REFLECTIONS ON 30 YEARS IN AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

1 Introduction

I shall start by saying a few words about my background.

I worked in Tanzania starting in 1961. This was initially with the Colonial Service, but for most of the time under British Overseas Aid. Following Tanzania, I worked with FAO in the field until the mid 1990s. I have spent only very limited periods in the main centres, and have usually worked at fairly remote stations such as Wau in South Sudan, Solwezi in Zambia, and Idd el Fursan in Western Sudan.

For this talk I am relying on my memory rather than on documentation. I have to hope that my recollections have not become distorted over the years. Currently the media have been very much taken up with different persons’ different recollections of the same events – and these are quite recent events. This has made me wonder if I have always got it right. Anyhow, I am doing my best to be accurate.

What I want to do is to take some episodes from my working life, and to try to draw some lessons from them. I have mainly been employed in applied research, and for that reason I tend to look at things from that perspective. I have worked mainly with crops, and examples from crop production therefore feature more than from livestock production. This is not to diminish the importance of livestock, or fisheries, or forestry.

2 Effects of the Economic Environment

In my time in Tanzania I travelled each year to a Research Conference. At these meetings, the officer responsible for each crop would often preface his remarks with a few words on production trends. In the early years the pictures presented was very rosy, with steady increases in cotton, wheat, sisal and just about every other crop.

Unfortunately it was not long before agricultural production began to stagnate. This was for a variety of reasons, but in many cases it could be attributed to a progressive deterioration in the Government machine and the economy as whole, with for example:

- farmers having difficulty in obtaining inputs

- farmers having difficulty getting paid for the crops and livestock they had for sale

- radical changes to the structure of agriculture, with many of the large scale producers being nationalised, and small scale producers being forced into villages

- frequent staff movements and re-organisations within Government, resulting in a lack of continuity and demoralisation.

Agriculture cannot prosper and develop in an unfavourable economic environment and where the Government machine is not functioning properly. I do not think that the way agriculture was organised at independence was radically wrong. When agriculture is not moving forward as one would like , you must beware of blaming the technical support services, and believing that you can turn things round by measures such as making research more relevant to the real needs of farmers or re-vamping the extension service. There is always some room for improvement, but the benefit will be marginal unless the economic environment is right.

You are always going to get more out of aid when it is given where the political, economic, and social environment is favourable. Where the environment is clearly not favourable, you have to decide whether you can target your aid so that it will be reasonably effective, or whether it you would do better to take it elsewhere.

3 Some Thoughts on Advising Farmers

As I said at the beginning, most of my time has been spent in research. However this hasn’t stopped me having some views on how best to advise farmers, and I want to turn to this now.

My first job was as agronomist at the Sisal Research Station. In addition to our research, the station provided a soil analysis service to the growers.

Many (but by no means all) of the sisal growers believed that the best strategy for running their estate was to spend no money at all unless it was absolutely unavoidable. They cleaned the fields just about enough to be able to get into them. They were not open to advice. However, because the soil analysis service was free, these individuals would sometimes ask for their soils to be analysed. I discovered that having got onto the estate for the soils work, it was sometimes possible to establish enough of a relationship with the grower to be able to point out some other options for growing the crop. In a few cases I made real progress. I have always felt very sorry for extension workers when they have to go out to try to raise productivity with messages but empty hands. Some people feel that the effectiveness of extension staff would be compromised by their becoming involved activities which are not strictly extension. I should like to see them undertaking any activity which brings them close to farmers, and particularly activities where they are giving practical help.

A few years ago, in Zambia, the farmers were being encouraged to grow soya beans and to use promiscuous (that is self-nodulating) varieties. The commercial farmers used superior varieties which required inoculation. My suggestions to the authorities to make inoculum available through the extension staff were met with horror. This would have taken some effort to organise, but the problems were not insuperable. I still feel it would have been worthwhile, and would have given the staff a way into the farmers’ confidence.

I should like to see extension staff involved as much as possible in giving physical assistance such as multiplying seed and providing some inputs.

4 Production for Cash

I have lived in quite a variety of areas and had experience of the aspirations of many different peoples. Some groups of the Dinka people in South Sudan seemed to be reasonably content with a subsistence life, buying nothing except salt, and possibly a little tobacco or soap. However this lack of interest in cash is exceptional. In fact development can be regarded or even defined as gaining access to more goods and services than are available in the existing economy.

