Growth it seems is the current development mantra. With agriculture often the dominant sector in the economy, getting agriculture onto a growth path is increasingly the core theme of policy documents whether from donors or from national governments. Similarly in Africa, governments are increasingly highlighting agricultural growth. For example, Uganda has its strategy for agricultural modernisation, Kenya has launched a Strategy for the Revitalisation of Agriculture and Ethiopia has committed to a second PRSP (PASDEP – the Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty, which commits to ‘a massive push to accelerate growth’. Not since the 1960s and 1970s has the argument for a trickle down approach to development following on from growth and ‘modernisation’ in the productive sectors been so dominant.

Where has this argument come from and what are its limitations and pitfalls? The argument for agriculture-led growth of course has a long lineage, dating to the classic work of John Mellor and Bruce Johnson at Cornell and Stanford, taken up by at IFPRI and others. By emphasising expenditure linkages – especially through consumption – this work countered the argument that growth linkages are low in small-scale agriculture because of relatively low external inputs. Using an array of techniques ranging from simple input-output and expenditure models to more complex social accounting matrices, multi-market models and village and regional CGE approaches, this research has shown that growth in agriculture does indeed generate rural non-farm growth and growth in the wider economy. Empirical studies from across Africa for example have highlighted how it is in small farm settings linked to markets that such potentials are often greatest. For example an IFPRI study in Zimbabwe showed how in the 1990s small-scale communal farming was generating more growth than the large scale commercial sector (although some high labour input enterprises such as horticulture represented important exceptions). The policy message that emerges from this now substantial body of work is clear – increases in productivity in small-scale agriculture can result in broader economic gains to the economy, with spin-offs to the rural non-farm sector. In time, the argument goes, this will result in a transition from a broadly subsistence based agricultural economy to one which can afford more inputs and become more commercial, specialising along the way – if directed by demand – into niche commodities and markets. As the sector’s fortunes improve, the opportunities for exit from agriculture will increase, as off-farm opportunities grow (for instance in farm labour, agro-processing, and the rural service sector). Such wider economic growth will be an economic pull – rather than the current situation of being pushed out from a failing agriculture. The end result, it is stated, will be a vibrant, fully modernised integrated economy, with a small but efficient agricultural sector continuing to generate growth and employment. Or at least that is how the standard storyline goes. But what are the problems with this simple version, so often repeated in current policy debates? If the relentless economic logic is so powerful, why hasn’t it happened in large parts of rural Africa ? And is there really only one pathway for such a complex process? Debates on economic growth and agriculture are huge, but some important qualifications and critiques to the standard growth narrative can be identified. First, are the models that generate these findings sufficiently realistic? Models are of course only as good as the data and the assumptions that build them, and in the case of growth linkage models these can be open to question. One of the most frequently used modelling approaches is the social accounting matrix (SAM). SAMs usually choose a base year and try and generate a best-estimate model of all the production, consumption, labour market and investment linkages in the economy, identifying in particular the role of agriculture (and its sub-sectors). Being based on fixed prices, where supply is perfectly elastic and responses are linear, conventional SAMs clearly cannot tell the whole story. Indeed, more complex multi-market and CGE models show how taking into account such factors is crucial. But it is perhaps less the technical and data limitations of the models that are of concern, but the way they frame and influence the policy debate. In Ethiopia for example, the argument for focusing new PRSP investments on ‘going for growth’, with an emphasis on boosting commercial agriculture, is based on a series of SAM modelling inputs into the policy process. Necessarily, but perhaps problematically, these simplify the debate into one that creates policy categories. For instance, in the case of the 2001-02 Babo Gaya SAM constructed by IFPRI and associates, the agricultural economy for the nation as a whole is divided into ‘subsistence crop farming’, ‘subsistence livestock farming’ and ‘commercial (or ‘modern’) crop farming’. Showing that what is (vaguely) defined as ‘commercial’ or ‘modern’ farming generates a significant value added share and so overall growth benefits provides the ‘evidence’ for the policy proclamations now emanating from both government and donors. This confirms, in turn, a particular type of investment, and support for a particular approach to the commercialisation of agriculture.

Second, such discussion – reinforced by such models – is often wrapped up in another argument that there are somehow a defined set of ‘stages of growth’, involving singular trajectories to some desired end (usually away from a backward, subsistence form of farming towards something better, more modern and commercial). A familiar argument since Rostow is that economic development consists of ‘stages’, and that the challenge is to find the technology, institutional instruments and market incentives to push things from one stage to the next. This is central to the Mellor-style growth argument discussed above, and much current academic and policy discussion since. But such evolutionist arguments of a somehow necessary move from one stage to the next can also be questioned.

Drawing on her work in South Africa, Gillian Hart, for example, argues instead for understanding growth patterns in terms of multiple trajectories, each situated in particular spatial and historical contexts. What happens in one place and one time period, will not necessarily occur elsewhere. She critiques in particular the imposition of ‘models from elsewhere’ in our eagerness to develop blueprints for economic growth. As the structural adjustment era in Africa so harshly demonstrated, such models do not always fit, and indeed may do much harm. This is not to deny the need to generate growth and foster linkages between farm and non-farm, rural and urban. Far from it. It is instead an argument for understanding how in particular contexts growth trajectories are different, and require different inputs, incentives and governance arrangements. Not all African farmers need to end up growing French beans and carnations for the European market, even if this is a good plan for some in some places. There are other opportunities that need to be sought out too, and the generalised models and universalised policy prescriptions do not help in the search for these openings. It is for this reason that the Future Agricultures Consortium work on commercialising agricultures is emphasising the diverse ways new forms of growth can be generated, and the diverse impacts this has on the agricultural economy, on wage labour and on the non-farm sector. Case studies include smallholder cotton farming in Kenya and Malawi, the horticulture/floriculture sector in Kenya and Ethiopia, and the commercialisation of small-scale staples crop production across the three countries. Different dynamics of commercialisation are evident, each requiring different types of support, and each with different (often highly gendered) impacts on poverty reduction and rural livelihoods.

A Sector Wide Approach (SWAp) is usually defined as a process in which funding to a sector supports a single policy and expenditure programme, under government leadership and using common financial management procedures across the sector.

SWAps arose in the early to mid-1990s as a response to the perceived failure of existing aid practices and delivery mechanisms. The approach was intended to enhance aid effectiveness and recipient government’s ownership. SWAps developed mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, in aid-dependent countries with low capacity, weak management systems and a large number of donor agencies, and especially in the main social sectors, health and education.

Ten years on, SWAps are now being used in a wider range of countries, including middle income and low aid dependent, and sectors, including agriculture and rural development. The most recent estimate points to about fifteen SWAPs in agriculture at different stages of policy formulation and implementation. Agricultural SWAps have been seen not only as a way of reducing fragmentation in donor support and high transaction costs with aid management but also as an opportunity to promote the much needed inter-sectoral – or sector-wide – policy coordination, within and beyond the state. From the recipient sector’s perspective the expectation might also have been that the SWAp would help to reverse the downward trend in development assistance to agriculture since the 1980s.

So what have agricultural SWAp delivered so far? Experience to date has been mixed. Strengthened government leadership and improved dialogue and harmonisation of management procedures between government and donors and between donors themselves are frequently noted as positive achievements of the SWAp experience. Yet, this has often been at the cost of a re-centralisation of the policymaking process, particularly around central departments of the ministry of agriculture, and of an excessive focus on the SWAp process itself rather than on sector policy outcomes. There is also very limited evidence that SWAps have actually led to a reduction in transaction costs – in fact, heavy management structures have been created to support the design, implementation and monitoring of the SWAp – or indeed the improvement in agricultural performance. Also, and despite the original intent, agricultural SWAps ended up concentrating almost exclusively on the way resources are channelled to the ministry of agriculture, doing very little to stimulate linkages with other sectoral ministries and non-state agriculture stakeholders.

