf of the research team from APRA’s ‘Corridors and commercialisation’ workstream

Photo credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by European Space Agency – (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Corridors Mini-Series:

PLAAS hosting new roundtable: ‘What is the character of the Agrarian Question in contemporary Africa?’

The APRA South Africa Hub at the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) is hosting a roundtable on the question: ‘What is the character of the Agrarian Question in contemporary Africa? Perspectives from East, West and Southern Africa’?

The event shall be attended by renowned scholars of the field:

  • Professor Issa Shivji, the Director of Nyerere Resource Centre at the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH);
  • Professor Kojo Amanor, University of Ghana;
  • Professor Ben Cousins, the DST/NRF Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape;
  • Professor Ruth Hall, the Senior Professor at PLAAS

The event will take place on 14 May 2019, from 13:00-15:00 at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa.

Building Livelihoods: Young People and Agricultural Commercialisation – Tanzania Country Study

With many African young people living in rural areas, their economies are characterised by small manufacturers and high rates of youth unemployment. Unemployment has been a major concern especially for graduates who seek formal employment in the urban areas. However, realities support the proposition that only the rural economy – built around agriculture, but encompassing much more – will be able to provide employment opportunities for many millions of young people into the near future. The theory is that rural areas, where such transformational processes take root, will provide more diverse and better remunerated on-farm and off-farm employment opportunities for young people. However, to date there has been little research that looks specifically at how rural young people in Africa engage with, or are affected by, two processes closely associated with rural transformation – agricultural intensification and agricultural commercialisation.

Research

The research was conducted in Kilosa District in the Morogoro Region of Tanzania, and specifically on the Dumila Ward, which was chosen because it is a well-established area of agricultural commercialisation, which occupies a strategic location along the Dar es Salaam-Dodoma road. The research aimed at better understanding of steps and pathways with which particular groups of young people engage in the rural economy in an area of a significant level of agricultural commercialisation.

42 in-depth interviews with young people aged 15 to 26 were undertaken. The interviewees were selected to cover four possible modes of engagement: (1) on-farm production; (2) on-farm wage labour; (3) off-farm wage labour; and (4) business operation. Within each of these modes of engagement, there are many possible activities: on-farm production might include the production of cereal crops such as rice, or horticultural crops such as tomato; while off-farm wage labour might include working in a hairdressing shop, a shop, canteen or on house-building sites. The assumption is that there are differential resource, knowledge, and social barriers to entry, both between and within these different modes of engagement, which will have important implications for those who are able to take advantage of particular opportunities.

The research revealed that as a rural commercialisation hotspot, Dumila offers young people a variety of different income-generating activities. The young migrants are attracted to the area by the availability of farmland, and the opportunities for both business and on-farm employment. The inability to complete school was a disappointment to many of the interviewees, which set the stage for their engagement with the rural (and largely informal) economy – education is seen as a key to formal employment. Social networks (family and friends) play an important role for the migrants in making decisions to migrate, as well as playing a very important role in providing both financial and land resources to support start-ups of their economic activities.

The young people draw on the experience gained from their rural activities while in school, working at home, and/or on the family farm. The findings also indicate that the young people gained access to land by renting, inheritance, and purchase. Inability to access land was not reported as a significant constraint to their activities. Both men and women engage in similar activities, although notably only women are involved in wage labour harvesting vegetables. The main crops grown include vegetables (carrots, green pepper, okra, onions, spinach and tomatoes) and seasonal crops (like maize and paddy). The focus is on activities and crops that generated ‘quick money’ and that have relatively low barriers to entry and have high returns. However, common hazards faced by young people in farming include unreliable rainfall, floods, sickness, theft, unpredictable prices, post-harvest losses, and accidents – in fact, everything at this level of production.

Generally, the interviewees showed themselves to be very persistent in the face of disappointment and failure; they were able to navigate difficulties and challenges, and many responded to poor outcomes by initiating a different activity. The interviewees resilience and flexibility enabled them to stay employed and keep busy throughout the year and significantly, many of them have been able to accumulate assets.

Recommendations

The key policy implication arising out of this study is that young people would likely benefit from improvements in financial services, input availability, and extension services; these would also benefit many other rural residents, regardless of their age.  Arguments for policy and programmes that provide social protection interventions tailored to young people who are in the early stages of livelihood building are important.  Such interventions might help with providing a steady source of income or protecting key assets during times of crisis. At the same time, programmes that help protect the health of young people, or help them return more quickly to good health, would be particularly important in maintaining the continuity of their economic activities.

Written by: Innocensia John and Victor M. Manyong

Photo credit: Innocensia John

Consultation, Involvement, and Ownership: Key Messages from a Dissemination event on Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) study.

On 14 February 2019, in partnership with the Rift Valley Forum, the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) of the University of Western Cape, and APRA conducted a panel discussion to disseminate a new report – ‘Participation, Voice and Governance in investment corridors in Africa: the case of LAPSSET’. The report examines the extent to which smallholder farmers, fishers, women and youth have been included in the implementation of LAPSSET in Lamu County – where the corridor is set to begin – and its potential impact on these communities. The findings were shared to a group of about 40 national and local stakeholders, representing donor and local activist organisations working especially with pastoralists, women and youth on various locations along the proposed corridor. The presentation and report were prepared and written by Ngala Chome, a researcher and doctoral candidate at Durham University in the UK.

