Two lead papers were presented as central contributions to the debate: the Draft Analytical Framework (AFW), at the beginning of the meeting, and Possible profiles and guidelines for the country case studies, at the end.
The tentative AFW paper draws on the premise that, as well as the decisive role (actual and potential) that agriculture plays in fostering rural incomes and employment, environmental stability and natural resources conservation, it also sustains (actually and potentially) the rural-urban population balance, social stability and cohesion, enhanced food security, cultural traditions and a number of other goods and services that are not the object of market transactions.
In low-income developing countries, where agriculture generates a significant share of gross domestic product (GDP) and ensures a considerable proportion of employment, the major contributions of agriculture to society are widely perceived as being economic development and food security. However, most of the time, its other social, environmental or cultural roles are equally vital for a more sustainable development - and the perception of the importance of these latter roles seems to be increasing as socio-economic development unfolds.
National development policies involving agriculture should address the full range of roles that the sector plays in society. By adopting this comprehensive view, the development assistance provided by industrialised countries might also assist better in checking natural resources depletion, environmental degradation, falling incomes, underemployment, social and cultural disruptions and excessive migration to urban areas, among other issues.
In developed countries, there is currently a growing appreciation of the public goods nature of many of the non-commodity goods and services provided by agriculture. Contrasting with this situation, in most developing countries the positive externalities of agriculture have not been well identified or valuated in relation to the broad objective of sustainable development. Given this lack of appreciation, the manifold roles of agriculture are rarely reflected in national and rural development policy options in these countries.
Most of the non-food and non-commodity goods and services that agriculture provides to society in the developing world are currently non-tradables, externalities and contributions to public goods. The great majority of them are jointly produced with the agricultural products themselves during the production process, and any policy affecting the level and nature of agricultural production is conducive to changes in the provision of these other roles. In order to study the roles of agriculture, the concepts of externalities, public goods and jointness of production are, thus, key to the basis of the draft AFW.
The draft AFW endeavours to propose a pragmatic methodological process rather than an academic research agenda. As a first step, it suggests the generation of comparable information across countries, which should derive from a process of identification, measurement, valuation (when possible) and analysis of the externalities of agriculture, with special emphasis on the positive ones. The second step would consist in analysing the policy implications that emerge from the factual and documented evidence produced in the first step.
In searching for an improved cross-sectoral and cross-generational allocation of resources that contributes more effectively to the general objective of sustainable development of society, the draft AFW identifies the policy challenge related to agriculture's roles in society as that of internalising externalities and tackling important market failures. In practical terms, it suggests that the relevant policy implications of the roles of agriculture will emerge for analysis as a result of the gathering of comparable, factual information on the nature and magnitude of the positive externalities of agriculture. Such policy implications will be related mainly to SARD policies, and are expected to have cross-sectoral policy dimensions.
In order to allow for a systematic exploration of the various roles and externalities of agriculture in any national context, the proposed framework groups them into five broad domains: i) environmental, ii) social, iii) food security, iv) economic, and v) cultural. The purpose of this classification is to map out the overall scope of the research and to highlight those domains and roles that are considered the most relevant for the study.3 The interlinkages and reciprocal interdependencies among most of these categories and subcategories are highly significant, and must be kept in mind and taken into account.4 While the economic and, to a large extent, the food security roles of agriculture are essentially captured by market mechanisms, the other agricultural non-commodity outputs - i.e. environmental, social and cultural - are typically externalities and contributions to public goods.
In its Annex, the draft AFW includes a tentative inventory and chart of recognised methods for measuring and valuating these roles of agriculture, which are proposed as a basic tool for identifying and analysing the various roles of agriculture and their scope in the national context.
The lead paper, Possible profiles and guidelines for the country case studies, proposes several features for the overall process of conducting country case studies (CCS).
In order to illustrate and make balanced comparisons among the real agricultural conditions of various regional, agro-ecological and socio-economic contexts, a global typology of the major farming systems should be used as a basis for CCS selection. Countless agricultural farming systems exist worldwide, but a recent FAO Farming Systems Study5 has combined these into about 70 major broad types, thereby providing an up-to-date, synthetic overview of the major agricultural systems worldwide from an environmental and socio-economic viewpoint. The paper suggests that this typology should serve as a reference for the ROA Project fieldwork. In each region, some key farming systems should be identified, and a limited number of countries will then be selected as illustrations of these systems. As a result, the study will embrace a representative array of contrasting situations.
The case studies will then follow a two-tier approach to identifying and valuating the various roles of agriculture: a national assessment and a farming systems-based study.
The national assessment should be based on a systematic review, at the national level, of the major roles of agriculture, and will assemble the available information - quantified where possible - concerning the economic, social and food security roles and the environmental and cultural externalities of agriculture. As far as possible, it should encompass both positive and negative externalities, with a special emphasis on exploring and documenting the positive ones, which have tended to be neglected in the past. The scope of the national-level assessment in each country case will depend on the following questions: To what extent can the subcomponents of the five identified domains be documented and measured at the national level with existing information? and To what extent can the externalities of agriculture be documented and measured at the national level? The information should be gathered with a view to analysing the policy implications related to SARD strategies and programmes and national cross-sectoral policies.