The difficulties with implementing the SWAp are not exclusive to the agriculture sector. SWAp experiences in the health sector, for example, have shown the danger of getting “swamped in a SWAp” – due to the obsession with the SWAp blueprint and the limited capacity of domestic governance structures to sustain it. However, the very nature of the agriculture sector makes the application of the SWAp philosophy arguably more complex than in other sectors. The challenges result from a number of structural features in the agriculture sector: (i) the state is a minor player in the sector, (ii) the role of the state is less about spending, or delivering services, and more about the elusive task of creating an enabling environment for private sector development (sound policies and regulation), and (iii) key policies, investments and services are not under the control of a single line ministry but spread across different sectoral agencies, both at central and local government levels. The degree of contestation on stakeholder roles and policies is also high, making any attempt to coordinate government and donor policies and resource allocation a very challenging task.

So what is the future for the agricultural SWAp? Answering this question requires placing the SWAp in the context of the rapid changes underway in the architecture of development assistance.

On the one hand, the widely accepted aid effectiveness agenda – endorsed under the 2005 Paris Declaration – emphasises the need for alignment and harmonisation of aid delivery with national planning and financial management systems. This agenda has been pushing forward budgetary support as the preferred modality for aid delivery, thereby strengthening the role of ministries of finance (and emphasising the centrality of the state budget) in the mobilisation and allocation of public resources. This has important implication for the SWAp since it changes the nature of the relationship between donors, ministries of finance and agricultural ministries in the negotiation of sectoral expenditure plans.

On the other hand, the SWAp as a central planning approach – which as such has always been in tension with the decentralisation process – is being challenged by an audacious new kid on the block. Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages project (previous Future Agricultures Hot Topic) is proposing to revive the old area-based development paradigm and shift the locus of decision making and resource allocation to rural areas. The foreseen scaling up of this village-based project could potentially have significant implications on both donor and government spending decisions and on the wider policy making process.

So do agriculture SWAps still have a space in the emerging context? Maybe – but they will necessary require some careful forward-looking rethinking. There is widespread agreement that coordination of public and private sector investments is critical for the development of the agriculture sector. In this sense, the idea of having a common forum for dialogue and coordination of policy interventions is compelling. Yet, is the ministry of agriculture the most adequate host for this forum? Does it have the clout, capacity, resources and incentives to deliver the much needed policy framework for sustainable and pro-poor agricultural growth? These are some of the questions the Future Agricultures Consortium is concentrating on. In particular, the work on agricultural policy processes is questioning what is the contemporary role of the ministry of agriculture in a volatile and increasingly demanding political and economic environment?

By Lidia Cabral

Links

Global Donor Platform for Rural Development

Aid to agriculture

DFID work on aid effectiveness – SWAps

Agricultural SWAps

Paris Declaration

Formalising property rights – and granting title in particular – is argued by some to be an essential part of the route to economic growth and the movement out of poverty. But will such moves really help in all circumstances, particularly for agricultural development in Africa?

A new commission – The High Level Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor – sets out, according to its website “to explore how nations can reduce poverty through reforms that expand access to legal protection and opportunities for all”. The site makes the case that “poverty can only be eradicated if governments give all citizens, especially the poor, a legitimate stake in the economy by extending the rule of law, making access to users’ and property rights and other legal protections not the privilege of the few but the right of all citizens”.

The Commission was launched in September 2005 by a group of developing and industrialised countries. The Commission’s Secretariat is hosted by the United Nations Development Programme in New York. The Commission, which will complete its work by late 2007, is co-chaired by former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright and Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto. Commission members include UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and focal countries are Tanzania and Guatamela, both with high-level political support. Donor support comes from Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK, combined with significant private sector contributions.

De Soto is perhaps the leading intellectual driving force behind the Commission. As President of the Peru-based Institute for Liberty and Democracy, he has argued in numerous works, notably his book ‘The Mystery of Capital’, that creating formalised legal systems to help the poor access property rights, assets and capital is essential for economic development.

Until January 2006, the Commission is in a preparatory phase, laying the groundwork for the first meeting, when an ‘overview of global knowledge’ will be presented. Following this, a series of workshops around six thematic analytical tracks will be held. According to the Commission, a key facet of this phase will be intensive consultation in order “to consider a broad range of perspectives and experiences around the issues of legal empowerment, the informal sector, land tenure, and property rights in developing and transition economies”.

Of particular concern to the themes of the Future Agricultures consortium is ‘Analytical track 1’ focusing on “Consolidation, dissemination and expansion of existing methodologies for empowerment through property reform”. This will focus on a comparative examination of ongoing property reform processes in selected countries, particularly where reform processes are based on these three institutions: Fungible Property Rights (communal, collective, and private); Legal Organisational Forms (communal, collective, and private); and Identity Devices that allow citizens and enterprises to operate beyond the confines of their family and neighbourhood circles in the expanded market.

According to the Commission website: “Analysis will also include an examination of the risks and opportunities involved, in order to provide a good balance sheet for policy-makers and provide the basis of a decision matrix whereby risk mitigation measures can reduce or eliminate the risks or enhance the opportunities not least for women, and for particularly vulnerable groups such as indigenous people”.

In this language it all sounds very benign. But a number of researchers and activists are concerned that the Commission – and particularly the involvement of Hernando de Soto – is a route to pushing an agenda of formalisation of private property rights in conditions where such an approach may be undermining of existing resource management institutions and the livelihoods of the poor.

As Daniel Bromley of the University of Wisconsin argues in his recent paper ‘The Empty Promise of Formal Titles’: “the causal story from insecurity to titles to security to investment to poverty reduction warrants critical examination”. Indeed, much empirical evidence points to a much more complex story. Formalised, private titles do not necessarily result in security of tenure; they are usually highly expensive to register and administer; and conflicts inevitably arise with other ownership and management systems, which, if given appropriate support, may provide much more effective routes to resource management and land tenure.

A well-established body of work demonstrates how for example ‘common property’ or ‘joint management’ systems are often highly effective at managing resources, with lower transactions costs, and less likelihood of exclusion of the poor and marginalised (see for example work collated by the International Association for the Study of Common Property; the CGIAR system-wide programme of common property and collective action; and the Land Tenure Center). Of course such systems don’t operate in isolation, and different property regimes interact and overlap in an area. It is policy and institutional frameworks for the the management of complex, multiple tenure arrangements, under conditions of high dynamism and uncertainty that is key. Simple recipes such as promoted by de Soto and others have been shown again and again not to work.

As a recent Policy Brief from the South Africa-based Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies argues “De Soto’s policy prescriptions may be inappropriate for the poorest and most vulnerable in our society”. Attention instead should be paid to “supporting existing social practices that have widespread legitimacy”. The Brief highlights, for example, the importance of understanding the social embeddedness of property relations; the layered and relative nature of rights, and the flexible character of boundaries. Gaining access to key livelihood assets – whether land or housing – occurs through a range of institutional routes, and formal title is just one, and in many settings very limited, part of a more complex picture.

A working group consisting of Norwegian NGOs under the umbrella of the Norwegian Forum for Environment and Development has established a website to encourage wider debate on these issues and to provide a counter to some of the positions being promoted by the Commission (landrightswatch.net/). The site states:

“We urge the Commission to seriously look into the complex realities of land rights. How will the Commission secure that women and other marginalised groups are not further marginalised in formalisation processes? Previous experiences clearly indicate that women are losers when land is registered. How will the unique and flexible traditions of collective rights among indigenous peoples and other communities be secured? Land cannot only be seen as an asset to be used in the market economy, land must also be understood in a socio-cultural context”.

As part of the work of the Future Agricultures consortium, field level work in Ethiopia, Kenya and Malawi will be exploring some of these issues, asking what sort of institutional and policy frameworks really make sense to ensure that pro-poor agricultural growth really takes off.

