The last mile debate? We need to increase our focus on the first mile
Prior to joining On Purpose as an Associate (in October 2013), Chris Gale worked for the City and Guilds Centre for Skills Development, where he was responsible for a number of projects related to improving skills development in India, Ghana and South Africa and co-wrote a number of reports aimed at improving the policy and practice of skills development, including ‘Training for Rural Development: Agricultural and Enterprise Skills for Women Smallholders.’ In this blog, Chris considers the importance of collaboration in addressing the issues faced by smallholder farmers.
The numbers don’t lie…
Agriculture is by a long way the single biggest employer in the world, employing around one billion people globally. This includes 500 million smallholder farmers who support two billion people (IFAD). It’s also well known that a vast majority of the world’s poor (around 70%) live in rural areas and this means that small-scale farmers are disproportionately represented within those living on less than $1.25 a day.
A key problem is that vast numbers of these 500 million smallholders are farming very small areas of land, often around half an acre (depending where they are in the world), and this doesn’t include many of the very poorest who are employed as agricultural labourers. Even where land is consistently productive, the small size of these landholdings (and thus, limited crop variance and production levels) means that smallholders remain particularly susceptible to a myriad of unpredictable factors that can detrimentally affect production, such as bad weather, illness, bad seeds or land degradation. In addition, climate change is exacerbating the challenges that smallholders face, with increasingly volatile climatic conditions making yields ever more unpredictable. This inherent volatility has created many challenges for people hoping to break the cycle of poverty. However, addressing these challenges holds the key to reducing poverty globally.
The key to raising production levels is bringing farmers to scale…
The role of smallholder agriculture in providing the agricultural increases needed to feed the world is hotly debated. Some argue that a key to tackling poverty is developing a system that provides smallholder farmers with viable and economically beneficial livelihoods. These opportunities provide potentially far-reaching social and cultural impacts for rural communities that in many places are being decimated by the desire, and often the need, for urban migration in search of jobs, particularly by young people.
Alongside the development argument, there is also an economic one. Some of the largest businesses in the world (Unilever, for example) have made commitments to increase the number of smallholder farmers with whom they work, with many making minimum engagements (Unilever has committed to reach a minimum of 500,000 smallholders by 2020). For these companies it is not simply an altruistic move as they know that they need to secure sustainable access to many commodities and the only way to do this is to make working in agriculture a viable livelihood opportunity (see Oxfam’s Behind the Brands scorecards — not many are doing particularly well!). For some commodities, such as cocoa and vanilla, the only source of production is small-scale farms, and big business has an important role to play in creating an enabling environment to develop commercial relationships to reach what are often extremely hard to reach locations.
The need for partnerships…
Consistently, ‘the need for partnerships’ is banded around and is often a nebulous way of saying “we don’t have a clue what to do, but lets talk more.” Within the agricultural development sector there are lots of organisations that have been doing amazing work for many years, but the issues are so stark that there is a desperate need to learn from these organisations and seek ways to expand their reach. If we are serious about tackling extreme hunger and poverty, we need to seek innovative approaches to working with smallholder farmers and cooperatives.
This challenge can’t be addressed by the development sector on its own, but extends to NGOs, businesses, social enterprises and the public sector. Increasingly, we are seeing examples of innovative partnership approaches throughout value chains and there is a desperate need to explore opportunities to transfer these approaches into engaging more effectively with smallholders. Fairtrade and other certification schemes have been around for a long time, but it is clear that they cannot be the catch-all answer. The percentage of products sourced through Fairtrade and others, despite some notable successes, has been relatively stagnant for a while. So, we need to seek alternatives.
There are unquestionably many challenges ahead: ensuring quality, maintaining consistent supply, providing access to credit and savings, communicating and engaging in marginalised regions, etc. However, if we can help lift this issue to a higher priority on the agenda for all of the groups listed above, the opportunity is there to begin to combat one of the biggest challenges facing the world today.