The report offers a fresh and insightful take on how LAPSSET may intersect with local livelihoods, as well as how people are anticipating this change, especially by applying various options that have been accorded to them by a new constitutional dispensation since 2010, that has given prominence to a language of communal consultation and participation in the public-policy making process. Local activists and politicians are taking advantage of key attributes of Kenya’s 2010 constitution, such as a reformed judiciary, an expanded bill of rights, new land laws, and political devolution so as to mobilise local voices regarding the future direction of LAPSSET. To a considerable extent, such strategies have been successful, as seen through successful legal petitions and the honouring of promises by the national government for financial compensation over land acquired for LAPSSET projects. However, as the panel which discussed the report’s findings submitted, much needs to be done to ensure that local voices are promoted, and that their vision for the future development of the corridor is seriously considered.   

Kang’ethe Mungai, the manager of the Mpeketoni Co-operative Society which represents about 3,000 smallholder farmers on Lamu’s mainland, and one of the panellists at the dissemination, emphasised Lamu’s agricultural potential, but stated that this has been largely ‘ignored’ by the government, constraining access to inputs and markets as a result. However, the fear that LAPSSET might help to induce more negative consequences for local livelihood systems is perhaps more widespread on and around the Lamu archipelago. Firstly, this is related to the existence of more informal land claims – most of the land is classified as Public Land that belongs to the National Government – a trend that explains local fears over potential loss of land, to planned LAPSSET infrastructural projects, and then to large-scale investors. Fishermen have also reported diminishing fisheries catch – perhaps caused by the on-going dredging around the port area – as was explained by Somo A. Somo, the Chairman of the Lamu County Beach Management Unit, and one of the panellists during the meeting.

In Lamu, a voluble political environment regarding the fate of LAPSSET – through which various demands for communal consultation, communal safeguards and for comprehensive environmental and social impact assessment reports have been made – the voice of women and youth is faint. As Khadija Juma, a member of the ‘Save Lamu’ organisation who was also one of the panellists at the meeting, stated that women were sidelined during the financial compensation for plots of land acquired for LAPSSET in 2015; and in most discussions regarding LAPSSET more widely. This side-lining, Khadija warned, should be corrected in advance of any major investments in future, as men may position themselves for disproportionate advantages at the expense of women. Umulkher Athman of the Lamu Youth Alliance expressed concern during the meeting regarding the promise of future employment opportunities, especially for younger people who were born and raised in Lamu, where there has been a history of minimal investments in educational facilities.

In sum, the panellists and audience agreed that LAPSSET has already unleashed vigorous local debates regarding the future distribution of its costs and benefits. The lesson, for other counties that will be traversed by the corridor elsewhere in Northern Kenya, is that these local ‘contentious politics’ are not only determining the current progress of LAPSSET – as targets shift, priorities are reset, and outcomes renegotiated – but will also influence its future political direction, including who will get what, and when, where and how this will happen.

Click here to access to the full podcast of the event.

Written by: Ngala Chome

Photo credit: Ngala Chome

So Near Yet So Far: Some Reflections on Land Reforms in Southern Africa

Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)

Land is the most critical productive asset in southern Africa, yet it remains a subject of unending contestations. The protracted land efforts in most of these countries have not yielded acceptable outcomes to all stakeholders. The land question is very much a contentious issue in Malawi, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, to name a few countries in the region. The nature of the contestations varies from case to case, but overall, they are shaped by a combination of domestic and global forces.

The argument we are making is that land reforms cannot be successful if they are not linked to the countries’ political settlements, especially in terms of how they have evolved over time. The tendency of those benefiting from the status quo is to distil politics out of the land reform efforts. Yet, it is impossible to distil politics out of the land reform efforts since these reforms invariably entail winners and losers. Potential losers are usually the most powerful with little interest in changing existing land ownership arrangements because they benefit them.

Land reform efforts are challenging, but not unmanageable. There are several key issues that require some critical reflection when pushing for, implementing and managing land reform efforts. These are: (1) the clarity of the vision of land reform; (2) the disjuncture between international and domestic perspectives of land reforms; (3) the complexity of land reforms in practice; and (4) challenges with data to guide land reform efforts.

1) Clarity of the vision of land reform

Land reforms can take different forms: restitution; redistribution; and tenure reform. Land reforms are often disagreements between and among stakeholders regarding the exact nature land reforms should take in a particular context. The main challenge is that there is often lack of clarity about which dimension is being pursued among key stakeholders in each context.

Different stakeholders push for different versions of land reforms driven by specific interests that they would want to serve. While locals tend to favour restitution, the development partners and beneficiaries of existing land ownership systems often push for the combination of land redistribution and tenure reform; and, this leads to unending and in some cases violent contestations. In most cases, these stakeholders are determined not to negate their positions.

2) Disjuncture between international and domestic political economy perspectives

The main issue is that international actors, especially multilateral development partners, have tended to push for a one-size-fits-all perspective of land reforms, anchored by the “willing buyer, willing seller” strategy. This strategy is described as completely voluntary transactions between a seller and buyer, which has promoted the commodification of land, and, in part, triggered the agitation of land expropriation without compensation in some parts of southern Africa, especially in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

This has been particularly reinforced by Hernando de Soto’s perspective of capital popularised in his book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. The argument he makes is that without titles or deed, poor people all over the world are not able to leverage their property for profit. De Soto’s conclusion is that you cannot have a progressive market economy if you do not have boundaries defining who owns what.

Several pilot projects have been implemented to demonstrate the efficacy of land redistribution and tenure reform. Existing evidence from countries like Malawi show that these pilots have been erroneously or selectively been considered successful when local contexts have not been effectively taken into account. As these pilots are being showcased as models for other countries which are embarking on land reforms to emulate, the critical question is: from whose perspectives are these pilots considered successful?

