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N° 21 - July 2004 Ghana: Root and Tuber Improvement Programme Roots and tubers – cassava, sweet potatoes, yams and cocoyam – are grown by the poorest Ghanaians and are crucial to their food security but had been neglected for many years. Ambitious and nationwide, the Root and Tuber Improvement Programme set out to raise the incomes of 720,000 resource-poor farmers by investing in research to increase production and improve the quality of these crops. It successfully developed new and better varieties of cassava and sweet potato and created an effective multiplication and distribution system thereby increasing the availability of plants and yields for smallholders. However, increased cassava yields have not yet led to higher incomes; farmers instead are facing higher production costs and lower output prices. The key recommendation arising from the evaluation is that a second phase should adhere more closely to the project’s original goals of increased food security and higher incomes for poor farmers, by taking a pro-poor approach directly aimed at poverty reduction.
Making marketing work In identifying roots and tubers as a ‘poor man’s’ food and starting from the premise that development of these crops would benefit the poor people who grew them was innovative as an approach to poverty reduction. Grown by about 55 percent of all farming households in Ghana, roots and tubers can be grown all year round; they grow well in poor soils and thus are a good crop to help reduce the vulnerability of poor communities to seasonal food scarcity. Development of roots and tubers would also provide farmers with new opportunities to increase their incomes. Focusing on one commodity was useful but the programme had a limited impact on the poverty levels of farmers, concentrating as it did almost exclusively on production whilst not paying enough attention to the processing and marketing stages – a flaw in the programme design. Yields from the new varieties were estimated at between 30 and 60 percent higher than from traditional varieties but farmers have been unable to sell or obtain a profit from their outputs. In addition, the President’s Special Initiative, which led to the founding of an export-oriented starch production factory near Accra in mid-2003, substantially boosted farmers’ demand even further for improved cassava varieties and for information on cassava production and processing techniques. The root and tuber programme benefited from the huge national interest in cassava, whilst the starch-production factory could not have functioned without the increased availability of cassava from the roots and tuber programme. As a result, demand for the new cassava plants developed by the programme exploded. Yet, apart from those who sold to the starch factory, few farmers were able to obtain attractive prices, nor did they have the marketing or processing skills needed to cope with the new output levels. Farmers now need more up-to-date knowledge of processing and marketing techniques; they need training, technical advice and information regarding storage, packaging and labelling. Regular transmission of price information by radio would be a huge boon as would support for networking between producers, processors and traders. In addition, assistance with the preparation of loan applications and enterprise models would help farmers determine their financing needs. Research matters: whose agenda? The new high-yielding, disease resistant varieties of cassava developed by the project were certainly worthy of widespread multiplication and distribution. Yet they were not ideal for improving household food security or increasing incomes. Higher yields and resistance to disease were cancelled out by cassava’s seasonal requirements for water and labour that clashed with the requirements of other crops and cassava’s shorter in-soil storage life. Moreover, although the cassava varieties had several non-food uses and generated income for increased household food security if sold at a good price, they did not fit with the producers’ diets. The roots and tubers programme was not successful in helping producers connect with industries using cassava as a raw material, with the exception of the new starch production factory near Accra. The weak support given to processing and marketing coupled with the specific characteristics of the new cassava varieties thus limited the root and tuber programme’s intentions to raise farmers’ incomes. To address these issues, poorer farmers’ opinions, demands, circumstances and requirements need to be taken directly into account when deciding research priorities and drafting research proposals. Proposals should also explain in detail the rationale for the research, the issues and problems to be addressed, the concrete benefits envisaged, for whom and how. Criteria for selecting topics should be equally weighted in favour of research funding and the technologies being researched (cultivation techniques or pest management practices, for example). Pro-poor research? Poorer farmers have to cope with more than most and have different constraints
and priorities: lesser quality household labour (in terms of health, skills
and education); limited access to finance for capital (such as farming
equipment and transport), operating expenses (production, crops and processing)
or cash flow; and a lower capacity to withstand risk. Again, the scientists
and project staff need to consult and collaborate with the poorest root
and tuber producers (not just the better off farmers or the farmer field
participants) and explore ways to respond specifically to their needs.
The Ghanaian government is keen to increase root and tuber crop production
whilst IFAD’s main interest is rural poverty reduction: marrying
the two would be possible if the research became more pro-poor.
Further information Republic of Ghana, Root and Tuber Improvement Programme, Interim Evaluation (forthcoming August 2004), Office of Evaluation, International Fund for Agricultural Development, Via Paolo Di Dono, 44, 00142 Rome, Italy. |
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