Policy issues

The Toolbox demonstrates some exciting possibilities, but also raises several important questions that must be faced in further initiatives to disseminate policy through the Web and CD-ROM.

The delimitation of a policy area

There is no discrete definition of a set of policies relevant to livestock-environment interactions^[7]. It is reasonable to suppose that in a world of complex economies tied together by globalisation, this will be the case with any sub-sector or policy theme. Some idea of the range of policies that can affect livestock-environment interactions is implicit in Young’s (1999) categorisation of policy types, that includes fiscal and property rights instruments alongside the extension and regulatory policies that are more normally associated with livestock development. Some specific examples from the toolbox illustrate this.

Given our growing understanding of pastoralist grazing systems, their environmental impacts and their development needs, the Toolbox needed to include as "policy pressures" contributing to overgrazing:

• Subsidies on dryland cropping which can displace herders into more marginal areas, or encourage build-ups of herds near sources of cheap grain (see Oram 1998)

• Exchange rate policies such as those of the CFA bloc, and export policies such as EU sales of cheap beef to coastal West Africa, which combined to inhibit environmentally-sustainable development of livestock industries in the Sahel until the devaluation of the CFA in 1995 (Moll and Heerinck 1998).

• Inappropriate land tenure policies that displace pastoralists or otherwise constrain pastoralist natural resource management (Behnke and Kerven 1994, Lane and Moorehead 1995).

In response to the latter, the Toolbox needed to include policy options such as the following:

• Strengthening local natural resource management (see Swift 1995)

• Promoting conflict management on rangelands (see Behnke 1994, also Warner and Jones 1998).

In order generally to reduce pressure on rangelands, the Toolbox additionally includes as policy options:

• Establishment of pastoral banking institutions to encourage pastoralists to invest in banks rather than in livestock (see Coppock 1994) and

• Encouragement of non-pastoral employment (see Morton and Meadows 2000).

With humid-zone ranching systems, policy debate moves even further away from livestock. There is a growing view that the much-publicised deforestation linked to livestock ranching in the Amazon is brought about not by the demands of livestock farming per se, but by misplaced subsidies and tax concessions, by road building programmes, and by loopholes in land law whereby putting livestock on deforested land became the best way of claiming legal title to it (see http://www.fao.org/lead/toolbox/Grazing/Deforest.htm,

Hecht 1992, Kaimowitz 1995, Faminow and Vosti 1998). Policy options in response to supposedly livestock-related deforestation therefore include:

• Critical appraisal of road building

• Establishment of protected areas

• Land taxation

• Reform of land tenure

• Selective credit controls

Delimiting a policy area for dissemination of information is therefore a pragmatic affair, which cannot be based on a priori intellectual judgements.

Regional specificity

The Toolbox attempts, through its 23 sub-systems, to encompass world livestock production systems and provide content appropriate to each. Almost inevitably, it has not succeeded in addressing the geographical variations within sub-systems, either from a technical or a policy point of view. Indeed the sub-systems themselves represent compromises. It emerged during the Senegal case-study (Anon 1999) that the Toolbox lumps the Casamance area of Southern Senegal and the groundnut basin of Central Senegal together as "semi-arid" whereas under local classifications they are "sub-humid" and "semi-arid" respectively. The technical options have had to be written with a high level of generality to address several sub-systems, or one sub-system across different continents, so that technically useful information such as species of fodder trees could not be included. At various points in construction, there were demands for information on the costs of technologies to mitigate environmental impacts (Nell 1999, Morton et al. 1999a), but it was decided that these were impossible to include in a way that was meaningful across countries. The technical options in the Toolbox were not designed as extension materials but as background material for policy-makers, but some NGOs and agencies contacted during the Brazilian testing (Morton et al. 1999a), pointed out that with a greater degree of regional specificity they could have been used in extension.

In terms of policy, it was difficult to tailor policy options to particular systems, where the same "underlying factor" with its technical description (for example overgrazing) was mentioned in various sub-systems^[8]. Within a single sub-system there could also be problems, as policies can only be evaluated within political and economic contexts that differ greatly between countries of similar agro-ecological conditions. Policy pressures and options for the sub-system "Ranching in Sub-Humid and Humid Zones" are tailored heavily to Latin American realities, as the associated environmental problems are assumed to be minimal in the humid tropics of Africa or Asia. But even within Latin America, there are major differences between countries in terms of economy, institutions and political set-up that make generalisation very difficult, not least the continuing beef import bans by the USA and EU which affect the Amazonian countries but not Central America. However, such differences could not have been addressed without a longer time scale and greater budget for construction than we enjoyed, and by addressing them we would have made the Toolbox more difficult to navigate and to use. Compromises had to be made.