A number of externalities defy measurement at the large or national scale.6 They can only be analysed in detail for specific sites, areas or farming systems and, where possible, attempts should be made to link the field study results to the national assessment of major roles of agriculture.
The farming systems-based studies will, thus, assess specifically the positive externalities of agriculture that cannot be assessed at the national level because of their nature or because of a lack of data. The selected farming systems, in addition to being the entry point and major selection criterion for the countries themselves, should also constitute a significant part of the country's agriculture sector so as to give greater relevance to policy implications at the national level.
While precise conclusions from analysis of the externalities of a farming system can only be drawn for the area and system studied, generalisations at various levels - when warranted - can be enlightening, and the economic, environmental and food security roles of a given system can be very important, even at the national level. This may also be the appropriate level for viewing particular social and cultural roles.
Both the national assessment and the farming systems-based study should adhere to a common set of guidelines and indicators so as to allow comparison and synthesis. Where relevant and possible, the research should be gender-sensitive. There should be at least one multidisciplinary study group for each CCS, composed of experts from the country in which the study occurs. Each of these groups will work for a period of approximately one year, with supervision from the Rome-based ROA team in order to assure a high degree of comparability among the results obtained.
As a whole, the approach proposed by the draft AFW was supported. The participants endorsed use of the economic concepts of externalities, public goods and jointness of production as the relevant basis from which to conduct the study; they also supported the multidisciplinary approach.
Some criticism was expressed, however. One participant considered that the AFW lacked coherence and focus, in particular from a macroeconomic viewpoint, and suggested that the project should be used as an opportunity for studying the impact of specific forms of liberalisation on agriculture and rural areas.
Another viewpoint was expressed by the remark that "Some developing countries may consider it a luxury to focus on the internalisation of the [non-market] costs of production of agricultural commodities". Realistically, policy-making in such countries is expected to continue to focus strongly on the economic (and food security) roles of agriculture.
In addition, it was generally felt that there was a need for further identification of the key issues related to the roles of agriculture, the linkages among them and possible innovative ways of addressing them.
In conclusion, however, there was general agreement that the proposed approach for the Project supplies an opportunity to produce:
It was underlined that the information generated by the Project could be relevant, not only to national policy-makers in the developing word, but also to the donor community, as far as allocation of foreign assistance resources and policies related to public goods are concerned.
The list of roles contained in the AFW was endorsed, and even enlarged in some instances. No individual role was singled out as being irrelevant, although the importance of each role varies according to country conditions. It was agreed that the grouping of roles under five domains was solely for the purpose of convenient presentation and discussion: this grouping does not constitute an analytical feature and should not become a constraint to the analysis and measurement of externalities. A critical step ahead would be to produce precise definitions of all the roles that the project takes into account, before any further attempt at identifying measurement methods and tools is made. The investigation of roles as externalities, semi-externalities, private or public goods, etc. was also felt to be needed.
It was agreed that the project should document both positive and negative externalities. However, it was recognised that, since UNCED, far more information has become available on the negative than on the positive externalities of agriculture and that, therefore, any information that the ROA Project could generate on the positive effects of agriculture would constitute a new and useful contribution to the debate.
The importance of linkages and interrelationships among roles was stressed. Among such linkages, cases of complementarity, synergy and the production of bundles of positive externalities were mentioned, but the major emphasis was placed on the need to document and analyse the extent to which externalities and the primary production of food and fibre are jointly produced by agricultural activity. Currently, such interrelationships are not well represented in the draft AFW, and they need to become an integral part of the documentation generated by the Project.
A number of participants argued that benchmarks are needed for the concrete assessment and measurement of the roles of agriculture, and for the distinction between positive and negative externalities. However, it was noted that the same externality may bring about positive contributions in certain circumstances and negative ones in others, or that an externality may be valued positively by some observers and negatively by others. In addition, reducing a negative externality is a positive contribution, and vice versa. It was also noted that positive externalities are often ignored until a crisis reveals that their disappearance has negative effects.
It also appeared necessary to document important issues in a dynamic perspective. In this connection, the pragmatic approaches suggested were to conduct diachronic analysis - i.e. comparisons through time of the roles of agriculture in a given country, including retrospective comparisons and future scenarios - and comparisons between what is observed and what is considered desirable.
There was unanimous agreement that policy implications are the final justification of the project. While it was agreed that policy decisions should be based on assessing the net externalities of agriculture versus those of other sectors in the economy, it was also accepted that: i) the analysis of other sectors (which is generally lacking) could not be undertaken by the Project; ii) studying the roles of agriculture would produce useful information and knowledge; and iii) the presentation of Project results must aim to provide all the explanations and precautionary warnings necessary to prevent the possible misinterpretation of the information generated, given the absence of an intersectoral basis for comparison.