When I went to Solwezi, Zambia, one job was to develop a research station which at that time existed only on paper. In the early days I was busy with planning, procurement and administration, but when I had the time (usually about twice a week), I would go out to the site to locate the boundaries and mark them with a trace, recruiting a few helpers on the spot. Very soon, I was shocked to discover that each day 50 or 60 men were congregating early each morning in the hope that I would come out, and that if I did come out, I would recruit them to help in the work that day, and thus improve their chances of gaining regular employment once the station was established. If I did not show up, the group would disperse around mid-day.

In other situations I have been surprised at the way small farmers are willing to produce for sale, even when the price is poor, and payment may be late and uncertain. I can give a good example of this from Western Sudan. In this area tomatoes are grown mainly in the dry season on residual soil moisture. In the main production period (December to March) more tomatoes are grown than can be used by the family and absorbed by the market for fresh fruit, and the surplus is sun-dried on the ground. During the drying process the tomato is contaminated to a greater or lesser extent by dust, sand and other matter. In some areas the production of dried tomato is on large scale.

In 1993, in these areas, the price was the equivalent of US$2.90 for a 45kg sack.. One tonne of fresh tomato yields about 80kg of dried product, so the price for the dried tomato was equivalent to US$5.18 per tonne of fresh tomato, or about half a US cent per kilogram. It is remarkable that farmers are willing to produce at all at these price levels. I was interested in trying to improve the quality of the product, but even very modest steps on this direction could only be contemplated if the resultant product commanded a much higher price.

There is great potential for development here, but the only approach would be to provide a remunerative market for a good quality product, and then help the farmers find a way to produce it.

I know that some studies have shown that when production for sale assumes an important place in the farming system, the nutrition of the farm family can deteriorate. This can be a matter for concern. However I think that we have to give farmers the opportunity to earn money without forcing them to do so. Whether they take that opportunity is up to them. In cases where there are some deleterious effects, these need to be tackled by measures such as nutrition education rather than by placing obstacles to them entering the cash economy.

In most of the places I have worked the typical farm family has been able to feed itself, and to have some resources available for production for cash or for paid work. The exceptions are where the family has suffered a loss of resources through misfortune, illness or death. In such cases I have sometimes been given the impression that we were expected to come up with a technical solution. I think that these are social problems, and the solution will have to be social rather than technical.

I think that in rural communities there is usually both the desire and the resources to increase production for cash, and improving opportunities for production for cash is a good way to bring about development.

5 Importance of Markets

To get cash you need access to demand for something that you have to offer, that is a market..

During my first years in Tanzania, the country was comfortably self sufficient in rice, but marketed production declined in the mid-sixties to the extent that imports were needed. An investigation revealed that this had arisen because the price to farmers had become unattractive. The price was raised and production rapidly recovered to the extent that it became a problem to deal with the quantities being sold.

In the South Sudan, in the 1970s, with the economy in ruins after many years of civil war, I was surprised to see how quickly the tobacco company was able to organise a contract production scheme, and how receptive the small farmers were to quite complex advice on how to grow and cure the crop.

My own involvement in crop purchase has been limited. In Tanzania we were advocating the use of tropical kudzu as a cover crop in sisal, but seed supplies were a problem. The seed pods of kudzu mature unevenly, they had to be collected before they shattered, and then they had to be dried, threshed and the seed cleaned. Producing seed by regular paid labour proved expensive. I announced that I would buy clean seed for SHs5/- per kilo cash every Saturday. It took about three weeks for the people to test my offer, but after that there was no stopping them, with even the children gathering pods on their way home from school, and a pile of drying pods outside every house.

I have since found that offering a guaranteed fair price in cash for the produce has been a very convenient way of multiplying seed of other crops such as groundnuts or sorghum. Just to clarify a point, I would decide my “fair” price as being more than the expected “farm gate” price directly after harvest, but significantly less than the going price at the start of the next planting season.

In Zambia, in the 1980s, the main cash crop for small farmers was maize. In the NW Province the soils were generally too acid and low in fertility to make maize growing commercially attractive, and marketed production was low. The market for other staples, which are easier to grow in the NW Province, such as sweet potato and cassava, was limited because maize meal was heavily subsidised. During the 1980s the farmers in one village identified an outstanding sweet potato variety. (Chingovwa) Though we did not identify it on the research station at least we knew a good thing when we saw it. We set about multiplying it and spreading it around.

