Bean Production
I saw a piece in today's paper - El Nuevo Diario - that peaked my interest. If you want to read it in the original, it is here: Bean Production Nicaragua. (If your Spanish isn't that good, Google will translate it for you, or I can send you a Word document with both versions.) This caught my attention because the new communities we are working with are basically agricultural. On our last visit, we spent quite a bit of time walking through some bean and coffee fields with the owners of these plots. I am not sure how they determine where theirs starts and another stops, but it does seem to work. AKF has a lot of ideas about how to help farmers, and we have, in the past, visited two "farm schools" that use organic, sustainable technologies to assist farmers.
This article also describes a coordinated effort between a whole bunch of different funding and education and technical resources. I am sitting here in the middle of things, and it is very clear to me that there are lots of people here working on lots of things in very effective ways. There is great energy and hope in all of this. So I thought I would explore this one a bit to see what we can learn.
Participants
Here are the major players in this bean harvest improvement:
- CRS - seems to have had the lead role, since it says that AID was working under their coordination. They appear to be all over the place. A very good friend of mine worked in their headquarters for many years as their strategic planning resource.
- US AID - seems to have provided the funding and some oversight. US tax dollars at work - creatively. This one was a modest investment of $30,000, and it increased the local farm production of beans 100% - not bad. I guess I should not be surprised that this entity appears so frequently - the author of Culture Matters ran this enterprise for 15 years - he seems to have given it a good long term focus.
- TehcnoServe - an organization focused on economic development through business methods. They have a web site, and a small collection of success stories in Nicaragua. See: http://www.technoserve.org/. They seem to be the glue, and the facilitators of this whole thing.
- Escuelas de Campo de Agricultores, ECA - no website that I can find, and I am not sure if it is an organization or a methodology. But there are lots of publications out there that cite this group or method with success stories. The methodology is a way of teaching farmers how to use local technology to increase yields. They seem to do it in a very communitarian manner. The school is the field, there is no teacher, but rather a facilitator, the goal is to achieve consensus in the community about how to proceed, etc. They use words like: "This philosophy is carried out according to the following principles: utility, reality, ownership, equity, respectful solidarity, and environmental sustainability." Works for me!
- The Farmers. In this case, 38 farmers worked with the school on their farming methods. Now, with the help of TechnoServe, they are going to build a processing plant, and sell their services on how to do this to the other 200 farmers in town. This certainly sounds like sustainable development.
Who Did the Hard Work?
But how on earth did this actually come to be? Who engaged the farmers, and got them working together and interested in this kind of thing? Who found the funding, got the trainers there, coordinated the technical assistance, the business vision, etc.?
Here is another TechnoServe project with coffee and cocoa production: TechnoServe cocoa in Nicaragua. I like the way these things work - but how do they ever get off the ground? They seem to already have a cooperating group of farmers - a collective or cooperative of some kind. But that very work is the genius of this whole thing. Coops are relatively recent here - and the whole idea of cooperatively owning things is a very scary proposition for this culture. Trust with communal funds is one of those cultural factors that typically impedes development. There are other good examples of coops here that are doing very well. How did they actually get started? I really need to see a study of that process.
Maybe some of my readers (all 4 of you!) can point me to more details on how this works. At the moment, I have to assume that they all began in some way with the process that AKF is using for these communities. First you establish a relationship of trust, get to know the leaders, help them identify their problems, help them organize to solve them. There is a whole body of literature on this to which I am not privy. Ah, more reading. It's really about building up social capital - see Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone. http://www.infed.org/thinkers/putnam.htm.
Here are a couple of other resources I intend to pursue:
- Popular Education and Social Change in Latin America by Liam Kane - looks like one I will be reading.
- Development in Practice, a journal on the topic. Development in Practice. It looks like it provides free access to faculty - I should qualify.
- http://www.infed.org/community/b-comdv.htm - A nice overview of the topic, with an extensive bibliography, but it seems to be mostly focused on North America and Europe.
- http://www.infed.org/community/b-compar.htm This one talks a bit about Saul Alinsky - an old friend in this literature. Many other sources cited here, such as this one:
- Burkey, S. (1993) People First. A guide to self-reliant, participatory rural development, London: Zed Books. 243 + xix pages. Just what the sub-title says - a compilation of practice wisdom plus some framing. Chapters on understanding poverty; development; self-reliant participatory development; agents of change; the training and support of change agents; getting started; working with people; external relationships; savings, credits and inputs; objectives and principles.
An "Ideal" Sustainable? Project
In looking for more "community development" sources, I found this one that looks like an "ideal" project that our Rotarians would just love to be part of. It is a video of a "sustainable project" in Nicaragua:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y0AvDmLCH0. Expand the text on the bottom to read a bit more about it.
Doesn't that just make you want to get down there and join in? There is a bit more here on the history of this: http://www.soltranslators.com/lacd.html.
It looks like a wonderful undertaking, but, and I almost hesitate to say this - this is NOT a sustainable development. This clinic they built depends heavily on North American aid and resources and likely will be that way forever. It will do really good work, and help a lot of people - but the people are not doing it themselves. It is saving babies - and it feels good, looks good, etc. But it's not keeping them from being tossed in the river. It is very hard to swim upstream! Everything in us wants to just get in there and help.
The sewing coops the article cites may be an exception - but, long term, textile manufacturing is not a great idea. There is a huge factory right here in Ciudad Sandino that has been sitting idle for years because the company that built it, with an IMF loan, found it was cheaper to move textile manufacturing to China! Everything I read says that textile manufacturing will soon be so automated that it can be done anywhere - independent of the labor costs. Then what? My guess is you make it near where you want to sell it. It is usually chaper to ship the raw materials than the finished product.
Lots of thunder and lightening here. Another "unusual" November rainstorm. It's actually called "global wierding" for the weather patterns.
You are doing a great job of giving us a picture of life there. Thanks Carl. Reading between the lines it looks like 'Keeping it simple' is very important. Here is a clever simple idea. Use a plastic soda bottle as a roof sun reflector. Would this work in your area?http://www.wimp.com/lightenup/
ReplyDeleteWhat a cool idea. YES - that would work anywhere here! Very cool. How do I get that to these folk?
ReplyDeleteThanks.