پیوند کشاورزان به بازارهای: روش های مختلف برای توسعه سرمایه انسانی

Programs focused on developing community-level management skills and human capacity can increase the opportunities for small farmers to benefit from market participation. Using a framework that links the concepts of collective power and agricultural development, and drawing upon evidence from Mali, Mozambique, and Cameroon, the authors differentiate three types of approaches to capacity building. Contract/Business programs such as out-grower and cash-crop schemes facilitate farmer access to goods and services required for production and marketing of a target commodity. Project/Technology programs, usually mediated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), focus on the promotion of improved technology. Process/Human Capacity investments also facilitate technology adoption and marketing, but focus initially on the development of foundation skills and social capital, including assistance for collective self-help, literacy programs, marketing activities, and decentralized development planning. Although the latter programs tend to be slower in producing tangible results, the skills emphasized often determine the ability of a community to access inputs and market production beyond the life of a project.

Other papers in this issue identify several promising public–private efforts to increase smallholder demand for, and access to, improved inputs. This paper focuses on a subset of these—efforts to group farmers into associations to improve accountability and reduce the transactions costs that frequently discourage rural traders, input suppliers, and output marketing companies from doing business with farmers. Approaches to group formation differ significantly in their attention to the development of community management skills and capacity. Such differences may determine the ability of rural communities to access and use inputs beyond the life of any particular project and their ability to fully participate in an increasingly global and commercialized rural economy. To examine these issues, we develop a political economy framework that forges together concepts of collective power and agricultural development; we focus on how different economic and agricultural investments influence the development of rural human capital, particularly the capacity for marketing. Using examples from Mali, Mozambique and Cameroon, we explore how different types of economic investments influence the viability and sustainability of farmers’ collective activities and their capacity to reduce input supply costs, improve access to credit and market commodities. The evidence is preliminary, but suggests that government and donor programs to build self-reliance and transfer a set of practical organizational and management skills can equip producer organizations with the capacity to initiate and sustain trade-based relationships with private sector firms and financial institutions.

The underlying concern for decentralized and participatory decision-making processes that create, strengthen and delegate power and economic responsibility to local and village organizations is not new. This was a central message of the 1979 Peasant’s Charter at the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development and again at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Since the 1980s this message has evolved to include concerns over the opportunities for, and constraints on, farmer organizations to assume responsibility for input and product marketing in response to economic liberalization and globalization (see Mercoiret, 1990, Serageldin and Noel, 1990 and Bosc et al., 2001). Similarly, the World Development Report 2000/2001 recognized that “voicelessness and powerlessness are key dimensions of poverty”, and it calls for efforts that “reduce obstacles to collective action and … the creation of powerful coalitions for rapid development” ( World Bank, 2000). Nevertheless, with 24 sub-Saharan countries facing per capita incomes that are lower today than they were after the first wave of electoral democracy in the early 1990s, perhaps it is opportune to re-examine how we look at popular power and agricultural development. In this paper we have identified the importance of examining the extent to which different types of investments influence the capacity of farmers’ organizations to make their own social and economic choices and thereby become full actors in the market. With the contract/business type of investment the opportunity to influence agricultural and rural development policy may arise, but the issues tend to be limited to specific commodities or products that are part of a company’s investment program. In this case, democratic conditions that create opportunities for negotiation are essential for farmers to become part of the main stream business and civil society. Without such conditions, there might be little incentive or pressure for companies to accommodate to farmer demands. With the process/technology type of investment non-governmental organizations or various types of donor-funded projects frequently limit the opportunities to develop farmer capacity for problem-solving and tend to define a continuing role for themselves as outside mediators. Farmer access to agricultural goods and services is limited and is often subordinated to, or dependent upon, the source of external funding. The investment in process/human capacity requires a long-term and focused commitment to develop human skills and social capital, including support for collective self-help capacity building. In contrast to technology-driven efforts, this type of investment values and encourages learning in order to deal with a broader set of actors and market opportunities. Based on this investment, access to agricultural goods and services tends to be demand driven as farmers play a key role in identifying their needs, and in capitalizing and managing their organizations. Promoting capacity building requires a long-term commitment and a willingness to emphasize less easily observed and more qualitative program outputs, and not the more commonly used indicators such as market transaction costs or sales volume. As this paper suggests, some programs may lead to more efficient market transactions in the short run. In the long term, only an investment in process/ human capacity will enable farmers to function as independent economic and political actors. This implies that governments and donors should revise their evaluation methods to account for the broader developmental impacts of process/human capacity programs. Rethinking the different ways in which farmers get organized for the market could contribute to the challenging platform of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). This platform embraces two powerfully linked goals. First, it acknowledges that economic development through improved agricultural performance goes together with the adoption of democratic participatory and decentralized processes. Second, NEPAD recognizes that human development is central to designing these processes and thereby assuring the bond between political and economic development. In response to this new platform perhaps some of the observations in this article will stimulate more thinking about ways of joining our previously separate considerations of the economics and politics of agricultural and rural development.