 So we'll go ahead and collect a few questions now. Yeah, Eric, go ahead. Yeah, Mike's coming, so be patient. I have two questions, Kuma comments. The first one for Alain. And just to give you a little background, I was raised in an era where planning was a good word and not a bad word. And as I understand it from Alain, it's really imperative at this stage to have a much better understanding of the demand-driven technology issues in order to design appropriate supply-driven technologies. So there's a sequential matter here. And what I was trying to think about is what is the best strategy to design such a modalities that would merge the requirements of demand-driven technologies and supply-driven technologies. And it occurred to me that it requires very different skills. You would require the skills of agricultural economists, rural sociologists to know much more about the extent to which activities during the season where production is not ongoing between harvesting and planting, what would be appropriate tasks that could be done. This requires certain skills, economists, sociologists. At the same time, these individuals should be able to also talk to the production agricultural types. So what this course for would be a team approach. And this is something I've never quite understood. The physical sciences and the biological sciences are way ahead of the social sciences in terms of merging different skills within a team to come up with solutions to these problems. So if I have any recommendation here, it would be to see how far one could go in coming up with an appropriate strategy to merge these two things. Then a very quick point on Catherine's presentation. Would you agree that there might be some kind of lexicographic ordering when it comes to decisions with regard to agricultural production that the male essentially has the first word? And then the woman, the spouse as I understand it, who typically manages financial matters would then with whatever residual is left over make decisions. This is a question mark. And then the final point is you didn't say very much about the decision-making process between the spouses. And I think it would be very interesting to understand better what is going on. Does the male simply make the decision and imposes it on his spouse or is it an actual dialogue that leads to a decision? I think one needs to understand this in order to perhaps come up with tentative solutions to this issue. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. There's a lot there. Let's take one more question. We'll just stay on this side. We have time to get over to this side in the next round. So take one or two more over here. Okay. Thank you very much. My question is on Catherine's presentation. Catherine, I just want to ask if we change the context of the experiment to a situation whereby a man has more than two, three, four wives. Do you think we see how the same conclusion from your experiment? Thank you. Okay. One more. Let's just go to the... We'll work our way back. Go ahead, Per. Yeah. Thank you very much. Pierre-Pierre-Pierre-Vaness and Cornel. I have a question to any of the panel members, and it has to do with rapidly changing land tenure and the possible impact on technology adoption. Even though the data are somewhat shaky still, it's my understanding that in several African countries, absentee land ownership has increased dramatically during the last 10 years. And I'm referring both to and within country investment and also the international what I have been referring to as landwrapping, but you can use whatever term you like. My question is, has that change in land ownership or user rights affected adoption of technology and has it affected productivity of the land and labor? Okay. Let's go to the panel. We have plenty of time, so we'll get to your questions, but we'll open it up. Who wants to go? Let me answer Eric's point. I think this is well taken. We would like to go to a more demand-driven approach. I think any class you take in BISAD on entrepreneurship and design would tell you that this is the starting point. You don't start with what you can do. You start with what your customers want. And the hardest part of design is precisely to identify what is it that those customers particularly want? And typically the way the approach that is being proposed is to organize an interdisciplinary team including psychologists and others who kind of probe into what is it that people would like to have. This concept of the sort of extreme non-adopters is a useful focus point. There are people whom you think should obviously be adopting what you are offering and yet are not doing so. And so those may be kind of your marginal future adopter provided you would do a kind of marginal change to what you are currently offering in terms of technology. But the point is that you have to be able to maintain an interdisciplinary dialogue not only among the scientists but also among the agents, namely the farmers and others. So that's why I spent quite a bit of time looking back at what the CGIR and others have been doing in terms of participatory approaches to research. And what you find is that they have been important attempts but they are usually quite limited. And typically they start with the wrong premise which is that the scientist knows the answer and is going to be able to sort of debug from what the farmers are going to say which of what the scientists can do is going to be applied. So in the end it is still supply driven from an agenda you would say instead of being broadly open, right? What we would want to do is the opposite to say let's take an interdisciplinary team. What is the issue? The issue is poverty, right? So the issue is not yield or