Prologue

The production of this report on the activities that were executed as part of Farmers Fighting Poverty in 2008, comes at a moment in time that tension within the agri-agencies and AgriCord is reaching its climax. We are halfway through the term of Farmers Fighting Poverty and plan to implement the programme according to the original proposal. In fact, we did so up to end 2008. However, back donors have not responded as expected. So far, they did not contribute at the envisaged level and we are not sure if we are able to continue implementing according to plan.

As such, this is nothing special. It happens in many projects and programmes. Yet, we feel odd about it because it presents us with an existential dilemma: if we are not enabled at this very moment in history to support farmers’ organisations at the necessary scale, it will probably never be. We feel this support is paramount in order to bring farmers’ organisations into action in the final stretch towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

We hardly know what more should happen to make our case. Since the beginning of our programme, the international attention for agriculture as a motor for development has increased substantially. This was the direct result of the food price crisis and the increase of the prices of staple foods in the first semester of 2007. Even the World Bank report 2008 was dedicated to agricultural development and highlighted the role of producer organisations.

Why was the development community called again to support agriculture, when twenty years ago this path had almost been abandoned? This is not because of a different role of agriculture in development. It is because the conditions have changed in a way that investing in agriculture, now will lead to development. And basically the most important change is the obvious increase in the rate of organisation of the target population: already 19% of the world’s farmers are organised and this number is increasing rapidly. And it is precisely the organised farmer that is at the core of our work, brought into action by us to the maximum, which makes our approach an effective approach.

In our work with farmers’ organisations we make use of internet communication and banking technology – other basic factors that makes the situation of 20 years ago different from the current one. These developments present us an opportunity. We grasp it and try to bypass all intermediation in development cooperation. We work directly with the organisations of the target population, sending the support to the level where the action is. We are helping the farmers at local level to improve their standard of living through our support to their organisations.

The farmers’ organisations and cooperatives in industrialised countries gave us a mandate to professionally enforce their development cooperation. It is this feature that makes our approach unique. It revolves around development cooperation from farmer to farmer, combining the private and the public sector. And we made this approach a success. During 2008, we helped 145 organisations in 52 countries to link up with their peers. The farmers’ organisations in developing countries tell us what they need. They do so through their supranational bodies, which are intimately linked to the working of the agri-agencies through their membership of the International Federation of Agricultural Producer (IFAP).

By this integration with IFAP, where members from both developing and developed countries meet in the Development Cooperation Committee (DCC), the constellation is turned into a powerful machinery to serve individual farmers’ organisations. They massively present us their requests for concrete support, making our efforts genuinely demand-oriented. They do so with the ultimate goal to strengthen their member-organisations, from local level up to the international level, to increase the provision of services to their members, to promote entrepreneurship and economic initiatives and democratise their economies and political systems. They bring about economic development, make income distribution more equal and build countervailing power against state and corporate monopolies.

And we, the agri-agencies, have been building our professionalism. We unified our project handling and established central decision-making within AgriCord. We constantly give public account of everything we do on internet (http://www.agro-info.net/). We cast our experience of years into practical Solutions and innovated in that way the practice of project support as we also did by implementing more micro-projects.

As you will read in the report, we did a great job in 2008. We say this ourselves to emphasise the importance of this consortium that is exactly what donors need to make their voiced intentions into a tangible success. Not because we are the only ones who can do the job. Not at all, it is a joint effort in which everyone, governments, civil society, private enterprise, multilateral institutions, has to play their part. The organised farmers in the developed countries and their agri-agencies have built an unique constellation and deliver excellent work that strengthens farmers’ organisations in the developing countries to complement or - even better - set the basis for the efforts of others.

The results are eminent. We met virtually all main targets of the programme that we had set for 2008, as will be proved by our figures and results. We are ahead of schedule with what we promised in the Farmers Fighting Poverty plan, however there is still a lot to be done.

The full report of all the results is in your hands. For those readers who are also donors we would like to add that the future of this important work is in your hands as well.

Kees Blokland
managing director of Agriterra