Sources

High Level Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor
Contact: hlclep@undp.org

Institute for Liberty and Democracy

The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto

The Empty Promises of Formal Titles, Daniel W. Bromley

Land Registration in Amhara Region, Ethiopia, Berhanu Adenew and Fayera Abdi, IIED

Land Tenure, Land Reform and Land Administration In Africa: Lessons of Experience and Emerging Issues, Lorenzo Cotula, Camilla Toulmin and Ced Hesse, IIED

International Association for the Study of Common Property

CGIAR System-wide Program on Collective Action and Property Rights

Land Tenure Center

Exploring Understandings of Institutions and Uncertainty: New Directions in Natural Resource Management, IDS Discussion Paper 372, Lyla Mehta, Melissa Leach, Peter Newell, Ian Scoones, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Sally-Anne Way, 1999

Tales of the Unexpected: Environmental Governance in an Uncertain Age, IDS Policy Briefing 16, edited by Lyla Mehta, 2004

Will Formalising Property Rights Reduce Poverty in South Africa’s ‘Second Economy’? Questioning the Mythologies of Hernando de Soto, PLAAS Policy Brief 18,
B. Cousins, T. Cousins, D. Hornby, R. Kingwill, L. Royston and W. Smit, 2005.

landrightswatch.net

One of the ‘quick wins’ identified by the Millennium Project’s assessment of how to halve hunger by 2015 was for a massive effort to replenish nutrient depleted soils in Africa through a combination of chemical fertilizers and agroforestry. Nigeria is hosting a ‘Fertilizer Summit’ organised by IFDC for Africa in 2006, with President Obasanjo taking the lead to follow up on these recommendations.

But what should be the key elements of the debate at the summit? With less than 10kg/ha of fertilizer being applied on average to African farm lands, access to soil nutrients is of course a key issue if African agriculture is to grow sustainably in the future. But how can soil fertility be improved? This is of course a long-running debate, and Africa has seen many fertilizer and soil management projects falter in the past. Central is how to encourage a balanced approach, recognising the diversity of soil fertility constraints across farm landscapes.

The simplistic, blanket solutions often suggested in grand plans for ‘soil replenishment’ often miss this. A key question is: are decentralized participatory approaches which are responsive to local diversity and complexity influencing current thinking around soils and fertilizer policies – if not, why not, and how can they be supported? Such issues are highlighted in some of the papers in a recent issue of Land Use Policy, focusing on soil degradation in Africa. A recent e-forum discussion highlighted the challenges faced by input markets, and the critical need to address institutional and policy issues, not just technical ones. Past reforms to the fertilizer sector have assumed the blossoming of a private sector-led supply system, but this has often not arisen.

A number of institutional challenges are highlighted in the e-forum summary, including the need to ‘kick-start’ markets, perhaps through voucher schemes, and develop fertilizer recommendations that are locally specific and attuned to rainfall variations. Institutional perspectives highlight legal and technical aspects market development – such as contract enforcement and information – but we also need to better understand how local input markets are structured by social, economic and political power relations. Market concentration and standardization in agri-food commodity chains has received increasing attention, but we still know little about such dynamics in fertilizer markets. To avoid the failings of a one-size-fits-all approach therefore, policies that are attuned to local soils, markets and farming conditions – and that take a decentralised, participatory approach – are needed, requiring much more than a simple focus on inputs.

Sources

Africa Fertilizer Summit – 9-13 June 2006, Abuja, Nigeria

UN Millennium Project website – Task Force on Hunger

International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development website

Soil Degradation in Sub-Saharan Africa, A. Hartemink and H. van Keulen (eds), Land Use Policy, 2005, Vol 22(1) – see articles by Mortimore and Harris and Fairhead and Scoones

Increasing Fertizer Use in Africa: What have we learned? E-forum commissioned by the World Bank and hosted by NRI International in collaboration with Imperial College London. Also see the summary paper… Policies for Soil Fertility Management in Africa. A Report Prepared for the Department for International Development, 1999, Toulmin and Scoones

‘A Realistic View on Increasing Fertiliser use in Sub-Saharan Africa’, (see under Debates) Bert Meertens, Rural Development Expert

Lessons from the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology

In recent years, global assessments have become the focus of considerable international scientific interest and the mobilisation of vast institutional, technical, human and financial resources. These frequently attempt to combine ‘expert-driven assessment’ with processes of ‘stakeholder engagement’ to address critical issues of major international importance.

They are often presented as transparent, objective exercises where the politics of knowledge and debates about the legitimacy, credibility and salience of different points of view are set aside in favour of building a consensus towards scientifically informed policy making. But what happens if the fundamental differences between conflicting visions of the right course of action remain? Can papering over the cracks allow diverse voices and sometimes clashing perspectives to reach agreement on vital issues of global concern? Or do we have to leave behind the exclusivity given to scientifically produced rational knowledge and acknowledge and address the elemental divisions, the positionality of the different players, and the framings that drive their agendas and privilege some viewpoints over others from the very start of these assessment processes?

The gold standard of global assessments is without doubt the International Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, the oldest and best established initiative. The IPCC is a scientific body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity. The panel was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). In 2007, the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, for its pivotal role in proving that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

Notwithstanding the apparent success of the IPCC, its findings through four assessment reports have repeatedly provoked a storm of criticism from global warming sceptics and even some within the climate science fraternity. Opponents assert that most scientists consider global warming ‘unproved’, dismiss it altogether, or decry the dangers of ‘consensus science’. Others maintain that proponents and opponents alike have been stifled or driven underground. As Mike Hulme, former director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research and one of the leading figures in climate science wrote in a personal statement on his website: “In recent months I have been chastised for some of my pronouncements on climate change. I have spoken out against the use of exaggerated language in the description of climate change risks; I have spoken about the limits and fragility of scientific knowledge; I have suggested that we should focus on nearer-term policy goals to improve human welfare rather than be so pre-occupied with one large longer-term goal of global climate management. As a consequence I have been accused of burying my head ostrich like in the sand; of undermining the power of science; of lacking passion about ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ of climate change.

Clearly, despite the push for consensus by the IPCC, deep divisions remain in the research community and the wider public on the climate change issue. These reveal how scientific uncertainties are contextualised, communicated and understood by different constituencies with contrasting, sometimes conflicting agendas. Alarmist and fatalistic framings, on the one hand, and those shaped by deep scepticism, on the other, often dominate the scientific and policy discourses on climate change, while more moderate perspectives, particularly those emphasising – i.e., reducing society’s sensitivity to climate change through human agency and empowerment – are largely absent, or at best marginalised.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), launched in 2001, aimed at assessing ecosystem changes over the course of decades, and projecting those changes into the future. From 2001 to 2005, the MA involved the work of more than 1,360 experts worldwide. Their findings provide a state-of-the-art scientific appraisal of the condition and trends in the world’s ecosystems and the services they provide, as well as the scientific basis for action to conserve and use them sustainably. The MA concluded that o ver the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. According to the MA, this has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. The changes that have been made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development, but these gains have been achieved at growing costs in the form of: (i) the degradation of many ecosystem services; (ii) increased risks of nonlinear changes; and (iii) the exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people. These problems, unless addressed, will substantially diminish the benefits that future generations obtain from ecosystems. The challenge of reversing the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands for ecological services can be partially met under some scenarios considered by the MA, but will involve significant changes in policies, institutions and practices that are not currently under way.

It is worth comparing the level of controversy over the climate science assessments of the IPCC with the Millennium Assessment. Relatively speaking, the MA has received far less media coverage (positive or negative) or political interest, even though it has a wider scope and much more sweeping policy implications than the IPCC’s climate science reports. The relative quiescence greeting the MA is owed to its near-complete disconnection from any specific policy proposal analogous to the Kyoto Protocol. Had the MA been connected with an ongoing diplomatic process as is the IPCC and with a proposal for binding international treaty of some kind, it would have been front-page news and the subject of intense controversy in capitals around the world.