fertilizer. It's what you could do with the assets that you currently have in order to improve the situation of this household which is basically affected by poverty which has to be defined but a solution which is to be jointly taken. So I think we are that far. The question is institutionally how do we arrange it that the CG had been importantly vested into farming systems and the CL and participatory research. What it has largely backed out is that it is not cost effective and so one has gone to sort of the Green Revolution type approaches where you have economies of scale by definition which leaves sub-Saharan Africa behind as Willis was saying a lot of heterogeneity the need for customization hence the need to tailor solutions to local situation but there is the issue of cost effectiveness and that's where I think we are still looking for well how to kind of bring the two together. We want more customization but we also want to be more cost effective than it has been in the past. Maybe on your question Per I think somebody in the room was better qualified to answer referring to Klaus but my understanding is partly also Klaus's work that many of, so when you get these larger land holdings that in terms of spillover effect for technology adoption that it hasn't been so big. There was one recent paper presented also preliminary results for medium sized farms in Tanzania so it's not published yet but they were kind of coming up with some more positive results sort of as I was alluding to that where there are areas with more medium sized farms there may be more mechanization so they may demand, they may have enough land and then sort of start to do machinery services in addition there are also even some insights that it may actually increase on the output price that may lead to a higher price for the small holders because more traders were coming so there's more volume to be gathered. These are preliminary results that's why I say don't take on the medium sized farm some space to watch but I think Klaus maybe you can add to that. I think it's interesting on the demand side the value chain is sort of coming in in a different way as I concluded in this fifth message for staple crops there are some opportunities for value chain and I think they're less than for many of the cash crops or the export crops where there's more value added but supplying the cities RISE I think is a very good example where there's clearly a lot more value to be added by providing the right RISE for domestic consumption so there in a way then it starts from the market which is what the urban consumer wants the distributor needs a RISE they can sell so then the question is okay how do I get the mill to procure the RISE which I can actually sell and then the mill how can I make the farmer grow the RISE which I can sell to the distributor and then to the customer and so there's a huge coordination problem which is sort of these chains are trying to come up and the government sort of trying to help either by supporting elements in the chain this could be the mill this could be the distributor this could be direct financing direct financing or simple coordination interprofessional organizations etc so I think there you do get that element of a demand driven it's catering to the demand we need a certain product at a certain volume of a certain quality now if you bring that to millet bring that to sorghum to bring that to some other staple crops it may be less clear than sort of these RISE is a bit of a cash and food crop at the same time so yeah I think there is more scope for that the value chains is potentially one is sort of naturally in a way addressing that a little bit so the question I think is also more for the public sector what technologies where do you invest, is it mechanization is that the technology we should is that what the farmers want what type of crops etc so that could be more demand driven I think so on the question of how do household really make decision what is the process of decision making how it happens I think there is really a lot to be studied and learned I think we know very little on exactly how the negotiation goes on and I think what makes it particularly difficult is also something that we observe in this project is that there is a large heterogeneity so you cannot say there is one model that applies like the husband would be the first mover and then it's very hard because there are definitely different models out there even in this very homogeneous context and this is also you know when we you talk about polygamy I think we know so we already know quite little as to how do these nuclear household functions but for polygamist household we know even even less one thing is for sure is that even in the case of a polygamist household I think it would be wrong to look only at the preference of the household head especially if you if you study the type of activity that women engage in because one thing that characterize from the data we have from Burkina Faso this type of household is the fact that women are quite independent in how they will manage their own income generating activity especially in polygamist union where there seems to have even more independence so I think there's actually a lot to be learned about how our preference aggregated and decision taken within households. I don't think we have the right answer yet in many developing country contexts. Let's take a few more. Go ahead back here in the corner. Thank you. This crucial topic. I think that in the past there were one or two arguments which have been put forward on why technological modernization in Africa is slow. One is that the R&D institutions they're dealing with Sorghum, Millet, Cassava and Maze basically. With