In the early 1990s, after a change of government, the maize subsidy was abolished. The poor people in the urban areas could no longer afford to depend on maize meal. Re-visiting the NW Province in 1996 I encountered a regular traffic of lorries heavily loaded with sweet potatoes, (of the variety Chingovwa,) leaving the province for the Copperbelt and Lusaka. I believe the quantities involved were over 100 tonnes per day in the harvesting season.

Later in the same year,1996 , I was in Malawi looking at ways of improving small scale irrigation for vegetable production. In many cases how you watered the crop was only of academic interest, since production was already more than the existing market could absorb. In one case , where there was a good market for potatoes, I was amazed at the ingenuity and industry of the local people in developing their production. The farmers had intercepted a small spring at the head of a steep sided gully, and brought it down the side of the gully for about 1 km to where it broadened out. Here they were able to gain command of a substantial area. In places the gully sides were almost sheer rock, into which a channel had been hewn. Crevasses in the rock had been bridged by aqueducts of old pieces of corrugated iron and logs. As far as I could ascertain this work had been planned and carried out by the local farmers without any external assistance, and the whole job had been done in less than a month.

It seems that the crucial step in stimulating development is to provide a market for something which the rural people can offer for sale. I am thinking mainly in terms of crops or livestock, but one should not rule out the sale of other items such as handicrafts or furniture, or just some of the labour which the family has available. Even when the full details of the technology required to produce the saleable item are not yet worked out, it is surprising how quickly solutions will be found once there is a real stimulus to get them. When farmers are aware of a problem and looking for a solution they make very good co-operators in research projects, and they will seek out advice rather than wait or hope for a visit.

6 Other Points

I should like to touch on a few other points before I finish.

1) Situations have been identified in which research staff seemed to be unaware of the real needs of the farmers. For example in Western Tanzania cotton recommendations were aimed at farmers who planted the crop early in the season, whereas in fact most farmers planted cotton much later after they had established their food crops. This and similar complaints have led to the wholesale diversion of research resources into Farming Systems Research, with a lot of effort going into surveys and on-farm trials. My impression has been that the surveys only rarely gave new insights, and that on-farm research often involved travelling hundreds of kilometres to run inconclusive trials. Whilst agreeing that some new initiatives were needed I think that simpler solutions could have been found for improving the relevance of research.

2) There is a philosophy that crop production should as far as possible replicate the natural order of things. Somehow it is more virtuous to grow crops together than alone, and one should adapt the crop to the environment rather than the environment to the crop.

Of course inter-cropping is sometimes the most appropriate way to make the best use of the land, but I have seen great efforts made to combine crops where it was impractical or else of no value. To give an example, a project in Kabompo, Western Zambia, advocated several inter-crop combinations, including maize and soya beans. In that area maize should be planted early in the rains – usually early November- and soya bean in the latter half of December. If you plant maize at the right time you can only establish the soya beans by reducing the maize population. This lets more weeds in, and makes control of these and establishing the soya very difficult. In my own trials of the Kabompo project’s recommendations, I could not detect any yield benefit from inter-cropping maize and soya bean.

During my time in Zambia we were under continual pressure from World Bank supervision missions to do more work on selecting crop varieties tolerant to acid soils, although there are many limestone deposits in the area. In the UK , besides liming land used for arable crops, farmers lime grassland because they know that the sort of grasses which are adapted to very acid conditions are not productive. Largely because the missions were so keen to believe that the solution to the problem of soil acidity in Zambia would be different to that in the UK, I was unable to get production of agricultural lime off the ground.

3) Finally a few remarks on the Training and Visit system of managing extension services. I can see that there is a problem that an extension worker left to his or her own devices may be liable to wander round without any clear purpose. It may well be that in a fairly uniform and intensively farmed area the T & V system, or something close to it is appropriate. However I have seen the problems which arise when this system is applied to diverse and sparsely populated areas, where travel costs are high, and simple messages are only suitable for a limited number of farmers. In this sort of situation I would favour using fewer and more highly trained officers, and giving them more freedom to get on with the job as they see fit.