I'm being a bit lazy today, but I wanted to post this paper (unpublished as far as I know) by a friend of mine in Malawi by the name of Stephen Carr; if you really dig into African agricultural literature, you might come across the title Surprised by Laughter, a quasi-autobiographical book he wrote about 10 years ago. You might also, if you Google the name, find that he was a relatively large voice in the quest to reinstate fertilizer subsidies in Malawi in 2006, largely due to his correct assertion that subsidizing inputs was far cheaper than sending food aid.
The paper is incredibly relevant to the work I do in that quality of delivery and appropriateness of interventions beats great inputs any time. Great read for those in ag. development.
Anyway, here goes:
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Author: Stephen Carr
Date: 2004
Title: OSMOSIS OR PROJECT ACTIVITY?
THE SPREAD OF AGRO-FORESTRY IN MALAWI
ABSTRACT:
Unlike a number of new technologies and
crops introduced into Africa in the past, the agro-forestry initiatives
intended to improve soil quality are not spreading rapidly from farmer to
farmer. This paper reviews the reasons for this failure in Malawi and describes
current activities aimed at remedying this situation.
African small scale farmers have shown
themselves eager to adopt innovation which they see as offering obvious
benefits. In many parts of the continent farmers mainly plant crops which have been
introduced from the Americas together with exotic trees from various parts of
the world. They have also adopted new technologies such as ox-ploughing and the
use of inorganic fertilizers. Most of this rapid spread of new crops and
technology has been by a process of “osmosis” from farmer to farmer with little
or no formal extension. Why then are agro-forestry technologies for improving
soil quality not spreading in the same way? The reasons include faulty
technology, a lack of appreciation of farmers’ labour constraints and the
absence of a striking short term impact on productivity. The response to this
situation has been the development of more appropriate technologies and the
intensification of formal extension. As a result there has been increased
uptake of the technology by farmers associated with projects but little osmotic
spread. Fresh initiatives are now need which make greater use of the extensive
informal networks which exit in the Malawian rural sector.
Key Words: crop productivity, extension,
small-scale farmers, soil fertility, technology adoption
INTRODUCTION
The dramatic changes which took place in
Sub-Saharan African small-scale farming during the first half of the twentieth
century were largely due to the rapid spread of new ideas from farmer to
farmer. These changes all provided obvious immediate benefits in terms of
increased productivity per unit of labour or access to additional sources of
food and cash. The challenge face a growing number of smallholders in Africa
to-day is of a different nature. Counteracting the slow but steady loss of soil
fertility on permanently cultivated land involves the use of quite unfamiliar
concepts and offers benefits and returns which are less immediate and obvious
than the switch from sorghum to maize or hoe to ox-plough. At the same time the
people who shouldered the responsibility for developing appropriate
technologies to meet the challenge of declining fertility of the often
difficult soil conditions of Africa were moving into unfamiliar territory. In
consequence, some of the early advice was faulty and this has also served to
limit adoption by farmers. The technologies are now being further refined, but
experience to date shows that intensive extension effort has been required in
order to elicit farmer response. As a result the level of adoption remains far
too low to have any impact at the national level. Malawi with its high
population density and degrading soils offers a good example of the challenges
posed by the factors described above.
EAGER ADOPTERS
Few countries in Africa were not touched
by the spread of new crops from the Americas in the first half of the last
century, but it is the rapidity of that spread which is particularly striking.
Examples can be drawn from a wide range of ecological conditions which
demonstrate this point. Cocoa was introduced from Central America to the Gold
Coast (Ghana) at the end of the nineteenth century and spread rapidly from
farmer to farmer so that production grew from 2,400 tons in 1902 to 176,000 in
1919 (Hill 1956). Cassava was not a major food crop in Nigeria in 1920
(Faulkner and Mackie 1933) but was the staple food of millions a couple of
decades later. Sweet potatoes were so rare in Northern Uganda at the start of
the last century that the vines could be used to replace cattle as a dowry
(Driberg 1923) and yet by 1935 about 250,000 ha. Were recorded (Tothill 1940.
Maize also spread rapidly across the East and South of the continent replacing
sorghum and millet as the staple food of millions of families. There was not
only a switch to more productive crops but quite new technologies, such as
ox-ploughing, were also taken up with remarkable alacrity. An example of this
can be drawn from Eastern Uganda where a handful of chiefs’ sons were trained
in ox-ploughing in the early 1920’s. No further government help or
encouragement was given and yet by 1936 it is recorded the 15,388 ox-ploughs
were in use in Teso country alone (Tothill 1940).
