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

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This is Jacques Fremy, from South Africa, a senior specialist for the development and management of skills training systems. I am a past member, from 1987 to 1998, of the World Bank team who had been supporting the cost- effective implementation of the Agricultural Services Initiative of the World Bank for Sub Saharan Africa. Born in 1942, I grew up on a family farm in a small French rural village and have a lifelong experience of family farmers especially after decades of hands-on capacity building/training-projects in Africa at the service of department managers and technicians, trainers and trainees, family farmers and many other types of village food producers. Since 1967, in and for Africa, my special training and management responsibilities included a "rural animation" project in Niger, an "integrated rural development" project in Cameroon, education and training projects and components and agricultural services projects for about 30 African countries. From 1987 to 1998 and through the coaching and training of about 8.000 national trainers, managers, engineers, scientists and technicians from about 30 countries, we have assisted our public and private partners, colleagues and farmers groups for the renaissance, rehabilitation, reinvention, re-organisation, integration and consolidation of their National Agricultural services. 

Family and village farmers have provided food subsistence for humanity for 10.000 years but too many have been unable to survive or to evolve in a viable, profitable and sustainable manner. For many various reasons millions of "family farmers" have now become endangered species who are under immediate threat despite the evidence that toxic industrial farming technologies and chemical food factories can never provide food safety and security while being in fact a major threat to the environment in toxic partnership with transnational industrial/chemical companies for the mining and urban sectors. The huge and permanent fragmentation of efforts during the last 50 years or so has resulted in the destruction of the vital chain of knowledge and skills for family farmers. This vital chain has been broken so many times that it has already badly damaged the traditional and institutional memory for most nations and societies. 

Yet, and more than any time before in human history, we badly need the millions of family farmers as much as they first need for themselves those precious skills to survive and/or to grow safely into viable, profitable and sustainable practices. Only the family farmers and their organic practices can help us to remain the only "free-range food producers" who are credible to produce free-range food thanks to their own production of the BLACK GOLD" "HUMUS", which is in their own hands if we assist them to produce it on a gigantic scale. And they can do it starting tomorrow morning. At the village and local market levels, the family farmers would secure much better and stable incomes together with village food consumers who would also benefit from safe and cheaper food products. Immediate and long-term benefits would be shared by the vast majority of poor food producers and food consumers. Well-defined, qualified and complementary rural services would contribute to a much better quality of life for all. In fact, cities are not sustainable because there are the very greedy engines and polluting machines producing billions of hungry consumers and wasteful customers.

For 400 years in Europe, the lessons and skills learnt by family farmers have been endless thanks to the consistent growth of public agricultural education, training, extension and research services/systems (AETERS). Thanks to better information, knowledge, skills, motivation and stimulation, our family farmers and village farmers could grow from being mainly or only subsistence farmers into becoming more modern farmers and commercial farmers. But we have to know that the problem for the future of human kind started with the industrial revolution. Before the 1950s our millions of family farmers could grow our food organically and ecologically. After the 1950s, they were pushed into buying toxic farming technologies which helped most of them to be in permanent debt, to disappear or to die. The biggest drama of all time is the continuing death of thousands of villages which had been sustainable when family farmers, larger families and relatives had been nurturing, protecting and renewing our natural resources and the quality of our environment.

Everybody suffers from rural desertification, rural migrations, unaffordable urbanisation and pollution, socio economic inequities, youth unemployment, waste contamination and modern social pests and diseases in our jungle cities. Today our modified economists and "private sales scientists" have replaced "the quality of life indicators" by "the cost of living indicators" as if human beings had already been transformed into numbers and statistics which are very useful for the global village traders, food speculators and human predators. We urgently need to rebuild the lifelines for our millions of family food producers and food consumers who could still protect themselves and the rest of us for food safety and food security through the revival of our organic family farmers and agro-ecological villages.

Well-educated and well-skilled family farmers are critical in the determination of other adequate rural services which would finally be efficient to answer their priority needs, gaps, constraints and concerns. The competition for survival and constructive socio-economic transformation at lowest possible costs and optimum rates of returns on investments would start to be observed and measured when "free public front-line extension technicians" and "best subject-matter extension specialists" are properly organized and qualified for being really accessible and available at the village and farm levels. This must be done if we all want to witness sound, participative and useful interactions between services, family farmers and small interest village groups under a regular and systematic monthly or bimonthly work schedule. 

Without good public training and extension services the researchers are isolated in the towers of paper publications and simply become useless for family farmers, village citizens and food consumers as well. Can you imagine a restaurant when there would be no waiter between the kitchen and the customers or any clinic or hospital without qualified nurses? Such restaurants and clinics would be bankrupt in two twos and rightly so. 

But the vast majority of poor family farmers and food consumers urgently need to be respected at long last for their priority needs to be attended to efficiently by their own public services. Please observe the proliferation of project cemeteries and NGOs when good public services cannot do their jobs properly because they are turned by you know who into captive and servile bureaucracies. Together the public and integrated AETERS could play a major role to advise family food farmers but also in guiding/advising other rural services, farmers organisations, village and community associations, credit banks and cooperatives, etc. 

We must avoid the catastrophic mergers of agricultural services with education and health services and together with other key services that are specialized in providing technical and financial support for rural infrastructure, collective equipment and other rural services that are specialized for water, energy, housing, health and education infrastructures and services. The quality of the people coming out of the best primary schools at village level accompanied by best professional AETERS would of course ensure the delivery of services for the best interest of most citizens in rural areas while creating the survival conditions for forced migrants to urban and periurban concrete jungles. 

Rural women, old timers, traditional leaders, FAO, UNESCO, the World Bank and other respected and specialized national, bilateral and international Institutions still have the INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY which could help rural  communities, parliaments, governments and national societies for playing a vital role for food safety, security and sovereignty and for the protection of our environment as climate changes are the next most critical world challenges for humankind.

Jacques Fremy.
Special advisor for AETERS for small farmers and sustainable villages.
PO. Box 2948, 
Parklands 2121, 
Johannesburg, 
South Africa
e-mail: jfremy (at) iafrica.com 

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