IV. Socio-Economic Activities
A Socio-economic Analyses
Two analytical socio-economic studies are/have been carried out by Cornell graduate students. These projects address the need to identify and analyze constraints in the socioeconomic context, which is likely to strongly influence possible agricultural intervention strategies aimed at increasing rice and wheat productivity and improving the nutrition and health of farm families.
(i) Effective Incentives for Chickpea Production in India
Krishna Rao completed a MS degree on this topic in August 1997.
Summary - Important as pulses are in India’s food economy, their cultivation has suffered in the country. Pulse production in India has remained stagnant between 10 to 13 million tons over the last forty years. One of the major causes of this stagnation is the negative growth in chickpea area and production in the post-Green Revolution period. Chickpea’s share of total pulse production declined from 45 per cent in 1970/71 to 35 per cent in 1991. In the same period chickpea’s share of total pulse area fell from 35 to 28 per cent.
The biggest declines in chickpea acreage occurred in the Indo-Gangetic region, especially in the wheat growing states like Haryana due to chickpea’s declining competitiveness with respect to its main competing crops - wheat and mustard. The relative production trends are similar to the acreage trends.
Many factors have affected chickpea’s competitiveness in Haryana. In analyzing factors such as profitability, risk and technical change, chickpea was not competitive with either wheat or mustard in both irrigated and dryland agriculture. In Haryana the high input technique of cultivation associated with modern wheat varieties was not compatible with the traditional mixed or sequential cropping of chickpea. Further, chickpea had lower profitabilityand higher yield risk than wheat or mustard in both dryland and irrigated agriculture.
The Government of India’s agricultural price policy has significantly affected chickpea’s competitiveness. The effect of the government’s output price policy and input subsidies on the relative production incentives for chickpea, wheat and mustard was quantified by estimating coefficients of protection. Effective Subsidy Coefficients indicate that mustard and wheat received greater protection and consequently greater production incentives relative to chickpea. Clearly, the increasing mustard and wheat acreage is testimony to this. This indicates a policy bias against chickpea in Haryana.
(ii) Household Decision Making; Income Generation versus Food Security
The objective of this research by Kaafee Billah is to better understand how farm families make decisions between income generation opportunities through sale of produce and family food security. Research is in Bangladesh. See graduate student section.
B Socio-Economic Surveys
In 1997, participatory rural appraisals were carried out in Chuadanga district and in Dinajpur/Rangpur districts in Bangladesh. Reports of these surveys are available. We found that the PRA’s were a goof first step but that there value was limited. These have been followed up with diagnostic surveys and reports are available on these.
As an example, a summary of the results of the PRA at Chuadanga and a perspective on the process and what we accomplished follows. The PRA was carried out jointly by BARI and BRRI scientists to help characterize the socioeconomic and biophysical environment as well as the constraints to rice-wheat production at a representative village in the district. The perspective was written by Shelly Feldman, who helped to train the group in the PRA technique.
PRA Summmary - T. Aman 1997
Broad Village Characterization:
1) Relatively well educated village, with 40% literacy, compared to national average of 32%
2) Relatively good health facilities: regional health complex very near village and family planning clinic located in village; however, only 40% of families have latrines
3) Majority of small farms (75%) are rented and 25% are owned; medium sized farms are equally divided between tenants and owners
4) Men make a majority of pre harvest decisions and do most pre harvest/harvest field work, while women are involved mostly in post harvest activities
5) Good drinking water/irrigation infrastructure: 79 active shallow tube wells, each producing roughly 14 L/s; enough to irrigate 3-4 ha per well
6) Agriculture employs 95% of workers with an average income of 31,647 Taka/farm (~$690); other non-farm employment yields 6678 Taka (~$145)
Biophysical Environment/Agricultural Practice Characterization:
1) Soils range in texture from sandy loam to loam with poor water holding capacity
2) Farmers are not dependent on draft animals; having access to 7 power tillers and 11 tractors through ownersip or rental services
3) Dominant cropping rotations are:
Fallow-rice-rice 47% of area covered
Jute-mungbean-wheat 20%
Fallow-rice-wheat 10%
Rice-mungbean-wheat 6%
4) Village yields of aus rice (early summer) average 3.1 t/ha; transplanted aman rice yields are 3.9 t/ha and wheat is 2.3 t/ha
5) Other crops include: jute (16% of area); mustard (6.3%); and pulses (mungbean, lentil, gram on 10% of the land); very little vegetable production
Constraints:
1) Low soil fertility cited as third greatest constraint after high input costs and low prices for rice
2) Despite high costs, farmers applying weedicide and insecticide with little regard/knowledge of IPM strategies
3) High cost of fertilizer limits inputs to less than recommended rates
4) Entomologists observed 70% of aman rice was affected by stem borer
5) Labor shortages at transplanting time
6) Late planting of wheat
Participatory research has become a rapidly expanding strategy among agricultural and social scientists who wish to learn more from farmers and be sensitive to their particular needs and interests. The use of participatory techniques often is complemented by greater awareness of regional variation in farm household practices, growing appreciation for local and indigenous knowledges, and recognition that as agricultural and social scientists and practitioners, we are relatively ignorant about both the organization of farm labor within households and the ways in which household decision-making unfolds, especially with regard to the adoption of new farming practices and technologies.