All over the continent farmers
demonstrated their eagerness to adopt new crops, new technologies, new foods
and new trees and this adoption was almost entirely unrelated to any formal
extension service but was the result of the flow of information from farmer to
farmer by what can be described as osmosis. A much more recent example occurred
in Malawi in the 1990’s when the government lifted its ban on smallholder
production of burley tobacco. Within five years of the change in policy some
250,000 farmers were growing a crop which requires considerable skill in both
production, curing, and marketing.
When African farmers have demonstrated
so clearly their eagerness to adopt new crops and technologies together with
the effectiveness of their own networks, why is it that there has been so
little spread of agro-forestry innovations intended to deal with the problems
of soil fertility with which many farmers are now
faced?
FAULTY ADVISORS
One reason for the slow spread of the
agro-forestry approach to raising soil quality was the weakness of some of the
initial recommendation given to farmers in Malawi. The earliest work
concentrated on alley cropping with Leucaena.
The hedges grew strongly on the exceptionally fertile soils of Chitedze
research station and gave encouraging results. After several years of research
there was a major push to popularise this approach on farmers’ fields. It soon
became obvious that the levels of growth at Chitedze were totally different to
those obtained on the degraded soils available to farmers and after a few years
the initiative was dropped. Unfortunately many farmers and had planted the
hedgerows, seen no benefit from them and been made suspicious of agro-forestry.
A range of different plants were then tried in alley cropping experiments both
under the national research programme and by ICRAF. From these Senna spectablilis was selected as the
plant of choice for the next major extension campaign. From the earliest stages
of this work there were doubts in some quarters as to whether the plants were
really drawing fresh nutrient supplies into the upper layers of the soil rather
than simply recycling them. More importantly it soon became apparent that for
poor families with no access to paid labour this was too risky an approach.
Just a couple of weeks delay in pruning in the early part of the growing season
could lead to a level of competition between the hedgerows and the young maize
which seriously depressed crop yields. Attention then moved from alley cropping
to inter-planting with Sesbania as
the shrub of choice. ICRAF pioneered this work which consisted in raising
thousands of seedling it polythene pots and transplanted them in a short
“window” of time which clashed with the crucial first weeding of the maize. The
whole process required unreasonable amount of expenditure and labour in
relation of the benefits it produced and was impracticable for small scale
farmers. Thus another three years was lost on a course which had been embarked
upon with insufficient appreciation of the real conditions faced by farmers.
Throughout this time efforts were made
to popularise the planting of Faidherbia
albida in farmers’ fields as a long term contributor to soil fertility.
Thousands of farmers were encouraged to establish nurseries in small polythene
pots and the transplant the seedlings into their fields at the start of the
rains. The results were disappointing. Most of the young trees put on virtually
no growth in the first year and the tiny seedlings were walked on or hoed out
because they were not noticed in a weedy crop. The occasional plant made
excellent growth and survived leading to a situation where a farmer might have
two or three Faidherbia plants actually
growing in a field out of a hundred which had been planted. This was obviously
not encouraging and the interest in Faidherbia
faded.
These failures panned about fifteen
years and have certainly contributed to the lack of widespread enthusiasm for
the use of agro-forestry for raising soil fertility.
A FRESH START
These failures led to the development of
new technical strategies of which the three most importer were:
- A move from alley cropping to inter-planting to increase biomass and reduce the loss of area planted to the main crop;
- The choice of Tephrosia vogelii for the inter-planting because it thrives under poor soil conditions in most of Malawi and can be planted directly in the maize crop rather than being raised in nurseries and transplanted;
- A change in the method of growing Faidherbia to overcome the problems of root damage caused by raising seedlings in small pots on the ground. This involved both direct seeding and the production of seedlings in much larger pots placed on racks to provide air pruning.
Once the technology had been improved
the focus of attention moved to the challenge sharing it with farmers. The
first major initiative came under a combined World Bank and IFAD project aimed
at improving soil quality. This was a $17 million investment which used the
2,000 extension workers employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. At the end of
five years very little had been achieved and the most optimistic estimate was
that about 2,000 farmers had adopted some method of improving soil quality.
