Side event organized by AgriNatura and the ESFIM project

Thursday, 23 February 2012 – 14:00-16:00

Oval Room B

Background

Farmers’ organizations (FOs) have a key role to play in advocating for change in policies and institutional arrangements to ensure that such policies and institutional arrangements meet the needs of their membership. However, farmers’ organizations often lack access to the information and evidence needed to develop pro-active proposals for change. In addition, the link between farmers’ organizations and national and international research is often weak, with a lack of research results on topics that matter most to farmers’ organizations and their members.

This side event presents the experiences emerging from the Empowering smallholder farmers in markets (ESFIM) programme. Through collaboration between national farmers’ organizations, local research providers and members of the AGRINATURA consortium, the ESFIM programme seeks to support and foster a research-advocacy interface that generates demand-driven action research supportive of policy activities that farmers’ organizations have themselves prioritized. 

Objectives of the event

The objectives of the side event are to:

• share first-hand experiences of national FOs on how they have identified and used research evidence to formulate feasible, evidence-based propositions for changes in policies and institutional arrangements that empower smallholder farmers and their organizations in local, regional and international markets
• dialogue with participants on the key lessons learned through such processes: what works well, what works less well, and why
• discuss how such processes might be strengthened and scaled-up.

Expected outcomes

The expected outcomes include:

• raised awareness of the value of farmer organization-driven, research-based evidence in policy and institutional change at the national level
• shared experience on key policy initiatives to empower smallholder farmers in markets
• deepened understanding of the challenges and opportunities of linking farmer organization-driven research and policy advocacy
• drawing out of key recommendations on how to enable research to better support the advocacy agenda of farmers’ organizations.

Agenda

Chair: Stephen Muchiri, CEO, Eastern Africa Farmers’ Federation (EAFF)

Presentations: (60 minutes)

Three country case examples will outline the evidence-to-policy process and the experiences of the farmers’ organizations themselves, what they did and how evidence contributed to policy or institutional change in favour of the smallholder; and a final presentation will provide a perspective from the research partners.

• Strengthening farmers’ organizations’ advocacy platforms on smallholder development issues: addressing cooperative law and taxation in Peru

Lorenzo Castillo, Coordinator, Junta Nacional de Café (JNC), Peru

A lobby agenda has been developed by a group of farmers’ organizations engaged in collective marketing (rice, alpaca wool, coffee, cocoa, potatoes), led by the Junta Nacional de Café (JNC), for inclusion in the strategy of the multi-stakeholder platform on agricultural policy – La Convención Nacional del Agro Peruano (CONVEAGRO). This agenda helped to refocus CONVEAGRO to address key issues that affect smallholders access to markets such as: the reintroduction of VAT on transactions of members sale to the cooperative that they self-manage; administrative hurdles that prevent access to government procurement for school feeding programmes; access of farmers’ organizations to regional investment funds; and policies that define quality parameters and enable marketing strategies that differentiate on product qualities. ESFIM provided research support to document relevant case studies on these issues, and supported JNC to lead a successful multi-year advocacy strategy. The presentation will focus in particular on the evidence-to-policy process relating to cooperative law and taxation.

• Developing institutions with an eye on smallholder interests: the Agricultural Commodity Exchange System in the Philippines

Raul Montemayor, National Manager, Free Farmers Federation Cooperatives, Inc. (FFFCI), the Philippines

ESFIM supported the participation of farmers in the design of a national Agricultural Commodity Exchange System. Such a system seeks to bring together buyers and sellers to trade through registered brokers and as such the system provides both opportunities and challenges in particular for the smallholder farmer as well as the small-scale entrepreneur. This presentation will present the process and the work undertaken which included a baseline survey in key maize-producing area, an exchange visit to Africa to share lessons on the operation of Agricultural Commodity Exchange Systems, and the design of training tools tailored to the needs and capacities of farmers’ organizations and cooperatives as well as small-scale maize traders.

• Bringing evidence of policy impacts on smallholders to the policy makers: the case of input and output markets in Kenya

John Mutunga, CEO, Kenyan National Federation of Agricultural Producers (KENFAP), Kenya

With support from ESFIM, KENFAP made a critical assessment of government interventions in input and output markets under the National Agricultural Accelerated Input Access Programme (NAAIAP). Specifically, KENFAP examined the use of a voucher system for subsided maize seed and fertilizer put in place by NAAIAP and its impact on yield and on farmer income. Based on this work, KENFAP proposed changes to the NAAIAP policy through the preparation of a memorandum to the Government on food insecurity. KENFAP further sought to strengthen mechanisms to improve smallholder produce marketing through the use of the Warehouse Receipt System (WRS) and contract farming.

• Challenges and opportunities in linking research evidence to policy processes of farmers’ organizations: the viewpoint of research partners

Giel Ton, Programme Manager, ESFIM programme, LEI Wageningen University and Research Centre, Netherlands 

Building on the preceding presentations, this presentation will draw together some of the wider challenges and opportunities in linking research evidence to policy processes of farmers’ organizations and some of the lessons learned from the work of ESFIM in over ten countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America in support to farmers’ organizations.

