Launching the ‘Millions Fed’ book in Addis Ababa yesterday, Ethiopian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development H.E Ato Tefera Derebew congratulated IFPRI and the authors: “It is good that we have best practices identified and that we have menus that help us choose what suits our situation.”
He also noted that Ethiopia has many best and good practices, but that more effort is needed to scale them up. “We have many ‘tourist sites’ as far as agricultural development is concerned” he said, the question is how to disseminate the lessons from these to the farmers so the successes are shared.
The Millions Fed project of IFPRI precisely aimed to identify past successes, assess the evidence for them, and to draw out some lessons that could guide future investments in agricultural development.
At the Addis Ababa launch, IFPRI’s David Spielman and Rajul Pandya-Lorch introduced the project and the book.
Spielman opened the presentation, giving a flavor of the proven successes documented in the book (twenty were selected and published from a wide and rigorous search). He illustrated three in particular:
- The long-term global research effort to contain wheat rusts in which scientists around the world joined forces to develop new varieties (download chapter 2 of the book).
- Farmer-led innovation in West Africa where communities rediscovered traditional agroforestry and land management practices to ‘re-green’ the Sahel. The key according to Spielman, was the way that local communities “regenerating some of their traditional knowledge to make this happen” (download chapter 7 of the book).
- The global effort by scientists and veterinary services to eradicate rinderpest in cattle. Spielman emphasized that this effort is only the “second disease in human history to be eradicated” (download chapter 16 of the book).
Pandya-Lorch shared some answers to the question ‘why were they successful?’ She highlighted 5 major reasons for success:
- Sustained commitments to science and technology
- Complementary investments in agricultural development: infrastructure, irrigation, inputs, markets, education, rural growth networks and the like. Science and technology is “important but is not enough.”
- Policies and private incentives to encourage farmers and entrepreneurs to invest in agriculture.
- Cooperation, collaboration and partnerships among all kinds of actors, scientists, farmers, companies, and governments for example.
- Leadership and dedication at many levels, which includes the need to provide spaces for leaders to take risks and innovate and be recognized. She emphasized that leaders don’t have to have PhD training – they exist all over and at all levels.
A key point from the study is that these successes were usually accompanied by trade-offs: The cases studied had losers as well as winners and they sometimes had less positive outcomes, on the environment for example. Pandya-Lorch argued that such imperfections are normal and that policy and program designers need to avoid ‘paralyzing’ themselves looking for the perfect policy or intervention.
Responding to a question from the audience, she emphasized that, at the end of the day, successes need to be owned; they emerge from evolutionary processes in which smaller projects start, try different approaches, get adapted and move to scale. It is essential during the evolutionary processes that space is provided for this innovation and experimentation to happen.
What advice and lessons might Ethiopia take from this study?
Answering this question, Spielman argued that Ethiopia already has some of the building blocks in place: It has sector strategies in place, it has taken some risks (setting up a commodity exchange for instance), it invests its own resources in science and research, and there are serious investments in complementary activities.
Complementing remarks by Food Laureate Gebisa Ejeta earlier this month, he suggested that Ethiopia could perhaps give more emphasis and space for experimentation and risk-taking. He called for more investments in collecting the evidence for agricultural successes, in doing the necessary impact assessment.
Report by Peter Ballantyne, ILRI
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