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Communities should be the ones speaking about agricultural production and transformation more than development agencies

Charles Dhewa
Efforts by development organisations to build the capacity of agro-based rural communities should by now be bearing meaningful fruits in the form of local institutions speaking for themselves.

On the contrary, in their eagerness to help, some development organisations could be undermining the capacity of local institutions to navigate and articulate their own situations. Why would a non-governmental organisation talk about small grains, livestock production and climate resilience when such messages should be coming from local institutions such as Community Based Organisations?

Communities should be the ones speaking about these issues more than development agencies. Which local organisation can go into UK, USA, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Sweden or other donor country and speak about agriculture in those countries?

Yet organisations from these countries find it ideal to continue speaking on behalf of local communities when such communities should be empowered enough to speak for themselves. Failure to address these power issues is one reason why most agricultural projects remain projects that do not translate into sustainable socio-economic change.

What motivates partnering?

Another new negative trend is the tendency by funders to encourage partnerships or consortiums as a pre-condition for accessing funds. As a result, many organisations are coming together for the sake of accessing money. There is little attention to the vision and mission of different organizations. In most cases, the needs of Community Based Organisations are not adequately reflected in new partnerships.

Organisations working in agriculture and rural development have different agendas which influence how they define impact and success. It is more sustainable for funders to support local institutions than a collection of organisations whose coming together is motivated by money than addressing real challenges. Local people that are employed by development organisations do not have the power to influence development.

They end up satisfied with earning high salaries when their work is not transforming lives. Why would an expensively trained agronomist or agricultural economist be satisfied with managing a few nutrition gardens or livestock projects whose value may not be more than $500?

That is a serious waste of talent, knowledge and resources.

What informs development interventions?

In most cases when calls for proposals are announced, an agenda will have already been set. Thematic areas will have been cast in stone – for instance focus on gender, youth, climate change, etc. Where situational analysis is conducted, it is merely for legitimising pre-conceived ideologies and voices. If what is found on the ground contradicts these prejudices, it is ignored and the project bulldozes its way as originally planned.

This is an illustration of the extent to which development interventions are ignoring voices that should inform local interventions. Agriculture-driven development should not just be about training farmers in farming as a business. Farmers already know that farming is a business which is why they continue doing it. What they need are roads that can enable them to move their commodities to markets.

They need warehousing facilities in order to store surplus commodities after a bumper harvest. They need local markets and participation in foreign markets. Unfortunately, development finance and donor funding come from the West without markets.

Many smallholder farmers are asking why donors and development partners are bringing money instead of bringing markets as well. Since local markets are already saturated and buying power is low, why should development organisations continue putting money in production?

If they are sincere, they should support the whole value chain from production to logistics, infrastructure development, value addition and unlocking export markets.

Importance of redistributing agricultural wealth Instead of congesting agricultural production, development organisations may change lives through supporting systems that can directly distribute agricultural commodities where they are needed.

At the moment, it is common for agricultural commodities to move from one rural area to urban centres and back to a neighbouring rural areas. For instance, groundnuts can move from Chipinge to Harare and back to Buhera. In most cases not much value will have been added to the product in urban areas.

Why can’t maize move from Karoi to Tsholotsho in exchange for pearl millet without passing through Bulawayo?

For that to happen there should be a mechanism that updates community needs. Commodities can then be easily moved from areas of production or abundance to where they are needed.

In most cases, there is no demand or market in areas where commodities are produced in abundance. For instance, there cannot be a market for bananas in Honde Valley because almost everyone produces the fruit.

Unfortunately, even if the fruit is needed in Gwanda, it has to pass through Harare, Gweru and Bulawayo where there will be so much double handling, contributing to losses.

Change in convening power

Big cities like Bulawayo and Harare previously flexed their pulling power for agricultural commodities because they were sources of reliable income through formal employment. Urbanisation was also on the increase and that meant high demand for food from farming areas.

Urban agriculture was not a common practice since most people in urban areas could earn reliable income. With an increase in population, urban farming is on the rise and this presents competition for commodities from rural areas.

The expansion of growth points and rural business centres is an opportunity for fruits and other commodities from high production areas to by-pass urban centres destined for new demand zones.

