1. Equitable partnerships for foresights
Input Gine Zwart,Oxfam
nd
2 Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD)
Punta del Este, Uruguay, Tuesday 30th of November 2012
“When it comes to hunger, the only acceptable number is zero” (Graziano da Silva,FAO
Director in his opening speech at the CFS Rome, October 2012) . The IFAD director, mr
Nwanze basically said the same in his opening speech on Sunday.
I guess nobody can disagree with this. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks today I
am going to make sure x number of people will sink further into poverty and be hungry.
The reality is that many of our actions actually do have that result. The reality is that the
number of people hungry has been stubbornly stagnant, whether it being 1 billion; 950
million or more or less, is not the point as mr Nwanze said in his opening speech.
Can research – can foresights play a role to make this number zero, to trigger real
change?
The chance of success will greatly increase if we manage to listen to those who are
hungry, the women and men who make up this figure, the many producers in the global
South.
How to get that done? I do not have a power point to show, I wanted to use the power
point of the future, a prezi but that was not allowed according to the strict rules of the
GCARD. So I will defy the marching orders and not use a presentation at all, and ask you
to listen.
My name is Gine Zwart, I work for Oxfam, an international development NGO and it is a
great honour and pleasure for me to have been offered this opportunity to pick up what
has been discussed today on equitable partnerships, share some of the practical
experiences of Oxfam and fortunately - be allowed to give some critical remarks.
There are hundreds of examples of multi stakeholder models, partnerships, participatory
research, etc. some more equitable than others - to share. The Global Foresight hub of
the GFAR (Global Forum for Agricultural Research) came across s a few examples and we
heard some today.
The words of this session: equitable partnerships is very close to my heart.
Here also many people will agree and have positive connotations with these words.
Equitable – Partnership
At the same time people start to wonder, think and shiver: Partnership - are we to get
into some kind of marital arrangements? How to organise this? It is far too expensive.
With who? There are millions of small-scale poor farmers: who represents who?
Equitable: why, what does that mean? What methods to use? And many more barriers or
fears pop up. I will deal with them one by one.
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2. Costs - Inclusiveness is too expensive
Then how expensive is it to sit under a tree? How expensive is it to listen?
On the 18th of June this year the CGIAR presented its Global Agricultural Research Agenda
to Improve the lives of the Poor while Protecting the Planet1 . A research agenda worth
$5 billion over five years. “CGIAR’s ambitious research agenda aims to reduce rural
poverty, improve the food security, health and nutrition of hundreds of millions of the
world’s poorest people, and ensure sustainable management of natural resources.” It
goes on: “Increasing the productivity of small‐scale farmers, who provide up to 80% of the
food supply in developing countries, is an essential part of the sustainable agricultural
equation and a top priority of the CGIAR.” “Everyone deserves the opportunity to have
access to safe, sufficient and nutritious food and economic security— as well as a healthy
planet,” these are not the words of an Oxfam CEO, it are the words of mr Rijsberman the
new CEO of CGIAR. Yesterday we heard many more of all these sweet words that break
our poor harts.
So there are myriad good intentions and there is a lot of money. At the same time it does
not cost that much to listen, to sit under a tree, to have a conversation. Money is not the
issue here. It is the will, the political will to take the effort to listen.
I have the chance of being part of a community, which might be called an equitable
partnership, a knowledge programme with 70 organisations working with millions of
farmers and millions of hectares producing healthy food and valuable knowledge costing
relatively little. Unity for diversity.
The work of these organisations is labour intensive; however it is extremely cheap if you
would be able to include all the benefits it reaps in terms of food security, assets and
institution building and the costs of poverty it puts to a stop. Examples within this
community show that interventions begin with the restoration of community
management. Next is the emphasis on local knowledge generated and refined to current
use over generations with no costs except for people talking. Modern science has proven
to give us some short term successes, but still needs to proof it can have success that
takes us for 1000 years to come. With this group of organisations’ we set out a future
vision of resilient communities without too much difficulty.
Despite a rich biodiversity of more than 5000 edible plants in the world well over half of
our food now comes from only three plants: rice, corn, wheat. To add to that 80% of the
export of these crops come from five countries (IFPRI) and are controlled by four
companies. For this community described above and for many others that is NOT the
future we want to live in. It is a very vulnerable and risky situation, much more
vulnerable, risky and un sustainable than many of the farming and food systems that are
now associated with these terms.
1
ref press release 18 June 2012 www.cgiar.org
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3. It is time to change the trend of the dominant narrative succeeding in attracting financial
resources at the expense of alternative narratives proposing alternative futures.
Smallholders are now the buzz word, also in the CGIAR. We hear it in every other
sentence. We do not need a foresight study to predict that if ecological agriculture, or
agricultural biodiversity or low external input sustainable agriculture is not taken up as a
research priority, the system will loose its credibility, not only among smallholder farmers,
but among the general public and eventually donors too.
The Foresight working group has come with a set of actions: The first set of actions would
not require additional resources from stakeholders, but the willingness to actively engage
some of their existing resources in strengthening the inclusion of farmers’ voices in on-
going foresight works.
The other set of actions for the establishment of a regular arena for dialogue between
foresight practitioners and farmer organizations, NGOs and CSO and a collective multi-
disciplinary multi-sector foresight project on the Farmers of the Future would require
additional resources or specific large-scale programme investment.
Complex - involving more people makes everything complex
Diversity is not the same as complexity.
The variety of people shapes systems, shape futures, so it is only logical to ensure a
variety of people is shaping foresight studies too. In fact diversity of voices being included
in any process can save us from gross mistakes and provide surprising solutions.
