Outlook on Agriculture

This paper examines the challenges in reforming agricultural extension in India to meet the complex and heterogeneous demands of agricultural and rural development. While extension can and should play a much wider role in engaging with these issues, its performance remains restricted to the traditional one of technology dissemination. Fresh theoretical perspectives on the nature of innovation and appropriate institutional reform are opening up new vistas for extension. But the implementation of many of these necessary changes is hampered by outmoded understanding of its role and function, lack of partnerships among the different actors, limited expertise and lack of an explicit agenda on institutional learning.

There are two alternative paths for humanity and the environment, and man's actions over the next few years will determine which path is taken. In one future, agricultural landscapes become depleted by an overpopulation of desperate peasant farmers, many of whom are forced to migrate to cities, only to discover garbage, crowded slums and squalor. But in the other more optimistic scenario, smallholders practise environmentally responsible, market-oriented agriculture resulting in rural prosperity and a flow of goods to clean, vibrant urban areas. The Forum for Organic Resource Management and Agricultural Technologies (FORMAT) is assisting Kenyans to pursue the second path, one in which organic resources in the countryside and cities alike are being creatively recycled and profitably processed.

The overall planning performance of the fisheries sector in Bangladesh over the past three decades was evaluated. Performance has been unsatisfactory largely due to contiguous overestimation of the planning targets and the existence of serious financial, technological, institutional and social constraints. Despite the remarkable growth in export earnings and a stable GDP contribution of 3.2–5.6%, budget allocations remained extremely low (0.7–1.4% of total outlay) in subsequent plan periods. Production from marine fisheries performed satisfactorily with slow growth in recent years, while inland fisheries with initial poor performance showed improvements from the mid-1980s owing to increased productivity in culture fisheries, particularly in pond aquaculture. Targets should be determined with the aid of a thorough review of past performances and there is an urgent need to streamline the implementation capability. Also, a shift from production-oriented planning and seeking technical solutions only to addressing broader institutional and social issues affecting the fisheries sector is essential. Government should emphasize the development of small-scale fisheries, strengthen extension–research linkage, improve infrastructure, build partnerships between relevant agencies and shift its top-down approach to planning towards a participatory bottom-up approach so as to release existing bottlenecks.

At the heart of all research activities in agriculture lies the huge power of human resources, which helps to galvanize scientists into action. This disorganized force of workers, called the labour force, comprises both men and women to be employed on an equitable basis. As in other areas of work, women working on the farm have certain stereotyped roles in an otherwise supposedly non-gender-specific domain. This paper looks into the presumptions, problems and prospects of these neglected, but essential women workers on agricultural research farms. It highlights the experiences and issues that have emerged from a novel experiment involving the empowerment of farm women. In the case presented, empowerment was achieved through a threefold strategic approach. This involved education to promote positive self-image and self-confidence, skills development, and creating an awareness of social change. Various initiatives were promoted on a sustained basis to bring about the change process. These included adult literacy programmes, payment of wages to individuals through their bank accounts, on-site skills development and training, participation of workers in decision-making meetings to develop action plans and set targets for their respective areas of work, acquisition of gender-friendly equipment, health campaigns, etc. All these brought about gradual but perceptible changes in their attitudes and behaviour. The result of this empowerment process was reflected in enhanced qualitative and quantitative outcomes. A crucial factor in the success and sustainability of this empowerment process was the support and visionary outlook of top management. The lessons from this case study can serve as motivating factors for other agricultural institutions to experiment.

It is widely reported that women provide the bulk of food production labour in Africa. Since efficient targeting of improved technologies demands an understanding of who is likely to use them, and new farm technologies have often been inappropriate for women's needs, this paper presents the relative contributions of men and women to food production labour in six major cassava-producing countries of Africa. The paper is based on farm-level information collected within the framework of the Collaborative Study of Cassava in Africa (COSCA). While the number of fields in which women provided more labour for each farm task increased consistently from the initial farm operations, such as land clearing and seedbed preparation, through sowing (planting) and weeding to the final farm operations such as harvesting and transportation, for which women provided more labour for the largest number of fields, the reverse was the case for men. The relative number of households where females provided more field labour than males was higher among female-headed households than among male-headed ones. Such households were characterized by a lower working age male/female ratio, and/or were engaged in tree crop production, which often absorbed male labour. Villages where females provided more field labour than males were more common in remote areas where access to markets was poor and population density sparse, or in countries where men had fled the villages because of political repression. Such villages were also more common among non-Muslim communities than among predominantly Muslim societies. On the whole, however, men contributed more labour in significantly more fields than women in most places. These observations suggest that it could be misleading to generalize that women are providing the bulk of food production labour across Africa. They provide clear evidence of gender division of labour on the farm, and help to explain gender bias in agricultural extension efforts in Africa. Recommendations that pre-harvest extension activities should be mainly directed at women have hardly been heeded. It is recommended that these activities should be targeted at both men and women, but more towards women where men have fled the villages for political reasons or for commercial ones such as poor market access opportunities.

This paper describes an empirical investigation of the application of benchmarking to cooperative enterprises in Wales to determine whether it was technically feasible, at what cost, and with what results. This entailed close sustained fieldwork with actual cooperatives, which was achieved by investigating the two largest farmer-controlled enterprises (FCEs) in Wales — Clynderwen and Cardiganshire Farmers Ltd, and Wynnstay and Clwyd Farmers Plc, who also collaborated in subsequent management appraisal and remedial action. The paper concludes that benchmarking is strategically feasible, that it has a favourable impact on the perceptions and attitudes of staff and members of participating cooperatives, and that it yields workable priorities and management recommendations, which can be implemented. Wider adoption of the technique by cooperatives is therefore recommended as a viable survival strategy — an alternative to the recent preference for abandonment of cooperative status. This is of particular significance for the marketing/entrepreneurship interface of FCEs in Wales.