This failure was blamed on the poor motivation and organization of the staff.
Two bi-laterally funded projects subsequently took over the task. The Promotion
of Soil Conservation and Rural Production (PROSCARP) project funded by the
European Union works through the Ministry of Agriculture. The Malawi
Agroforestry Extension Project (MAFE) works with the staff of 21 NGOS’s and 19
CBO’s. Both have outstanding senior staff who are not constrained by the
limitations of a government department and are able to provide technical
advice, training, leadership and encouragement to the front line extension
staff of the government and the voluntary agencies. Both organisations
encourage farmers to improve the quality of their soils through a range of
activities including conservation, the use of manure and compost, crop
diversification and agro-forestry. The main thrust of the last is
inter-planting of Tephrosia and both
have achieved remarkably similar results over the past four years as is shown
by the following figures:
|
|
Number
of farm households involved
|
Number
of ha. of Tephrosia planted
|
|
PROSCARP
|
66,780
|
5,134
|
|
MAFE
|
57,000
|
5,841
|
While these figures are a lot more
encouraging than the results of the Ministry of Agriculture’s initiative funded
by the World Bank they still represent a small fraction of the farming
population and demonstrate that even the adopters are only using the technology
on small part of their land. The limitations of this achievement is highlighted
by the fact that some 35,000 additional families take up farming each year as a
result of population growth so that the proportion using agro-forestry to
improve soil fertility is actually declining.
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
The “problem” needs to be seen form two
perspectives. The first is that of the project managers who perceive it in
terms of the quality and performance of extension staff. MAFE blames “low
levels of expertise and motivation among extension staff, limited use of
up-to-date extension materials, lack of co-ordination among service providers
and inadequate monitoring and evaluation of what is working and why” (MAFE
2001). PROSCARP has similar perceptions. This focus on the problem as being
institutional clearly demonstrates that the technology is not spreading from
farmer to farmer by “osmosis” but is wholly dependent upon extension staff
influencing individual farmers, which is inevitably a slow task which would
take generations to have a nation impact even with an improvement in the
quality of extension performance. The government has by far the largest cadre
of field staff but even they have only one extension worker per 2,000 families
while for the NGO’s the ration would be more than twice that number. Until the
main route of adoption is from farmer to farmer there will only be a small
proportion of the land under improved management using agroforestry.
The second aspect of the problem is,
therefore, why are farmers not just copying from their neighbours as they have
done with so many other innovations? It is certainly not a reluctance to plant
trees. A recent survey revealed that 90% of farmers had planted trees at their
homesteads and 86% had planted trees in their fields. (PROSCARP 2001). These
were mostly for food, medicine, fuel or timber. This is further confirmed by
MAFE’s recent experience with encouraging the planting of trees (as opposed to
leguminous shrubs) where they have 210,000 participating families planting some
9 million trees per year (MAFE 2001). Why the reluctance to interplant Tephrosia? There are several fairly
obvious reasons. The first is the shortage of examples of farmer success with
the technology. Among the few thousand farmers who have attempted to use this
technology only a small proportion have followed the critical rules for early
planting, correct spacing and proper incorporation of the green manure during
cultivation. Poorly developed stands of stunted Tephrosia plants do not provide an adequate boost to the following
maize crop to convince farmers that the effort is worth the return. Really
striking examples of enhanced fertility are few and far between, largely
because of delaying planting of the Tephrosia.
MAFE research indicates that where there has been a good stand of Tephrosia that in the first season it
will raise the following maize crop yield by 20% (W. T. Bunderson, pers. comm.
2002). For an 800kg crop that is an additional 160kg. This is a useful addition
but compares poorly with farmer experience of the impact of 100kg. of
fertilizer which would more than double the yield. If the farmer persists then
the second planting of Tephrosia will
raise the yield by 40% which offers a more convincing example of the value of
the technology. Poor experience in the first year means that examples of
successful consecutive Tephrosia
crops are even harder to identify. The second reason is that farmers are being
asked to embark upon a quite new form of activity which does not relate to
their previous experience. This is quite different to switching to an
alternative food crop or planting a tree for timber or fuel. Instead of inter-planting
pumpkins, beans or groundnuts the farmer is being asked to plant a crop which
cannot be eaten, provides no human medicine and little fuel and yet must be
treated with the same care and precise time as a food crop. Most smallholders
in Malawi have little understanding of the role of rhizobia or the importance
of organic matter in the soil so that it is not surprising that the technology
is not spreading with the rapidity of an attractive new food crop or fuel wood
tree. The switch from sorghum to maize required no totally new agricultural
concept and therefore needed no education programme to foster adoption. The use
of leguminous shrubs for green manuring does involve quite new concepts and
therefore farmers need some basic education in soil fertility and not just a
proposal to plant some strange seeds in between their maize plants.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Based on the two classes of problem
outlined above what can be done to help many more farmers to discover effective
ways of stemming the current degradation of their land with a low cost
innovation? This paper makes three suggestions.