Participation versus authority

Maximising the participation of stakeholders including farmers is now development dogma, and it might be expected that the Toolbox would have capitalised on the possibilities of electronic media by becoming an interactive forum to which users could contribute information, references, additional links to other Web sites, and opinions. Indeed, the Toolbox design was duly criticised, especially in the Brazil study, for being non-interactive, non-participatory and top-down. These views reinforced the team’s decision to include a "Feedback Forum" with a facility to comment by E-mail, but feedback will still be moderated by FAO’s Virtual Centre for Livestock and Environment, and presented in a discrete section of the Toolbox (at least until it can be integrated more closely by the Virtual Centre into an updated Toolbox). The more radical conception of allowing users to directly upload their own information was rejected, for two reasons. Both of these reasons could be significant in broader discussions on the electronic dissemination of policy.

Firstly, unlimited and unmoderated uploading would make the Toolbox unwieldy both to use and to maintain. It would defeat one of the implicit objectives of the Toolbox, that of overcoming information overload.

Secondly, and more controversially, unlimited participation in some of the policy debates of the Toolbox might be counterproductive. The best example again comes from the humid tropics of Latin America. Many in Brazil, particularly those with vested interests, would disagree with the links proposed between existing legal processes for claiming land, tax breaks, subsidised credit and road-building programmes on the one hand and deforestation on the other. During the case study one organisation of large livestock producers thought the page on subsidies contained "childish and unfounded statements, and erroneous criticisms of ranching" (Morton et al. 1999a). Yet these analyses, and the policy recommendations that flow from them, originating as a radical critique of mainstream development (Hecht 1992) are now very much part of that mainstream, and contained in the 1997 publications (de Haan et al. 1997, Steinfeld et al. 1997) that represent the views of a large consortium of multilateral and bilateral donors.

During the Brazilian case-study, there was strong interest from NGOs in using the Toolbox in advocacy and lobbying, and from those involved in teaching the sort of interdisciplinary courses where policy-makers are made aware of environmental issues. That the Toolbox’s analysis of deforestation is backed by the major donors will do something to assist advocacy for pro-environment policy changes. Allowing vested interests in the Amazon the ability to post opinions and data that challenge the new consensus will be a heavy price to pay for participation and interactivity. There is no easy answer here, but anyone seeking to use these electronic means to influence policy must realise that speaking unambiguously and with authority is important in leveraging progressive policy change, and that there are real trade-offs between such authority and "participation". The addition of feedback facilities via the mechanism of a moderated E-mail conference system perhaps represents the best possible compromise.

The need for promotion and training support

The Toolbox is formally a self-contained soft decision-support system, and experience at the second workshop showed that policy-makers could learn to navigate and use it within a few hours. However, it emerged strongly from the case studies, especially those in Brazil and India (Morton et al. 1999a, BAIF Development Research Foundation 1999), that it would need an intensive effort to publicise its existence, train would-be users in its use, and give them follow-up support to make an impact on livestock-environment interactions. As the Indian team put it:

"Special efforts like the holding of seminars, workshops, training etc. would be required to facilitate the toolbox application in policy making and planning process. Integration of results becomes possible when many people working at various levels involved in policy making and planning process come from various backgrounds/discipline.

Policy makers and implementers alone may not be able to make use of results obtained from the toolbox. They will require help of technical people such as experts from livestock management, soil science, watershed management, various disciplines of environment etc. i.e. single handed use of Toolbox may lead to improper interpretations. Therefore interactive exercises need to be encouraged at least up to the phase of familiarisation of the Toolbox.

At the end of the case study exercise, the entire team felt that specific efforts would be required to bring together all the stakeholders viz. policy makers, subject matter specialists, financial institutions, and implementers including the NGOs and farmer co-operatives for implementation of Livestock-Environment initiatives in a participatory manner." (BAIF Development Research Foundation 1999)

It had been planned from the beginning to include a Training, Extension and Public Awareness module in the Toolbox. This was duly completed and contains background information on communication and agenda-building, and specific guidelines for national workshops for awareness creation at policy level, and for livestock-environment interaction assessment at area level (Leegwater et al. 1999, http://www.fao.org/lead/toolbox/Tepa/TEPA.htm). For maximum impact of the Toolbox, these or similar proposals must be implemented. At a bare minimum, there must be an effort to publicise the availability of the Toolbox and give basic technical training in its use.

The limits of information provision

An additional point leads on from this, but goes further. Policy research and policy dissemination have rightly become important donor-funded activities in recent years. Policy is complex and it is worth paying researchers and others to identify the best courses of action for policy-makers. But we must recognise that such technocratic approaches have their limits. There are very strong forces propelling deforestation in the Amazon: the economic interests of elites, the continuing interest in relocating population from more densely-populated areas, and national strategic interests. However intellectually appealing a policy analysis, or user-friendly its packaging, it can only go so far in influencing policy makers. Determinism is out of fashion, and it is important to remember that Southern policy-makers are capable of autonomous responses to information. But those involved in such research or dissemination must also continue to bear in mind that that autonomy is constrained by larger political and economic forces within their society.