I would like to tell a short story about heaven and hell, I heard recently from Desmond
Tutu. It is based on a Jewish folk tale that tells the story of a man who wanted to
understand Heaven and Hell.
First, he travelled to Hell.
Here, row after row of table was piled high with platters of food yet the people seated
around the tables were starving to death. Each person held a full spoon but the spoon was
very long, so they could not bring the food to their mouths.
Next he went to Heaven.
The setting was the same here as in Hell – row after row of long tables laden with food and
all people had these long spoons. However the people in Heaven were happy and well fed.
He couldn’t work out why things were so different so he watched for a while.
As he watched, a man picked up his spoon and dug it into the dish before him. Then he
stretched across the table and fed the person across from him. The recipient thanked him
and returned the gesture.
It is as simple as that.
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4. Us not being able to see the simple solutions and immediately looking for technical
solutions and us not understanding certain systems we are not used to and calling these
systems complex and difficult surely should not be the problem of people living in these
systems.
Sometimes foresight can help us see that we don’t need longer or shorter spoons but can
simply change our behaviour.
Who to listen to? Who represents who?
There are millions of smallholder farmers. Exactly because there are millions it is good to
listen to even one. Many weak signals in fact are strong realities to people living in
poverty. Think of biofuels, land grab, GMOs, to name a few.
Europe has over 40 000 cooperatives or similar organisations, staffed by over 600 000
people (FAO). In Africa this figure is probably much higher. These producer organisations,
cooperatives, savings groups, labour exchange group, or women’s groups are not staffed,
most is voluntary and un paid work. They do have valuable knowledge to share and have
mechanisms to do so and to mobilise people. Asia surely has staggering figures as the
level of organisation through self-help groups in e.g. India is extremely high. All this is
social capital that can be built on and listened to.
Foresight is dominated by western or northern views of the future, from scientists in
developed and emerging countries, with limited inclusion of voices from other sectors
and other regions. Boosting agricultural productivity seems to be the inevitable solution
and most foresights come to an unavoidable growth path towards the future. Yields are
only part of the range of ecological, social and economic benefits delivered by farming
systems: so why this pre occupation with yields? The question one wonders about: to
what extent is this analysis based on an underlying world view that is not made explicit? 2
A world view that is dominated by individual ownership and capital accumulation as being
the highest achievable and desirable.
If we were to take the world view of the fast majority of people who are actually non-
western we might get different foresights. Cyclical as opposed to linear; abundance and
trust as opposed to scarcity and dis trust; living as a privilege that comes with certain
duties instead of living as a right that comes with privileges, people as part of nature as
opposed to nature to be there to serve people, deriving rights, and explaining ones
existence, from relationships and not from property are just a few fundamental
differences that come to mind that would influence the outcome of any foresight or
research dominated by non-western world views.
Robin said: We cannot predict the future: we can create it. The question is: WHO creates
it?
2
see also Erik Mathijs brief no. 01 : Sustainable food consumption and production in a resource constrained
world.
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5. Partnership
Key words for partnerships are respect, trust and mutually empowering. For any
knowledge intensive process trust is key while at the same time if it is not empowering
there is not reason to be in a partnership. Small -scale producers are not form Mars, they
are not aliens, they are people like you and me and they need to be able to trust the
partner they work with. History has given them reasons enough to be careful with sharing
their trust.
Only eight out of the foresights studied by the GFAR foresight group specifically indicate
foresight as a learning or capacity building process for many of the participants.
The capacity to change policy and orient actions is very much linked with the demand for
foresight from a decision-maker, and the ability of foresight leaders to directly interact
with decision makers in the policy setting process.3
How to make it equitable
Food and agriculture has become a global issue of importance to us all. That is relatively
new. It is the first time in history that the melting of a glacier in Nepal has something to
do with the bread we ate at lunch. It is the first time in history that food can be put into a
car; the first time in history that fuel and food prices are so clearly linked. 40% of the
USA’s maize harvest goes into the fuel tank of our cars. It has huge impact on the food
prices, yet it has very little impact on the fuel price.
We seem not to be able to react to this new reality very well, despite all the rhetoric of
business as usual not being good enough anymore. We are facing a number of crises at
the same time; many people are starting to agree. However most talk is as if it is some
kind of accidental oversight or lack of research, rather than an outcome of historical
processes. At the root of the multiple crises lies a power imbalance.
It is both common sense and common (economic) knowledge that money is power. So in
order to make any relationship more equitable: I would say follow the money and see
where the changes can be made and see why it is difficult to talk about equitable
partnerships in many cases.
Having said that the internet has this great potential of democratising and giving
opportunities for more equity in knowledge gathering, sharing, generating, testing ideas
and feeding into research and foresight agenda’s.
I am taking the opportunity to advertise the Future of Agriculture on-line debate that we
as Oxfam will be holding the first two weeks of December. Farmers, cso leaders, ps actors
and the directors of the FAO, IFAD and IFPRI have all been writing 1500 word essay
answering four different What if questions and these will be used to start a debate on the
3
Chapter 1 of the report “the voice of Smallholders in Shaping Priorities, chapter 3 of the report on the State
of foresight in food and agriculture and the roads toward improvement, prepared for the CGARD 2012
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6. Future of agriculture in over 40 countries at the same time in French Spanish and English.
On the internet a voice counts rather than ones position. Please feel invited to join this
conversation (www.oxfam.org/grow).
Complexity and diversity are assets and it is simple we need not to un tie the Gordian
knot, we should rather look for complex and diverse - Gordian - solutions.
I like to belief that if the man in Tutu’s story was a woman, she would have taken the tale
a step further than just to understand what was happening. She would have connected
the people from Hell and Heaven, as making connections is one of the many core
competences of women world-wide.
Thank you for listening
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