Our argument is that universalising land reforms across the region is a recipe for disaster. These universal standards or models are not bad in themselves, but countries should have the liberty to reflect on them and see how they can use insights from these models to effectively deal with the peculiarities of their own context. The bottom line is that context matters a great deal, and land reforms have to factor this into the equation to ensure success.

3) The complexity of land reforms in practice

The tendency is to look at land reforms as a simplistic exercise, when it is in fact a deeply complex exercise. The underlying argument is that fixing the problem of land is not as simple as dealing with the legal niceties or simply parceling out land to new owners. Land reform is much more complex because it involves identities and inter-group relations not just economics or material wealth. This understanding is quite critical to the potential success of the land reforms.

Studies are increasingly showing that land is closely related to owners’ identities and their sense of belonging. An example from Malawi is quite illustrative in this regard: people in the Mzimba district are against the new land legislative framework enacted in 2016 because it does not sit well with their culture; the framework entrusts the adjudication of land disputes to the District Commissioner, who is a career bureaucrat. For the people of Mzimba, this is a non-starter because in their view there is no way critical land matters can be entrusted to a ‘foreigner’. As a result, the people of Mzimba have successfully resisted pilots of the new land legislative framework in their district.

4) Lack of robust data or strategic data manipulation

Land reforms cannot be successfully implemented in the absence of data that is deemed credible by the eyes of all stakeholders who often have fundamentally competing interests, which is, for instance, a very big challenge in South Africa. Using the same data sources, different stakeholders paint different pictures of the current state of affairs within land reform efforts. Stakeholders opposed to the amendment of Section 25 of the Constitution – to allow for land expropriation without compensation –argue that land reforms, as initially conceived, have achieved quite a lot, while those pushing for the amendment argue that there has not been worthwhile progress.

Data from international agencies such the European Union (EU) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that Malawi has a huge land balance of unused land simply because they do not view customary land as owned and used land. Malawi has ended up developing the Green Belt Initiative (GBI), with the aim to irrigate all land within a 20km radius of all major rivers and lakes. The assumption was that Malawi has up to 1 million hectares of arable land available, yet it has been very difficult to empirically verify the existence of such a magnitude of land.

Conclusion

These four challenges illustrate that it is impossible to filter out politics from the land reform efforts. There is the need to consider the uniqueness of each context, with particular focus on the nature and configuration of the political settlement. The nature of the existing political settlement is quite important and must be considered in totality of its historical and contemporary experiences.

Countries doing land reforms must engage in open and frank dialogue sessions in order to collectively find lasting solutions to the land question. Such dialogue is, however, not an easy feat; it requires countries to be masters of dialogue. Dialogue requires listening, empathy, open-mindedness, understanding and cooperation. To cooperate, one must understand; to understand one must be open-minded; to be open minded, one must empathise; and, to empathise one must listen.

Written by: Blessings Chinsinga and Mirriam Matita

Photo Credit: Neil Palmer / CIAT (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Changing Face of African Agriculture: Farm Size Distributions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Credit: Milu Muyanga

In Jeffrey Herbst’s seminal book, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, African states and local traditional authorities are struggling over control of land.  Herbst’s prescient observation, written in 2000, continues to unfold in dramatic ways today.  Traditional authorities, historically the custodians of customary land, are selling it to those with money and influence, transferring an unknown but certainly large amount of land from future generations of rural-born people to investors, speculators, and state-led projects.  For example, while it continues to be widely reported that 94% of Zambia’s rural lands are under customary tenure as it was at independence, a recent article estimates that it is only 54% today due to massive reallocations of customary land by chiefs to individuals with private tenure.

Are traditional authorities selling off land they control now because of growing signs – in the form of land bills, for example – that states are trying to wrest control of their land?  While it is difficult to clearly establish whether chiefs are selling off land to urban based investors, rural elites, and even successful smallholder farmers for fear of eventual government regulations transferring land allocation powers to the state, this is certainly a plausible premise in light of the fact that the state has already dispossessed traditional authorities of the land they used to control in a number of African countries.

The result of such under-the-radar land reallocations is that the landscape of African agriculture is rapidly changing.  In many African countries, it is no longer true that the vast majority of farmland is under small-scale farms.  The national shares of area under cultivation and the value of marketed crop output from medium-scale farms of 5 to 100 hectare have grown rapidly over the past decade (Figure 1).  In Ghana, for example, the share of national cropped area under medium-scale farms rose from 25% to 48% over the past twenty years, and medium-scale farms now account for over half of all nationally marketed oilseeds and horticultural crops. This is not happening everywhere.  In densely populated countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, the expansion of medium-scale farms is proceeding slowly.

African states seem to be generally supportive of such changes.  They are keen to increase food production and marketed farm output to feed their rapidly swelling cities and reduce dependence on food imports.  Putting land into the hands of capitalized, educated, and entrepreneurial African farmers supports this objective.  Medium-scale farms are attracting major new private investment by input suppliers that improve market access conditions for nearby smallholders.  Farming areas with a high concentration of medium-scale farms attract greater investment by large-scale grain buyers.  In Tanzania, small-scale farms are much more likely to rent mechanisation services in areas with a high concentration of medium-scale farms.  Other evidence from Tanzania indicates that smallholder household incomes are positively and significantly associated with the share of land in the district controlled by 5-10 hectare farms, after controlling for market access, rainfall, and other local conditions.

Figure 1. Medium-scale (5-100 ha) farms share of national value marketed crop output (% share).  
Source:  T.S. Jayne, Milu Muyanga et al, The Changing Face of African Agriculture in an Era of Rural Transformation. forthcoming APRA Workstream 3 report. 

