While I recognize this forum is mostly concerned with the application of ICT to rural finances, would it be completely inappropriate to think about the overall mechanism for providing financial services to rural communities to promote poverty alleviation of smallholder farmers and their communities? Are we providing the most effective services for the money being invested? Is there a better opportunity to make some suggestions to the micro-finance community on how the micro-finance programs could possibly be more effective in serving the smallholder farmers and assisting them get out of poverty?
  As I understand it, most of the micro finance for smallholders is production credit for purchase of inputs such as certified seed, fertilizer and plant protection chemicals. Also, this is usually administered through some form of farmer organization often utilizing credit clubs in which club members are expected to assure each other of loan repayment, and in the event of non-repayment of individual the other members of the club will have part of their crop confiscated to cover the loss. Something that can be highly antagonistic to those whose crop is confiscated. I believe this has been the bases for most of rural development projects for the past couple decades. I also believe that these programs require continual external facilitation and while available can claim some success, but the project ultimately collapse once the external facilitation effort ends.  I also feel there is considerable spin reporting promoting these programs even when there is only limited participation by the intended beneficiaries who, perhaps wisely, take most of their business elsewhere, even when members of the program. Much of this could be concern for having their crop confiscated to cover a defaulting loan.
Very little credit is provided to the service providers to allow them to more effectively serve the smallholder producers by enhancing the operating environment in which the smallholders operate that will allow them to enhance their yields, the yield recovery and quality of marketed crop. Most of the time the relationship between smallholder producer and service provider has been considered as an exploitive praetor/prey when it might better be considered as symbiotic with each dependent upon the other, in an overall suppressed economic environment that already curtails profit margins.
The service providers would not only include the agro-dealers who provide the inputs and through whom they market their crops, but also those providing mechanical assistance such as tractor owner/operators who can provide contract tillage. This would greatly enhance crop establishment time substantially increasing the yield potential. It is often overlooked as operational limitation are rarely considered with the assumption there may be a surplus of labor available to smallholder, and being nearly oblivious to the dietary calories available that might limit the work day to as little as 4 hours and total crop establishment extended to over 8 weeks. With the dietary energy available it is virtually impossible for smallholders to manually dig themselves out of poverty.
Other opportunities for service providers to enhance the returns of smallholder would be through mechanical threshing of various crops. Typically this will provide a 10 to 15% increase recovery over more common whacking or trampling and provide a cleaner final product that would require less winnowing, if any. This additional recovery could more than pay for the service even if the charge was a 5% in-kind payment. Also, some mechanical winnowing would easier allow a cleaner final sale that could come close to meeting the > 1% foreign material and command up to 10% higher price, or perhaps avoid have the value discounted as the trader would eventually have to pay to have the crop cleaned before being sold to the consumer or processor.

Out of space to be continued as following comment

As I have been following the forum it appears the emphasis remains sharing research information within the research community across the globe. Perhaps that is where most of the sharing is needed. But there is a question that I have been thinking of the last couple days, and that is to what end. My guess is that:

1. occassionally the sharing of information will lead to a completely innovative idea, that can then be researched in detail, etc.

2. More commonly it is simple a sharing of similar information that reinforces or fine tune already estabished innovations. As such if gives the scientists confidence in what they are doing. But since agriculture is always a very local science how critical this is may be a worthy question to address.

3. It also tend to be commodity specific or even sub-commodity specific looking at fertility, weed control, pest management separately and treating the research commodity as if it were the only commodity involved.

This is all well and good and is done in an ideal research environment with few if any limitations on resources needed to conduct the experiments. As mentioned before this gives excellent results as to the physical environment potential, but does not measure the drag on this potential that result from the limited resources the end user may have when attempting to apply the research to their specific fields, and integrate it into the rest of their farm enterprises, both crop and animal as appropritate.

My concern along with that of several other members is how the research information gets to the farmer end user, particularly the smallholders with the very limited resources to implement it and in the overall economic and administrative environment found in most developing countries. That is virtually no tax base to fund agriculture support services.

The need here is for more general information on all the activities needed to optimally producer a crop. This is normally done as strictly an educational effort for detailed recommendations and assuming that farmers can readily accept the research result once they understand it. If not it is the failure on their part to learn and they need to be repeately taught. But what happens to the research result when the basic crop establishment, by a hungry exhausted farmer who can only work 3 or 4 hours a day, takes 8 weeks instead of the anticipated 2 weeks? Will the rest of the detailed message still be valid, or will the plant population, weeding, fertilizer response be severely compromised? How does this drag get fed back into the research program so adjustment can be made? I wish the forum could spend a couple days address that issue.