It was recommended that policy implications (and possibly recommendations) be formulated at the country level (and below) in the countries investigated - but it was also recognised that indirect policy implications may emerge beyond the national setting. The meeting advised that, within the Project's life span and resource limits, work to be done in the short term has to focus on constructing a basic documentation of agriculture's roles, as a prerequisite to the unfolding of policy implications. It was also agreed that SARD should be the backbone of analysis of policy implications.
The importance of documenting the policy setting for sound analysis of the roles of agriculture was mentioned on several occasions. However, no further guidance was provided on this topic, probably because the subject of the expert meeting was limited to documenting and measuring the roles of agriculture.
Concerning implementation of the CCS, participants supported the proposed process, which is based on a two-tier (national assessment and detailed farming systems-level investigation) and multidisciplinary approach.
It was suggested that the national assessment study should include: i) an inventory of agriculture's roles that are considered relevant in the country concerned; ii) a qualitative assessment and analysis of their importance; and iii) an assessment of their medium- to long-term dynamics.
The use of farming systems as the key classification for country selection and for subnational analysis of the roles of agriculture was fully supported. In this connection, reference to and use of the recent FAO farming systems classification was endorsed.
Concerning the farming systems-based studies, it was made clear that within a particular farming system the use of different technologies and, hence, factor use (in other words, farming practices) can have different consequences in terms of the roles of agriculture, and a question was raised concerning the most appropriate way to take this dimension into consideration. It was suggested that a pilot study be mounted in which this issue could be investigated further. Comparisons among dominant and desirable practices, and the nature and extent of their effects, might prove useful in this connection.
Finally, the warning was frequently expressed that valuations of the same externality, with the same physical magnitude, may vary significantly according to the stakeholder, the time and the country concerned. Accordingly, major factors that influence rural dwellers', the urban population's and - above all - policy-makers' attitudes towards, and valuation of, agricultural externalities should be investigated. Such information is crucial to the derivation of policy implications. It was recommended that the issue be addressed in the CCS and in the Project's final comparative synthesis - possibly based on analysis of the factors that determine or induce differences in perceptions of the same externalities.
The lead paper provides an overview of the environmental externalities of agriculture and presents an inventory of the economic tools than can be used to value them. The paper examines and discusses how valuation techniques derived from developed country experience can be transferred to developing countries. Its annexes contain a comprehensive compilation of the state of the art in economic valuation of the environmental externalities of agriculture.7
The author identifies nine broad types of positive externalities that are produced by agricultural activities: watershed protection; flood control; groundwater recharge; soil conservation; biodiversity and wildlife habitat; open space; scenic vistas; and isolation from congestion. Seven types of negative environmental externalities are also listed: nutrient/pesticide runoff; reduced watershed protection; reduced flood control; soil erosion; biodiversity loss; wildlife habitat loss; and odour.
As with any production activity, agriculture can cause both negative and positive side-effects, or externalities, that are not accounted for in markets. Agriculture's positive environmental services, or externalities (often called "amenities" in industrialised countries), and negative externalities (dis-amenities) are unintended consequences of market activities that have an impact on people other than the producer of the externality. As such, these by-products tend not to be priced in the market and, hence, their economic values are unknown. Many of these externalities have characteristics of public goods - they are non-rival and, at least partially, non-excludable in consumption. Without government intervention, rural negative externalities may be overprovided, and rural positive externalities underprovided.
Because rural positive externalities are non-market goods, they do not have market prices, and measuring their value requires special economic techniques. The main methods for valuing rural amenities are survey approaches, such as the contingent valuation method (CVM), and approaches that make use of existing data that have been collected for other purposes, such as the travel cost method (TCM) and the hedonic method. The CVM is the only available economic tool for valuing non-use rural amenities. The maximum amount of one thing a person is willing to give up in exchange for getting one unit more of something else is considered a fair measure of the relative value of the two things to that person. A monetary value, such as the United States dollar, is a universally accepted measure because the amount that people are willing to pay (WTP) for something reflects how much of all other for-sale goods and services they are willing to give up to get it.
The paper provides advice on the choice of relevant indicators and general guidelines for conducting CVM surveys. It also provides advice for the aggregation of non-market values and makes the point that the ROA Project's approach can be conceived and/or perceived as a benefit-cost analysis that includes non-market values.
Although CVM is the most popular non-market valuation method, the author warns that its implementation in developing countries can result in a complicated, lengthy and expensive process, which must be carefully conceived in collaboration with local people to be sure that the questions are understandable and culturally appropriate for the relevant population. While reliable and consistent information for policy-makers about the broad amenities generated by agriculture has begun to be produced (with CVM as a tool) in industrialised countries, the issues surrounding provision of the positive externalities associated with agriculture have hardly been tackled at all in developing countries.
During the discussion and debate, the importance of what viewpoint underlies any valuation exercise was raised again: "Who valuates? Whose perspective is being used?". The point was made that technocrats in developing countries are often sceptical about the validity, reliability and relevance of valuation tools. For example, applying concepts such as the polluter pays principle, cost recovery and cost sharing in countries where millions of people are considered to be poor - most of whom are small-scale farmers trying to make a living in marginal lands - may prove politically disastrous to governments and "may invite accusations that academics are insensitive to social and economic complexities of the real world situation". A common primary concern in developing countries is how agricultural production in marginal areas can fulfil its primary functions without depleting the natural resource base.
