December 15, 2008
Guenette Speaks on Access to Markets at InterAction Workshop
As the food crisis deepens, organizations of many stripes are exploring the best approaches to help the world’s poorest communities. A promising development was a workshop on Connecting the Chronically Poor to the Agricultural Growth Agenda held December 12, in Washington, D.C.
The workshop was organized by USAID, Interaction, and the BASIS Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program ,a global research effort based at the University of Wisconsin. The three organizations invited approximately 75 people to participate in planning a larger, 2-day summit to be held in Washington, D.C., on February 26-27. Paul Guenette, technical managing director for ACDI/VOCA’s Agribusiness Africa Portfolio, presented on access to markets and will reprise that role in February.
USAID and its academic and NGO partners reviewed the causes of chronic poverty, implications for programming, and interventions that promise effectiveness and scalability. Andrew Shepherd from the Chronic Poverty Research Center presented on The Chronic Poverty Research Report 2008: Measures, Drivers and Solutions, followed by UC Berkeley's Elizabeth Sadoulet, who presented on Agricultural Development for Poverty Reduction and Connecting the Chronically Poor to Agricultural Growth Agenda. ACDI/VOCA’s Guenette and Chris Delgado of the World Bank spoke on market access.
“Diversification to a cash crop, that is, farming both staple and cash crops, is the key to breaking the chronic poverty cycle,” Guenette said. “The shift into cash cropping alongside food cropping brings income, obviously, but the shift also has a secondary and very beneficial effect on the farmers’ food crop productivity.”
Other speakers from the University of Wisconsin and Heifer International summarized issues on access to assets, and those from Oxfam International presented on productive social protection risk and vulnerability management.
Currently, agriculture receives only 4 percent of official development assistance and public spending. Speakers argued for investing in agriculture and explained how agriculture should no longer be seen as a “sunset industry” in development theory, whereby smallholder farmers are net buyers of food and are the major group to lose from the current food crisis and the spikes in food prices. Recommended immediate actions included increasing emergency food assistance and organizing more rationally the “next harvest” food production. Medium-term actions include increasing productivity in agriculture and reversing recent governmental and donor neglect for agriculture .
Expanded social protection is essential for helping the chronically poor. Rural labor markets for the rural poor are often exploitive, and rural poor need to work collectively to improve their bargaining power. Typically, the chronically poor have insufficient assets to move ahead, and without meeting a critical asset threshold cannot have sufficient scale or stability.
One session dealt with how agriculture is recognized as essential to alleviating chronic poverty, but raised questions as to whether good agricultural development principles are being sufficiently respected in safety net programs or whether significant developments need to take place first. Suggested interventions included improving infrastructure, empowering rural poor, raising agricultural productivity, strengthening demand-driven links to markets, building on existing bases step by step, and assisting target populations to define and prioritize risks. Participants discussed how interventions need to be context-specific with opportunities to build trust and be reliable, and how target populations need to grasp the benefits of participating. Findings will be used to inform the larger February conference.
ACDI/VOCA is known for our approach to market-oriented agricultural development and has recently issued a paper on appropriate responses to the food crisis. To read the paper, click here.