From the contrasting experiences of the IPCC and MA, it would appear that the magnitude of scientific uncertainty in policymaking is directly proportional to the political and especially economic stakes involved in the outcomes of global assessments, which means that it is unlikely that legitimate uncertainties of environmental science can ever be definitively resolved to the satisfaction of all scientists, policymakers, civil society actors, industry representatives and other stakeholders. The massive effort at synthesis and consensus will be frustrating to those scientists and other stakeholders who hold heterodox but valid views. To date, most assessment processes have not accommodated or responded to this clash of perspectives, values and agendas very well. It is therefore a valid criticism that the scientists and others participating in each iteration of these assessments have become increasingly self-selected in a manner that overstates consensus and downplays dissent.

IAASTD – Agreeing to Disagree

The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) is the latest is a long line of high-profile global assessments, one that falls in the ‘controversial’ category on several counts. The origin of the $12 million initiative dates to 2002, when a group of international agricultural biotechnology companies asked the World Bank whether it recommended genetically modified (GM) crops for developing countries. Robert Watson, then the World Bank’s Chief Scientist and a key actor in other global assessments including the IPCC and the MA, and currently the Chief Scientific Adviser for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), suggested that the Bank review the entire range of agricultural technologies and policies, convinced that agricultural research should be considered in the context of the broad set of factors shaping agricultural development in the 21 st Century.

Thus began the first major collaboration on a global agricultural science and technology assessment involving international agencies, governments, the private sector and non-governmental organisations. The IAASTD initiative, co-sponsored by multiple international agencies (FAO, GEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, the World Bank and WHO), also received financial support from the private sector and the Governments of Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and the European Commission. It has a multi-stakeholder bureau comprising 30 representatives from governments and 30 representatives from civil society.

Over three years, from 2005-7, the IAASTD evaluated the relevance, quality and effectiveness of agricultural knowledge, science, and technology (AKST), as well as the policies and institutional arrangements in relation to AKST. The final report (comprising a global and five sub-global assessments) is due to be accepted and approved by governments, with support from the sponsoring international agencies and some 50 NGOs, at an Intergovernmental Plenary Meeting from 7-14 April 2008 in Johannesburg , South Africa . The Synthesis Report will present the key findings from all the reports addressing eight thematic issues: bioenergy, biotechnology, climate change, human health, natural resources management, trade and markets, traditional and local knowledge and community-based innovation and women in agriculture.

The original overarching question guiding the IAASTD is a mouthful: “How can we reduce hunger and poverty, improve rural livelihoods, and facilitate equitable, environmentally, socially and economically sustainable development through the generation, access to, and use of agricultural knowledge, science and technology?” To address this multi-dimensional question, the IAASTD adopted a stakeholder (but expert) led scenario approach as its centre-piece, drawing on experiences from IPCC and the MA. Such approaches have become increasingly fashionable, as agencies try to manage uncertain scientific, technological and policy futures. Watson and his team solicited suggestions about what to include in the assessment from over 800 stakeholders representing scientific and agriculture-related organisations around the world. In theory, such an inclusive approach can be a plus, conferring political legitimacy and credibility on a complex assessment process. In practice, it can lead to logjams.

Part of the tension over IAASTD reflects two competing worldviews of agriculture. Some assessment stakeholders and authors stressed the importance of recognising the ‘multi-functionality’ of agriculture, by which they mean that in addition to producing food, farmers have other important roles, such as maintaining the landscape and fostering cultural heritage. This, however, is a highly contentious term, which many non-Europeans view as a just fancy word for ‘protectionism’, particularly those who see agriculture as more of an industrial process than a way of life. Thus, one of the key findings of the IAASTD is that there are diverse and conflicting interpretations of the role of agriculture science and technology in development, which need to be acknowledged and respected. This is not exactly a helpful insight for policymakers trying to decide whether to recommend a particularly controversial approach or innovation, but it does reveal the complexity of stakeholder engagement processes and indicate that consensus can be encouraged, but ultimately not imposed.

It is perhaps not surprising that this massive effort encountered some snags. Some authors of the eight main chapters of the Synthesis Report say that from the start the process was disorganised, lacked direction and suffered from turnover of authors and continual reworking of drafts. Moreover, some teams bogged down in conflicts about ‘hot topics’ such as GM crops or trade liberalisation, with various members charging each other with bias. One contentious chapter, on how to help developing countries generate and adopt agricultural research, was dropped altogether. And halfway through, just before initial results were to be presented in October 2007, the IAASTD bureau decided to eliminate a major modelling exercise which its proponents claimed would have provided insights to help policymakers compare the outcomes of four broad policy scenarios, such as futures with more free trade or green technologies. But various civil society groups objected that the models were not ‘transparent’.

Critics charge that the broad mandate of the IIASTD made conflict inevitable and stunted the assessment’s analytical rigour. On several key issues, consensus proved elusive. Industry scientists and some academics, mainly agricultural economists and plant biologists, believe the assessment was ‘hijacked’ by participants who oppose GM crops and other technologies of industrial agriculture. Conflict erupted in the review process as well, with some scientists and biotechnology industry representatives, such as Deborah Keith of Syngenta, complaining that their comments were not incorporated into later drafts of the chapters because of resistance. As a result, tensions peaked in October 2007 when major biotech companies and GM advocates voted with their feet and pulled out of the process. Their representatives won’t be attending the Jo’burg meeting.

For their part, supporters argue that the IAASTD assessment was a comprehensive and rigorous process, with more than 400 authors involved in drafting the reports, drawing on the evidence and assessments of thousands of experts worldwide. The drafts were subjected to two independent peer reviews by assessors from government, civil society, industry and specialist research institutes.

What is the final result? The IAASTD report proposes a fundamental re-thinking of our approach to AKST and essentially calls for a new paradigm that gives farmers a central role. It recognises that market forces alone cannot deliver prosperity and food security to the poor, and that trade rules unfairly favouring rich countries and multinational corporations must be reformed. Similarly, intellectual property laws need to be reformed to prevent patents on novel crops from stifling new research and agricultural innovation. Finally, the report is critical of the power and resources of the multinational companies that dominate world seed and fertiliser markets.

Key findings of the assessment include:

• Doing more to involve women to advance development and sustainability goals
• Creating opportunities for poor farmers and rural labourers through targeted investments
• Integrating formal, traditional, and community-based knowledge to improve AKST
• Creating space for diverse voices in science and technology policy processes
• Systematically redirecting agricultural development towards agroecological strategies, particularly to realise environmental sustainability

It is notably muted in relation to the claimed benefits of GM crops, highlighting instead the lingering doubts and controversies surrounding their development and use.

The mixed success of the IAASTD suggests that a key challenge for development in an era of globalisation is how collective perspectives, values and outcomes are negotiated across diverse cultural and institutional settings at an international level. As Janice Jiggins, one of the contributing authors to the IAASTD, observed in a recent article in New Scientist, “The IAASTD process has explicitly value-laden goals: to reduce hunger and poverty; to improve rural livelihoods; and to facilitate equitable, environmentally, socially and economically sustainable development. These demand a unique attempt at joined-up thinking, synthesising knowledge and experience from domains that are normally kept firmly separate. This in turn was almost certain to make dialogue exceptionally difficult – and so it proved.”
If nothing else, the IAASTD should bring more attention to the plight of the rural poor and the chronic underinvestment in agricultural research. Whether it is able to do more than that – to, for example, spark debate on the degree to which agricultural science and technology is meeting the needs of the poor or whether everyone gains from free trade – remains to be seen.

What is evident is that, in future, organisers of expert-driven global assessments will need to be more mindful of how the sometimes competing agendas and conflicting perspectives of different ‘epistemic communities’ can be integrated, obscured or excluded through these complex, highly political processes of scientific review and stakeholder engagement. They will also have to confront how dispute and dissent are dealt with among the various players, particularly given the power differentials involved. Furthermore, they will have to openly acknowledge how the design and deployment of particular tools and methods (from formal meetings and conferences to the use of scenario and computer modelling exercises and from the composition and coordination of writing teams to the terms of reference of review panels) influence the interactions of the actors and, ultimately, the outcome of the assessment process itself. In short, they will have to do away with the smokescreen of ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ and acknowledge the politics of knowledge and meaning that shape these assessment agendas.