It was again underlined that the same externality may be positive for some and negative for others, and that perceptions of its magnitude may vary greatly - depending on the individual stakeholder's viewpoint - leading to different valuations. In this connection, gender, regional and ethnic dimensions, as well as indigenous local knowledge, have to be taken into account and integrated into the valuation process. It was suggested that the various stakeholders (e.g. farmers, forest dwellers, tourists, etc.) allocate weights to their valuations. One of the methodological tasks ahead for the Project is the specification of viewpoints, weights and aggregation procedures, in both the individual CCS and the cross-country comparisons.
It was also argued that, owing to their stable or increasing value as scarcity and population pressure increase over time, not all of the lasting environmental "goods" and "bads" of agriculture lend themselves to conventional write-off or discounting procedures. Thus, issues of irreversibility and extinction, as well as the long-term feedback to agriculture from its environmental impacts, need to be included in the analysis but may not be realistically weighted through valuation.
Finally, in relation to the policy implications of environmental externalities, it was argued that the environmental effects of agriculture are public goods that operate at different geographical scales: "carbon sequestration on a world scale, others on a watershed scale or a local scale". However, these effects cannot be treated in isolation by policies aiming to modify their supply. The example was given of an agronomically and economically integrated bundle of yield increases and stabilisation, which also leads to reduced costs and drudgery, carbon sequestration, elimination of sediment loads, production of clean groundwater, and increases in several aspects of biodiversity. As a result, it was stressed that jointness of production emphasises the need to integrate policy instruments and adjustment policies, mutually, at the international, national and more local levels.
The lead paper recalls historic approaches to the economic roles of agriculture. The author believes that one aim of the ROA Project is to extend this thinking a step further, in particular to identify those economic contributions about which the market prices of agricultural commodities do not convey enough information to secure an optimal level of the activities concerned.
The author proposes a typology of the economic roles of agriculture that distinguishes the sector's direct use contributions from its indirect use ones. Direct use contributions include both traditional roles (food, surplus labour, exports, capital/savings transfers, and consumer markets) and non-traditional roles (production of agro-industrial goods, services and jobs; provision of land for urban expansion; tourism; and provision of safe food). The sector's indirect use contributions include both externalities and public goods, and embrace a more productive workforce, welfare system substitution, productivity growth, rural viability, recreational amenities, cultural and heritage values, landscape values, contributions to equity, enhanced learning capacity, provision of community space, harbouring of unique ecosystems, and provision of safe food - which has both private and public attributes.
The author argues that, while they are easily measurable, the many economic contributions of agribusiness are often ignored by governments and policy-makers, in spite of their dependence on primary production. He also stresses that agriculture's many contributions as semi-externalities or public goods would not exist without agricultural production, but that producers are not compensated for them. For example, agriculture ensures a number of welfare-enhancing, income transfer and income shock buffer functions. It also tends to provide a broader range of substitutability among factors of production, especially labour and capital, than industry does. Its social welfare role often acts as the most important buffer between poverty (author's emphasis) and full-blown chronic undernutrition. Agriculture also performs a very important social welfare infrastructure role in remote locations, creating development opportunities and producing basic necessities for isolated communities.
Over time, agriculture remains more productive than industry and, as a consequence, the real price of food declines, contributing to increased savings, increased incomes, economic stability and overall total factor productivity. Periods of high agricultural growth rates are associated with falling rural poverty.8 The paper also states that agriculture's role in providing jobs, income and food contributes indirectly to education which, in turn, provides private and public benefits. This contribution is a classic example of the benefits (of increased education) to society being higher than the benefits (of that education) to an individual.
As far as methods for documenting the economic roles are concerned, the paper recommends that both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the non-traditional economic roles should be used to capture the related benefits and values. A narrative approach would involve analysing the economic roles of agriculture in contributing to agribusiness, local trade and service firms and the social structure of rural communities, as well as analysing the likely influence of new technology and economic stress on the organization and control of agricultural resources. The paper proposes the use of a social accounting matrix (SAM) to explore how agriculture sectors generate the direct use of non-traditional contributions to the overall economy, recalling that SAM data requirements are not problematic for most developing countries and that a great deal of information can be obtained from the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) database.
The first discussant of the paper argued that the dynamic nature of agriculture, and the very objectives of any measurement of its roles, should not be forgotten, and concluded that the direction in which agriculture is to be guided should be very clearly stated.
In this connection, the discussant described a possible future scenario of what he calls "rock-bottom state" in which many of agriculture's useful externalities are minimised. This state is characterised by: i) a purely commercial agriculture that has minimal externalities, does not differ from any other average industry and responds only to market signals; ii) roles of agriculture that are negligible, i.e. an agriculture that does not have any real competitive advantage in providing socially, economically and environmentally useful externalities; and iii) very large firms providing all agriculture-related services (e.g. environment, tourism), as long as society pays for them. He derived three conclusions from his considerations: i) farm families (in contrast to commercial farms) are at the centre of the current externalities of agriculture, i.e. he called attention to the importance of the human factor in the debate about the roles of agriculture; ii) agricultural systems are moving towards the rock-bottom state anyway; and iii) measurement and documentation of agriculture's roles has to be linked to finding optimal levels of agricultural externalities.
