Suiting the action to the word
VI Conclusions and recommendations
We are halfway implementing Farmers Fighting Poverty, the programme AgriCord has launched to support the fight against poverty and hunger. In this fight, farmers are crucial because they produce food and wealth in rural areas. It is a simple, but so often forgotten truth: they establish new enterprises that bring forth employment opportunities for their children, who could also go to school because of their parents’ entrepreneurship. The structural transformation of the economies in developing countries starts with farmer creativity and hard work. Their organisations prove to be of vital importance in this transformation, as they are powerful machines to disseminate new ideas, new technologies and knowledge over vast areas. These social aggregators are marketing interfaces to reach the bottom of the pyramid, the people who have to live on less than two dollar a day; they reach them because of their layered structure. At the same time, they are the social media transmitting the voice of the poor on a large scale. The agri-agencies support these organisations to become stronger, that is: to better serve their members, both with new services, products and connections, and with advocacy on their behalf. Rural democracy, economic growth and income distribution benefit from the determined action of organised farmers.
Farmers’ organisations in industrialised countries hold these abovementioned ideas as truths, as they went through the same development not so long ago. They now have taken their responsibility to support their peers in their efforts to build strong organisations. Ordinary farmers, who worked a lifetime in starting up their own farms to improve the well-being of their families, urged their organisation to become active in development cooperation. At the same time, the farmers did not sit back and relax either, but decided to dedicate the best of their abilities through the AgriPool. They go on missions and share their accumulated knowledge by giving a hand to their colleagues in disadvantaged situations. And also young farmers who are still building a farm and a family, find time to join hands with colleagues far away. With the support of governments, these farmers and their organisations established specialised agri-agencies with the sole ambition to free the world of hunger and poverty by strengthening farmers’ organisation.
Since a few years, world leaders share and voice their belief that Millennium Development Goal I, the eradication of extreme hunger and poverty, can only be reached through increased investments in agriculture. Since the food price crisis at the beginning of 2008, this belief has been voiced in international fora over and over again. We feel proud to directly contribute to the potential success, since our efforts improve the performance of organised farmers. There are almost no farmers’ organisations in the developing world at international, supranational and national level that have not been in contact with or supported by the agri-agencies. This report has given account of the results of our efforts in 2008. We have included testimonies of those who directly benefitted from the combined operations of the agri-agencies and farmers’ organisations in so many countries. The clear increase in our quantified data must be convincing; although the bulk of activities is still to come, we have already met almost half of the programme’s objectives set for the whole period.
Can you imagine 145 farmers’ organisations laying their strengths and weaknesses under the magnifying glass in order for us to better assist them? Many of these organisations are formulating plans for organisational improvement, smoothening internal communications or improving their human resource or financial management. Others are presenting plans to their governments and by doing so, gear new investments to rural areas. Many also analyse their institutional environment, improve relations with suppliers, buyers or governments. New cooperatives were established and we saw a massive number of new farmers’ groups arise at grass-roots level. The farmers united to improve their production or access to markets, others deployed new technologies. We worked on insurance facilities, assisted in projects that intent to make the production more sustainable and increase food security. We improved the access to information by the establishment of telecentres.
Our business is strengthening farmers’ organisations, and that is exactly what we did. The improvement in the rate of organisation is confirmed by the absolute growth: the total membership increased with 11,4%. The other most prominent figure is the income diversification indicator of the organisations. This indicator witnessed an increase with an impressive 12,5%, reinforcing that our clients are becoming genuine, self-reliant membership organisations.
We saw an enormous increase of activities at grass-roots level, proved by the more than 5000 new groups that were set up. The number of farmers that participated in all these activities exceeded that of last year by far. Our actions led to a participation that was almost twice as high as our expectations. In 2008 alone, already more than 50% of the targeted 2.7 million farmers to be involved in Farmers Fighting Poverty, participated. A survey under 7% of all participants showed positive presents us with convincing evidence of income growth. We collected many stories from many farmers around the globe who witnessed the impact of the work of their organisations with the support from the agri-agencies.
In 2008 59% of our activities are in Africa. We are active in fragile states such as Colombia, Congo DR and Palestine. We went to China and the Arab world to work on sensitive issues such as people’s and particularly women participation and democratisation. We are also impressed by the massive involvement of women in all the activities of the farmers’ organisations. Where their share stagnated around 11% until 2006, nowadays they make up 41% of all participants. These targets were set to be reached only just after four years of programme implementation.
The results mentioned prove that our strategy to work through national organisations is successful, as they reach out to their members. And on top of this we explicitly focussed on the local level. By building economic ventures from scratch like UPA-DI did or through the micro-projects introduced by Agriterra, the local level becomes more connected to the higher layers of the organisation. By virtue of this focus on grass-roots level 36% of our efforts contributed to poverty reduction, a figure that evolves according to plan and might reach in that way 59% by 2010.