One form of participatory research, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), advocates greater interaction between researchers and farm household members using techniques that provide quality data to researchers while facilitating exchange among researchers and community members. Robert Chambers, the father and promoter of PRA, identifies eight different techniques found useful for PRA researchers. These include participatory mapping, transect walks, matrix scoring, well-being grouping and ranking, seasonal calendars, institutional diagraming, trend and change analysis, and analytical diagraming. Each technique is assumed to enhance scientific understanding of the constraints inhibiting improved agricultural production, the use of sustainable practices, and the interactions between production and consumption. Accomplished over the course of approximately one week, the process is used to verify and confirm a shared appreciation of the experience by all participants, and is envisioned as one way to draw participants into the project or goal of the research.
Time constraints and tight budgets provide the rationale underlying the use of PRA as a research strategy. Supporters argue that comparisons reveal little difference in quality, reliability, and understanding of PRA data with information gathered through more costly surveys and field methodologies. Supporters also assume that traditional research designs promote didactic rather than experiential learning, focus on learning new approaches to knowledge production rather than on changing behavior, and that they respond to long, rather than short term investments. These characteristics of PRA are useful for thinking about the process of understanding and working toward change. But, such short-term interaction with farm family members contradict the recent appreciation for qualitative methodological approaches and gender aware research. Both approaches stress the significance of time, sensitivity to subject, and the building of trust and exchange between the researcher and the subjects of study. Moreover, these approaches recognize that to understand the complexities of social life, including processes of decision-making and changes in long-term patterns of production, exchange, and consumption, it is critical to observe, develop trust, and share information over a relatively long period.
National scientists working with the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute and Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute chose to use the PRA approach to: 1) increase interaction and exchange among various disciplines, 2) identify farm practices and constraints as perceived and experienced by farmers, 3) explore the needs of farmers to aid in the likely adoption of new practices and technologies, and 4) refine an agenda for future research. What has the PRA field experience revealed?
Visits to the two Bangladesh Rice Wheat project sites and a seminar organized to explore research scientists’ understanding of PRA revealed a curiosity, excitement, and enthusiasm for the approach. This enthusiasm indicates a willingness among scientists to engage directly with farm communities that were previously seen merely as recipients of experiments and field trials, and a curiosity about what can be learned from this short-term emersion. However, two broad problems also are revealed. When asked what they learned from their village visit or what information was garnered from farmer exchanges that they did not previously know, only a few of the scientists were able to provide substantive answers. To the question, "How do you interpret the varied sources of information that you were able to record during your field visit?" the problem was even more troubling, since it revealed that scientists seemed unable to make sense of information that did not fit within their existing frameworks and failed to draw connections between different types of data. In sharing their findings scientists noted the same list of constraints to increased yields that they assumed prior to their field visit. Also despite the increased participation of women among participants in the PRA, there was the assumption that women knew relatively little about farm production. Thus, while scientists expressed excitement about the approach and were keen to continue using it, when queried if their field visit altered how they thought about farm practices, few thought that the PRA had made a notable difference.
Perhaps most revealing about the PRA experience is the absence of a dialogue among diverse groups of scientists and their inability to employ PRA other than as a package of techniques which they pursue ritualistically. As each group employed the approach in a similar way, it became evident that PRA was a methodology that was unable to assist scientists in using their field visits to generate new forms of exchange among themselves as well as with farmers. Likewise scientists were unable to engage in the sort of exploration of themes across disciplinary boundaries that would help illuminate farmer practices and needs. In short, in the tradition of the Green Revolution package where the system was assumed to work best when it worked together, the implementation of the PRA formula undermined the possibility that local community members could be fully represented in the research process, including in the data analysis state. Moreover, there is little indication that the PRA would provide a future opportunity for long-term collaboration between the research and farmer community. These problems are structural features of the PRA approach that stem from the way it is taught, and the motivation to keep costs low, share results quickly, and give relatively little attention to the research process. Thus, while the participatory impulse is critically important for all research, its packaging under the PRA rubric suggests that new forms of training, a new appreciation for self reflection, and more critical engagement across sites, disciplines and among researchers with diverse skills and expertise are necessary to make it an effective and innovative tool for scholarly endeavor.--- Shelley Feldman, Dept. of Rural Sociology