By Charles Dhewa
Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-When economists and policy makers in developing countries talk about evidence, in most cases they mean numbers or statistics.
For instance in African countries, statistics dominate the language used to describe fiscal policies and budgets in monetary terms. Factors like contribution to GDP, production outputs per hectare and export earnings are all about figures.
However, in real life, evidence goes beyond figures or statistics. If developing countries swallow this notion of evidence hook line and sinker, they completely undervalue their economies.
Towards a broader notion of evidence
A broader and meaningful notion of evidence can emerge from answering the following questions:
- To what extent is information, knowledge and skills shared in the agriculture sector considered evidence and how is such evidence accounted for?
- What are the drivers of knowledge sharing and skills development in agriculture and rural development? Who are the actors?
- How do we account for soft skills that are passed from generation to generation?
- How do we value knowledge and skills in agriculture markets that have sustained African agricultural sectors for decades, enabling farmers, traders and other actors to send their children to school? How do we correctly account for the contribution of such knowledge to academic education?
In African agriculture, the evidence default is to look at production statistics and productivity only.
There is lack of evidence on employment creation along the value chain, covering activities like production, logistics, marketing, processing and others. Agriculture’s contribution to employment creation in related industries like input providers and equipment manufacturers is barely captured as useful evidence. Yet without diverse evidence, it is impossible to properly lure investment into the agricultural sector.
Harnessing the power of social evidence
Beyond statistics, it is important to gather evidence of how trust and relationships are built as collateral, how business networks are forged and how all this sustains the whole agricultural sector.
Without strong relationships and trust we end up with actors working in isolation and silos, making it difficult to make a collective difference together. Imagine what can happen if there are no relationships between farmers and traders, between informal markets and formal companies.
There should be tools and processes for assessing the value of such resources and hidden factors.
Evidence on how the agricultural sector copes with shocks like floods and other unforeseen circumstances is fundamental. Such evidence can be gleaned from how value chain actors and institutions like markets cope with challenges like climate change.
Critical insights include how markets and households cope with floods and drought, before emergency activities like food aid are introduced. Ideally, households and communities should be empowered to come up with quick decisions that feed into coping mechanisms before external support comes.
That means, reliable evidence should be available and properly consolidated. Households in a community may not be vulnerable to the same challenges at the same time.
Also important is the extent to which enough evidence of an agricultural sector’s coping strategies is available. Without such evidence, there is a danger of either over-rating or under-rating the entire sector’s capacity to cope with challenges.
It is possible for more than 70% of the coping strategies to be available within a particular community. Figuring that ahead of time will ensure interventions address underlying issues of which drought may just be one of the symptoms.
To what extent does food aid address underlying socio-cultural and environmental issues that prevent germination of permanent solutions?
Importance of questioning conventional practices
How much evidence is there to prove that by pursuing monoculture in crops like tobacco, cocoa, coffee or cotton, African countries are not weakening their farming communities to achieve food security and nutrition?
It is easy to measure tobacco’s contribution to GDP in terms of export receipt figures but also easy to calculate the crop’s opportunity cost at household and national levels.
The entry point into this issue can be finding out what could have been achieved by putting the same land to other uses such as producing nutritious food so that countries producing tobacco won’t have to use tobacco income to import food or medicine.
What are the environmental and opportunity costs associated with cutting down trees to grow and burn tobacco versus putting the same land to alternative uses?
Do we have enough evidence of how our climate mitigation strategies are responding to climate change? If most causes of climate change are not in the agricultural sector but due to industrialization and other external factors, what is the point of subjecting farmers to climate smart agricultural initiatives that do not address the root causes?
Farmers may do everything right but suffer from floods caused by factors beyond their control. Due to lack of evidence, we may be very far from developing tools that can address the effects of climate change.
To what extent do we have evidence that technologies such as ICTs are addressing real issues? What if technology may even be distorting markets and destroying established value chains. For instance, use of mobile phones may be destroying trust between farmers and traders, built over generations by promoting side-marketing since opportunistic buyers are easy to access through mobile phones?
To what extent can we say agricultural tools coming from outside are increasing agricultural productivity? Those tools may even be leading to more losses through mismatching equipment capacity and the capacity of farmers.
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