The second discussant agreed with the speaker's view that agriculture experiences the highest increases in factor productivity, and stressed the importance of technological change, particularly at the margin, in terms of both transformed agricultural practices and the accrual of benefits. He introduced the concept of the diffusion of urbanization: "agriculture accelerates urbanization, but it also can disperse it". He compared the cases of African and Asian countries, where two opposite agricultural policies were followed. In the first case, a great failure in achieving agricultural growth has led to tremendous growth in the capital cities, very little growth in small towns and regional centres and a massive increase in urban poverty. In Asia, on the other hand, agricultural growth has stimulated a widely dispersed system of towns and small cities (e.g. Taiwan Province of China, where geographically dispersed urban centres that had initially been built on agricultural incomes and demand soon took on a life of their own, consolidating the dispersed pattern).
Finally, the third discussant warned that, before generalisations can be made about agriculture acting as a buffer during economic or financial crisis, there is a need to look at the conditions under which agriculture can play such a role, i.e. the extent to which the isoquants for agriculture are flatter and can accommodate excess (author's emphasis) labour force. Not only is capital labour substitution an issue, but so too is the land constraint. He suggested looking into typologies of the conditions under which this safety net attribute of agriculture can occur, its nature and its sustainability. He concluded by suggesting that crises are not a good benchmark against which to assess the welfare substitute roles of agriculture, since shocks can rarely be predicted. A more pertinent question would be: To what extent does the agriculture sector prevent premature urbanization from happening and, as such, to what extent does it prevent negative externalities from happening?
Other questions were raised regarding agriculture's welfare substitute roles: How can it be measured? Can it be measured as the foregone cost of having a welfare scheme in place? What are the implications for policy direction? Is there a need to find a way of "adjusting" the value of agriculture upwards to reflect its welfare safety net role?
It was also stated that rural people bear the brunt of adjustment as the rural sector shrinks and they have to relocate to urban areas. According to the new economics of labour migration, the costs and benefits associated with the decision to migrate are weighted by the rural household, including the cost of placing a migrant in the city or abroad. According to the discussant, city dwellers also pay their share of the marginal cost of rural-urban migration (stress on urban services and public goods, increased crime, etc.).
Regarding the economic contribution of agriculture to alleviating poverty, the discussant agreed with the general argument presented in the lead paper, and pointed out two recent findings: i) agricultural growth alleviates both rural and urban poverty, while growth in the manufacturing sector affects only the latter; and ii) unless income distribution is extremely skewed, agricultural growth has a larger impact on poverty than growth in other sectors has.
During the general debate, which was largely based on the Indonesian experience, it was argued that abrupt increases in food prices may result in social unrest. In such circumstances, the stabilisation of food prices brought about by domestic agriculture is beneficial for social stability. Reducing or controlling inflation is therefore another potential major role of agriculture that could be studied as a semi-externality of the activity.
Based on the case of Mexico, the lead paper focuses on the role of the agriculture and rural sector in relation to poverty alleviation, stating as a premise that the social impacts and roles of agriculture depend on: i) the characteristics of the rural sector; and ii) institutional arrangements and government policies. The main thesis of the paper is that poverty alleviation is an important role of agriculture, but that any strategy to alleviate rural poverty requires a lot more than agricultural support and production-oriented policies.
The paper presents a strategy for reducing extreme poverty in rural areas significantly and a framework for evaluating government social programmes, both of which were implemented recently in Mexico. It provides guidance on how to assess the importance, possibilities and limits of using agricultural policies to attain social objectives (with a special focus on poverty reduction), and it insists on the need for complementary strategies, providing lessons from the Mexican experience.
The paper states that the first step in assessing the externalities of the agriculture and rural sector should be to carry out a sectoral diagnosis, i.e. an assessment of the characteristics of the rural sector. It suggests a standard set of relevant indicators for this exercise, including population size, employment, contribution to gross national product (GNP) and growth of agricultural GNP: the study should consider the total subsidies (including public spending and explicit or implicit fiscal deductions) directed to the rural sector and, in particular, to the agriculture sector. It should also assess the social heterogeneity of the sector, evaluating the severity and depth of poverty among rural people. For example, in rural areas of Mexico, one family out of two is poor and the severity of poverty is three times greater than it is in urban areas. Finally, other characteristics of the rural poor population, such as human capital, geographical dispersion and vulnerability, should be systematically investigated. In this connection, an analysis based on identification of the leading risks by age, region and income group might be helpful. Such an analysis draws on social risk theory to identify the main risks across the life cycle, and uses household survey information to calculate indicators of risk for the poor compared with the average population. This may be linked to an evaluation of current policies, in order to assess their effectiveness in reaching target populations and coverage.