However, there are warning signs as well.  The acquisition of land by outside investors certainly reduces the stock of land under customary tenure that will be accessible to current and future generations of local people.  As traditional authorities sell off land to outside investors based on willingness to pay criteria, their actions are raising the price of land, making it more difficult for young people to acquire land, and raising the likelihood that they will exit farming and migrate out of the area.  The rise of land markets is creating a new class of landless workers in Africa, who sell their land informally to others, and become dependent on the local non-farm economy for their livelihoods.

Given the scale of the acquisitions, a major question is how investor farmers are viewed by those in customary communities – as sources of economic dynamism and employment or as exploiter?  Historically, the nature of land conflicts in Africa centers on dynamics between autochthonous members of a community (i.e., those with a real or mythic link to a community’s original inhabitants or settlers) and strangers, or newcomers.  As with emergent investor farmers, strangers have been attracted to certain lands because of their commercialisation potential (e.g., cocoa in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire; rice in Tanzania; and maize in Zambia). Conflicts with long-established customary communities would invariably follow. However, security at the national level depended on whether the central government consistently favoured autochthonous communities or the stranger, newcomers. An open question is how the emergent investor farmer phenomenon maps onto these well-documented dynamics across Africa.  Will African investor farmers be regarded as strangers with marginal familial and social connection to local communities?  Whom will African governments favour in a context of rising land scarcity and palpable tenure insecurity?

Implications for agricultural policies

A major policy question for African governments and international development partners concerns the future role of smallholder farms in Africa.  While opinions are divided, our interpretation of available evidence is that governments must focus explicitly on promoting the productivity of smallholder farms to achieve agricultural and economic transformation with poverty reduction.  Inclusive forms of rural income growth are likely to accelerate the pace and equity of structural transformation processes.  Where competition for land is not intense, new investment in medium-scale farms can be a powerful source of economic dynamism, attracting private sector investments in input and output markets that improve market access conditions and the commercialisation potential of small-scale farms.  In such areas, questions of “either/or” might be somewhat misplaced. 

However, in densely populated areas where small-scale farms predominate and where there remains limited additional land for area expansion, the priority is clear:  focus on promoting the productive potential of small farms, realizing that success in this endeavour will lead to progressive movements of individuals and households out of farming and into off-farm jobs as part of the structural transformation process.  In short, a successful smallholder-led agricultural strategy will result in a declining share of the labour force in farming over time. 

Conclusions

Our view about the role of medium-scale farms is that they should be allowed to develop under a land tenure policy that does not conflict with land tenure security of indigenous rural people or foreclose area expansion opportunities for small-scale farm households. Medium-scale farms appear to be a source of rural dynamism as long as they are not displacing indigenous rural people in the process.  Land registration and certification procedures – in sync with customary social norms and institutions – will be needed to provide such protection.

Many African governments, sometimes unwittingly, are already making decisions about which scale of farming to promote by their land policies and agricultural sector expenditures.  Rather than investing in infrastructure, technologies and extension services that benefits all farmers large and small, many public expenditures are being captured by farms that produce and sell the most – which means a bias toward larger farms.   In Zambia, for example, about 50% of the government’s agricultural budget goes into subsidy programs benefitting the most privileged 5% of farmers. Similarly, government preoccupation with clearing the way for land market transactions, despite extensive rhetoric to the contrary, is largely focused on trying to create ways for large investors to gain access to land.  Inclusive forms of rural transformation will require greater attention to supporting smallholder farms even as larger farms gain greater traction in the region.

We believe that a small-scale farm-led agricultural transformation strategy could have succeeded, and could still succeed in parts of Africa, as it did in much of Asia, provided that African governments provide sustained support for smallholders through policies and public expenditures targeted toward them.  Ethiopia and Rwanda appear to be pursuing such a strategy with reasonable success, but it is difficult to identify many other African governments that have demonstrated a sustained commitment to smallholder-led development.  Consequently, we are likely to see the face of African agriculture continue to be slowly re-shaped toward medium- and large-scale activities. 

Written by: T. S. Jayne, Milu Muyanga, and Caleb Stevens

Photo credit: Milu Muyanga

This blog summarises work from a forthcoming APRA Workstream 3 report on Changes in Farm Size Distributions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jayne and Muyanga are professors in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at Michigan State University and members of the APRA team.  Stevens is USAID’s Land and Resource Governance Advisor.

Agricultural Commercialisation Pathways and Household Outcomes: The Tale of Four Oil Palm Output Sales Arrangements in South-Western Ghana

The availability of well-developed markets for agricultural output is crucial for boosting commercialisation and reducing poverty in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Oil palm, Ghana’s most important traditional export crop besides cocoa is widely produced in south-western Ghana, particularly the Ahanta West and Mpohor (Wassa East) districts. Consequently, various oil palm output marketing arrangements have emerged over the years in these areas. Although oil palm production in Ghana started in the early 1850s, it is not until 1976 that a large scale oil palm processor, Benso Oil Palm Plantation Ltd (BOPP), emerged and started large scale oil palm processing in the oil palm-rich enclave of south-western Ghana.[1] In 1988, Norpalm Ghana Ltd (NGL) entered the south-western Ghana oil palm market as one of the largest oil palm buying companies. BOPP and NGL run their own oil palm plantations, employing hundreds of contract and out-grower farmers. These companies operated as the “big two” oil palm buying companies in the area until 2013, when Building Businesses on Values, Integrity and Dignity (B-BOVID) – a medium-scale palm fruit processor – appeared on the scene, proclaiming farmer-inclusiveness in the oil palm industry, promising farmers various incentives in the aim to capture a greater share of the oil palm output market and improve farmer welfare. B-BOVID became a third force in the oil palm output market in the region. A careful observation of the operations of these oil palm marketing companies in relation to oil palm farmers elicits a key research question: does the distribution of farmers among these oil pam output buyers differ, and are there differences with respect to their level of commercialisation and welfare? We conducted a survey of about 700 households in 20 communities in the Ahanta West and Mpohor (Wassa East) districts. Apart from farmers who sell their output to the three companies (NGL, BOPP and B-BOVID) we identified ‘independent’ farmers who sell to the open market or process their own oil palm. Our study therefore involves these four oil palm commercialisation (OPC) models.

