ICRISAT's Plan. Inclusive market-oriented Africa & Asia

MANILA: In planning for Africa or Asia, you map out what you want to do. The questions are: What are you mapping out for? How do you get there? Most of all, where are you coming from? We can have the answers for ourselves if we learn from the bad and good lessons of ICRISAT in the last 40 years. ICRISAT wasn't always that smart.

ICRISAT was in Africa for this year's regional planning meetings for West and Central Africa (WCA) on 22-24 January in Barmako in Mali and on 27-29 January in Nairobi in Kenya. In Barmako, scientists came from the regional and country offices in WCA and from ICRISAT headquarters in India to map out the WCA's research agenda. In Nairobi, the planning meeting was attended by scientists and staff who came from ICRISAT Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as well as from the WCA and ICRISAT India (31 January 2014, ICRISAT Happenings 1608, icrisat.org).

Actually, all those ICRISAT scientists and staff came from the same place: Isla de Caridad (Isle of Charity). If you don't know where it is, you're not a native of the place. A place with concern for the poor, those in the drylands of Africa and Asia. Charity also implies that if Mohammed cannot go to the mountain, the mountain must go to Mohammed.

Caridad. Charity, says the American Heritage Dictionary, is benevolence or generosity toward others or toward humanity. In making agriculture work for the farmers, we must give them what is due for their labors. We have not done that since the marketplace was invented.

In the Nairobi and Kenya planning meetings, ICRISAT scientists and staff came with the knowledge that they were there to design or redesign their science, with this common aim:
Enabling farmers to adapt to climate change and new opportunities, and making markets work for them.
So, how can ICRISAT enable farmers to adapt to climate change? Climate change brings droughts to both the Good and the Bad Lands, so ICRISAT also breeds for the bad lands drought-tolerant crop varieties of chickpea, peanut, pearl millet, pigeon pea, and sweet sorghum. Those new varieties increase farm yields despite lack of soil moisture and in the presence of their enemies, those pests and diseases. Breeding a resistant variety is applied science with an inhuman pest.

So, how can ICRISAT help the dryland farmers grab new opportunities? Markets untapped or new are the best opportunities for dryland farmers. In my hometown of Asingan, Pangasinan in the Philippines, for our coop Nagkaisa, we have been discussing some blue ocean projects like organic rice and special rice. Except that we know the market works against producers.

So, how can ICRISAT help make markets work for the farmers? By allowing the laws of the marketplace to operate while transforming the farmers into middlemen who, thereby, enjoy the values added throughout the chain, from field to food, from production to consumption. This is the strategy called inclusive-market oriented development (IMOD).

On IMOD, in one planning session, ICRISAT Director General William Dar said:

Inclusiveness means that the very purpose of our research work is to help smallholder farmers out of poverty to self-sufficiency and prosperity. Smallholder farmers must be given access to scientific innovations designed for the poor, to help them connect to markets, but in a way that builds their own resilience rather than creating dependency.

If I were to summarize the above 54 words, I will transform them into 2 key principles in only 6 words, and they're these:
(a) Ownership of innovations
(b) Ownership of markets

Ownership of innovations

The ICRISAT innovations come in the forms of new varieties and new or improved cropping systems. Thus, over the years and among other places, the new ICRISAT varieties include open-pollinated and hybrid sorghum released in Botswana, peanuts in Malawi, pigeon pea in Myanmar, chickpea in Ethiopia, finger millet in Tanzania, and sweet sorghum in Mali, among other places. These varieties are either resistant to drought or diseases, or both; all are high-yielding. Ownership means the farmers must adopt these varieties and follow planting instructions to reduce costs of production and obtain maximum yields. "Smallholder farmers must be given access to scientific innovations designed for the poor." The new or improved cropping systems are innovative and cost-effective, and they include creating a watershed where none grew before, harvesting rain, micro-dosing of fertilizers, skip-a-row irrigation, and land rejuvenation. For those innovations to work for them, the poor must follow instructions. Science with a human face works only if the humans respect it.

Ownership of markets

If there is a single factor in the triumph of inclusive market-oriented development over similar ideas, including inclusive growth by the National Economic Development Authority of the Philippines, it is ownership of markets. In NEDA's inclusive growth, those who are rich own the markets, not those who are the poor.