John Thompson – April 2008

Links

International Panel on Climate Change

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA)

International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD)

Momentum for investments and action to promote an African Green Revolution are gaining ground, with African Governments (individually and through CAADP), with international and bilateral donors, with private donors, with farmer organisations, and with the private sector (see: http://www.agra-alliance.org/ and http://www.yara.com/). This is very exciting, and the agenda is moving forward rapidly in many different ways and at different levels – on farmers fields, in agricultural businesses, in national and sectoral programmes and changes, in public private partnerships, and in international policy development and support. Development of African smallholder agriculture and an African Green Revolution is critical for poverty reduction, economic growth and welfare in Africa.

It is not clear to me, however, that the many different players and promoters in this are agreed on what, in the words of Kofi Annan, a ‘uniquely African green revolution’ involves and what it should achieve.

From my observation it seems that there is general agreement on the importance and need for:

• Partnerships involving public sector, private sector, civil society, farmer organisations, and public and private donors, with good practice by all partners (transparency without corruption or inefficiency, etc)Investment in regional and domestic infrastructure
• Factoring in climate change to decisions while recognising the difficulties in this
• Technical and institutional innovation
• Improving soil fertility, crop genetic potential, and crop protection through increased and better use of inorganic fertiliser and improved seeds, and increasing irrigation
• Supply chain development, standards and regulations in supply chains, more value addition in African agriculture, and greater recognition of the potential for domestic and regional markets
• Small and medium entrepreneurs to have better and lower cost access to finance, particularly for medium and longer term investments
• Recognition and attention to variability in agricultural constraints and opportunities within and between countriesInvestment in education
• Greater recognition of the critical role of women in farmingUrgent action and implementation by all players rather than continued discussion of vision, plans and frameworks.

This not an exhaustive list, and these are generally unexceptional sentiments. There are, however, a number of fundamental issues which do not appear to be widely recognised or indeed on which there are some disagreements. We have to ask how far lack of attention to or agreement on these issues may undermine implementation and action to promote an African Green Revolution.

There appear to be a wide variety of sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting understandings of the ‘uniquely African green revolution’. Some of these explicitly or implicitly recognise fundamental environmental and social concerns raised by critics of the Asian green revolution and promote completely different ways of increasing agricultural productivity in Africa . Others would explicitly or implicitly reject many of these concerns but focus on business development around cash crops. A third group would support the focus of the Asian green revolution in increasing food crop production through technical change significantly dependent upon use of fertilisers and high yielding crop varieties.

Different conceptualisations of the ‘uniquely African green revolution’ appear to have a variety of objectives, but they have a common focus on promoting production and the interests of farmers. There appears, however, to be limited explicit recognition that around 50% of African farmers are net purchasers of food, or that while increases in agricultural productivity are a key first step in pro-poor economic growth its key contribution is to promote and allow increased reliance on non-farm (not agricultural) incomes for poverty reduction and higher standards of living: in most parts of the world this has involved exits out of agriculture.

The importance of differences in opportunities and constraints for private sector involvement in staple food and cash crops is closely related to this. Examples of successful unsubsidised private sector initiatives in agricultural finance and other aspects of staple food supply chain development are very rare. However increased productivity of staple foods is of overwhelming importance in pro-poor growth. First, there are currently huge land and labour inputs into low productivity smallholder staple food production in Africa . Second, low and stable prices of staple foods are critical for stimulating both domestic demand for non-staple agricultural and non-farm production and for releasing labour, land and financial resources from low productivity staple food production. This is because high and unstable prices make smallholders unwilling to leave inefficient subsistence production and trust the market for supplying all of their food needs. However substantial interventions from government are needed to stabilise prices and to subsidise production or consumer prices, and such interventions were an important component of the green revolution in Asia . Thus although the generalisations listed earlier apply to both food and cash crops, a much more active government role is needed in food crops than in cash crops (where government roles may best be restricted to investments in infrastructure and an enabling environment). Government attempts to play an active role in food crop markets are very challenging and have often failed. However the different roles and opportunities for private and public organisations in food and cash crops need to be explicitly recognised and acted on.

On the one hand there is widespread concern that the African green revolution should recognise the uniqueness of African conditions, but there also appears to be considerable and appropriate interest in applying lessons from other parts of the world to Africa . In the latter case there is, however, a danger of limited recognition of the particular needs for and challenges to growth in poor rural areas – particular needs and challenges which require particular solutions. Picking lessons from economies which have higher levels of economic and market activity is often very unhelpful in these circumstances. An appropriate historical understanding of what worked in the past in other parts of the world before their green revolutions may often be more helpful than taking lessons from what works now, when they have already achieved their green revolutions.

Related to the point above are calls for mechanisation and the use of herbicides to increase farm incomes. These will often offer very substantial benefits to farmers (reduced drudgery, savings in family labour time, and savings in expenditure on hired labour and in time recruiting and supervising hired labour). However if there are substantial numbers of poor people relying on hired labour for their livelihoods then widespread adoption of mechanisation or of herbicides can reduce both wages and opportunities for hiring out labour, and increase poverty. These are difficult and complex issues which need to be recognised.

Broad agreement on the need for an African Green Revolution is very important and very welcome. As part of this a broad and loose definition of what is meant by a ‘uniquely African green revolution’ encourages broad based support and diversity. It is also important, however, to recognise the different visions that are encompassed in this. It is by pursuing the different potentials and addressing the different difficulties associated with these different visions that there is the greatest hope that the benefits of these visions, and of their diversity, can best be realised.

Andrew Dorward, October 2007

Links

Aliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

African Green Revolution website

Ethiopia celebrated the start of its third millennium on 11th of September 2007. This seems an appropriate moment to take stock of the state of smallholder agriculture – the sector in which over 80% of the population derives their livelihood, as they have done for centuries past. Greater agricultural development is the key for reducing high levels of poverty and hunger in Ethiopia, and policy makers have accordingly devoted a high priority to its advancement.

Farmers have responded positively to Government reforms that include a strong extension and credit-led push for intensification of food staples production through the use of modern seed and fertiliser. Agricultural growth has been impressive over the last decade, especially when compared against the performance of the sector in preceding decades. Although short-term economic performance is unpredictable due to the predominantly rainfed agrarian economy, aggregate agricultural GDP growth has been around 4.7% over the past decade. This growth should have resulted in substantial improvements in food supply. However, the food supply situation has improved only marginally, partly because of increased population pressure and partly because of low, stagnanting yields. Overall cereal yields have averaged about 1.4 tons per hectare, merely a quarter of yields achieved in Asia since the green revolution.

A number of well-known interacting and self-reinforcing factors have hindered the realisation of the full potential of agriculture in Ethiopia. One key factor that has received the most attention by policy makers and donors in recent years is the importance of efficient marketing and the correct setting of agricultural prices. A high farm price is, of course, important for stimulating on-farm investment and thus increasing agricultural production. But the challenge in Ethiopia is to determine the exact conditions under which a high farm price leads to increased and sustained farm investment.

This short piece focusses on the recent food price rise in Ethiopia and the resultant paradox that followed it, and aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the future of smallholder agriculture.

The recent food price escalation in Ethiopia: a puzzle?

Primarily in response to the 2001/02 sharp decline in grain prices, and to counteract the the fall in fertiliser use the following year, policy makers have tried to improve farm prices and farmers’ access to markets (especially export markets). Policy attention to the production and marketing cash and export crops has also been growing as the push for agriculture to be more export-oriented gains speed.

