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

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Wed, 17 Dec 2014 16:43:47 +0100
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I am Robert Agunga, associate professor at Ohio State University (USA) and a native of Ghana. I have great field experience in extension from Ghana as well as from many African countries where I have worked as a consultant. 

First of all, I am very grateful to the FAO and GFRAS for their endless effort at finding lasting solutions to problems of extension as a vehicle for increasing smallholder farm family productivity. I am also thankful to all of you who have contributed to this discussion. It is unfortunate that I am coming in at the tail end. I am trying to read up so if I am saying something that has been discussed already I apologize.

A couple of years ago a number of African extension faculty members and extension administrators from nine African countries plus a couple of us in the USA came together to found an organization called ExtensionAfrica with the primary objective of injecting professionalism into African extension. Again, we are a very young organization and do not have our cards fully outlined yet. So, I cannot tell as much as I would have liked. Also, I am not speaking for the organization, just a personal contribution to this discussion.

In a nutshell, my conviction is that we are expecting far too much from grassroots extension workers than we have trained them to deliver. The extension task is becoming increasingly sophisticated yet extension workers seem to lack the training to cope with this increasing sophistication. Many of us contributing to this discussion have PhDs. I have hardly heard the voice of a grassroots worker. Now, we are telling extension workers that their task is to facilitate holistic development as in promoting "integrated rural development approach", that they serve as facilitators of holistic development programs. I am not sure if their training has prepared them for this type of activity.

Also, I really don't think that we are taking a social scientific approach to extension. I think we are all agreed that extension is a problem solving process whereby we identify the needs, set goals and objectives and design strategies to achieve these goals. We need to set clear extension goals and then see if we have the expertise in place to achieve them. Also, we seem to be talking about value chains or processing of agricultural products yet the basic challenge is production. Let's achieve the production and then we can take on the processing aspect when we get there. We have big industry people ready to handle the processing but the problem is where it has always been--increasing smallholder production. Let's stop talking much about value chains and get production done. [This echoes the comments by Deogratias Lwezaura (Message 71), who wrote "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"...Moderator].

Another point, a fundamental extension philosophy is that not all farmers want to go in the same direction. So, the need is to provide flexibility for farmers to go on their different ways. However, when we choose specialized crops to promote or give input subsidies. When we do that we are essentially discriminating against certain farmers. I was in one country where the government will put fertilizer subsidy for maize growers but not for vegetable growers. Yet, how can you provide the family with balanced diet feeding them with carbohydrates alone?

Last point, extension workers across Africa and the developing world as a whole, are being subjected to all kinds of treatments from politicians, consultant, and what have you. If extension workers are organized into a profession I believe they are better able to function as such--by getting the professional training they need, for example. Now, there are all kinds of extension approaches out there yet, as my revered colleague, Neils Roling, has argued, if extension methods differ so much how can we ever get to a generalization of extension science?

Cultures may vary but extension methods need not vary with differences in culture. I hope we can debate this a little.

Robert Agunga
201 Ag Admin Building
2120 Fyffe Road
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210, 
USA.
e-mail: agunga.1 (at) osu.edu

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