the exception of Maze these are crops that are not grown in the West. The Green Revolution which succeeded with wheat and rice and corn as well basically were crops that were grown in the West. I remember that one of the arguments was that supplied in your own terms supply side research and development actually are weak because there's not much support by the international organizations while there was in Mexico and in Southeast Asia and so on and so forth. So is it still true? Is it still viable? Another story was that at the University of Amsterdam one of my PhD worked there three years and there was this professor Kaiser who said that Africa is not increasing food production because basically there is ferrous soils and so Africa has bad soils and water is not like in Bangladesh that meter down under the ground but 100 meter is very expensive to get so that is unsuitable and is it now if that is the case even supplied driven modernization becomes very costly and so that it's not surprising that the farms won't adopt it and the third point is that like Willis mentioned is an entire stream I mean there's a long chain of problems I mean if you have the wrong exchange rate I mean this is what has happened in Africa for 20 or 30 years people in the cities particularly in coastal cities they eat pasta, polenta and western food which are subsidized and cheap and they have a very little time and require very little time in processing now so now that is not what you've been discussing but again I mean that perhaps the exchange rate maybe should come in and finally to you and the commentator one proposal it is true there are many factors Africa is different, is heterogeneous and so on and so forth why methodologically not doing one of these natural experiments now one of the experimental countries could be Ethiopia Ethiopia has been trying to increase yields and it has attacked the problem on all fronts and now I don't know which one is the other country for the country factor and then you can see which are the factors which are binding the yields increase, thank you Jean-Philippe I'm Pekka Jamsen I would like to ask Mr. Professor de Jean-Vierre because I think he is one of the contributors of the World Development Report of 2008 which talks quite favorably about farmers organizations could you say anything about the role of farmers organizations in poverty reduction when thinking of wider from the technological point of view that's a great short question yeah we'll go to here de Jean-Philippe and then we'll go here and then we'll do a round over yeah just a common other question the intervention and the presentation by Alain was in a sense quite discouraging for me because it reminded me of the kind of analysis we were making 30 years ago especially when India wanted to have the magical recipe for developing the agriculture of Africa because it had climatic conditions especially in semi-arid areas and rain-fed areas that could be helpful for Africa which ended up in a total failure and I have the impression that many of the concerns that we have highlighted were those to which we concluded were important at that time at least quite a number of them especially regarding the need and the opportunity outside of the peak agricultural season and also the problem of the specificity of micro-climatic conditions in Africa and the need for specificity but here you are mentioning a concern that seems to me extremely difficult to surmount this idea that is it cost-effective you know you don't have any scale economies but there is one thing at least I think that hasn't been touched that seems to me to be quite important when I think of the comparator Asian case if I believe you know the kind of approach and analysis and conclusion of people like Hayami and his team his work in Japan, Philippines etc he was essentially saying that many of the coordination problems that you have mentioned were solved by local leaders, big farmers emerging gradually then coming to shifting to becoming a middleman, collecting agricultural producing, transmitting input and technical progress and selling into the cities etc which I found always a fascinating ladder kind of story and that does not happen in Africa or in very rare circumstances and here we don't talk even about farmer organizations really andogenous emergence of the private market agents and why why is it so difficult in Africa and also what is the political economy of it behind because is it possible for business leader at local level to emerge being unimpered by state institutions etc so I think this is an aspect that should be kind of addressed to in addition to farmer organization one last question right here yes Jan Lo from the International Potato Center for Dr. Dujonvry and Luke you should have mentioned quickly in passing extension services and maybe the need for new models or is it the need to back to basics when I travel in China I'm always amazed at the very wavy line between public and private sector and massive extension services being used from the public side to support value chain development so you can't have adoption without access so I'd like to hear your opinions on the returns to public sector extension investment in Africa where you think it's been successful and do we need more of just the back to basics right panel I don't think it's all doom and gloom I said Maze for example Africa by and large has remained self-sufficient in Maze and in addition to some inter-regional trade so I think this is a crop where there has been quite a bit of progress even though there's still a 2 ton per hectare on average but there has been quite a bit of response there's also been a supply response in rice not enough to keep up with the growing demand