Towards equitable benefits from agricultural interventions

The process of Agricultural Research for Development—beyond its technological outputs—could help to understand and create the conditions under which disadvantaged people can participate in and benefit from agricultural development.

Background

This research focuses on how agricultural research for development engages with social equity, in relation to technological intervention. We approached the topic from different angles, combining systematic literature review, a case study in northern Ghana, and scenario simulation.

Results

Indifferent to difference?

Research on the impacts of agricultural technology interventions is dominated by comparisons of adopters and non-adopters. By contrast, in this literature study, we critically reviewed how technology evaluation studies assess differentiated impacts in smallholder farming communities. We searched systematically for studies which present agricultural technology impacts disaggregated for poor and relatively better-off users (adopters).

Our objective was to identify and understand differentiated impacts of agricultural technology interventions. Our findings were the following:

• The number of studies that assessed impact differentiation was startlingly small: we were able to identify only 85, among which only 24 presented empirical findings.
• These studies confirm an expected trend: absolute benefits are larger for the better-off, and large relative benefits among the poor are mostly due to meagre baseline performance.
• Households are primarily considered as independent entities, rather than as connected with others directly or indirectly, via markets or common resource pools.
• Explanations for impact differentiation are mainly sought in existing distributions of structural household characteristics.

Operationalising social equity perspective in Research for Development

Agricultural sustainability assessments often overlook social equity. This study examined the integration of social equity in a large agricultural Research for Development (R4D) programme in northern Ghana, through a case study approach.

Equity was operationalised in different ways:

• As trade-off analysis: a desire to express inequity in metrics, alongside metrics in other domains (productivity, economic, environmental) privileged quantitative metrics that could not capture social relations, drivers of social difference, or address fairness.
• As technology scaling: this objective problematised inequity as a constraint to adoptability. Typologies were proposed for technology tailoring and targeting—but statistical constructions of social difference were difficult to identify in the field, adopt by scaling partners, and did not capture the dynamic nature of farm types.
• As a transformation pathway: informed by Gender Transformative Approaches and engaging social scientists, methods were explored to challenge inequities by revealing them, discussing desirability of change and how this might be achieved. Essential were organisational and individual awareness and learning.

What is a viable farm size?

In this study, we explored what is a “viable farm size”—in other words, the farm area that is required to attain a “living income” which sustains a nutritious diet, housing, education and health care. We used survey data from three contrasting sites in the East African highlands—Nyando (Kenya), Rakai (Uganda), and Lushoto (Tanzania) to explore viable farm sizes in six intensification scenarios, and compare these with current farm sizes. These simulations served to explore the limits of technological optimism for reaching viable incomes among smallholder farmers.