The business of synergy. Making millions of farmers millionaires?

MANILA: It seemed strange that Director General William Dar of ICRISAT was asked to address on 26 October 2014 a convocation of the 2014 graduating class of the Synergy School of Business (SSB) at Hyderabad in India. ICRISAT's mandate is research in agriculture, specifically in the growing of 5 crops for the drylands of Africa and Asia: chickpea, peanut, pearl millet, pigeon pea, and sorghum. Actually, ICRISAT is also into business partnerships, having the Agri-Business Incubation (ABI) set up at its campus in Patancheru, Telangana, India. In fact, ICRISAT's ABI won the prestigious Asian Association of Business Incubation (AABI) Award in 2008. In January 2014, ICRISAT held a 1-day Agribusiness Fair at its headquarters and was attended by more than 300 agribusiness innovators and entrepreneurs (ANS, 17 January 2014, icrisat.org). On that occasion, Dar said:

ICRISAT nurtures a research for development paradigm, now guided by a strategic framework called Inclusive Market-Oriented Development (IMOD). We have been reinventing ourselves for the past 41 years to efficiently and effectively serve the interests of smallholder farmers in 55 semi-arid countries across Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

With IMOD, ICRISAT wants the farmers to reinvent themselves too and become market-oriented like never before, and reap the values added as seeds transform themselves into more seeds and more food and are distributed locally, nationally, even internationally.

Our mission is to make smallholder farmers in the drylands prosperous, not just self-sufficient. And that is why we are engaged in promoting an inclusive and technology-based entrepreneurship and agribusiness program.

ICRISAT wants farmers to become entrepreneurs by teaching them how to cultivate crops efficiently and market their produce profitably. So far, the poor farmers have been at the losing end of marketing.

During the SSB convocation, Dar also said:
At no other time in history has there been a more challenging moment to join the work force, particularly in the world of business. But neither has there been a moment more loaded with promise and opportunity, especially for students of SSB known for its academic rigor, and (is) unique for its participative and experiential learning.

Surprisingly. the words of Dar to describe SSB can also be applied to describe ICRISAT, with the rigor of its science, the uniqueness of its participative approach, and the village-level, hands-on learning that is true for all participants in the struggle for inclusive development.

To help incubate businesses and to engage others to participate in IMOD is to generate synergy. Synergy is, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, "1. The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects. 2. Cooperative interaction among groups, especially among the acquired subsidiaries or merged parts of a corporation, that creates an enhanced combined effect. From Greek sunergia, cooperation, from sunergos, working together."

Synergy is necessary in this world of competition. Even in agriculture, whether they realize it or not, farmers compete with each other in access to inputs, and in access to services in harvesting, in postharvest handling, processing, and marketing. That is why it is well that they learn to produce synergy among themselves, which is what the ICRISAT-defined partnership pursuing an IMOD strategy is trying to accomplish.

Dar asked questions of the SSB graduates as if to say these were actually business opportunities. One, "Why do societies not work out mechanisms to produce and distribute food more equally?" My own guess would be because of the high prices of food.

"With about 80% of the food consumed in developing countries produced by smallholder farmers, how come they comprise 75% of the world's poorest people?" My own explanation: When the farmers sell, the prices are low; when the farmers buy, the prices are high – after harvest, because of market manipulations by merchants, the farmers cannot afford to pay for the grains of the crops that they themselves raised!

That is why, Dar said:
To have economically viable and vibrant rural economies complementary to sustainable cities, we must address the centrality of smallholder producers, put massive investment in rural infrastructures, and change our mindsets to think that agriculture is a business that feeds the people, generates incomes and creates jobs.

And it's a business that is sustainable because the businessman sees to it that the inputs and outputs can be sustained through wise and efficient utilization, the natural resources being allowed to replenish themselves by themselves.

My life-long goal is to champion the cause of smallholder farmers in the international arena and bring in together leaders from all over the world to help support the conditions of poor farmers and populations suffering from poverty and hunger. My mission is to be able to unlock opportunities for smallholder farmers and change the world's narrative on agriculture to wealth creation, away from just poverty reduction.