Unfortunately, food supply systems that were influenced by colonial patterns are finding it difficult to adjust to these new demand trends. Even if mango production has increased in Harare and other urban centres, mango and other fruit producers in Mashonaland and Manicaland continue to take these commodities to Harare when they may be needed more in drier areas like Masvingo and Matabeleland South.

The perception is that Harare and other big urban centres have all the money. Yet business has migrated to gold mining areas such as Shurugwi and other areas along the great dyke and rivers like Mazowe and Sanyati where alluvial gold panning has become big business.

Transport routes that link rural and urban areas continue to limit possibilities of rural communities exchanging commodities without going via urban centres.

Another challenge is lack of warehousing and cooling facilities in rural farming areas which force farmers to push everything to urban centres where some handling facilities are available.

Even where it makes sense to preserve commodities at local level while prices firm up, farmers find themselves pushing unripe commodities like bananas to urban centres for ripening close to the market.

While semi-processing should be happening in rural farming areas, processors are now linking with markets than with farming areas. This tendency locks money in urban areas/markets at the expense of rural and farming areas.

Traders have to stay with money in order to buy commodities that show up haphazardly.

Inappropriate dance with colonial models

Zimbabwe is adopting the western financial models to address its cash crisis. Financial authorities think a cash crisis can be addressed through plastic money yet there is no support infrastructure to roll out plastic money in rural and farming communities as well as along the value chains.

Plastic money does not work for farmers if local shops and service providers are not accepting it. It is naïve to put all our faith in plastic money which does not connect with Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS).

If colonial models like the Post Office are now longer used, even though stamps are still printed and are on sale, resulting in local people moving forward with mobile phones now, what makes financial authorities think plastic money will immediately get traction unless they first put in adequate infrastructure.

Financial institutions should oil the economy but they remain uninformed about what is important. Many people still associate banks with keeping and giving out money yet banks should identify niches and build models around those niches. For instance, a bank that dedicates itself to agriculture should become an undisputed heavy weight champion in that niche and generate appropriate models.

If it wants to invest in the avocado value chain, it should do it so well that no one would dare to try and compete. Transforming indigenous and communal properties into appropriate collateral

We need to rebuild our own models based on trust, relationships and Communities of Practice (CoPs). Industrialisation introduced a system where properties guaranteed a market as collateral. If houses were the only form of collateral most houses in urban areas would have been sold to recover debts. Rather, relationships and other invisible forms of collateral like networks account for the survival of most economies.

More than 70 percent of African smallholders do not have title to land or leases. The notion of title deeds was brought by colonialism but there is no commensurate model that unlocks the value of title deeds in rural areas. By embracing title deeds as the only valuable factor, investment policies exclude a lot of people whose properties in rural areas and growth points cannot be converted into title deeds.

Money means nothing if there is no one able and willing to use it. There is need for a partnership model rather than a big brother syndrome being propagated by banks.

Revisiting the notion of nutrition

While policy makers and development organisations are not moving with time, ordinary people are quietly going back to their roots as revealed by food choices and consumption patterns.

Most modern nutrition programmes are not riding on indigenous knowledge. Oils and pulses are being pushed at the expense of wild fruits and indigenous foods that may be more nutritious.

The language used is about iron, zinc and other academic or highly scientific terms. As we try to revive African agriculture, it is important to understand the nutritional shift that has happened. It is important to cultivate new relationships with alternative markets. Promotion of indigenous food and knowledge systems is lagging behind. It doesn’t help to continue investing in maize while importing necessities like cooking oil.

Why should we continue drinking coke when our farmers are struggling to sell small grains which can produce nutritionally superior beverages?

It doesn’t make sense to continue associating our small grains and indigenous vegetables with curing certain diseases as if that is the main unique selling proposition.

• Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge management specialist and chief executive officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa (Pvt) (www.knowledgetransafrica.com) whose flagship eMKambo (www.emkambo.co.zw) has a presence in more than 20 agricultural markets in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on: [email protected]; Mobile: +263 774 430 309 / 772 137 717/ 712 737 430.