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Want to uplift agriculture? Educate farmers, and let experts farm as well
2006-05-10 08:23:54
By Nimi Mweta
Running around in circles, or in confused circles, is the only epitaph one can give to some research quarters baffled of course by sheer inability of any of their spin strategies on agriculture to yield fruit.
Of late they are depressed that the latest World Bank-cum-bureaucracy plan, ’Mkukuta’ is scarcely of any promise that it can change agriculture. If anything, the crisis gnawing at the fundamentals of agriculture – rain, vegetation, inputs, prices – worsen.
Without seeking to jump the gun about the issue, the ’Mkukuta’ blueprint at least requires clemency from nature, so that incremental efforts put up by the government (largely via debt relief cash) can produce fruit. But then if such proceeds go for the purchase of emergency power systems and relief food, it is evident that far more time will be needed for tangible or incremental effect to be noticed.
The problem thus looms larger than it was thought, and indeed it is to the credit of the fourth phase government that is directing its efforts at this crisis (environment, chiefly) and maintain the tempo of incremental bits.
Yet of course it is scarcely comforting that this initiative has taken place, as it is clear to all and sundry that the problem of agriculture is that there is no huge ’heave ho’ initiative somewhere, pulling farmers from lethargy.
There is no agent, a class of entrepreneurs at the farming level or sector who show the way in terms of use of land, inputs, marketing focus and taking risks, and instead there are traditionalists and few non-traditional farmers. We fail to use any of the quotas we are provided with in protected markets like AGOA and EBA arrangements in the US and European Union respectively, to boot.
The trouble one finds is that agriculture is a sort of Achilles Heel when one sets out to analyse the country’s economic situation, one where there is least ability to grapple with fundamentals.
There is more academic initiative when it comes to variations of ’spin’ in how say crop marketing is handled, or how extension education is conducted, but nothing that seems to ’subvert’ what exists on the ground: do we have the right agents for agriculture? None of this can be raised, for economics treats the peasants as a God-given quantity.
Thus the dons in the Economic Research Bureau and elsewhere don’t seem to realize that ’Mkukuta’ is the nth plan as to how to reach agricultural and wider growth with the peasants as the basic quantity.
Without this realization it is evident they can’t proceed to tackle the next question, as to whether this agent given the task of moving up agricultural growth is apt for the task, or it is needful to have other agents.
Lately there is a revelation, what Karl Marx would in such circumstances call it the ’Revelation of St Semboja,’ that the only way agriculture can move forward is not just extension services, but that these extension staff should also be farming. Isn’t that absolutely true?
The irony of this suggestion is that it contains the key to a combination of the two syndromes of all faulty formulas, namely an ’apologetic idealist’ element and a ’vulgar realism,’ all put into one idea.
There is something of an apology that education is the key to improving agriculture - and since the right spirit isn’t forthcoming from the farmers, and for that matter livestock herders, then some educated groups need to do it.
But then the very function of extension officers is to educate farmers on methods of farming or for that matter improving livestock they own; if they don’t take up the idea, too bad.
That is where the ’vulgar realism’ arises, that it is the same educated people in the sector who should also do the farming, but the proposition isn’t clear if they should replace traditional farmers as the mainstay of agriculture, or add a little to what is produced already.
But even if the latter was tried, that is, increase output, definitely it couldn’t help to change the levels of poverty because it wouldn’t belong to the farmers, even if perhaps it would reduce the need to import grain.
But then again they could sell it across the borders.
This is not the first time that someone has come up with a plan seeking to replace the peasants as the main force or group upon which the country relies for its agricultural output.
The first was an ill-fated World Bank plan, or say government plan more or less accepted by the World Bank back in 2003, that a fund should be set up to loan retiring agricultural officials, so that they put their expertise into farming..
It isn’t quite different from this plan by Dr Semboja, but it is changing the focus group – making it more directly related to the task, but emptying it of practical content as well, as agricultural officers can’t also be tasked with farming. It is just unrealistic.
What can be gathered from the first plan and the present suggestion, since they share some proximity is obvious even to a bird’s eye view, that the peasants are unreliable as a force to improve the country’s agriculture.
But then put in that manner, the proposition is next to meaningless for it might in a way be addressing the problem of obtaining sufficient grain within the local market and not having to import, which isn’t an especially urgent issue.
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