We must dream less of the poor decreasing in their number and more of the poor increasing in their wealth. Not number of mouths to feed but number of pockets to fill. Not limitations but abundance.
The world, with its huge potential, cannot be a museum of poverty. It has been my passion to use agricultural business and scientific innovations to turn the world's smallholder farmers into millionaires and billionaires.

Farmers becoming millionaires and billionaires – is William Dar, Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, the #1 among the 15 centers of the CGIAR, crazy? "That is an aspiration," he tells me. A strong desire, longing, or hope (Random House College Dictionary).

Easier said than done. Is it a pipe dream? Here I will speak from personal experience. From my year-long training consultancy with agrarian reform beneficiaries (landless farmers) under the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) in Pangasinan and La Union provinces, I know that the best farmers can earn 1 million pesos a year from hybrid rice or hybrid corn. I also know a professional in my hometown of Asingan in Pangasinan who earns that much from less than half a hectare planting pepper. In documenting (photographing) farmer borrowers for the Agricultural Credit Policy Council's 2012 coffee-table book The Filipino Farmer Is Bankable (150 pages), I met farmers in San Jose City in Nueva Ecija who were earning at least 1 million pesos from 1 ha a year planting white onions – they had a direct marketing arrangement with the Jollibee fast-food chain.

Any farmer can become a millionaire within a year if he has the mindset of a businessman and uses a productive combination of technologies and systems suitable in his area of operation. That is to say, learning much from ICRISAT, he plants the right crops (new or improved varieties, multiple crops) for more produce and higher yields in the same area, cuts his costs (up to 90% from farmer's practice), accesses affordable credit, and belongs to a group that does direct marketing of farm produce, eliminating the middleman.

Thus Dar challenged the new SSB graduates in India:
These are the challenges that I pose to you – future transformational business leaders of this country. Go into the business of feeding the forgotten poor, venture into making agriculture a profitable business.

Today, we may not realize it, but farming is largely a losing proposition. Even the farmers don't realize that! Because they don't compute. Because they are not business-minded. Been there, seen that!

In the image above, the original taken 09 August 2013, my photograph of a common service facility (CSF) of the Rissing Multi-Purpose Cooperative (MPC) of Bangar, La Union shows the promise of the business of synergy even in the use of machinery for cultivation and harvesting. The CSF is the gift of machinery of the DAR to active land reform farmer coops; CSF is worth millions of pesos. The gift of millions of pesos of income for farmers must come from the MPC, the farmers themselves.

With synergy in mind and inspired by ICRISAT, borrowing mostly from the strategy it calls the IMOD, I as the General Manager of the Nagkaisa MPC in my hometown, say my own 5-Year Farmer Millionaire Challenge to my own country is for public-science-private partnerships to move cooperatives to make millionaires out of their members by supporting farmers starting from seed selection up to market selection, providing them access to farmer-friendly credit from beginning to end of a crop production cycle, and by engaging in wealth-producing direct marketing, where they indeed can dictate the prices.

Did you know that the FAO says postharvest operations account for more than 55% of the added value in agriculture in developing countries (fao.org)? That millions of our farmers have remained poor must be because we have neglected postharvest; I say this is where to make millionaires out of the millions. This is where governments should spend millions of dollars for development acceleration programs for the poor farmers who make up the backbone of the country.

Partnership is synergy; I've written much about ICRISAT partnerships (see for instance my "IMODest Proposal. A Coop Revolution for millions of poor farmers," 28 September 2013, iCRiSAT Watch, blogspot.com). In synergy, we must teach farmers to aspire to become millionaires themselves, not remain mired in the mud in the poverty of their thoughts as they remain to be poorly paid producers in the lucrative business of others. Let us help the farmers create synergy in their own business enterprises and reward themselves richly. That indeed would be science with a human face smiling widely!