Following this policy shift, the price of agricultural products and food in particular has increased substantially. Food inflation, for instance, grew from some 7.7% two years ago to about 20% recently. Although high agricultural prices was a policy choice, emerging conditions reveal the dilemma of these high food price in Ethiopia. Policy makers, busy designing strategies to increase agricultural prices only 3 or 4 years ago, are now doing an about-face and seeking to reduce the price of key food crops. For example, the Government banned the export of agricultural produce such as tef, corn and wheat one year ago. But even this measure has proved inadequate to curb soaring inflation, and the Government has resorted to distributing wheat and food oil at subsidised prices to lower-income groups in urban areas. The most recent policy intervention was to raise the wages civil servants and pensioners.

Similarly, in response to rising food prices and the falling real value of fixed cash transfers, the government shifted 1.8 million beneficiaries in the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) away from cash transfers and back to food aid, even though one of the original arguments for promoting cash transfers was to encourage local production by enhancing local demand and price of food crops.

So why this paradox, and what explains it? The recent developments in the Ethiopian economy pose many important questions that could help us better understand the complexities under which Ethiopian smallholders operate, and the conditions necessary for the growth of the smallholder sector. But first, let’s revisit the factors behind soaring food prices and high inflation.

What contributed to high inflation?

Price-related inflation is either a supply- or demand-driven problem, or a combination of both. There may also be an imbalance in their respective growth rates. Although Ethiopia’s domestic food production has improved and continued to grow (albeit slowly), the key problem is instead the inability of the smallholder sector to meet the rocketing demand for food.

Demand for agricultural products both in the domestic and export markets has grown rapidly. Exports of pulses, oil seeds, meat and meat products, and live animals increased by 51%, 152%, 99% and 960%, respectively, between 2003/04 and 2005/06. Similarly, effective demand (demand backed by purchasing power) for food crops in the domestic markets has expanded in recent years following recent developments in the economy. Enhanced urban incomes, coupled with an expansion of the informal sector could generate new employment and raise the level of effective demand for food grains. In rural areas too, the demand for food grains may have been boosted following the transition of food aid programmes into cash transfer programmes.

Why have high food prices forced the attention of policy makers?

Relatively high farm prices are advantageous for smallholders and the economy in general, as they contribute to future food production and a subsequent relative decline in prices. But increased farm price has become a problem in Ethiopia in very short period of time. Why?

Four factors could help to explain this. First, the majority of Ethiopians spend a disproportionately large portion of their income on food, which makes them very sensitive to even the slightest increase in food price. This has political implications, as it could worsen political instability.

Second, and if the high food price is associated with an export market that competes with domestically processed crops, shortages or high prices of industrial crops could lead to the closing down of some domestic agro-industries. This is the case for some domestic food processing industries (e.g. the Addis Modjo Edible Oil producing industry, see www.addisfortune.com).

Third, a high food price also hurts Ethiopian smallholders given that the majority of farmers are net-buyers of food. This removes some of the gain they may have received from a high producer price.

Fourth, the likelihood of high food price increasing other prices (including transport, inputs, industrial goods) is high, and this again removes some of the benefit smallholders gain from a higher food price.

Apart from the aforementioned factors, high and unstable food prices could negatively affect long-term national development , as it introduces instability into the macro economy.

What is the solution? Green revolution!

In Ethiopia agricultural production is failing to keep pace with growing demand for food, and this has resulted in increasing food prices. Even though higher food prices can be good for smallholders, the solution is to realise a green revolution that allows growth in agricultural production to keep pace with increasing food demand.

Ethiopia needs a sustained and rapid growth in per capita agricultural production, which was the key to the successful green revolution in Asia. The green revolution has enabled Asian smallholders to capitalise on the advantage of high farm prices in the short-term but a relatively declining farm price in the medium-to long-term.

It is important to analyse the whole system in order to identify the policy and institutional gaps and constraints that can hold back smallholder agriculture from growing rapidly. Ethiopia must realise its own green revolution soon.

Samuel Gabrielselassie, September 2007

There has been much hype about the prospects of ‘sustainable agriculture’, but little rigour on exactly what we mean by a sustainable agricultural system. Work by Jules Pretty and colleagues has attempted to assess the range of experiences, but the data is scattered, and often focused on particular well-funded, NGO-promoted case examples. Where dramatic spread of low external input approaches have occurred, these have often been driven by external factors, such as niche market demand (e.g. organic produce) or rising costs of alternative inputs (such as the prohibitive cost of fertiliser in much of Africa today).

The evidence from existing literature on the impacts of low-external-input techniques on poverty reduction is ambiguous. As with many technologies, access to labour, skills and contacts very often favour better resourced households and individuals. The new book ‘Self-sufficient agriculture’ by consortium member Robert Tripp offers case studies that highlight the important interactions between labour, knowledge and technology innovation and adoption. Many of the case examples of low-external-input technologies require significant labour and skill inputs. The art of farming is often, as Paul Richards has observed, more like a skilled and knowledgable ‘performance’, and rarely a simple routine operation. This is perhaps especially so with low-external-input systems.

But who has the labour and skills for such new innovations, and how are these acquired? The book discusses the complex trade-offs between the availability of household labour (and the gendered dynamics of this), and health status (through the impact of HIV/AIDS for instance), markets for hired labour, off-farm income earning and migration and other agricultural activities. Equally access to skills and knowledge may also be socio-economically differentiated, especially with the decline in coverage of state run agricultural research and extension systems, and the greater reliance on private sector input supplier and dealers, who make their money from simple input packages (of seeds and chemicals ), and not complex combinations of technology, skills and knowledge.

A key conclusion of the book is that low-external-input technologies are in many respects not different to any other technology with different inputs. Their reification in multiple NGO projects and the focus on their spread and scaling up, has perhaps missed the wider debate about how to encourage appropriate innovation systems that respond to the diversity of needs of highly differentiated farming communities, and how through such processes to offer a wide range of technology choice through various combinations of routes – public and private, group-based and individual, deploying scientific and indigenous knowledge. There is a need to use a diversity of methods too – and not just the current fads, such as farmer field schools – and develop robust institutions, both at local level, but critically at national and international levels, which see the challenge of technology innovation and development in a more rounded, comprehensive way.

The themes of technology innovation systems in agriculture will be key concern during the next year of the Future Agricultures consortium’s work. As the UK’s DFID Research Department gears up to fund a ‘research into use’ programme as a follow on from the decade-long Renewable Natural Resources Strategy, thinking hard about systems, processes and institutions for technology innovation and spread will be key.

Sources

Africa Fertilizer Summit – 9-13 June 2006, Abuja, Nigeria

UN Millennium Project website – Task Force on Hunger

International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development website

Soil Degradation in Sub-Saharan Africa, A. Hartemink and H. van Keulen (eds), Land Use Policy, 2005, Vol 22(1) – see articles by Mortimore and Harris and Fairhead and Scoones

Increasing Fertizer Use in Africa: What have we learned? E-forum commissioned by the World Bank and hosted by NRI International in collaboration with Imperial College London. Also see the summary paper…

Policies for Soil Fertility Management in Africa. A Report Prepared for the Department for International Development, 1999, Toulmin and Scoones

‘A Realistic View on Increasing Fertiliser use in Sub-Saharan Africa’, (see under Debates) Bert Meertens, Rural Development Expert

What is seasonality and why does it matter?
Seasonality has long been recognised as a major determinant of poverty, food insecurity and hunger in tropical countries. Agricultural seasonality arises from the peculiar feature of farming in the tropics: that farmers harvest only once or twice each year, which means that their livelihoods depend crucially on a successful harvest.

Families with undiversified livelihoods must survive all year long mainly on the crops that they consume as food and sell for income, and a single failed harvest can destitute a poor family with limited savings or assets. Where markets are fragmented, food supplies are highest and prices are lowest just after the harvest, but this pattern reverses in the ‘hungry season’ before the next harvest comes in. In the 1980s, Robert Chambers and others wrote about the lethal combination of depleted granaries, rising food prices and high prevalence of diseases like malaria and diarrhoea, that characterises the rainy season months before the main annual harvest.

What did governments do about seasonality?