Also, most smallholder are involved several crop and animal enterprise the management of which has to be integrated to obtain the maximum yield of all farm enterprises and priortize their crop program, usually giving priority to subsistence crops over cash crops. Again that can compromise the best research effort. But are there any return links so the researchers can better appreciate the constraints under which the farmers are operating and not simply blame them for failure to learn and appreciate the research results. The alternative is to keep pushing out solid research results that are beyond the means of smallholder farmers to utilize.

This still leaves the question of the means used to convey research information to the farmers. With most extension officers concnetrate on collaborating with development project as a means of getting some supplemental income, most of this is through the donor assisted NGO. They then try to operate this though farmer organizations and cooperatives, but this leaves the question is this best method, or dispite the social ideal is the accompaning business model just to cumbersome and inconveninet that the farmers are better off taking their business elsewhere. I fear the latter is the case and an issue that needs to be address in some forum, if not this one.

Thank you.

 

Please indulge me while I provide a brief discription of the economic and administrative environment found in most developing countries and how that could impact on data that can realistically be collected and how information flows.

Financiall Suppressed Economy

I usually define the economy of developing countries as financially suppressed. I confess that is my own term and the economists may have more academic term to describe the situation. What I mean by this is that while consumer prices, particularly of goods produced in country, maybe 1/3 to 1/5th what they are in the US or EU, wages are perhaps 1/12th what they are in the US or EU. The result is that while we may spend 15% of our income for food, out colleague may be spending 65% and smallholder beneficiaries may be spending in excess of 80% of their wages or produce. The result is that, since you cannot tax what people have to spend to survive, the tax base for which to provide civil services including support for agriculture programs of most governments becomes virtually non existant.  

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/FinancialSuppressed.htm

Financially Stalled Government

The major impact of this on agriculture services is that the are no operating funds to undertake programs. Virtually all government revenue must go to meet the contract obligations of the civil officers, after that very little is available for fuel for transportation, laboratory supplies, and field supplies, etc. Thus unless supported by some NGO project officers have little choice but to sit around their offices hoping to get some support, or under take consulting opportunities for some of the larger farmers who can afford to pay for the services. This is not a conflict of interest as it would be in the US, but perhaps the best opportunity for officers to come in contact with growers.

The result is that most of the research is deferred to collaboration with NGO with the most noticable the variety development work in colloaboration with the CGIAR centers. Also, most of the extension is in collaboration with NGO as part of development projects, and extension personnel migrating from project to project where supplemental income is available. The host officers ultimately ending up with supporting roles. Data collection is also limited to what can be easily observed with limited potential for any supporting laboratory analysis.

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/FinanciallyStalled.htm

It also means that many of the services available on paper may not be up to international standards. Perhaps the prime example would be certified seed and regardless of how well trained or motivated the certification team may be if they don't have the funding to make 3 field visits a season nor the supplies for running germination test, then the program has to operate mostly on the honor system.

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/VarietyImprovement.htm

Under these conditions libraries are mostly irrelivant with books left over from expatriates project and well out of date, journals subsctiptions are impossible to maintain. Thus what is left is the freely circulated material like that coming from FFTC in Tawain and used to come through DIFD until funding ended.

Fortunately there is the internet but the most reliable and sustainable would be from the cafe near the offices as these computers tend to be maintained and serviceable while those associated with host government offices tend to break down after which there are no means of repair.

Kind of a dismal picture, but I think fairly realistic.

Thank you,

Dick Tinsley

Continusing on the previous contribution and effort to relate research results to smallholder agriculture it might be useful to make a distingtion between the science and art of farming. In this case:

Science vs. Art

The science of farming is the result of the research effort that as mentioned previously is largely defining the physical potential of the environment and represent the maximum yield potential. This is all well documented and effectively shared among the agriculture scientists including extension officers. As mentioned before it does not factor in the drag imposed by the limited resources available to manage land and assume the are no restriction.

The art of farming is the manner individual farmers, smallholder or large, optimize the science of farming to the limited resources they have to manage their land and the different enterprises they are involved to maximize their total returns to all farm enterprises, deliberating reducing the returns to some enterprises to optimize the returns to others. This may not be as well documented and may actually be difficult to generalize, but needs to be appreciated. But as mentioned previously this is the drag the limited resources places on the physical potential.