Institutional arrangements and government policies directed to the agriculture and rural sector, together with governmental resource allocation, are the second driving force in shaping the social roles of the sector, and the second aspect that could be documented in CCS. Institutions and policies have to be critically reviewed, in particular the production-oriented programmes and targeted social programmes that provide, not only short-term assistance, but also opportunities for changing the structural conditions of poverty in the medium term. The paper reviews Mexican institutional arrangements, current policies and programmes, their efficacy and efficiency, related strategies, and proposed tentative guidelines for similar exercises in other countries.
One important step, according to the author, is to evaluate whether the country has an integral and coherent rural development strategy and an explicit poverty reduction strategy that provides both productive and social lines of action while differentiating between actions directed to promoting rural productive activities and those that target poverty alleviation. The author suggests that this differentiation should be based on a conceptual framework that identifies the objectives and incidence of rural policies and whether they provide public or private goods. The evaluation should assess the extent to which these lines of action allow greater competitiveness in the rural sector, and the degree of impact that they have on agriculture's positive externalities. It should review the extent to which government support of specific public goods (public productive and social infrastructure; animal and plant health; innovation and technology transfer; actions for regulatory modernisation; legal certainty of property rights; temporary employment programmes for productive infrastructure, etc.) contributes to these objectives.
In general, the papers stress that, depending on the demographics and socio-economic setting of the country, the solution to alleviating poverty by increasing income might lie outside the primary sector. Part of the solution might be in other areas of the economy that allow more orderly migration, not only to the urban sector but also to the secondary and tertiary sectors in the rural sector.
The first discussant commented that the lead paper is a valuable contribution to the study of both the poverty alleviation roles of agriculture, as a sector, and the social policies that target that sector. Until the late 1980s, the Mexican Government had tended to act as if rural poverty alleviation was practically synonymous with agricultural development. By contrast, and based on the concrete results of impact monitoring and evaluation of public expenditure in recent social programmes in rural Mexico, the lead paper shows that social development programmes (such as education, health, nutrition, income transfers and pensions) have had, and can have, a significant impact on rural poverty alleviation, above and beyond the contribution that is attributable to agriculture per se. As stated in the presentation, "a strategy to alleviate rural poverty involves a lot more than agricultural support and production-oriented policies". According to the discussant, "a significant part of rural non-farm employment [in Latin America] is now only very indirectly related to agricultural production processes." 9
The discussant stressed the implications of the lead paper for the design of the ROA Project AFW and CCS, particularly regarding policy implications in middle-income countries. In such countries as Mexico, significant positive externalities for social development are likely to be associated with agriculture, but there is a need to examine these externalities carefully in order to avoid overstating the case in favour of productive support of agriculture. The discussant also underlined that, in the least-developed countries, the role of agriculture in poverty alleviation would probably appear to be much more important than it is in cases similar to that of Mexico, owing to a stronger linkage of agricultural production to rural employment as shown, for example, in the well-known work on India by M. Ravallion.10
Drawing on African experience in particular, the second discussant underlined the importance of some other social roles of agriculture which are not addressed by the lead paper: the contributions of agriculture to social stability, by reducing potential social conflicts (because agriculture keeps "people occupied, as a way of life"); and its contributions to cultural heritage, by allowing the perpetuation of a society's traditions and values (such as the celebration of various family, communal, city or national festivals involving ancestral worship), which fulfils people's cultural aspirations.11 This latter role also contributes to maintaining and transferring local knowledge of medicinal plants for traditional medicine; family cohesion, by contributing to better intrahousehold and gender relations;12 and social capital, by encouraging intracommunity solidarity and the community management of common resources.13
Regarding rural heterogeneity and demographics, the discussant argued that the case of Nigeria differs from that of Mexico, and that the remittances sent by migrants to their families play an important role that should be studied. As for the articulation of social welfare and productive social policies, he agreed on the need to provide both productive assets and social infrastructure, such as education, health and sanitation, but added that these should be assigned the role of helping the poor to make positive contributions to overall social well-being.
Regarding methods and measurement tools for documenting the roles of agriculture at the rural community level, he suggested that samples should be relatively small and that surveys should extend over a significant time period in order to provide accurate observations. Focus group discussions have been found to be a reliable approach to data collection in Nigeria. These can be complemented by "key informant" interviews, especially if a history of development is needed. The oldest people in a community should be interviewed in depth as a way of identifying trends, changes over time, and opinions regarding such changes. Finally, the discussant emphasised the need for making the ROA Project case studies truly participatory. Stakeholders should not only be consulted or given a final report at the end of the project cycle, but they should also be involved in all stages of the process.
In the general discussion, one point that was made forcefully was the need to avoid confusing stability with absence of change, since dynamic transformation is critical for development.
The lead paper suggests that, when addressing traditional agricultural societies, researchers should first understand the relationship among three variables: the productive system, the environment, and the culture. Examples of pastoral societies and flood recession farming were used to illustrate this.
