Science of the Inarticulate. IMOD as ICRISAT's new drylands strategy

MANILA - I'm Maet Tasirci, the son of a dryland farmer of Asia; in fact, my mother is Asian and my father is African. Through my friend the journalist, I just heard that the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, which is based in India, has just come out with a brochure on the Institute's new strategy they call Inclusive Market-Oriented Development, IMOD, especially dedicated to poor farmers in both Asia and Africa. I have learned that IMOD is a product of consultations across Team ICRISAT's 3 regions: Asia, West & Central Africa, and Eastern & Southern Africa. ICRISAT and partners had wanted to discard the Silver Bullet approach to destroying the Vampire of Poverty. It wasn't working. The specter was still stalking the regions.

ICRISAT Team Captain William Dar says:

We needed to understand better how development actually happens in the drylands. How can it be triggered? How can it be sustained, so that these regions need not always depend on emergency relief aid? How can the poorest be involved? And given the diversity of dryland settings, how can diverse solutions be scaled up for wide impact?

And so ICRISAT began to learn from the poor farmers, the literate learning from the illiterate the art & science of the inarticulate, as exemplified in the Adarsha success story of ICRISAT. William Dar says, "We realized that the poorest farmers are really stuck in a poverty trap." Without money, they cannot buy farm inputs; without added inputs, their farms produce less; without surplus, they have nothing to sell - and nothing to buy inputs the next year. "So the poverty cycle just repeats itself," Dar says. "This engine is not gaining traction. It is just spinning its wheels."

Beyond the abstruse language of the IMOD brochure that is beyond the fingertips of Frank Hilario and Bill Gates, and from what I know of ICRISAT, I'm trying to understand it from the point of view of a scholar from the countryside, thinking of a farmer who has a family to nourish and wife to support him as much as she can. Family is paramount to me.

The poor farmer's dream is of course for his family first to rise from poverty and eventually to prosper from the fruits of their own labors. But in Asia and Africa, can the families ever? The common view of experts is that the poor families of the poor lands in these poor regions will always remain unresourceful and unproductive failures. That's because they don't know what's good for them.

Differently, led by William Dar, ICRISAT experts, along with public and private partners, came in to Asia and Africa, and learned even as they brought in new advocacy with innovation, The New AI (my coinage) - modern understanding of farmers, modern seeds, modernized policies, modernized investments, modernized marketing and other support services. And they found that with The New AI, poor farmers can communicate with scientists on their own terms, grow a watershed where none grew before, grow more with less, connect more to the market and earn more - including earn back their dignity as people.

In practical terms, The New AI translates into new added income. It calls for a farming family to produce its own food surplus: one part to serve as buffer in times of scarcity, enjoying value reserved; the other part to connect to markets, enjoying values added as the farm produce transforms along and traverses the marketing highway. With its new added income, a farm family can buy as necessary more food, and as needed more inputs such as seeds, fertilizer, labor, tools, livestock, insurance, and even formal education. It's a win-win situation.

Multiply a successful single farm family into a village, and you will see, William Dar says, "these will further raise farm productivity, triggering a series of investments leading to economic growth." It takes a family to rise from poverty; it takes a village to rise to prosperity.

The cycle of prosperity goes on to take a country. It takes a country to become, for instance, once again a major exporter to the world. With ICRISAT and partners collaborating with the National Small Farmers' Association of Malawi, that country has returned to being a well-accepted source of peanut (groundnut) for the European Union market. ICRISAT's small contributions have grown big: peanut varieties that are both higher-yielding and disease-resistant, and an inexpensive system for detecting and controlling aflatoxin.

With things like that, Dar says, ICRISAT and partners can "help the world to reduce poverty, hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation in the dryland tropics." At the very least, the drylands will become less poor, less hungry, less malnourished, and less ravaged.

We are talking here, Dar says, of 300 million people in the dryland tropics living on less than 1 dollar a day, officially referred to as the level of "absolute poverty." Not only that; another group, 700 million live on less than 2 dollars a day. "People who are this poor," Dar says, "live in a constant state of hunger and insecurity. They spend their days working hard in the fields, but get little for it because their lands are depleted and drought-prone." Without The New AI, the poor farmers in Asia and Africa work with old seeds, tired soils, and parched fields. Without The New AI, the poor farmers cannot respond intelligently to climate change and other environmental stresses.

William Dar says:

(The tropical drylands) are facing a convergence of pressures that we call "a perfect storm." The poor are the most vulnerable to the storm; they have the least resources to cushion these shocks. If the poor are to survive the perfect storm, it won't be through piecemeal, Band-Aid type approaches. We need a long-term, holistic strategy for reducing their vulnerability.

Dar says the perfect storm is a swirling chaos of climate change, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, food crisis, energy crisis, and population explosion. To help dissipate the perfect storm, to support what I call The New AI, ICRISAT's new and improved strategy includes acquiring new investments in research on one hand and investments in development on the other. Dar says all that calls for building the capacities of crops, the capabilities of soils, as well as the competencies of the poor farmers, including women and youth, in the villages. For instance, for the landless and women at the Adarsha and other watersheds, help extended includes setting up village knowledge centers as well as village seed banks via self-help groups, training in product processing, grading and adding marketability, as well as poultry rearing and vermin-composting. In Tanzania, producer marketing groups have been developed and strengthened for farmers to enjoy high farm prices and ensure access to inputs and information.

"Even our hero, Dr Norman Borlaug," Dar says, "Father of the Green Revolution in irrigated Mexico and Asia, found that plant breeding alone could not achieve the same result in Africa." Miracle seeds gave miracle yields, that was all. More than all those wonder seeds were needed. "Too many other systems were dysfunctional. Fertilizer wasn't available, or was too expensive; credit and infrastructure were lacking; and markets were unable to smooth out the yearly variations in grain production." Fertilizer became out of reach to the poor farmer; credit became scarce; government support became inadequate; and markets remained uninterested in investing in the poor producers.

ICRISAT made its own mistakes. Dar says:

At ICRISAT, we attempted the Green Revolution approach. We bred many varieties that showed outstanding performance when well-managed with fertilizer and good soils and weed control. But when they reached the farm, these varieties rarely received such good treatment. They could not express their potential.

"They (farmers) can't eat potential," Norman Borlaug said. "Africa needs inputs, access to markets, infrastructure and credit."

Yes, with The New AI, ICRISAT and partners public and private can help African and Asian farmers to help themselves. Inputs supplied, inputs multiplied. Access to credit, access to transport, access to facilities, access to markets - and in all, access to management. Farmers must become businessmen; farmers must discard dependency and become managers themselves. Now then, for The New AI to succeed, ICRISAT has realized that farmers must learn management, not the least of which is the management of risk such as through farm diversification, that is to say, I must say, the New AI must metamorphose into the new advocacy with innovation and management, transforming into The New AIM. With that, ICRISAT and partners can then wish the good farmers of Asia and Africa:

"May their tribes increase!"