African governments knew all about seasonality, and had institutional mechanisms and policies to deal with it. Many governments maintained a ‘strategic grain reserve’, which allowed them to respond not only to critical food shortages but also to seasonal fluctuations in food availability and prices. Across Africa – from Malawi and Zimbabwe in the south to Ethiopia and Kenya in the east, to Ghana and Senegal in the west – agricultural marketing parastatals purchased staple cereals cheaply after the harvest, stored it for 6-8 months then sold it back on local markets at cost price. These ‘open market operations’ aimed at smoothing food supplies and dampening price rises between the harvest and hungry seasons. Many governments also introduced pan-territorial and pan-seasonal food prices. All farmers were paid the same ‘floor’ price for their harvest, no matter how far they lived from transport routes and markets, while consumers were protected against high food prices by subsidies on staple goods that set a ‘ceiling’ on seasonal price rises. Unfortunately for poor rural Africans, these policies contradicted the basic principles of neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ thinking, which declared institutions like parastatals and grain reserves to be inefficient and corrupt, and policies like producer and consumer price subsidies to be fiscally unaffordable in poor countries. More generally, the Bretton Woods agencies decreed that public interventions in markets undermine incentives for private traders. Accordingly, the activities of parastatals were scaled down, grain reserves were abolished or run on a semi-commercial basis, and subsidies were phased out. The intention was to provide incentives for traders to step in and provide ‘market-oriented food security’. In most cases, they didn’t. Why is seasonality back on the policy agenda?

Seasonality never went away, of course, but when the institutional and policy pillars that had been deployed to deal with it were removed, it was apparently forgotten about by policy-makers. Only when recent food crises in Africa exposed the inability of public actors to protect the rural poor against production and market failures did it become clear once again that many Africans face a food crisis every year, when their granaries are emptied and food prices soar. In 2001/02, southern Africa suffered its worst food crisis in living memory. Experts concurred that the problem was not the size of the food gap, which was not unusually large, but the problems that market-dependent families faced in accessing food during the hungry season, due to unprecedented maize price rises. A massive humanitarian food aid operation was mobilised too late to prevent loss of life, which peaked when maize prices peaked in early 2002. Giving evidence to the UK Parliament’s ‘Inquiry into the Humanitarian Crisis in Southern Africa’, one expert witness remarked: “If you had stabilized the price of maize in 2001 in Malawi no crisis would have occurred.” What are governments doing this time?

Governments and international donors and NGOs are responding differently to seasonality now. Instead of mandated agencies implementing food security policies, they are relying increasingly on targeted cash transfer projects. In Ethiopia, the Productive Safety Net Programme is delivering cash (or food), usually with a work requirement, to 8 million beneficiaries for up to 5 years. These transfers are supposed to be regular and predictable for the 4-5 months of food shortage leading up to the annual harvest. Kenya is also piloting seasonal cash transfer projects in rural areas. In Malawi, Oxfam GB and Concern Worldwide delivered ‘emergency cash transfers’ to 11,000 households between December 2005 and the harvest of April 2006, following poor harvests in 2005. Why are cash transfers a ‘fourth best’ solution?

There is enormous enthusiasm for cash transfers among donors, NGOs and some governments in Africa, and early impact assessments confirm that they bring multiple benefits to beneficiaries, in terms of protecting food consumption and facilitating household investment in farming and small enterprises. It is less clear that these relatively small injections of cash into a minority of households in selected rural communities are having any discernible impact on local markets and economies, in terms of attracting traders and smoothing food prices over space and time. More fundamentally, we would question whether cash transfers are adequate and appropriate for addressing the ‘seasonal food crisis’ that millions of Africans face each year. In fact, we would suggest that cash transfers are only a ‘fourth best’ solution. A ‘first best’ solution is to prevent subsistence crises from occurring at all, through strengthening production systems (e.g. introducing irrigation to reduce dependence on unreliable rainfall), strengthening markets (to minimise supply failures), and reducing chronic poverty (to minimise demand failures). A ‘second best’ option would be to strengthen insurance mechanisms against the impacts of weather shocks. India’s Rural Employment Guarantee Programme is one example. Another is weather-based insurance – currently being piloted in Ethiopia, Kenya and Malawi – whereby payouts to countries or farmers are triggered by rainfall below a specified volume. ‘Third best’ is to intervene in input and output markets to correct for market failures. Although market interventionism remains unfashionable with most donors, many African governments are insisting on subsidising fertiliser, maintaining buffer stocks and retaining parastatal agencies for the ‘social function’ of protecting household food security. Innovative approaches are also being tested, such as using futures markets to ensure access to food imports and reduce price uncertainty. (Malawi bought a call option on the South African commodity exchange in 2005, saving up to US$90 on each ton of maize imported, at a cost of US$25 per ton.) Cash handouts to some people affected by seasonality and food crises is a ‘fourth best’ solution. Apart from the inevitable targeting errors (exclusion of many individuals who need assistance, inclusion of others who don’t), compensating selected individuals for structural problems – i.e., underperforming agriculture compounded by market failures – does little to address the underlying causes. Cash transfers certainly have potential (though still largely unproven) advantages over food aid, not least by facilitating investment in agriculture and stimulating local economies, rather than undermining production and trade. Nonetheless, cash transfers should not be promoted as a projectised alternative to systematic efforts to tackle agricultural seasonality, specifically, policies that strengthen agricultural production, build input and output markets and rural infrastructure, and provide effective and comprehensive insurance against livelihood shocks.
by Stephen Devereux

Links

Future Agricultures briefing: Promoting Agriculture for Social Protection or Social Protection for Agriculture?

Emergency cash transfers – key lessons from Malawi and Zambia

Government and donor intervention strategies for limiting food shortages

Powerpoint: Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP)

The Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC) recently published an in depth evaluation of the 2006-07 Malawian government subsidy programme for fertilisers. The evaluation, by Andrew Dorward (FAC and University of London) and Ephraim Chirwa (FAC and University of Malawi), assesses the impact and implementation of the Malawi Government Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme (AISP) in order to provide lessons for future interventions in growth and social protection. This follows on from a similar study covering 2005-06 by Blessings Chinsinga (University of Malawi).

Resources: Working Paper:
Lessons Learned from the 2005/06 Malawi Input Subsidy Programme
by Blessings Chinsinga

Discussion Paper:
Rethinking Agricultural Input Subsidies in Poor Rural Economies
by Andrew Dorward, Peter Hazell and Colin Poulton FAC Briefing: 

FAC Briefing:
The Malawi Fertiliser Subsidy Programme: politics and pragmatism

FAC member John Thompson reflects on the 2008 World Food Summit, arguing that any solutions will require the international community to move beyond simple, short-term technical or market ‘fixes’ and address the political economy of food and agriculture.

The UN Food Summit in Rome from 3-5 June aimed to address the soaring food prices which threaten to turn the bottom billion into the bottom two billion. The world’s agricultural leaders will be taking an impressive declaration and some serious proposals away with them, but will anything change when they get home?

When the Chief Executives Board of the United Nations met in Bern, Switzerland, in late April 2008 to assess how the international community could best contribute to combating the global food crisis, they agreed to set up a High Level Task Force, chaired by the UN Secretary General, with the Director General of the FAO as the Vice Chair. The Task Force is composed of the heads of the relevant UN specialised agencies, funds and programmes, the Bretton Woods Institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund), and relevant parts of the UN Secretariat. The aim was to promote a unified response to this huge challenge.

The first objective of the Task Force has been to produce a clear plan of action, known as the ‘Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA)’. Key elements of the CFA were presented to leaders from 151 countries who are participating in the UN’s High-Level Conference on Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy in Rome.

Following several days of intensive negotiations, a draft declaration on how to resolve the current food crisis has been circulating among delegates. The final declaration will be released at the close of the conference on 5 June. The draft version of the declaration is impressive. It calls for immediate action to assist countries affected by the food crisis, immediate support to small-scale producers, and the development of food stocks and other risk management mechanisms. The draft declaration also calls for medium- and long-term measures, including for governments to fully embrace a people-centred policy framework for agriculture, to increase the resilience of food systems to meet the challenges of climate change, and to conduct further studies to ensure that production and use of biofuels is sustainable and takes into account the need to achieve global food security. Obviously, this is no small feat.