Household Socio-Economic Outcomes – How Do the Output Sales Arrangements Fare?

There is high participation in both input and output markets by farm households. For instance, 67 % of farm households used some hired labour, and 86 % of the value of crops produced were sold, on average. But does the rate of commercialisation differ across the marketing channels? Farmers who engaged with the “big two” companies (BOPP and NGL) were more commercialised on the input (fertiliser and hired labour) side, with BOPP being slightly more commercialised than NGL. Overall, independent farmers were the least commercialised on the input side of the market.

The story is similar on the output side of the market. Using the household commercialisation index (HCI), which measures the ratio of the total value of crops sold to the total value of crops produced by the household, the “big-two” farmers are more commercialised than the other two groups. Here again, commercialisation rates are lowest among independent farmers (see Figure 1).


Figure 1: Household commercialisation index (%) by OPC arrangements
Source: Based on APRA–Ghana Work Stream 1 (WS1) Survey Data 2017

What are the associated welfare outcomes? Returns to farm labour is also highest for farmers who engaged with the “big two”, compared to B-BOVID and independent farmers. However, BOPP associated farm households were again better off than those associated with NGL (See Figure 2). Returns to labour (on- and off-farm) per worker varied widely across the sales arrangements, with BOPP and NGL associated farm households reporting the highest average returns (about US$832 and US$554, respectively); independent and B-BOVID households reported US$327 and US$296, respectively.

Policies promoting agricultural commercialisation are premised on their expected positive association with household welfare. As one would expect based on the outcomes above, per capita net income is highest for farm households who sold their output through the “big two” (US$1,586 for BOPP and US$1,081 for NGL); per capita net income is almost identical for B-BOVID and the independent arrangements – about US$952 and US$953, respectively. Based on the multidimensional poverty indicator (MPI), BOPP-associated households were the least deprived (41 %) compared with households associated with the other output sales arrangements, of which all have an identical deprivation rate. Overall, therefore, BOPP-associated farm households are better off on all the welfare measures, as well as having the highest rates of input and output commercialisation.

Figure 2. Proportion of households with returns to farm labour below the poverty line
Source: Based on APRA–Ghana Work Stream 1 (WS1) Survey Data 2017

In conclusion, the assessment of oil palm farmers’ socio-economic outcomes in south-western Ghana reveals that among the four (4) oil palm output sales arrangements, farmers associated with BOPP have better outcomes. This prompts certain critical questions. What is it about the BOPP-model that yields these outcomes? Could it be the number of years of its existence, scale of operation, or just a coincidence? Watch this space for the next blog discussing the unique attributes and operations of the BOPP-model that could potentially contribute to these observed outcomes.


[1] Based on “Brief on the Oil Palm Sector in Ghana” by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Available online at http://mofa.gov.gh/site/?page_id=8819

Written by: Louis Hodey

Photo source: Solidaridad Network

Working Paper 24: Building Livelihoods: Young People and Agricultural Commercialisation: Tanzania Country Study

This paper reports on a study of how young people engage in the rural economy in an area where there is a significant level of agricultural commercialisation. The objective was to develop an understanding of the steps and pathways with which particular groups of young people seek to construct livelihoods in or around these hotspots, and the outcomes associated with these efforts.
Findings reveal that, as a rural commercialisation hotspot, Dumila offers young people a variety of different income-generating activities. Young migrants are attracted to the area by the availability of farmland, and the opportunities for both business and on-farm employment. Education is seen as a key to formal employment. Social networks (family and friends) also played a very important role in providing both financial and land resources to support their economic activities.

Working Paper 23: Mechanised Agriculture and Medium-Scale Farmers in Northern Ghana: a Success of Market Liberalism or a Product of a Longer History?

In recent years, the significant uptake of tractor-ploughing services in Ghana has been heralded as a success of market liberal policies. It has been argued that market reforms have enabled medium-scale farmers to expand their operations and invest in tractors, which they also hire out to smallholders, enabling a significant expansion in agricultural outputs of both categories of farmers. However, this argument is based upon the assumption that, with structural adjustment and the rolling back of state services, past policies on mechanisation disappeared and left no footprints in agrarian production.

This paper explores within a political economy framework, the historical dimensions of mechanisation in Ghana and continuities in the agrarian structure between the period of state-led agriculture and market liberalisation. It rejects simplistic understandings of state policies in neo-patrimonial frameworks that associate the expansion of mechanisation with political patronage and diverting state resources for political support. The existence of expanding private markets in tractors after the imposition of structural adjustment in Ghana suggests otherwise.

At what level is market participation by smallholder farmers considered commercial farming?

Farmers shelling groundnuts_ Credit Linvell Chirwa

There is consensus in literature that smallholder agriculture commercialisation occurs when farmers produce more output per unit of land and labour by using improved technologies, such as improved seed and inorganic fertiliser; produce greater surpluses; and, increase their market participation, which results in higher incomes and living standards.

