June 22, 2009
Ag Development Approaches Examined in the Washington Post
The June 19 edition of the Washington Post carried a front page article entitled “U.S. Pursues a New Way to Rebuild in Afghanistan.” Running over 4,000 words, the piece was a timely effort by Rajiv Chandrasekaran to grapple with an important but complex topic. Chandrasekaran is the former Post bureau chief in Bagdad, whose 2006 book Imperial Life in the Emerald City about Iraq’s Green Zone was nominated for the National Book Award.
ACDI/VOCA is not mentioned in the piece but welcomes the scrutiny of development strategies and concurs with the need to reform agricultural development. While no silver bullet is available, there is growing support for increased attention to long-term sustainable agriculture development. The Post article is just the latest in a litany of reform messages.
In February, 40 relief and development organizations united in the Roadmap to End Global Hunger campaign calling for increased spending on food and agricultural aid. The same month the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released its report advocating renewed U.S. commitment to alleviating global poverty through agricultural development. Also in February USAID held a major poverty and hunger alleviation conference that had a strong agricultural subtext.
In March, the Capitol Hill Forum 2009 was devoted to “Advancing Agricultural Development and Addressing the Global Food Crisis—Present and Future.” This confab was sponsored by the Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development and 21 cosponsors, including ACDI/VOCA. The Coalition for Agricultural Development (CFAD), cochaired by ACDI/VOCA Vice President for Outreach and Cooperative Programs Dr. Susan Schram, has advocated a comprehensive food security strategy and a doubling of agriculture development resources. CFAD is composed of 70 organizations, including private sector companies, universities, NGOs and cooperatives.
This month President Obama announced that he intends to double U.S. assistance for global agricultural productivity and rural development, and to institute a comprehensive food security strategy.
While much of the development community’s positioning above was driven by last year’s global food crisis, broad-based, long-term sustainable agricultural development is also relevant in poor, conflict-affected areas such as Afghanistan—anywhere agriculture is a mainstay of the economy.
As ACDI/VOCA President Carl Leonard recently said of our company, “Since the Kennedy administration’s recommitment to overseas development, we have battled food insecurity and built smallholder farmer capacity in 145 countries. Since the vast majority of the world’s poor have agriculture-based livelihoods, broad-based agricultural development is the only sustainable road to food security.” The Post article said that more that 80 percent of working-age males in Afghanistan are small-scale farmers.
In recent times U.S. programs to alleviate hunger have underemphasized long-term agricultural development. Fewer agriculture projects were mounted, and as the article suggests, some of those were politically driven and designed to produce quick results.
A high-performing agriculture sector does not happen easily, and in areas torn by conflict the development challenges increase manifold and progress is hard won. A careful, systematic approach is required to develop sustained local capacity, but such an approach of course requires that the planners themselves have capacity. In the Post article a high USAID official uses the term “eviscerate” to describe the loss of agricultural expertise suffered by the agency during workforce reductions in the 1990s. This diminution has been ruefully noted at all the development community conferences and in policy pronouncements mentioned above.
ACDI/VOCA agribusiness specialist Paul Guenette said, “We believe that investment in agricultural programs is one of the best ways to guarantee that families around the world can reliably feed themselves, generate economic activity and build assets.”
But discrete success stories are not a worthy goal. As Guenette said, “If you want to develop agriculture, you have to go at it more than two or three years. One of our most successful programs is in Kenya, where we’ve worked for seven years.”
The project in Kenya takes an integrated “soup-to-nuts” approach. It is targeted to a broad base of small-scale farmers who increase their productivity, improve the effectiveness of their organizations and increase their access to agricultural markets and business support services. This range of activities and services is known as a value chain approach, and ACDI/VOCA has long been a leader in its refinement.
Ruth Campbell, who leads ACDI/VOCA’s enterprise development practice, said, “The value chain approach takes a holistic view of market systems to achieve poverty reduction through economic growth. It calls for addressing constraints wherever they occur in the system. In the case of agriculture this often means helping farmers organize to achieve economies of scale, strengthening their relationships with private sector firms to facilitate access to inputs and services, and building the capacity of public and private sector stakeholders to work in new ways that increase the competitiveness of the sector.”
Campbell said, “Stimulating competitive behavior can be a complicated process and often requires long-term investment, but this is what sustainable, scalable development entails. The alternative is results that fall off as soon as the project ends.”
In the Post article Afghans are described as “smart farmers.” In fact many are accustomed to growing cash crops, sometimes two per year, in a demanding market-based system.
With what the development community has learned from 50 years of experience and what such beneficiaries can teach us, ACDI/VOCA believes governments and their development partners must rise to a recommitment to effective agricultural development.
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