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Moderated conference on rural advisory services for family farms: 1-18 December 2014

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Fri, 12 Dec 2014 16:29:32 +0100
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I am Dr. Deogratias Lwezaura, Principal economist in the Ministry of Agriculture, Tanzania. 

I have been following the good comments coming out. While we are in agreement that there are still, of course in general terms, low levels of technology adoption, my concern is whether we have developed the benchmarks regarding the appropriate level/rate to say that a technology has been adequately adopted with a particular intervention. Is it 50%, 60%, 80% or 100%. Probably we may think of having scenarios across target groups i.e. project participants (direct), non-participants (but in the project area) and non-project participants (non-project area). If we have not developed these scenarios we will always say there is low level of technology adoption - and the debate will be endless. 

Much has been said regarding the importance of advisory services looking at the whole value chain (see for example in Abdulmojeed Yakubu (Message 11), Moses Kondowe (27) and others). In fact, I am truly in agreement with Datta Rangnekar (66) that we are pushing too much to farmers to adopt. While his comments were on many technologies across commodities and enterprises, my concern is the now topical focus on value chain approaches, meaning that the same farmer should embrace production, processing, preservation, value addition, marketing aspects etc. This to me is another dimension of pushing too much to a farmer. A farmer needs to specialize to be able to be in better place to utilize the available scarce labour/resources. If a farmer can be allowed to act on every segment along the value chain, what will the other players in the system such as the processors, transporters, middle men, traders do? Everyone only had to do what s/he were good at (comparative advantage), that is when there would be efficiency of the value chain - increases economic efficiency and opportunities for growth for competitive sectors. My statement might be provocative, but in a sense this is my own view point. 

Another issue I want to put across is based on experience in Tanzania regarding farmers being organized in groups particularly in irrigation schemes. The groups set their rules under which every member has to abide. For example, each member is required to grow quality/improved rice varieties such as SARO 5 to be able to qualify to remain in the group. This is probably one approach that can be adopted in any extension methods to ensure technology scaling out. 
 
Dr. Deogratias Lwezaura (PhD)
BSc, Agric economics, MSc, agric. economics, PhD, economics
Ministry of Agriculture 
Dar es Salaam, 
Tanzania
Mobile: 255 754 273 997
e-mIl: lwezaura (at) hotmail.com

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