Rural Ghana in Hipstamatic
October 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
A look at some of the smaller towns outside of Tamale in Hipstamatic:
Tiller
Maize
Playing in the shea nuts
Grievance, rainfall, & migration in Burundi
September 18th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Currently reading an interesting paper by Eleanora Nillesen & Philip Verwimp on whether agricultural shocks (namely rainfall shocks) increased people’s likelihood to actively participate in Burundi’s civil war. They find that, whilst negative shocks to the price of coffee (the country’s principle cash crop) didn’t increase rebel recruitment, drought shocks were positively correlated with recruitment, perhaps underlining the greater role of agriculture in helping households manage risk – it could be a greater blow to lose consumption crops than to receive a lower yearly payment for a cash crop. (It was especially interesting to read this in light of Heather Sarsons’ recent work [PDF] questioning the use of rainfall as an instrument for wages from agricultural labor, based on new data from India. She suggests that, unsurprisingly, rainfall may affect people’s participation in political protests through channels other than the creation of grievance & reduced opportunity cost of involvement. Since N&V weren’t using rainfall as an instrument, this critique doesn’t directly apply to their work, but it’s still useful to think through the multiplicity of ways in which rainfall affects people’s lives in developing countries.)
N&V also included a small methodological note which I found especially telling in re: the social importance of land in Burundi. The sample for the data underlying this paper was drawn from households who completed the 1998 Burundi Priority Survey, which was a joint project of the Burundi Institute of Statistics & Economic Studies and the World Bank. Interestingly, despite the fact that N&V collected a second round of data in 2007, after multiple years of war, they noted only 13% attrition from their original sample. As they write, “In Burundi the pressure [on] land is extraordinary high… As a result people may have only have fled [from the conflict] at the very last minute, if there was no other option, and return[ed] immediately after the violence…to ensure their claim to land. Most often, our survey team would find the households in the same location as in 1998″ (p. 6). Pretty remarkable.
Contextualized illustration
May 3rd, 2010 § 1 Comment
IPA-Tamale recently moved to a new office, and in the course of packing up the Examining Underinvestment in Agriculture storeroom I found a flipbook used by the Ministry of Food & Agriculture to educate farmers about the benefits of using fertilizer on their maize fields. MOFA has its share of politicized decision-making and elite capture, especially with regards to fertilizer distribution, but interestingly enough it still commissioned illustrations that were thoroughly representative of the lives of the average smallholder farmer.
Cover. As you’ll see, the intended audience is one of male farmers, who grow maize as an accepted male crop – but their wives still play a significant if unacknowledged role.
Skipping to the middle of the book for a second, this illustration of the farmer in his field captures a lot about the intended audience. Note the straw hat, simple sandals, manual distribution of fertilizer, and use of a repurposed condensed milk can to hold it.
Contrast this to the implicitly better-off fertilizer salesman, who shows up to deliver fertilizer in a baseball cap and closed-toe shoes. (Jan Chipchase has a good post mentioning footwear as status markers.) There’s not much romanticization of the economic prospects of smallholder farming here.
There’s some great detail as well in the section on how to avoid storing fertilizer improperly. The protagonist obviously isn’t doing too badly, because he has a metal roof, but leaks are a persistent problem. His young daughter, here seen splashing in the spilled fertilizer, is wearing appropriate earrings and waist beads. (And yes, it’s quite normal that she’s wearing nothing else.)
What does it mean for farmers to recognize themselves in this officially sanctioned view of how to farm?
Where I’ve been
March 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
A random sample of a different sort
There is a very strong correlation between my returning to Africa and my completely neglecting this blog – which says less about African internet than about how busy I always find myself when I’m here! I came into my current position with IPA at the beginning of a two-month household survey examining underinvestment in agriculture in northern Ghana, and since then our whole team has been working non-stop. Our surveyors leave for the field between 7 and 8 am every day, so I’m usually at the office by 6.30 to make sure that everything’s prepared. Then it’s a long day of tracking survey documents, sorting soil samples, assigning survey teams to new communities, preparing per diem payments, troubleshooting the netbooks & survey software used in the field, selecting respondents for field audits, taking calls from surveyors, and making frequent three-hour round trips up to our satellite office in Walewale, among any number of other things. An early day might end at 7 pm, and a late one at 10 pm. The sheer amount of work has forced me to grow more as a manager than I have in any other position I’ve yet had, which has been fantastic. It simply doesn’t leave much space at the edges of my days for anything else.
Income elasticity of food expenditures
April 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Just a quick note on the research on agricultural supply chains that I’m doing right now – I’m finding it fascinating that one can guess at the nutritional status of households based on their income elasticity of food expenditures. Poorer households tend to have an elasticity of demand close to one, suggesting that people who are far from getting their nutritional needs met will spend almost all additional income on food. Wealthier households in developing countries, on the other hand, are more likely to have an elasticity of close to zero, suggesting that people who are well-nourished will spend little additional income on food. Of course, it’s also been found that some wealthier households have an elasticity of caloric intake close to 0.5, hinting that as income goes up, consumption of packaged foods that are more expensive and less healthy may crowd out some cheaper and more nutritious foods. This is so cool – graphical representations of the complex social & economic realities that govern food choices.