Therefore, to qualify as a smallholder commercial farmer, the following features are key:

  • An ability to invest in an enterprise such as maize, beans, groundnuts, tomatoes, potatoes, and onions;
  • Capacity to procure improved farm inputs, and an ability to use modern methods to increase the volume of output produced per unit of land and labour;
  • Ability to meet own food consumption needs, as well as produce a surplus to sell in order to achieve higher incomes and living standards.

In Malawi, smallholder farmers can be classified into three groups, based on how land, labour and capital are combined within different households, production units and their associated farming systems:

  1. Semi-subsistence farmers – these farmers are unable to produce a market surplus because they use recycled seed with no inorganic fertiliser. Their production is not able to meet household food needs throughout the year. These farmers mostly grow maize every season and supply agricultural labour to other farmers, which is their main income source. They have adequate access to land and may rent some of it to other farmers. Most of these farmers can be considered for humanitarian response or safety net programs. However, this category of farmers may evolve into self-sustaining subsistence farmers if targeted with input subsidies, which may increase their access to productivity-enhancing technologies in the longer term as demonstrated by recent evidence in Malawi.
  2. – these farmers have limited access to both input and output markets, which does not allow them to produce a market surplus. They have adequate access to land and may rent out part of it to other farmers. These farmers can meet their food needs from own production, however, the need for cash to purchase groceries, clothes and farm inputs forces some farmers into selling part of their output. Usually, they sell their output in small quantities as needs arise to small-scale traders who penetrate the remote rural areas, in order to smooth out consumption of necessities. This kind of selling is referred to as ‘distressed selling’ or ‘distressed commercialisation’. Those that sell part of their produce may be food insecure and may be required to engage in wage labour and petty trade in order to sustain their food consumption. If the capacity of these farmers is built in areas – not limited to organising them into farmers’ clubs or linking them to financial institutions and input revolving funds – some of these farmers may evolve into emerging commercialised farmers.
  3. – these farmers have adequate access to modern farm inputs and produce a market surplus. They can hire in agricultural labour and rent additional land to increase their scale of operation. They produce enough to meet food needs and have diversified to high-value crops or off-farm income-generating activities. Usually, they sell their output in bulk and some of them may secure contracts with big buyers. These farmers can respond to price signals and decide when to sell their output or to store it in order to get a higher price. Some farmers may belong to farmer associations and their agricultural production is self-sustaining. Most of these farmers have accumulated productive assets, send their children to school, are food secure, and have an improved standard of life. These farmers need institutional support to create economies of scale, increase access to services and markets, and promote forms of economic co-operation to facilitate access to value chains.

Livelihood trajectories and agricultural commercialisation

Part of APRA’s work, including in Malawi, is to analyse the livelihood trajectories of smallholder farmers that are ‘stepping out’, ‘stepping up’, ‘hanging in’ and ‘dropping out’ of agriculture, within the lens of scale of production and extent of marketed surplus. According to APRA, farmers that are ‘stepping up’ are those that may move to more medium-scale operation, investing in more land, employing labour and deploying capital. Farmers that are ‘stepping out’ are those that may diversify and become engaged in market-based operations along the value chain, including processing, transport, bulking and wholesale. Farmers that are ‘hanging in’ are those that are simply surviving in agriculture, whereas farmers that are ‘dropping out’ are those that are moving out of agriculture to other employment and livelihood options in urban areas.

APRA’s Malawi team recently implemented a quantitative tracker study based on a survey that was conducted in 2006/07, which focused on the Farm Input Subsidy Programme. In this tracker study, households from the original survey, including any off-shoot households established in the last 10 years were revisited in 2018/19.

From our data, we have found an interesting mix of farmers that match the three categories of farmers above. The main task for the team was to classify the households into the four APRA’s livelihood trajectories in order to better understand the different pathways smallholder farmers commercialise their subsistence farming in Malawi. A comparison of farmer’s engagement with output markets between 2006/07 (baseline data) and 2018/19 (current data), shows that there are some farmers who have never engaged with markets, who may be classified as semi-subsistence farmers. These farmers are more likely to ‘hang in’ or ‘drop out’ of agriculture, ceteris paribus.

Furthermore, the data reveals that some farmers who were selling their produce in 2006/07 are still selling their agricultural produce in 2018/19. These farmers may be classified as semi-commercial or potential commercial farmers based on their activity levels and are more likely to be ‘stepping up’ or ‘stepping out’ of agriculture, ceteris paribus.

Our data also shows several farmers that were selling their produce in 2006/07 but stopped in 2018/19. However, it is unknown at this stage if it can be determined whether those have stopped selling part of their produce are either distressed subsistence farmers, emerging commercialised farmers or both. In order to classify these latter households into one of the livelihood trajectories, APRA Malawi team will do a more thorough analysis to determine whether these farmers have moved out of agriculture to pursue other livelihood options or if their livelihoods have simply deteriorated over the years.  

In summary, understanding smallholder farmers’ rural transformation process is important to accurately analysing their livelihood trajectories over time. During the analysis, it would be wrong to simply focus on one indicator such as market participation, given that some subsistence farmers may sell part of their produce out of distress, which does not mean that they are commercial farmers. Therefore, market participation by smallholder farmers in input and output markets is considered commercial farming when all key features of agricultural commercialisation process are met.  

Written by: Stevier Kaiyatsa

Photo credit: Linvell Chirwa

Irrigating Africa: can small-scale farmers lead the way?