Research/Extension vs. Development

In this case the role of the research/extension officers working from experiment stations or relying on the result of experiment station work is broad base mandate to develop and promote the maximum yield potential of area. Basically a top down technology transfer activity. 

The development officer, usually working through some NGO and in a more confined area of a beneficiary community is mandated to take a closer look at the research information and work with the farmers to optimize their use of the technology with the limted resources available. It also includes facilitate access to such additional operational resources as contract tractors for basic land preparation that will expedite activities and allow better use of the research information. This also needs to be fed back up, but that link tends to be considerable weaker than the downward flow. However, the research/extension programs need to be much more aware of the limited resources farmers have to accept the research results, and not simply write off the lack of use to lack of interest or limited knowledge, etc. This is where some additional information needs to be developed and distributed.

 http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/Adoptors.htm

 http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/Integration.htm 

I hope this makes some sense,

Thank you,

Dick Tinsley

 

In the effort to translate research results for the smallholder end user, perhaps we should consider the limitation of agronomy and other bio-technical research developed from small plot analysis, particularly those with a high manual labor component such as land preparation and weeding. The agronomic research does an excellent job of determining the phyiscal potential of a given environment, BAS!!! What it can not do is measure the drag on this potential resulting from the limited operational resources available to extend the research from the small plot to the whole farm, particular for smallholder who may only have sufficeint calories to work 3 or 4 hrs per day, if lucky.

The problem is that this whole idea has fallen through the cracks into what appears as an administrative void in the research/development process. Who is responsible for determing the amount of labor and other operational resouces needed and available to manage the land either at the farm level or the community level. The latter when involving hired casual labor that migrates through a community. Historically the default has to be concider it infinite or at least unlimited. This is doubtful.

Thus who is or should be responsible to determine if the farmers can effectively use the technology promoted for their benefit? Or conversely given the labor available how long will it take to complete various activities and how will that impact on the yields, quality or other factors. Is it the agronomist, but they are poorly trained for this analysis? Is it the economist, they can tell what is needed but usually fall short of the amount available? Is it the sociologist? who. I think there is a whole set of information that needs to be evaluated in integrating the research results to the smallholders' limited capacity to utilize the data.

Thank you,

Dick Tinsley

If the forum will indulge me I would like to open a somewhat different tangent to the discussion. It seem that most of the discussion is relative to sharing information between the different research science program or perhaps even the extension programs. I would like to suggest that a critical concern is how useful it is to the end user which I think is the smallholder producers in the developing world.

The question is not do they have the knowledge or can obtain the knowledge, but do they have the means to take what was developed through small plot research and extension demonstration and extend it to their total farm, or whatever portion they need to. The underlying concern here it the basic premisis that has guided or perhaps misguided the development effort for some 40 years. Basically that the farmers were not effectively using the resources available and that substantial economic development could be done with education and motivation, the operational resources were already available. http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/BasicPremise.htm

I am going to question this and suggest the labor and the other operational resources needed to manage the land are the most limited aspect of smallholder agriculture and this results in prolonged time to accomplish most agronomic task until the biotechnical information being effectively shared and extended is render ineffective.

Perhaps the easiest way to get at this is to look at the calorie energy balance for smallholders. Why it is trite to say that a hungry person cannot be expected to work very hard, that is percisely what we have been expecting for the last 40 years. Also, we can claim that smallholder only provide enough food for 6 months, but do we factor that into field work we expect to be undertaken to releive their poverty.

As I can best see this the basic fact are it requires 2000 kcal/day to meet basic matabolism requirements for a sedimentary person such as someone confined to a refugee in a camp. To this must be added around 300 kcal per hr of agronomic field work. For a full 10 hr day it will take some 4000 to 5000 kcals depending on the work being done. In contrast farmers and laborer may only have access to some 2000 kcal/day just enough to meet basic matabolism requirement with little if anything left for work. An interesting example would be the Millinneum Village Projects in East Africa that allocate some 1.1 t of maize per family of 5.7 people. This quickly convert to 192 g/per/day which converts to some 1930 kcals. Again enough to survive but not do any strenous work. The result is that the agriculture work day may be restricted to 3 or 4 hrs and those stero-typical men loafing around the village in the afternoon maybe more hungry and exhausted than lazy needing a swift kick to the posterier. If this is all the a person can be expected to work in a day, how long will it take for them to undertake the 300 hr needed for manual land preparation of a hectare, and what will that to all the swcience being shared. http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/CalorieEnergyBalance.htm

Thank you,

Dick Tinsley