The draft declaration calls for a rapid and successful conclusion of the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation and for the international community to continue its efforts to liberalise international trade, which has led some developing country leaders to claim that some countries were playing politics with urgent food matters. As Walter Poveda Ricaurte, Ecuador’s Minister of Agriculture told reporters, ‘We believe the problem is much more political than everything else. We have to differentiate between the countries who are really affected by the food crisis and those who are seeing it as an economic opportunity.’ (Read the full article in the Boston Globe)

The wrangling over diplomatic language came after United Nations officials announced a major aid package to help ease the food crisis, but UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned up to $15-20 billion dollars a year would be needed. ‘We simply cannot afford to fail,’ the UN chief stated at a press conference, ‘Hundreds of millions of people expect no less.’ New funding totalling some $2.7 billion was announced on the second day of the conference, where Ki-moon has already called for a 50 per cent increase in food production by 2030.

In parallel, and perhaps even more impressive, are ‘Elements of a Comprehensive Framework for Action’ (pdf), the draft recommendations of the UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis. Once again, the emphasis is on boosting smallholder farmers’ food production, increasing social safety nets and strengthening risk management. There is really very little new in these recommendations, but the focus on coordination and concerted action is an important addition, and long overdue.

So it looks like the world’s agricultural leaders may be leaving Rome with some serious proposals in their pockets. But what comes next? There is still a real danger that very little will change in the global food system or international food and agriculture policy when it comes time to implementing the recommendations. Entrenched interests and food politics may yet win out over shared visions and good intentions. Major corporate interests are lining up to offer their products – genetically modified crops, hybrid seeds and fertilisers, among others. These may have a role to play in getting agriculture moving and boosting productivity, but a wider deliberation about technical options and agriculture futures in different places is often missing. And where are the farmers’ voices in these discussions?

The proposals on the table will require a radical break from the past and a completely different approach to building equitable and sustainable food systems and reducing food insecurity, systems which are capable of withstanding increasing economic, environmental and technological shocks and stresses. To achieve them will require the international community to move beyond simple, short-term technical or market ‘fixes’ and address the political economy of food and agriculture, which has led to gross distortions in terms of trade, massive underinvestment in farmer-centred research, extension and education, and biased policy processes that have failed to meet the needs of the majority of poor people – both producers and consumers – in developing countries. If they fail to meet this challenge, it will be said that those who gathered in Rome this week were merely fiddling while the world burned.

John Thompson is an IDS Fellow, food and agriculture domain co-convenor for the STEPS Centre and member of the Future Agricultures Consortium

Dercon and El Beyrouty make several important points in their note of Dec 4 about the role of agriculture in economic growth and the relationship between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors in the process of structural transformation. Where Dercon and El Beyrouty misrepresent the World Development Report 2008 (with no personal stake on our part in that publication) is by inferring that the statement “agricultural productivity growth is vital for stimulating growth in other parts of the economy” implies looking at agricultural growth in isolation from other sectors, and/or giving agriculture priority over all other sectors (agriculture first).

This is clearly not the case. Neither the WDR nor any other informed development economists are advocating such an approach. Indeed, the WDR argues that, over a generation, many people will have to move out of agriculture to escape poverty. The key point that the WDR and other authors make is that for most low-income countries, increasing agricultural productivity is critical to creating the demand to support non-agricultural sectors and to releasing the capital and labor to finance their growth – a process documented in the green revolutions and associated economy-wide growth experienced in much of Asia. Hence empirical studies find that agriculture-led growth generates roughly double the poverty reduction of comparable industrial growth. Far from thinking of agricultural growth in isolation from other sectors as Dercon and El Berouty suggest is the case, the WDR and other initiatives to support African agriculture are based on past evidence of how smallholder-led agricultural growth kick-starts broad-based economic development. Public investments in agricultural research, for example, generate median rates of return of 34 percent in Africa.

The problem of imbalanced and poorly integrated growth strategies in many countries in Africa over the past two decades has been one of widespread neglect of investment in agriculture in Africa and its linkages with the rest of the economy, not overinvestment. What is being advocated now is a correction of this imbalance to allow agriculture to contribute positively to intersectoral linkages and overall economic growth rather than acting as a brake on them. It is not a case of “agriculture first” but “agriculture also”.

The consequences of two decades of underinvestment in agriculture, in terms of productivity, real food costs, hunger and malnutrition for Africa are indisputable. The slow growth in manufacturing and other non-farm sectors of African economies in the 1980s and 1990s is not unrelated to the slow income growth among the roughly 70% of the population engaged primarily in agriculture. The 2008 international commodity price shock was a wake up call to how fragile food security (urban and rural) has become – with over a hundred million additional people pushed below the poverty line globally. The long-term projections of rising real energy costs, rising fertilizer feedstock materials, and a rapidly growing urban population, all indicate rising real food costs unless investments are made in agricultural productivity growth as well as other sectors. The 2008 shock was just a foretaste. Yet in response to higher food prices many African governments and their international aid partners are having to spend heavily on consumption and/or production subsidies to minimize the social consequences of high food prices rather than invest in solving the underlying causes, prominent among them low agricultural productivity.

Recent calls by G20 leaders for an additional investment of $20 billion in agriculture and food security over three years would, if realized, still amount to less than 10% of total OECD official development assistance flows. The Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) calls for African governments to invest a similar share of public investment, recognizing that some countries may need higher levels and other less given their circumstances, in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty and hunger by half by 2015. This level of investment does not seem unreasonable in view of the underinvestment during the past two decades, and the very serious consequences of that underinvestment for overall economic growth as well as food security.

Dercon and El Beyrouty state that “An optimal growth strategy, therefore, must be designed to move people to sectors and locations that are optimal for growth and poverty reduction, rather than focusing on where people are located currently”. Precisely! Historical evidence points out that it is hard to envision how to achieve this without agricultural development being part of the process. Now that there is a broad-based political consensus on the part of African governments and international donors on the need to re-invest in agriculture, the challenge facing CAADP planners and analysts is to identify smart national and regional investment portfolios aimed at creating a pattern of agricultural growth that will foster employment expansion and growth in the non-agricultural sectors, including the off-farm portions of the food system.

What is the role of agriculture in Africa’s economic growth? An opinion article by Stefan Dercon and Kareen El Beyrouty critiques arguments for “agriculture first” programmes. Michigan State University Food Security Group provide comment and stress the importance of re-investing in agriculture.

Read:

• Opinion piece by Stefan Dercon and Kareen El Beyrouty
• Comment by Michigan State University Food Security Group

Agriculture is an urgent global priority and farmers find themselves in the front line of some of the world’s most pressing issues—climate change, globalization and food security. Twenty years ago, the Farmer First workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, launched a movement to encourage farmer participation in agricultural research and development (R&D), responding to farmers’ needs in complex, diverse, risk-prone environments, and promoting sustainable livelihoods and agriculture.

Since that time, methodological, institutional and policy experiments have unfolded around the world. Farmer First Revisited returns to the debates about farmer participation in agricultural R&D and looks to the future. With over 60 contributions from across the world, the book presents a range of experiences that highlight the importance of going beyond a focus on the farm to the wider innovation system, including market interactions as well as the wider institutional and policy environment. If, however, farmers are really to be put first, a politics of demand is required in order to shape the direction of these innovation systems. This calls for a major rethinking of agricultural R&D, the boosting of the knowledge and capacities of farmers’ organizations to innovate, the strengthening of networks and alliances to support, document and share lessons on farmer-led innovation, and the transformation of agricultural higher education.

Farmer First Revisited should be read by students, policy makers, development professionals, and natural and social scientists aiming to bring the concerns of grassroots farmers to the forefront.