In order to document the tight and mutually reinforcing relationships among food production systems, climate and the environment, and the issues of culture and traditional values, the author advocates the use of cultural and political ecology. The economic, social and cultural dimensions in which people live are affected by agriculture and agricultural practices, and agriculture is, in turn, affected by climatological factors and the physical and biological environments. During discussion of this paper, it was mentioned that three major agricultural production systems have emerged from this interrelationship: extensively cultivated land-surplus agriculture in Africa; intensively cultivated labour-surplus agriculture in Asia, with "unimodal" land distribution among small marginal farms; and dualistic agriculture in Latin America.
Quoting the work of B. Miller, the author also points out some of the negative externalities that are produced by agriculture under given circumstances. The costs of agriculture may include "social inequality; disease; despotism; and destruction of the environment from soil exhaustion and chemical poisoning, water pollution, dams and river diversions".
He uses the example of swidden farming (bush fallowing, shifting cultivation or slash-and-burn) to show how many development practitioners have not properly understood traditional practices. If an adequate fallow period is maintained, swidden cultivation is not only environmentally sound but also, compared with its alternatives, economically appropriate. Yet, from one society to another, there is a good deal of variation in the ways in which swidden farming operates, even in comparable and adjacent regions.
The paper recalls that, according to Cernea, there are four causes of patrimony loss (excluding warfare):
The author adds a fifth cause of patrimony loss: the intentional destruction of patrimonial resources by acts of government policy. In his example of the Senegal River, environmentally and socially sustainable production from floodplains was a primary victim of hydropower development, since the conventional management of large dams terminates the annual flooding on which such production systems depend, replacing it with the retention of waters in an upstream reservoir and their release only when needed by the turbines. While there is a rich literature on the need to compensate people who are forcibly relocated from the reservoir area, there is relatively little that deals with the downstream victims, who are not forced to relocate but who cannot maintain their pre-dam production systems. The author claims that, recurrently, governments and development planners support the replacement of "primitive" flood-recession systems with irrigation, because of the latter's seemingly larger returns per unit land. However, the calculations on which this comparison is made rarely, if ever, include the returns from fishing and herding. The author's research along the Senegal River demonstrates that the true returns from the "traditional system", when all the factors of production - land, labour, capital - are taken into account, vastly exceed even the best forecasts of what is anticipated from irrigation.
An important, and often overlooked, positive externality of food production systems is the contribution they make to intergroup harmony under ethnic diversity. For instance, with the Manantali Dam imposing changes in the flow regime and the anticipated conversion of the land into capital-intensive irrigated perimeters, there were a series of explosive ethnic conflicts.
The author praises and encourages the inclusion of the cultural roles of agriculture among the ROA Project's objects of study, but warns that this must not "imply universal commitment to a particular value system, a total embrace of a historical tradition, and obscure the significant segmentations that exist everywhere". These segmentations are not always evident to "visitors". He also stresses that, while conceptually it is possible to separate the empirical arenas contained within the rubrics cultural, environmental, social, food security and economic, the boundaries among them may not correspond at all to local realities, neither may insistence on selecting one scientific discipline as having analytical "rights" over which arena best advances understanding.
The first discussant considered that the issues regarding the documentation of cultural roles of agriculture still need to be properly defined. She proposed a typology of four main observable phenomena through which the cultural roles of agriculture can be documented: i) production systems; ii) consumption systems; iii) indigenous knowledge; and iv) artefacts.
The second discussant concentrated on African collective landholding systems and on the role of clans and lineages in regulating, maintaining and preserving land use over generations. Outside political or economic contact and population pressure tend to break down traditional forms of land tenure and use, ending the delicate balance between cultural forms and livelihood systems that has, in many cases, developed over centuries.
When badly planned and executed, development projects can also have diverse impacts on local culture and society. The disruptive impact of land privatisation during past World Bank projects on agricultural, socio-economic, and cultural patterns was criticised. The discussant offered an example of how members of one agricultural system, freed of traditional social controls in ancestral areas, had badly damaged the physical environment in zones that were pioneered for groundnut cultivation. The transposition of a farming system outside its original social and cultural context removes time-honoured constraints that allow that system to be sustainable in its original location.
As a whole, the major cultural roles that seem to arise from the meeting's discussion embrace cultural identity and diversity; cultural heritage; traditions and customs; beliefs, values and religion; and indigenous knowledge. The importance of differentiating stakeholders' viewpoints during valuation activities was repeatedly underlined.
The lead paper argues that domestic agricultural production plays a key role in hedging against possible shortages of food supply or sharp increases in import prices. It stresses that food security must be attained with minimum costs by the optimal combination of domestic production, importation and stock management, and that it is not desirable to maintain extremely low or high levels of food self-sufficiency. In the long term, as development proceeds, food security may be better achieved by lowering the food self-sufficiency level, shifting resources to the production of non-food export crops or manufacturing goods, and importing staple food requirements.
The paper provides a useful set of food security indicators which have been rearranged on the basis of the definition and elements of food security and aim at documenting the food security roles of domestic agriculture in the ROA Project study. It also gives an example of a methodology for deriving a composite index of the contribution of domestic agricultural production to food security, based on assessment of the opportunity costs and risks associated with food security in different conditions of national self-sufficiency, international competitiveness and purchasing power.
