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Charles Dhewa
Good rainfall seasons are usually the breeding ground for agricultural commodity associations.

As farmers harvest more than they can handle individually, the need to form strong commodity associations becomes sensible.

 

However, what makes agricultural commodity associations thrive or die has not been adequately explored in Zimbabwe.

While farmers unions get more attention than commodity associations, it is commodity associations that sustain any farmers organisation.

The export of beef and horticultural commodities over the past decade was anchored on strong commodity associations.

Without commodity associations, farmers unions are like a computer without software.

One of the key foundations of an agricultural commodity association is the calibre of its members.

In addition, the capacity to produce commodities consistently, a member’s knowledge-seeking behaviour is a critical factor.

Without individual farmers’ skills in personal knowledge mastery, most commodity associations become echo-chambers dominated by a few talkers and many passive information consumers.

The underlying intuition driving commodity associations is that farmers can share robust knowledge if they are able to come together into an association that shares a compelling purpose.

However, the downside is that if not properly organised, they may become a silo that is not able to speak to other commodity associations of silos.

Building commodity association will address a scenario where the majority of smallholder farmers have not mastered the art of using information from diverse sources.

How markets nudge farmers to take control of their own learning

Organised demand from domestic and foreign markets force farmers to be organised, which is why commodity associations become critical ways of organising producers.

Constant interaction with the market exposes farmers to diverse sources of information and communication channels.

Sorting out facts from fiction becomes a crucial skill for every serious farmer if s/he is to compete in dynamic local and global markets.

While value chains receive a lot of attention, they are nothing without commodity associations where farmers take control of their learning and professional development.

By encouraging competition, markets tend to be very good at nudging all value chain actors to take knowledge acquisition into their own hands.

Farmers can out-source services like transportation but, not knowledge acquisition.

The market has a way of instilling an individual, disciplined process by which value chain actors make sense of information through interacting with several ideas from several people.

For instance, the individual discipline of learning from field days, agricultural shows and other events enables farmers to become competent knowledge seekers, sharers and users.

Farmers who frequent agricultural markets are aware that knowledge is such a heavy burden to keep to yourself.

Through the market, they realize how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts as they build on the knowledge of others. Everyone’s knowledge is a part of the social learning contract.

When farmers take this knowledge back to their commodity associations, those associations become resilient sources of innovation and growth.

Through seeking information from markets and other sources, farmers keep up to date, both at individual and commodity association level. Building a diverse network enables them to pull information and have it pushed to them by trusted sources.

Sensing is how they personalise information and use it in their farming context. It includes reflecting and putting into practice what they learn from the market and other sources.

This often requires experimentation where they can learn best by doing and making mistakes. Sharing includes exchanging ideas and experiences, the same way they exchange plants and animals.

The discipline of personal knowledge mastery enables farmers and other value chain actors to distribute power and knowledge. As demonstrated by informal markets, standardising personal knowledge mastery reduces the value of knowledge.

When knowledge in the market is reduced into a document, its value goes down since it loses a significant portion of its fluid context. Implicit knowledge that keeps informal markets vibrant requires personal interpretation and engagement to make sense of it.

As an institution, the market helps this knowledge to flow. The flexibility of knowledge in the market remains at the individual human level and in trusted relationships built over years.

Commodity associations which invest in understanding these dynamics perform better and last longer than those which do not.

Although conventional farmer training approaches tend to be standardissed, farmers make their own sense in complex ways.

That is why emphasis on personal learning style is very important. Mastery comes through deliberate practice where farmers can develop the ability to see patterns hidden to the undisciplined eye.

Commodity associations can help in supporting individual ability to share and explain implicit knowledge toward pushing boundaries of knowledge.

Fostering collaboration

Commodity associations foster collaboration where farmers work together for a common purpose. When dealing with complex challenges such as climate change or diseases, collaboration enables the emergence of creative solutions.

Productivity can develop the skills necessary to support other value chains. A robust commodity association provides a metaphor and a conversation accelerator for farmers to ask better questions such as:

◆ How can we increase awareness of our activities and collective capacity as a commodity association?

How can we test alternatives to learn new practices?

How can we take action based on new knowledge?

What skills are necessary to ensure smooth knowledge flow within our commodity association and outside?

Where commodity associations have strong links with the market, new farmers graduate faster in ways that reduce their learning curve.

A smart farmer can under-study the market and build commercial networks that will enable him/her to engage in profitable farming without going through the whole learning curve.

Mostly this can happen through acquiring marketing skills. Engaging with a trader who has more than five years’ experience can enable a farmer to implement knowledge from the market in a cost effective manner.

Reducing the learning curve

When skills and intelligence are built within an institution such as a commodity association or a market, there is reduction in the learning curve of those who belong to those institutions.

The institution will perfect the knowledge through removing impurities and curating information such as market and production trends, size of the market and number of actors.

Such intelligence reduce chances of making mistakes and failing. To that end, the commodity association and markets quicken processes of mastering the business by prompting farmers to specialise and become champions.

Ultimately, these champions evolve into a value chain of specialists from production, marketing and processing. Information starts flowing very fast and learning also happens faster.

Pitfalls of farmers receiving information from different sources can be minimised through commodity associations.

Most farmers are failing due dependence on unverified information from many sources, some experimenting and in a trial and error mode. By verifying and authenticating information, invisible clusters in the market make things work very well.

Commodity associations benefit from how informal markets have moved from academic ways of learning to practical use of all human senses such as observation, feel, touch, smell, hear and taste.

This has crystallised into a bundle of habits and intuitions. Besides constituting learning through participation, it is a faster way of learning rather than seating in class and imagining how commodities behave in the market.

Each sense has its own capacity to hold and absorb knowledge – hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, etc.

Many farmers can only extract this evidence if they belong to a commodity association through which evidence can be consolidated.

Commodity associations can also benefit from an amazing culture of passing on knowledge within the market as an institution.

Those who have been in the market for much longer have their own knowledge which is passed on to novices and future generations.

On the other hand, new comers can integrate new knowledge with experiences held by those who have been in the market for generations.

Therefore the market is sustained by the tradition of passing on all modes of knowledge sharing. This constitutes knowledge value addition.

Old knowledge has hidden opportunities that can be surfaced creatively through commodity associations.

•  Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge management specialist and chief executive officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa (PVT) Ltd (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.