INCENTIVES
IN SOIL CONSERVATION[1]
President,
World Association of Soil and Water Conservation
by
David
Sanders
The
title of my presentation is “Incentives in Soil Conservation”. Why this
subject? Well, some five years ago I attended a workshop in Thailand. It
looked at how soil conservation programs are now being implemented and
what the problems are. The meeting concluded that progress is being made.
This is largely because the importance of fully involving the landusers
is now generally accepted as a precondition to success. New methodologies
have been developed to make this possible and most soil conservation programs
are now designed to take this into account. In fact, all donor organizations
now seem to be demanding that all the projects that they fund adequately
provide for “people’s participation”.
But,
the workshop did highlight one major shortcoming: even where the landusers
are fully involved there may still be little progress. The reason is that
landusers may simply not be willing or may not be able to change their
practices because of the prevailing economic, social or political forces
that are beyond their control.
Programs
have been trying to overcome this problem by using a variety of incentives.But,
unfortunately, many of the incentives used have proved to be ineffective
or even counterproductive. Clearly, there was a need to examine incentives
more closely and to discover which incentives will work and under what
circumstances.
With
this in mind, four of us, working on behalf of the World Association of
Soil and Water Conservation, invited some 50 people who are well known
for their work in this field, to contribute papers that could be made into
a book on the subject. The result was the publishing of the book in late
1999, “Incentives in Soil Conservation - from Theory to Practice”[2].
This was an important piece of work and my presentation today is based
on what we discovered as we worked on the book.
Direct
incentives
can be provided in cash in the form of wages, grants, subsidies and loans,
or in kind through the provision of food aid, agricultural implements,
livestock, trees, seeds etc., or as a combination of the two.
Indirect
incentives
include fiscal and legislative measures such as tax incentives, guaranteed
inputs and input prices and land tenure arrangements. They include services
such as extension services, technical assistance, the use of agricultural
equipment, marketing, storage, education and training. They include social
services, community organization and the decentralization of decision making.
Our
study highlighted the fact that of the two, indirect incentives are by
far the most important. This particularly applies to land tenure rights,
markets and prices and decentralization of decision making.
Equally
important are disincentives. Like incentives, disincentives come in many
forms, varying from cash or in kind payments to tax disincentives and legal
measures.
In
the end, the way a farmer reacts to land degradation and soil conservation
programs is most likely to be the result of him or her weighing up all
the different incentives and disincentives that may be available or in
force at the time.
One
of the more difficult things to decide is where and when should incentives
be used?
The
Landcare program am in Australia has demonstrated how incentives, if well
thought out and used, can be very effective in leading landusers to take
up and continue to use new and better conservation practices. On the other
hand, there have been many cases where incentives have had very little
long-term effect, with landusers carrying out prescribed works only for
the sake of obtaining short-term benefits and quickly reverting to their
old ways once the incentive is withdrawn. You will all be aware of examples
of this. The massive use of food-aid as an incentive in Ethiopia during
the 1970s and 1980s is to me a good example.
The
first lesson to be learnt is that incentives, whether direct or indirect,
should be related to what has been called“farmer
pull” rather than “technology push”. In other words, if incentives are
to be effective, they must be directed towards problems as perceived by
the landusers, rather than just the implementation of technical measures.
The
book provides simple guidelines that can be used to indicate where incentives
are likely to work and where they are needed. I will quickly look at just
a couple of these.
The
effects of land degradation.
|
|
On-site |
Off-site |
|
Economic |
1 |
2 |
|
Uneconomic |
3 |
4 |
1)Where
the problem is on-site and the treatment is economic, that is, it is perceived
by the landuser to more than pay for itself, the task is primarily one
of extension and providing the landuser with the correct type of information.
No other incentive should be needed. For example, it may be possible to
solve the problem by helping the on-site landuser change his farming practice
from, say, clean cultivation to no- tillage - as has been done very effectively
in southern Brazil.
2)Where
the problem is off-site and the treatment is economic, the task is again
one of extension and again no other incentive should be needed.
3)Where
the problem is on-site and the treatment is uneconomic, that is, not considered
worthwhile doing by the landuser, (e.g. an expensive terracing system may
be needed), three possibilities arise:
*the
landuser treats the problem for the public good but contrary to his own
economic advantage;
*the
landuser is forced to carry out the required measures (regulation);
*the
landuser is subsidised to do what is required through one or more incentives.
It
is very important to carefully consider the Causes and Constraints that
landusers operate under. The
importance of fully involving the landuser in soil conservation programmes
is now recognized but what are still not generally appreciated are the
constraints under which landusers operate.
Table
3. Landuser attributes.
|
Extrinsic
factors |
Resources
of land, labour, capital, equipment, etc. |
|
Intrinsicfactors |
Awareness,
technical understanding, conservation attitudes, etc. |
There
are extrinsic and intrinsic factors which affect all landusers.