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Farmer-led irrigation comes in many different shapes and forms. Remi Nono-Womdim/Flickr

Ian Scoones, University of Sussex

We often hear that irrigation in Africa is too limited, and that the key to a “green revolution” on the continent is to expand to levels seen in Asia.

But what if there is much more small-scale, informal irrigation in Africa than we thought? Could this be the basis for irrigating Africa?

In our recently published paper, we looked at initiatives taken by small-scale African producers in expanding irrigation. We found that farmer-led irrigation comes in many different shapes and forms. Informality, flexibility and adaptability are the watchwords. Most significantly, such irrigation initiatives are led by farmers, although they also rely on networks of technology suppliers, equipment repairers, market brokers, extension agents, transporters, banks and credit agencies, among others.

This sort of irrigation was dismissed as “just gardening” by an irrigation specialist we engaged with during our study: too small to make a difference, and not geared to commercial production. Instead, engineer-designed irrigation schemes are often advocated, in Zimbabwe as elsewhere. But the history of these schemes in Africa has not been a happy one. They have repeatedly failed, as strict cultivating and watering regimes are imposed, and high-cost equipment breaks down.

Yet, such schemes remain central to development programmes across the continent, despite the disastrous record. What is the alternative? Could farmer-led systems lead the way?

Informal irrigation

In our study on land reform farms in Zimbabwe, published as part of a wider collection from across Africa, we found that farmer-led irrigation in our sites proportionally covered many times more area than formal irrigation schemes do at a provincial level. And this despite official statistics suggesting that informal irrigation accounts for under 10% of national irrigated area.

The mismatch in the figures is striking. Of course, extrapolation is problematic, but evidence from across the country suggests that farmer-led systems, across multiple small plots, is widespread. Without external support, land reform farmers use their own initiative and resources, making use of available water – from small dams, rivers, streams or wells – to boost production.

Areas irrigated range from small homestead plots to large fields. One commercial irrigator was securing an income of around US$30,000 from five hectares, with input expenses of US$12,000, and was employing some 20 people. Most had more intermediate operations, using a variety of pumping systems, whom we classified as “aspiring irrigators”, with plot sizes averaging 0.43 hectares.

Regional mapping is now capturing the true extent of small-scale irrigation more effectively, while research in Mozambique shows how accounting for multiple, small farmer-managed plots would nearly double the national estimate of total irrigated area.

Could farmer-led systems, then, be the basis for a new irrigated “green revolution” in Africa; one that is already happening?

Conditions for success

Access to cheap technology has been essential. The price of mobile pump sets has massively declined in recent years. Made in China, available in every town, and repairable by local mechanics, such pumps can be bought in Zimbabwe for as little as US$250. Combined with flexible piping, this means that water sources can be used year-round.

Since acquiring the land in 2000, around three-quarters of those irrigating in our sites have built new wells, many of them subsequently deepened, while 85% have purchased pumps of different types. Across 49 plots, over 8km of piping has been bought in the last few years.

Because such farmer-led irrigation systems can be operated flexibly across a range of scales, available labour and capital can be matched to the production system. Some very small plots, usually around homesteads, are favoured by women, who can combine watering and tending vegetables with domestic and care work.

Young people, who did not receive plots during the land reform of 2000, are enthusiastically embracing irrigated farming as a livelihood. Without any chance of a formal job in town due to the deeply depressed economy, they are investing in farming, aiming to scale up over time. Technical knowledge, urban contacts and other skills are being deployed for successful businesses, focused on horticultural farming and trading.

At the other extreme, larger plots with irrigation systems that use submersible pumps – powered by generators and fitted to newly-drilled boreholes – are being established. These farmers have upgraded to significant commercial operations, based on contracts with supermarkets and vegetable traders in nearby towns and market centres.

Indeed, many of the irrigated plots in our sample are geared to commercial production. This is not “just gardening”. These farms are supplying regional towns, including supermarkets, with vegetables. As a video from our sites shows, this is boosting the local economy, with market traders, brokers, transporters and others all benefiting.

As irrigated agriculture expands, there are also dangers of creating market gluts. There is a limit to how many perishable tomatoes can be sold. Diversification is key and some of those in our study area are trying out new vegetables, from butternut squashes to sweet peppers. With expanded mobile phone coverage, people’s ability to negotiate contracts and supply markets in a timely way also improves.

Rethinking irrigation policy

Small-scale, flexible, farmer-led irrigation is not a panacea for the challenge of expanding irrigation and boosting production in Africa. Standard irrigation schemes will continue to be part of the answer. Yet the hidden extent of informal irrigation, led and managed by farmers, is clear across Africa.

There are challenges for sure. Opportunities are unevenly spread, with larger operations dominated by richer men. Markets are limited, and issues of product diversification, storage and processing must be tackled. Sources of water for irrigation are constrained, and sustainable use and access regulations are needed.

With the right policy framework and support – not blinkered by a narrow and outdated view of irrigation – these challenges can be surmounted. As Zimbabwe contemplates new land and agriculture policies, farmer-led irrigation approaches must be central.

Felix Murimbarimba and Jacob Mahenehene also contributed to this article.

Ian Scoones, Professorial Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

APRA Brief 18: The political economy of agricultural growth corridors in eastern Africa

A new wave of agricultural commercialisation is being promoted across Africa’s eastern seaboard, by a broad range of influential actors – from international corporations to domestic political and business elites. Growth corridors, linking infrastructure development, mining and agriculture for export, are central to this, and are generating a new spatial politics as formerly remote borders and hinterlands are expected to be transformed through foreign investment and aid projects. In our APRA study, we have been asking: what actually happens on the ground, even when corridors as originally planned are slow to materialise? Do the grand visions play out as expected? Who is involved and who loses out? To answer these questions, APRA research into growth corridors has focused on three key examples: the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), the Lamu Port and South Sudan Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor, and the Beira and Nacala corridors in Mozambique.