Not only the number of participants was far higher than foreseen, the value of project support per capita transferred to this larger number of participants was also higher than foreseen. This was possible because of the higher commitment of the other agri-agencies in the programme. This enthusiastic involvement of all agri-agencies is the big success in the building up of AgriCord in 2008. Where in 2007 their contribution through their own back donors was lagging behind expectation, this picture has impressively improved in 2008.
We proved in 2008 to be able to deal with a 54% increase in volume of operations. Of this total volume, we spent relatively more than planned on projects. We did so not by enlarging the amounts per project, but by the implementation of more projects. The number of employees increased with 42%. This increase was less than the increase in the volume of operations, meaning that our operations have become 7,6% more efficient.
We increased our advisory services accordingly. We deployed 169 farmer experts (AgriPool experts), the type of advisors that is so characteristic to our work. An 15% increase in comparison with the first year of Farmers Fighting Poverty. We built alliances with SNV and PSO to make an additional 10 advisors, or their full-time equivalents available for farmers’ organisations.
As our results prove that the witnessed growth goes hand in hand with succes in implementation, efficiency and reaching our targets, one can say that we know how to manage fast growth.
At the level of the agri-agencies we also saw improvements in the way we take stock of the data we collect about farmers’ organisations. Much of it is now also available on the internet (http://www.agro-info.net/ > Organisations). In this way, we hope to provide information to all those who are or become active in the field of rural and agricultural development. By sharing this information, we make the time and effort invested by the agencies in collecting this data even more valuable. The increased visibility of farmers’ organisations on our website and on the growing number of own websites, serves another purpose as well. It makes it almost impossible to bypass farmers’ organisations, as happened so often in the past.
When we look back at the points for improvement that we identified in the conclusions in last year’s report, we can say we effectively dealt with them. We considerably improved the efficiency and effectiveness of our operations in 2008 with an enlarged staff that accelerated operations. We did so, and not simply by enlarging the projects but even through smaller projects, contrary to the trend we see in other development cooperation organisations. We reached virtually all targets set for 2008. We feel proud to do our jobs in a professional way and responsibly use the taxpayer’s money entrusted to us. We completely made up for the slow start in 2007. We also succeeded in reaching a better balanced contribution to the programme from the different agri-agencies.
When we started our Farmers Fighting Poverty journey in 2006, we included a quote from ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’ in the first pages of the programme description. The author, Marguerite Yourcenar, makes Roman Emperor Hadrian reflect and say: “….one of my most beautiful days was when I convinced a group (of farmers) to set up a cooperation and to negotiate directly with the traders in the city. Never before did I feel I could be so useful as an emperor.” In 2008, in the framework of our programme we saw thousands of these groups emerge. Would Hadrian be a world leader today, he would surely support the agri-agencies and farmers’ organisations.
What do the outcomes of 2008 indicate for 2009? What will we do with the funds that a present-day Hadrians may entrust to us? We will do our utmost best to comply with the farmers’ expectations. The operations of the agri-agencies trigger an enormous demand from the organised farmers in different developing countries. The recorded accumulated demand for projects in 2009 is over € 45 million. In a similar vein, we will eagerly take up the challenge to do even more, where we feel we can do more. For instance, we want to contract directly at the lower levels of organisations through micro-projects, thus send the money to the level were the action takes place. We also want to take up the challenge and improve the results within the work areas on participatory policy development and training. In 2008 we screened 42 new organisations, and the plan is for this number to increase.
As stated in the introduction of this report, Farmers Fighting Poverty is a joint affair; but not only of the agri-agencies. It needs to be a joint effort of all international organisations, individuals and donors that wish to see Millennium Development Goal I reached by 2015.
We find ourselves in an odd situation with a growing demand for our services from farmers’ organisations in developing countries, an efficient, effective and innovative practice of development cooperation by AgriCord and its members, solidly enrooted in OECD farming communities, with a very favourable political environment that urges action in agriculture; yet, the commitments from back donors do not follow their voiced intentions. Maybe the Dutch Agrarian Daily had a point, when the editor-in-chief wrote that “primary producers are often ignored in the talks about hunger in the world…[..]. There will be no food if nobody tills the land, if nobody sows, manures and harvests. But at all the international fora this prosaic reality loses out to elevated political objectives.” (Agrarisch Dagblad - November 24th, 2005). Now, it is time to suit actions to words, if not elevated political objectives become meaningless rhetoric.
Farmers in developing countries are ready to play their part in reducing hunger and poverty. The agri-agencies are ready to support them. Hands on the plough, the best is yet to come!