Open discussion: (50 minutes)

Conclusions: (10 minutes): Felicity Proctor, Consultant to the ESFIM programme

Closing remarks: Stephen Muchiri, CEO, Eastern Africa Farmers’ Federation (EAFF)

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

With important delay due to lateness of translation, the report of the workshop « Farmers’ organizations and agricultural research for development in Africa: roles, complementarity with others stakeholders and partnerships institutionalization » organized within the scope of the PAEPARD project is now available on the CSA website!

See http://www.csa-be.org/spip.php?page=seminaire&id_rubrique=12&id_mot=187.

Best regards and best wishes!

Julie Flament

In 2004 CIOEC submitted an intitiative Law for the legal recognition of OECAs, filed on September 1st National Congress, with support from the Ministry of Agriculture. It aims to achieve legal recognition of OECAs and promote their development through production, processing and / or jointly marketing of goods and services.

After years of stagnation this ‘OECA Act’, initially by the political upheaval in  Bolivia in 2004 and 2005, and, from 2006, as a result of the Constituent Assembly that had priority and was considered as an alternative pathway for the OECA Act to be approved.. approved priority, work done in 2007, 2008 and achieving approval in 2009. CIOEC re-introduced the initiative during the consultations about the Ley de Revolución Productiva Comunitaria 144 in 2011.
In this framework, the CIOEC Bolivia decides to table discussion of the OECAs Act and seek approval for adoption in 2012. One of the main strategic lines of work of the CIOEC-Bolivia since its creation is the impact on public policy. In this framework, with the support of AGRITERRA (Dutch institution), it has initiated participatory process of formulating public policy proposals for the benefit of small farmers, through the workshop “Participatory Process of Policy Generation (PPPG)” CIOEC formulated its core focus for ESFIM in a workshop 25 to 27 October in La Paz, with the participation of national leaders, departmental and sector organizations and technical staff. This workshop identified the need for the approval of the Draft Law on OECAS, with emphasis on the regulation of the constitution, organization and organizational functioning of the Rural Economic Organizations (OECAs) and tax rules (special rules for OECAS).

 Giel Ton, ESFIM programme coordinator, presented the emrging lessons from the colaborative research during a session on “Learning Networks” during the International Conference ”Innovation in Extension and Advisory Services”. The efforts in ESFIM to establish an interface between the research community and farmers’ organisations’ advocacy efforts, is example of a change in an innovation system around institutions for smallholder market access.

The main objective of ESFIM was to generate a successful pilot experience to articulate NFOs with evidence-based policy formulation and strategic advocacy on issues that benefit smallholders’ empowerment in markets. A precondition for participating FO’s is that they have a positive attitude towards the role of evidence-gathering to validate and refine their policy proposals. The ensuing assumption is that this drives the willingness of FO’s to create sustainable linkages with research institutes, NGOs and universities. ESFIM worked only with organisations that had already a minimum of experience in advocacy. Indeed, the articulation with organisations that had an extensive trajectory of advocacy provided better conditions to focus research than the organisations with little experience. 

The major ESFIM management challenges that appeared in the process are related to the budget allocation between contracted research support and member consultation processes. This affects the core of the ESFIM programme, the objective to establish a functioning interface for articulating research support with policy definition and advocacy in farmers’ organisations. It proved necessary to convince the (changing) leaders and stakeholders of the resources, time and effort required to have quality and evidence-based research findings. A separation of funds for contracted research separate from funds for participatory processes may resolve this tension. Part of the ESFIM funds could be put in an ESFIM Research Support Funds: country-specific competitive funds, eligible to farmers organisations only, and exclusively for contracting research support to them.

EFIM has just started up.  After some years of ESFIM-type of activities, the NFO’s will have increased ‘living experiences’ with managing research assignments and articulating more precise research needs. They will have gained experiences with a wider group of researchers and consultants, and will deepen their relation with the ones that have gained trust and respect. Step-wise increases of mutual trust between researchers and NFO-leaders and -staff, coupled with transparent and farmer-led grant funds with a governance structure that anticipates the eventual biases due to internal funding needs of NFOs and/or the professional preferences of researchers are the key components to harness the research-advocacy interface of NFOs.

The presentation can be downloaded here: Extension 2011 -ESFIM – Giel TON

Progress Report on NAADS and proposals for Reform – UNFFE fnl - June 2011
This action study focuses on the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS), a heavily capitalised program of government that aims at transformation of public delivery of agricultural extension services into a largely private sector-led delivery system under a client or farmer controlled arrangement. Preliminary findings show there islimited understanding of NAADs operations amongst farmers, inadequate focus on farmer constraints like labour, access to inputs, ineffective extension services for crop and animal farmers, unresolved market access issues, unclear NAADs farmer credit schemes among others!

Eight districts have so far been covered; the next phase will target 40 sub-counties in the entire country. This progress report highlights key insights from the field (captured in photographs and draft narrative) that will be distilled in the final report. The final report, will detail specific proposals for NAADs reform. These proposals will be the fodder for The farmers Green Print on NAADS.