but there has been a substantial supply response so I don't think it's all doom and gloom the point we're trying to make here is it's not enough and it's not enough to sort of we draw attention from it which you sort of start to see slipping maybe a little bit and I think that's one key message that's sort of I think a lens point on the maybe more emphasis on demand side issues I think if you talk about examples Ethiopia has been mentioned Rwanda has also been mentioned who would have thought that Rwanda would have managed to double its yields in a period of 5 to 10 years it's concerted efforts Ethiopia that didn't look as the island of fertility either I mean it was a country of hunger and famines Ethiopia has dramatically increased its productivity yeah you can debate here and there the numbers whether it's actually the high high numbers which are put up but clearly there has a lot of progress that has been made now Ethiopia is also a country which has invested massively in extension agents there is an extension agent there are three extension agents per district for the different activities it's crops and livestock etc a natural resource management so there has been a very concerted effort and I would argue that still up to today it hasn't really been tried I mean despite yet there would be more attention etc but it hasn't really been tried there is some supply response but it's simply not enough yet and I think in Asia many more concerted efforts have been done as well and that then leaves out many of the mineral rich countries especially oil rich countries which basically their public spending on agriculture is even lower in terms of shares at least so they're not even trying as much as the others so there's still scope to do more despite the big challenges yes there's more risk there's more heterogeneity etc but I think one can still invest more in those countries which have around in Ethiopia come to mind but Ghana has made a lot of progress as well Burkina so there are countries where more has been more astride or one tries in a different way and yields go up but then it's not sustainable Zambia yields have gone up quite a bit but in a way that's not sustainable same with Malawi let me start with the point that Andrea was making that there's a lack of investment in the tropical crops in a sense and where success has been achieved is more where there was interest on the part of the West to see investment being made in corn and wheat and rice etc but not so much in the tropical crops although SIP has done some important work on sweet potatoes but what we see today is a divestment of research capacity in the African context and so we would like to see results namely technology being adopted but we don't want to invest in technology generation and what we see is that what's available it does not correspond to what is needed for technology adoption so what we witness is a contradiction which is simply led by what donors and governments are doing that is we refuse to invest significantly in research in agricultural research when we do it we do it in a way which is not prone to sustaining using the research budgets for research purposes that what the donors do in using the CGIR is basically use it to support projects that the donors would like to be to be developed the attempt to raise the core support to the CGIR has not been successful and there's basically a divestment of investing into basic research in the CGIR system so what we would like to see Andrea is absolutely correct here we would like to see adoption of technologies for the tropical environments namely the kind of farming systems that we see in Africa and at the same time we just refuse to invest in the what it would take to produce the technologies for those environments right on the producers organization I think it's absolutely key small farmers are not going to do it on their own the context is quite often a sad story of the cooperative movement that has been used for political control more than to serve farmers needs so we need really to reinvent what kind of organization would be effective in this particular context but you look for example in India the use of self-help group and the the coalitions of self-help group into larger producers corporations in order to mediate the relationship between farmers and the markets through the assembly and the contracting at the higher scale shows that the importance of using collective action in order to reach the market and this is something which Willis can maybe say more about this but which is still largely to be done in the African context in part because of the kind of history of what has been happening with the cooperative movement. What Jean-Philippe was saying I think is quite interesting that is why is coordination not happening at the local and why is coordination not driven more by for example large farmers who can take into their own hands kind of the management including the subcontracting with smaller farmers in order to deliver to supermarkets or to agro exporters or agro industries this is where maybe the issue of property rights that Pierre was mentioning and that Willis have been mentioning is quite important right the only five percent of the land in Africa today is under kind of complete property rights. You may not need a complete property right in the Napoleonic sense in order to have security of property rights and to support investment they are kind of all kinds of forms of secure property rights which are left to be invented that would deliver the kind of security needed for investment purposes but in order to have the sort of local coordinating leadership that you would like to see happen what needs to have security of property rights at