From Boko Haram to COVID-19: Creating equitable farming systems in times of crisis
A discussion with Nigerian wheat breeder Kachalla Kyari Mala, Lake Chad Research Institute, Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria. By Chris Knight.
In Northeast Nigeria, where agriculture forms the backbone of rural communities and livelihoods, Boko Haram has forced millions of men and women to flee their homes, taking refuge in crowded settlements on the outskirts of the region’s largest cities and towns, and leaving behind not just their homes, but their ways of life.
In the region’s largest city, Maiduguri, an estimated 130,000 Internally Displaced People (IDP) have settled into urban and peri-urban IDP camps — part of over 1.4 million displaced people residing in camps throughout Borno State alone.
Many in the camps are farmers by profession, cut off from their lands and communities, and unsure of when they will be able to return home. Along with the cramped quarters, they share an eagerness to get back to their fields and earn a living again. Yet even in these dire circumstances, a program is helping displaced Nigerian farmers create income opportunities and plan for the future by providing gender-responsive training, education about best agronomic practices, access to land and seed, and marketing opportunities.
“The people in the IDP camps, most of them are farmers. What they know is farming. This is their business,” explains Maiduguri-based researcher Kachalla Kyari Mala, a wheat breeder at the Lake Chad Research Institute (LCRI), part of the Agricultural Research Council Of Nigeria.
Kachalla’s project, Gendered-based Opportunities and Constraints for Wheat Production in Internally Displaced Person’s (IDPs) Camps, was designed “to improve the livelihood of IDP’s with equity and equal opportunities between women and men wheat farmers in relation to access and control over assets, inputs and benefits including wheat technologies.”
LCRI initiated the training program in 2018 to assist displaced wheat farmers living in the IDP camps. The project launched after Kachalla and his team received training in gender-responsive agriculture research methods starting in 2017 through the Gender-responsive Researchers Equipped for Agricultural Transformation (GREAT) project, a joint effort between Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and Cornell University, in the United States.
Kachalla, a wheat breeder by profession already holding degrees in botany, genetics and crop breeding, is currently working towards a Ph.D. in crop breeding. The research center where he works has a national mandate to aid farmers by breeding for genetic improvement of wheat, barley, and millet. He never expected to be working in camps with displaced people, or that his work would be so impacted by political and social issues.
Like many in the life sciences, Kachalla’s training didn’t prepare him to work on such issues, but now his work demands it.
And like much crop breeding work taking place in a development context, Kachalla and other researchers on the project had to learn to engage communities in different ways, and collect data that could help them better understand how men and women relate differently to crops, in the field and beyond. This meant learning to use methods like key informant interviews and sex-separated focus group discussions — tools more frequently associated with social scientists than plant breeders. It also meant viewing crop breeding within a larger social context, and leaving the field and station to get into the communities. In this case, it meant spending significant time within the IDP camps, and seeing that the crop itself couldn’t be separated from the community.
“Because of the insurgency we couldn’t even access some of our outside stations,” Kachalla says. “We felt [that working in the camps] is necessary, since so many of our target beneficiaries are in the camps: why not now focus our attention on them? We are looking at livelihood activities to revive them back. So that is why we are doing most of our activities in the IDP camps to achieve our mandate.”
Bringing equitable benefits to beneficiaries in the camps is no easy task due to many intersectional factors, of which gender is a core issue. “Getting access to the IDPs is a huge challenge,” according to Kachalla, “because one has pass through security scrutiny and secondly the IDPs themselves are full of expectation, their mind set is always that of humanitarian support but in our case we have come to interview them, we found it very difficult before we could overcome the situation.”
From the beginning, however, the project was designed with a gender-responsive framework to bring equitable benefits to beneficiaries, says Kachalla, necessitating that they find ways to overcome these barriers. He’s become critical of scientists — and plant breeders in particular — who don’t design their research in a way that people can actually benefit from.
“The issue of gender is paramount. As scientists we sit down and think. What we think in our offices, we go to the field and produce. But this is not right. We have to incorporate the issue of gender. Our research should be more gender responsive, more inclusive.”
Women in the IDP camps face negative stereotyping and discrimination. With respect to wheat farming, those barriers impact their ability to produce and benefit at nearly every step of the way.
Kachalla described an incident last year where the scientists cleared and allotted land for a group of men and women to farm. Before long the scientists received complaints that the men in the group had taken control of all that was produced.
“(Women) don’t have access to land, they don’t have access to seeds. Even if they produce at the end of the day…the men actually get control over whatever they produce, due to the traditional aspects and the religious belief that women are always inferior to men,” says Kachalla. “We’re now trying to educate them trying to explain to them that both women and men are equal in terms of whatever they are doing, so they shouldn’t be downgraded. They shouldn’t be seen that way — that women are less important than men.”
The spread of COVID-19 has only worsened the situation faced by displaced peoples in Northern Nigeria. There are reports that the virus has only emboldened Boko Haram, adding to the chaos and despair in the country.
Kachalla says the people in the camp are well aware of how devastating the virus is and are abiding by social distancing protocols set forth by the Nigerian Center for Disease Control. The collective fear has had a paralyzing effect on the personal connections that are so critical to achieving the goals of the program, according to Kachalla.
“With this COVID-19, the farmers are somewhat skeptical about meeting us, and we are somewhat skeptical about meeting them, due to fears of contracting the virus,” he explains. The strict protocols have put a damper on agriculture activities and interpersonal interactions between the farmers and scientists.
Remote meetings are not a possibility for the IDPs he’s working with, says Kachalla. “The issue of video calls with the IDPs is very difficult. They don’t have access to all the technologies, to be candid. It requires internet facilities; it requires high throughput mobile phones or tablets. It’s very difficult to have a Zoom meeting or something like that.”
Even with communications technology, some activities just cannot be done remotely.
To grow crops, one must go to the field. Kachalla says they are slowly adapting to the new challenges. “Initially what we used to do — we come to the IDPs, we engage them, we mix with them, we sit down together, sometimes we even eat together. But now because of the underlying issues we have so much respect for the issue of social distancing. We don’t engage more than 5 or 6 farmers at a time. We keep a distance of 2 to 3 meters. We use face masks. So we are able to overcome the fears.”
Despite the strict social distancing measures and challenges of living and working in the camps, Kachalla says the program has had successes, which gives him hope to continue working. He says he wants to see the transfer of knowledge of best agricultural practices, implemented in a gender-responsive manner, that will benefit people for many years to come.
“The idea is for them to have the knowledge, for them to know what they are doing when they go back to their homes,” Kachalla says. “So that they will now be self-reliant and they will improve on what they are doing.”
“We have trained them. We give them seed. They produce, and we also identify marketers for them to move all the seeds…so it’s a success for us. They are now waiting for the insurgency to be over so that when they go back to their villages they can produce in large quantities. They’ve adopted all of the best practices, so they can now produce by themselves.”
In the midst of a pandemic and a violent conflict that has displaced millions, intersectional vulnerabilities shape society’s road to recovery. With the key role of agriculture as a livelihood for men and women who have been displaced and marginalized by these events, inclusive participatory agriculture research is, by all means, an essential service. Kachalla’s initiative shows us that even in crisis there are opportunities to improve ourselves and our communities to lay foundations for a better future.
Chris Knight is communications specialist in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University.