Information & pricing in local agriculture
March 20th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Landscape, Murambi District, Rwanda
Thinking some more about the geographic scale of different agricultural markets has led me to consider how information availability and pricing might differ between them. Mobile phones are still a fairly rare commodity in rural Rwanda (outside of the towns), and if some set of extremely poor farmers were only selling extra produce hyperlocally, it seems that perhaps prices would either be set in total isolation from regional or national prices, or might be determined exclusively by a few people with mobiles. (I wonder if outside information would be convincing in this scenario – if the phone guy says to the farmer, “this cassava is 5 francs cheaper in Nyamata,” would the farmer accept this as a negotiating tactic, or assume that he’s lying? Perhaps it’s connected to how easy it is for the phone guy to actually access the cheaper cassava in Nyamata – the credibility of his threat.)
Then again, even with mobile technology to help information access along, its helpfulness still seems fundamentally predicated on A) physical mobility and B) social networks. Information about great prices in a town up the road will be less useful to a farmer if he still can’t reach it easily, and receiving the information in the first place is still connected to one’s actual social network (and ability to pay for airtime, of course). I wonder if the differing availability of mobiles to rural residents of different socioeconomic statuses may actually increase the vulnerability and exclusion of the poorest of the poor, rather like differing levels of access to microinsurance might actually push healthcare farther out of reach of the poorest.
Market access for the poor
March 15th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
I wish I had a better intuition on the question of the social impact of large-scale agriculture on smallholder farmers. I’m guessing the deciding factor is the strength of their existing market connections – whether they’re strong or weak, and central to livelihoods or a supplemental source of income – but I can’t seem to get at it on Google with specific regard to Rwanda.
This is probably analogous to any form of large-scale, cost-efficient production – the potential for socioeconomic displacement depends on the product you’re displacing. And I suppose that’s also a commentary on the target market. I’d guess that the vast majority of Rwandese agricultural production is by smallholder farmers for either hyperlocal (within a few miles) or local (say half a day’s walking distance) markets, and that only certain commodities are ever going to be linked to the Kigali low-income or high-income markets. (There’s not really a hell of a lot of local stuff being sold to high-income people in Kigali anyway, except maybe the specialty vegetables at Simba. The wealthy mzungus & Rwandese have their own totally separate selection of imports, whose prices correspondingly reflect good information about international pricing and transport costs. Which is to say, they cost an arm and a leg.)
So I’m wondering if perhaps there are many smallholder farmers who are producing the same types of commodities as might be produced commercially, but if they’re really not linked into the same markets that large-scale production would target. It seems like this might be more of a threat to medium-scale enterprises that already serve perhaps a regional or national (Rwandese) market, but then that’s a difficult ethical issue from threatening the livelihoods of smallholders who have almost nothing to start with. It’s a persistant challenge of doing business in poor countries – weighing the social benefits of increased food production & lower prices (marginal improvements to the well-being of many relatively poor consumers) vs. the possibility of undercutting the incomes of medium-scale farmers (major detriments to well-being of a few relatively poor producers). As an aside, I think there’s also an interesting lesson about innovation in there – that its effects will go in different directions depending on whether it’s creating an improved version of an existing product or service, or whether it’s creating something so novel that new markets develop around it. “Innovation” always seems to be referred to as a uniform category of activities, without regard for its differing impacts, at least in popular parlance.
Occupational categories
February 1st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Baskets woven by co-op members, Mayange, Rwanda
I was struck recently by the New Times‘ “good news” that the rate of non-agricultural employment in Rwanda has doubled in the last 10 years! That is, it’s apparently gone from 5% of the population to 10%. Kigali is such a bubble; it’s easy to forget that there are many Rwandese people who will live out their days without ever seeing a multiple-story building or a paved road.
That said, this official stat about 10% non-ag employment/90% subsistence ag seems like at best a crude measure of people’s actual livelihood strategies. I haven’t seen a specification of how much non-ag employment is formal or informal (or even what you’d consider to be “informal” around here), and in a similar sense, I’m sure that many rural residents participate in at least some non-ag activities as part of their income-smoothing plans. I’d love to see a better measure of this data – to get a sense of how many people are exclusively dependent on agriculture (though perhaps with different types of income-generating activities within the sector), and how many are principally dependent on ag, with a significant amount of income still coming from other activities (carpentry, say, or teaching, or day labor on other farms…). I also know a small subset of co-op members in Nyamata who grow most of their own food, even though they make a majority of their income from basket-weaving – I wonder how they’d be classified.