least to a sufficient level that you are going to sustain investment support investment this is still to a very significant extent missing. Then I think the seed question about extension is also quite good right the classical models of extension are not cost effective we can't have extensionists or lead farmers who are going to take the initiative of go talk to every single other farmers right so there are other forms of experimenting with how to deliver extension. Extension after the end of ISNA in a sense has been the abandoned child in the CG system there has been extension is always criticized for what it's doing instead of being encouraged and experimented with and innovated with new approaches right what we have been working on with especially with IRI in India are two things one is to use the agents in the value chains as the extensions agent so for example the agor agor dealers as being the person why not do extension to the agor dealers. The agor dealers have invested interest in seeing that the seeds that are made available are actually going to be bought by the farmers who are their clients right so you can actually use the agor dealers as kind of massive multiplicators of information which is being conveyed to them with their particular clients and the other is you are mentioning the fact that a lot of the extension work has been to try to use the social networks and to try to place information identify the seeds we are starting with this in representation maybe what you do is to reverse the system to say what you want to do is to create a buzz in the information system in the social network that there is something new to be learned from talking to others and not try to spoon feed from the seed farmers the farmers to whom you are seeding planting the information expecting that they are going to go forward and communicate the information to others but create a demand for this information and then the farmers will know where to go because you go to the large farmers you go to the extension agents if it is the case you go to people whom you know you are being informed but what is key is to create the idea that there is something new so a change in culture in a sense towards innovation which is going to induce mobilization of the farm community in seeking information as opposed to waiting for the information to be delivered and that could be quite more effective so I kind of agree with you that the extension system has been left behind to a very significant extent to all models that we know Gersholt Federer than others have been criticized and do not work and there is a need for experimenting with other ways of doing it Ok, next round of questions let's just start at the back and we'll move the mic forward here and get three or four more questions Thank you, my name is Guto Wajesa from University of Helsinki My question goes to Katrin when you addressed the intra-household decision making dynamics you didn't mention about the size of the household itself maybe the children and in fact to me it also occurs that even the ages of the children would matter somehow how do you take care of that issue that is my question, thank you The next one here We have two together, right there Thank you, my name is Anna Taivalmo I have also a question to Katrin regarding your last question where you asked that if we should insist that the extension both men and women are participating extension in households and I think that there is a simple answer here that it's yes because there is a gender gap in agriculture FAO and World Bank have estimated that the yields would be 20 to 30 percent higher if the women had the same access to resources technology, land, finance and the extension than men So my question is that have you look at the women's economic empowerment within households more broadly because that all, the women's economic power are not only making decisions on investment but also how to use income that you get from the invest have effects on decision making capacity in the family Thank you I'm rather glad that our discussion gave us a broad overview and highlighted the fact that Africa is a huge and diverse place or area and therefore solutions that work in one place might not work equally in another I'd like to provide some observations and perhaps you can interpret those even as questions one is that production can be increased of land use agricultural land can be increased either by intensification or by expansion of a subsistence agriculture now if you do the latter it would mean deforestation and degradation of land in large areas and this can result in adverse environmental impacts so that's a very serious consideration so that we should really be concentrating on intensification of agriculture rather than devastation now when you consider that if you increase the technology by introducing more efficient and new technology then you reduce the amount of manpower or in terms of personnel that you need to manage these farms or even small farms which would mean that you have to find alternative employment for those who are displaced and these displaced individuals might not be highly trained and therefore they cannot earn enough to become equal to others in our quest for equalizing inequality so therefore the labor on the farm would have to be higher quality labor because they would have to run the machines and repair them and here you need training programs for that purpose which will take time now coming back to a country I love very much Tanzania if you increase the area of land in Tanzania it means you will destroy wetlands and you have to count the disadvantages and the costs of doing that because wetlands are very important Tanzania is basically an arid country and wetlands