Warren Nyamugasira
25 February 2008
opinion
There is renewed interest in agriculture as an important tool for engendering development. The 2008 World Development Report focuses on agriculture as "a vital development tool for achieving Millennium Development Goals" noting that cross-country estimates show that agriculture-originating GDP growth is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as GDP growth originating outside agriculture.
Because Uganda is still rural based, with eight of every 10 people living in rural areas and depending directly or indirectly on agriculture, agriculture for development is serious business. Even industrialisation, if it is to be sustainable, it must have forward and backward linkages with agriculture. For all it is worth, the report provides guidance to governments on how to design and implement agriculture-for-development agendas.
However, this requires a revolution in smallholder farming productivity. And it is here that problems, hot debates and fierce disagreements begin with some praising programmes such as Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA) and National Agricultural Advisory Services (Naads) and others rubbishing them as having nothing to show for the billions of shillings sunk into them.
According to Denis Mutabazi in his article "Govt messing up agriculture" Daily Monitor ,Tuesday, February 21, "the expert government panel which facilitated Naads design identified lack of farmer access to information, knowledge and technology as the biggest impediment to agricultural growth.
It envisaged an agricultural transformation process maturing over at least 25 years... By blasting Naads as 'having nothing to show' other than spending a lot on farmers' education, government is behaving like an impatient idealist..."
Mr Mutabazi sparks a very important discussion. Firstly, there is the critical question of who is government. If a 'government expert panel' designs Naads and another suggests a change, which panel is more government than the other?
Mr Mutabazi sees the revisionists as "government messing up." In a sense, he is right because currently there seems to be two schools of thought in the government, one driven from Washington; the other from State House.
Secondly, Naads and other 'transformatory' government programmes inherently have two sets of objectives -one technical and the other political.
Mr Mutabazi and most commentators approach things from the technical and forget or rather ignore the fact that unless such programmes serve the political objective of votes-attraction, the political one will almost always inevitably over-turn the technical one.
It is up to the technocrats to figure out how to market the technical approach in a way that makes political sense. An important aspect is timeframe. In Uganda, the political timeframe is five years, at a time, not 25 years in one go. In politics, a 25-year stretch is eternity.
More critically, the poor are on the side of the "impatient (political) idealist." The poor cannot wait for 25 years for Naads to "build a firm foundation" for sustainable farming enterprises. The poor would be dead and buried by then. The politician knows that and would be committing political suicide to talk in those timeframes.
He knows that when things go wrong the people appeal directly to the politicians- the President, the Members of the Parliament and the like, and rarely the technocrats- Ministry of Finance, Agriculture, Naads Secretariat and the like.
To borrow Mutabazi's nomenclature, in political-speak, a 'relief-like' Naads comes in handy, although I hate to trivialise the issue to the extent Mutabazi does. It is the farmers, not the politicians that have rejected Naads. I bet: if farmers loved Naads, politicians would be pumping more money into it, not suspending its funding.
Thirdly, Mutabazi claims that Naads is designed on the philosophy of "teaching the farmer how to fish" as opposed to "giving him fish." To sustain livelihoods the poor do not only need "fishing lessons" if at all, but a fishing rod, a hook, a bait and most importantly, fishing rights and markets. That is why the current debate on land reforms is a very important one and like Naads, has both political and technical dimensions.
The author is a policy analyst and development activist; and founder of the Advocacy Centre for Strategic Social Change
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