The first discussant stated that, despite its extremely useful identification of issues and suggestions, the paper falls short of providing a sufficiently detailed analysis of the issues, and focuses too much on trade.14 The hypothetical example of how to calculate the contribution of domestic agriculture to food security is not followed by practical guidance on how to use this analysis in the CCS.
In response to the question of how agriculture can enhance availability, the discussant stressed the need to focus on its productive aspects. On the issue of the role that agriculture can play in enhancing access to food, he suggested focusing on the income-generating aspects of agriculture. Agriculture provides income to those who own land and grow agricultural commodities; and it also provides income to those who work on other people's land, even if they themselves are landless. In addition, the agriculture-generated income itself provides a source of demand for the products of the rural non-farm sector, a facet that is receiving increasing attention. Regarding the issue of agriculture's role in promoting stability of access, the example of the Indonesian crisis of 1997 was given - large numbers of people returned to the land and managed to stave off starvation only because they had access to food grown by themselves or their relatives. Finally, regarding the roles of agriculture in ensuring food quality, the discussant stressed that these depend on the type of production techniques used and on the extent to which farming is an industrialised business.
Expanding on the speaker's detailed list of indicators, the discussant suggested that, in developing countries, it might be useful to base the analysis on food availability and food access indicators to see whether any patterns emerge. For example, regarding availability, it is easy to find information on the natural conditions of agriculture, factor endowments and infrastructure, among other issues. On the other hand, information on the institutional environment of agricultural production, although available, tends to be somewhat variable in quality. If such information can be collected and combined in a way that produces an indicator of availability, that indicator could be calibrated against data on the actual availability of food in order to improve its reliability. Such an indicator, when found to be reliable, could offer a simple and relatively inexpensive way of measuring availability in a country.
The second discussant commented on the author's model of food security by suggesting that the livelihood effects of any changes in the composition of national food supply (trade, domestic production, stock) should be examined.
He also pointed out that the cost of domestic production does not depend only on the production function, but also on the institutional set-up of agriculture and, in particular, on gender relations. He stressed that the issue of women not owing land is very relevant, and that it has significant consequences on the working of agrarian systems, the productivity of those systems, and accumulation of and access to food. He considered that the actual or potential feminisation of agriculture should be analysed in terms of its impact on agricultural production and income realised from agriculture.
The discussant suggested that the indicators proposed in the lead paper should be expanded to include indicators that represent, on the one hand, the effect of gender relations on food security and, on the other hand, the situation of regions that are food-deficit within state boundaries. Such indicators are: women's share in landownership (production function); their share of food consumption (accessibility); and monopolies and interlinked markets for food-deficit regions (physical accessibility).
3 The order in which these five categories of roles are presented follows the definition of agriculture adopted for this study: "agriculture is the transformation of the environment by human societies in benefit of plant and animal species which are primarily useful for food and other purposes (artisanal, medicinal, industrial and energy uses), providing the possibility to exchange commodities and generate income". Food security was deliberately kept as a separate category from the social and economic roles of agriculture in order to reflect the specific character of agriculture as a way of life and a means for survival in developing economies and societies.
4 For a definition of each domain, see Analytical Framework, paragraphs 3.8 to 3.13.
5 FAO. 2000. FAO Farming Systems Study. World Bank Rural Development Strategy Revision. (draft)
6 Many externalities cannot be well captured and documented at the national level because they are highly site-specific, their scope concerns a specific site and they cannot be perceived beyond certain boundaries. For instance, the flood prevention effect of paddy-rice terraces cannot benefit the areas that are located outside the river catchment.
7 The annexes encompass: i) a review of theoretical and empirical issues related to the CVM and TCM; ii) case studies applying both methods; iii) evaluation of the advantages and limitations of various valuation methods; and iv) recommendations for the application of the CVM in developing countries.
8 Binswanger and von Braun, 1991; Timmer, 1992; Bell and Rich, 1994; Johnson, 1998a; Mellor, 2001, as quoted by Stringer, 2001.
9 Berdegue, Riordan et al., March 2001. World Development.
10 Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion, 1996. How important to India's poor is the sectoral composition of economic growth. World Bank Review, June 1996. Vol. 10
11 According to Akinwumi, "it is no coincidence that most major celebrations in developing countries take place during or soon after harvests of major staple foods".
12 Happiness in rural settings can be understood as the husband's capacity to fulfil his role as the breadwinner by filling the barn with grain to last the whole year through. Akinwumi recalls a woman telling him that "a husband is only worthy if he assures his family of food throughout the year".
13 A longstanding tradition in most northern villages of Nigeria is the annual gathering into a common pool of "zaquat", or 10 percent of each farmer's grain yield. This store is supervised and controlled by the village head and provides food for the sick, strangers and the religious leader. Any farmer who lacks seed collects from the pool. The food security implication is obvious.
14 While no one can dispute the importance of trade, it is important to strike a balance between the relative contributions of agriculture and agricultural trade in the promotion of food security (Broca, 2001, Session 6: Food Security Roles of Agriculture).