The ownership of markets by the poor works out like this:

The farmers are or become members of a producers association that is either associated with a bank or has funding itself as a cooperative that works for the common good. 

The farmers borrow either cash or input for their farming with low rates of interest. In between harvests, they can even borrow from their cooperative for family needs. 

When harvesting comes, the harvests go to the warehouse of the coop, to be stored there and to be sold only when the price is right. There is no rush to market. While their harvests wait in the warehouse, the farmers can borrow against them, to survive or thrive. There are no panic sellers even if there are panic buyers. 

When the coop finally sells the produce under its care, the farmers get the fair market value of their harvests – not to mention added benefits for being members of the coop. In so doing, what the coop earns is what used to be what the middleman earns – the coop is now the middleman and the farmers enjoy what they should enjoy: high prices for the fruits of their labors.

The concept of the IMOD is the strategy that ICRISAT & Partners have adopted for 2010 and beyond; I first wrote about IMOD in 22 September 2010 ("An African Revolution. IMOD Power to the Women!" iCRiSAT Watch, blogspot.com). Among other things, IMOD calls for farmers' direct access to markets, that is, they are their own middlemen.

The concept of inclusive market-oriented development is a great magnification of the World Bank's concept of inclusive market-oriented enterprise. With the enterprise model, you're talking of helping at most a family; with the development model, you're talking of helping at least an entire village. One view is fragmented; the other is holistic. One favors the entrepreneurs, the other the villagers.

If you want the poor farmers of Africa and Asia to survive, IMOD your system! That is, make crops more resilient and farms more profitable, able to feed the growing population using limited resources available.

In Mali, Malian Minister of Rural Development Bocary Tereta gave thanks to "ICRISAT's commitment to strengthen its research partnership with national institutes in critical areas of research such as resilience, up-scaling of improved technologies, processing, and soil health."

The Malian Minister also said:

I am delighted that ICRISAT interventions in Mali focus on the improvement of millet and sorghum which are staple crops and form the base of the country’s national food security stock of 35,000 tons per year. Increasing millet and sorghum production and yield would mean reaching food security and raising the national cereals stock to prevent food issues. Therefore, we have great interest in whatever technologies are available for resilient farming.

As we improve technologies for smallholder farmers to cope with climate change, we should take into account a value-chain approach, providing capacity building where needed for processing and access to markets to enable farmers to increase their revenues and improve their livelihoods.

In Nairobi, during the planning meeting, William Dar said:

Inclusive market-oriented agriculture is the key to making farming more profitable for the poor and emerging farmers in Eastern and Southern Africa. Partnerships and collaboration are critical to developing tailor-made solutions that suit the context of the region and providing farmers with access to science-based innovations that will build their resilience.

The news release coming from ICRISAT said that during the planning meeting, the participants held brainstorming and interactive sessions "to identify new areas of research and opportunities for scaling out improved technologies and tools."

"Scaling out." Even at the University of the Philippines Los Baños in Laguna, the scientists are slowly learning that they have to scale out their technologies and tools in order to help more of their target clients.

I leave the UP Los Baños scientists to their busyness in their investigations, while I look again at the concept of ICRISAT's IMOD and its public-science-private partnership approach to development – minus many a Shylock of a usurer and a middleman. In the current marketplace, it is a sad story that the Shylocks harvest more than the farmers.

In fact, as General Manager of our multi-purpose cooperative called Nagkaisa in Asingan, Pangasinan, having absorbed the essence of IMOD, I have found that the concept fits perfectly with Philippine cooperatives – with modification in the membership of the Board, the Vision and Mission. The Vision must include emancipation from poverty of the members. The Mission must include incorporating IMOD as central policy. The Board must have a public-science-private-peasants composition – peasants, plural, 3 or more peasants in the Board, to keep the Board grounded on reality. I have called the basic idea a Super Coop (see my "The Super Coops of 2014," Nagkaisa, blogspot.com).

With leaders who have not only a heart but also a helping hand for the poor farmers, with farmers empowered to help themselves within the village, I am sure any coop that is inclusive market-oriented will bring about development of any village.