APRA Brief 17: Tractors, Markets and the State: (Dis)continuities in Africa’s Agricultural Mechanisation

Agricultural mechanisation has once again become a topical issue in African policymaking, following the reinstatement of agriculture in the growth and development agenda for the continent since the turn of the century. But the contribution of mechanisation to agricultural growth and food security and, more broadly, an inclusive and sustainable development trajectory is not linear, and the debate around desirable types of mechanisation and role of the state (versus markets) in the process is far from settled. Drawing on research in Ghana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, this brief offers an overview of recent trends in Africa’s agricultural mechanisation and of how the topic has been handled in the policy debate and highlights findings from the three country studies that illustrate how state-sponsored or farmer-led mechanisation are enmeshed in broader processes of agrarian change.

Youth engagement with commercialisation hotspots in Ghana

Credit Neil Palmer - CIAT

Youth unemployment and underemployment are key development challenges facing many developing countries, especially in Africa. In working to address these challenges, there is a belief among policymakers and development practitioners that the rural economy – built around agriculture, but encompassing much more – will be able to provide income-earning opportunities for many millions of young people into the foreseeable future, thereby addressing the youth employment challenge in Africa.

The analysis that informs this view highlights one or more of the following: increased use of productivity enhancing technology (like seed varieties and fertilisers, and ICTs); engagement with national, regional and global value chains; development of, or engagement with, markets (including land rental markets); mechanisation; entrepreneurship; greater business orientation; increasing importance of processing and value addition; diversification; and finally, investment in research and infrastructure. The assumption is that rural areas, where such transformational processes take root, will provide more diverse and better-remunerated on-farm and off-farm employment opportunities for young people. But, to date there has been little research that looks specifically at how rural young people in Africa engage with, or are affected by, two processes closely associated with transformation – agricultural intensification and agricultural commercialisation.

Research

In recent research in the Techiman area, Brong Ahafo Region, Ghana, we examined the pathways with which particular groups of young people seeks to construct livelihoods in the context of agricultural commercialisation, and the outcomes associated with these efforts.  In analysing the pathways and outcomes, we identified four possible modes of engagement within commercialisation hotspots: (1) on-farm production, (2) on-farm wage labour, (3) off-farm-wage labour, and (4) business operation. Within each of these modes of engagement there are many possible activities: on-farm production might entail production of cereal crops, horticultural crops or purely commercial crops like cocoa, cashew or tobacco; while off-farm wage labour might entail working in a hairdressing salon, as an assistant in a shop or canteen, or in housing construction. Between and within these different modes of engagement, there are different resource, knowledge and social barriers to entry, and it is these differences that have important implications for those who are able to take advantage of particular opportunities.

For instance, our research revealed that many rural young people will prefer to be somewhere else or at some point dreamt of doing something else. However, even if they would rather be somewhere else and/or doing something else, for most of these young people, commercialised rural economies do offer a range of income-generating activities, both on-farm and off-farm wage employment, as well as business operations. Support from social networks is key in enabling rural young people to start their diverse income-generating activities; while their activities had little barrier to entry, many reported receiving financial assistance and the lending of a piece of land from their fathers, mothers or siblings to begin their work. Although many of the activities engaged in by the youth are largely small-scale in nature, there is evidence of asset accumulation in the form of residential plots, housing (and other buildings), farmland, motorcycles and motor-tricycles. Interviewees proudly reported investing in their children’s education, as well as their own development (e.g. undergoing training to become a hairdresser or mechanic). Accumulation of these assets reflects the combination of a relatively dynamic rural economy, enabling social relations, plus hard work.

However, what is worrying about the situation of these rural young people is that their assets, and the economic activities that generated them, remain vulnerable to hazards and can be quickly lost; our interviewees identified a number of such constraints or hazards affecting their activities. These hazards can be categorised into two: personal, health-related hazards on one hand; and business-related hazards on the other. The interviewees told of health-related hazards, including accidents, theft, on-the-job injuries, sickness, and family tragedy. The business-related hazards reported includes biophysical conditions (prolonged drought and unreliable rainfall), low demand for produce or services, bad luck, confiscation of motor-tricycles by police due to failure to produce a license, occasional non-payment of daily wage by employers, employers closing down, and loss of savings due to collapse of a micro-finance institution and business failure. Whether working on-farm or off-farm wage work, as a producer or in business operations, hazards such as these are part of daily life, and may necessitate the liquidation of hard-won assets.  

Overall what this research tells us is that whether or not a young person wants to be there, being in an area of intensive agricultural commercialisation compared to one with limited commercialisation is probably as good as it gets. However the constraints and hazards experienced by these youth in efforts to build their livelihoods deserve policy attention

Recommendations

There is, for example, a clear opportunity to use policy and programmes to help protect young people’s accumulated gains from hazards in the rural environment. In the first instance, such policies should include informing and motivating young people, so that they take full advantage of existing social protection programmes. In Ghana, an obvious example would be the National Health Insurance scheme. There may also be opportunities to use programmes to make it less likely that key assets would need to be liquidated in order to meet unexpected or emergency expenses.

Written by: Thomas Yeboah

Photo credit: Neil Palmer – CIAT

Brief: bit.ly/2u6utC0

Working paper: bit.ly/2Hi21py