Distinguishing
between these factors is important if the correct incentives are to be
selected. Too often we concentrate on the intrinsic factors. For example,
it may be a waste of time to provide technical training to a farmer if
his real problem is lack of long term access to land or capital. This is
a mistake frequently made in projects in developing countries.
I
would now like to move to some of the conclusions that come out of the
study.
The
adoption of agricultural innovations, in general, and in soil conservation
in particular, is a complex process. Few farmers are able to adopt even
simple technologies, let alone packages of conservation measures without
adjusting their traditional practices and their livelihood strategies.
The book concludes therefore, that a necessary condition for adoption is
that changes must be profitable to the farmer. But, profit
by itselfmay not be sufficient to
stimulate the required change. Profit maximization, while being an important
driving force, is by no means the only motivational force.
It
should also be understood that the objective of incentives should be to
alter the long-term behaviour of the landusers, not simply to boost
adoption rates in order to meet project targets. It is all too easy for
incentives to turn into wages without the recipients making the linkage
between the incentives and the desired conservation. Far too often, incentive
schemes, such as food-for-work programs, turn into work-for-food programs
without altering the landuser’s behavioural pattern.
We
looked at the justification for providing incentives.
Incentives
are not simply justified by low incomes. If the desired conservation measures
are profitable to the landusers, it is most likely that the landusers will
find the way to finance the necessary changes. If they cannot, then it
may be necessary to provide enabling incentives, such as cheap credit
or improved land rights. Incentives may be necessary to overcome barriers
to the adoption of profitable conservation measures. Experience demonstrates
the incentives may be justified for both rich and poor landusers where
society clearly stands to gain.
One
important conclusion - and one which will surprise some of you - is that
the use of incentives may be justified on a continuing basis. Numerous
examples exist of projects failing after incentives were withdrawn. Obviously,
the landusers did not consider the conservation practices profitable without
the incentives.But if society derives
adequate benefits from the conservation activities, then there is a case
for the incentives to be continued indefinitely.It
may be necessary, and also fair, that those who benefit pay the costs.
We
tried to evaluate the impact of different incentives.
This
was difficult because to evaluate the impact of incentives, it is necessary
to carefully monitor their use and effects. One thing that this study shows
is that monitoring is difficult to do and, in fact, is seldom done. Changes
in behaviour patterns are particularly difficult to assess and, therefore,
the benefits attributable to the incentives hard to measure.
Also,
it is difficult to differentiate between the effects of incentives andexternal
factors such as weather and markets. Because of this, it is understandable
that some of the contributors to our study came up with different conclusions.
This was so in the case of food-for-work. The conclusion from a Central
American project was that food-aid led to dependency. But another writer
claimed that food-for-work was an appropriate incentive in Tunisia. Interestingly,
the conclusions of a review of the huge food-for-work program in Ethiopia
in the 1980s was that the top-down approach and selection of inappropriate
techniques were more important factors in the failure of the scheme than
the use of food-for-work as the incentive. And, even more interestingly,
it was found in Indonesia that the effectiveness of the same incentives
not only differed between projects but between farmers in the same project.
It
is significant that, again and again, the contributors to the study came
back to the issue of profitability. In one way or another, they
all tend to conclude that soil conservation must be profitable for the
landuser if it is to be sustained. To some this means that soil conservation
must be profitable in its own right without outside incentives. To others
it means that outside incentives must be provided as long as the conservation
activity is not profitable by itself. But most agree that, when the measures
are profitable to the landuser, they are likely to be adopted and maintained.
That is, using incentives to make projects profitable contributes to their
success. And, importantly, the sustainability of soil conservation measures
depends upon their continued profitability, either with or without continued
external incentives.
Finally,
we looked at what are the future challenges in the use of incentives?
From
this study it would seem that the most important requirement at present
is to remove the many disincentives to conservation that presently exist.
This may be more difficult than it first seems. Many existing government
policies are designed to overcome other problems, such as inadequate food
production and low farm incomes, and often these unintentionally contribute
towards land degradation. The problem is understandable - governments,
and society in general, are inclined to view food production and the welfare
of the farmers as more important than soil conservation. A major problem
facing people like us is to reconcile the multiple objectives of society
and not simply to argue for soil conservation for its own sake.
Another
challenge is to design sustainable incentives. As numerous chapters in
this book illustrate, soil conservation incentives, particularly in the
form of subsidies and technical assistance, tend to be temporary measures.
Usually, when these incentives are withdrawn, conservation activities also
cease. There is a need to build the right types of incentives into the
social and economic systems for the continuance of soil conservation programs.
Also,
the effectiveness of using incentives for soil conservation is constrained
by the institutions within which they are applied. The challenge is to
devise incentives that work within the particular institutional structure
in which the problem exists.
Certainly,
there is no single incentive appropriate for every problem.