are very important for sustaining wildlife resources and as you already know wildlife resources and environments provide tremendous revenue from tourism so if you take away the water supply to the wildlife you will diminish wildlife populations drastically and this will also be added to by the impact of poaching on the wildlife and therefore you might find that your increased income from agriculture tremendously diminishes the income from tourism secondly when you intensify the agriculture you have to consider the impact of pesticides on the intensification and the consequent pollution and if you pollute water it's very serious for human supply of water the other aspect of Tanzania is that about 70% of Tanzania is unfit for rain-fed agriculture and also because of the presence of taxi-fly which gives Nagana in cattle and sleeping sickness in man and you can also consider Kenya where more than 50% of the area is unsuitable for rain-fed agriculture now in Kenya only recently it was reported that they are trying to afforest an area as large as Costa Rica why because that size area has been degraded due to collection of firewood and there are other repercussions concerning wildlife concerning climate change concerning rainfall water supply etc etc so these are the complications actually which arise from just discussing and focusing on intensification of agriculture by technology expansion of agricultural land use and things like that thank you let's go one last question right here very short question I would like to know whether Africa can frock leap to adopt precision agriculture thank you just one thing that I was just thinking that demand-driven technology adoption and there I was thinking of connecting to your household decision for technology adoption so basically in agriculture the technologies are very different some are divisible and some are indivisible say for example the water pumps which are or tractors right so from demand-driven side so for some of the technology say laser technology which is family adoption ownership that can happen but for large one what can happen is that there may be entrepreneurs who are giving the service so people do not want the technology the bulk technology to own but they want the irrigation service they want the water pumping service so the service-driven entrepreneurs can actually provide the service and not the technology ownership this has actually happened in many of the states in India where they were late adopter of the technology and they really did not want to participate in the green revolution at the beginning so they went for a service-driven technology service provided to others okay thank you so we only have really a few minutes left but what I want to do is first ask Willis he's been patient as a discussant so first if Willis has anything to contribute there's no way the panelists will be able to respond to all those questions that will give them a few last minutes here but the discussion can continue over coffee but Willis? Well thank you very much I think we benefited a lot from the questions which came from the floor and opened new areas for for further work but I think the issue of incentives also matter if you give incentives to any individual be it in Africa or anywhere they will respond accordingly so if effective incentives are given be they the small-scale farmers or large-scale farmers in Africa they will respond appropriately as it were then I need also to say that collective action is very important in areas of small-scale farming because if they don't collect them I mean bring themselves together it is going to be very expensive to give services to them and in fact even in information so once the information is there and collective action arrangements can be made I think there's one area where productivity increases in small-scale farms can be achieved and lastly we have to avoid coordination failure whatever we do if there's no lack of coordination then of course everything will come to zero as it were thank you very much thank you so panelists anyone dying to give a last 30-second response to those complex questions Catherine you had a few to you why don't you take the last few seconds okay just very quickly so unfortunately I think I don't have a great answer so yes in many complex households there are many more than two adults there could be adult children living in the same household also having some decision-making power how to integrate how to make sense of the decision-making process in that case is even more complex and I think there are very few efforts trying to understand this there's so on the on this question about decision-making in various areas within the same household I think this is actually a great question we often summarize things by speaking of a bargaining power for two people but if you at least see a bargaining power in different sphere let's say you get very different answers and I think we don't again we don't really know how to aggregate this one project we are working on in Cameroon actually suggests that what we sometimes take as a lack of cooperation like you know different people managing the own sphere may sometimes be actually some kind of delegation model which is not necessarily inefficient and this is yes I think so this is again a project that is going on but I think this may offer a new view on the way this complex household may function and the type of household I've talked about today are really nuclear so it's already quite complicated in those simple households with that if you have questions then I feel your pain because I have 18 questions that I didn't get to ask but we will have time over coffee and elsewhere let's thank them for their presentations in discussion