The first is that the focus of the
current extension efforts should be more on quality than on quantity. Until
communities can see really successful examples of the use of a technology there
is little likelihood of any farmer to farmer spread. Given the crucial
importance of early planting, correct spacing and appropriate use of the
resulting biomass it is essential that field staff are encouraged to have some
well-distributed examples of the successful use of Tephrosia rather than large numbers of mediocre stands which have
little impact on crop productivity. This will involve staff in hands on work
with selected farmers to ensure that the job is done properly rather than
giving instruction at a meeting. The same applies to the establishment of Faidherbia.
The second is that the extension effort
will need to look more fundamentally at educating farmers in the basic concepts
of soil fertility. Farmers whose ancestors have been able to rely on fallows to
naturally restore fertility for them, have little traditional knowledge of what
is happening to their farms now that they are under continuous cultivation.
Without such an understanding it is unlikely that there will be any widespread
adoption of technologies which seem quite alien to the farmers’ experience. For
most extension staff this is something quite new. Farmers can be encouraged to
switch to hybrid maize varieties without having to know the underlying
principles hybridization, but dealing with the comparatively new problems of
soil degradation does require a fresh understanding by farmers. Most extension
staff in Malawi are not particularly good educators having been used to giving
orders rather than embarking on a dialogue. There are ongoing efforts to change
these deep seated attitudes but these efforts will also need to prepare staff
to pass on more fundamental knowledge to farmers in an imaginative way.
Thirdly the widespread adoption of
better soil management is going to depend on the better used of the thousands
of informal groups which exist in the rural villages of Malawi. Throughout the
Malawian countryside there are church women’s groups which meet regularly,
mosque groups, choirs and traditional societies which are will defined and have
widespread networks. These have the potential of providing thousands of
volunteers to complement the work of formal extension officers. At present they
have only been tapped by a small number of NGOs but they offer the one channel
that could reach out to really large numbers of farmers. An extension worker
who has worked with a few farmers to develop really successful examples of
agro-forestry and then recruited a hundred volunteers who have had basic
training in soil fertility and seen the successes, is likely to have a far
wider impact than one who feels that he or she alone has the professional
qualifications to carry out extension. Neither the government nor the NGO
community can possibly employ enough staff to carry out this educational task
without an army of volunteers. The groups are there in the rural areas. What is
now needed is the courtesy, humility and understanding of the professional
extension staff to elicit their support and through them initiate the osmotic
spread of agro-forestry as a tool for counteracting the soil degradation which
has become such an urgent problem for so many Malawian smallholders.
CONCLUSION
There is increasing evidence that
currently available agro-forestry technology is capable of making a significant
contribution to enhancing soil quality on the small scale farms of Malawi. It
is currently being used by a small fraction of farmers and is spreading only
though the direct action of formal sector extension workers despite abundant
past evidence of farmers’ readiness to embrace new technologies. What is now
needed are more obvious examples of the successful use of agro-forestry by
farmers, more education of farmers in the basic principles of soil fertility
and the use of the abundant network of village societies as a source of
thousands of volunteers to supplement the work of formal sector extension
staff. In this way the spread of the technology will change from being
dependent on project activity to an osmotic movement from farmer to farmer.
REFERENCES
Driberg JH (1923) The Lango. Fisher and
Unwin, London, UK
Faulkner OT and Mackie JR (1933) West
African Agriculture. Cambridge University Press, UK
Hill P (1956) The Gold Cost Cocoa
Farmer. Oxford University Press, UK
MAFE (2001) Annual report October 2000
to September 2001 Blantyre, Malawi
PROSCARP (2001) Information for
management topic paper no. 25 Blantyre, Malawi
Tothill JD (1940) Agriculture in Uganda.
Oxford University Press, UK
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