IRIN Focus on communal farming project

While heavy rains have pounded southern Cote d’Ivoire in recent weeks, wells in the northern area of Bodokro are virtually dry. A canal built recently in the locality may have to wait a few weeks before it collects its first rainwater. The dry spell has ruined this year’s peanut harvest and threatens to have a similar effect on the soy bean crop in Bodokro, some 60 km northwest of Cote d’Ivoire’s second largest city, Bouake. The greatest hope for farmers there is to have a constant source of water, the accountant of the men’s farming cooperative in Bodokro, N’Guessan Kouakou Augustin, told IRIN in Bouake, 350 km north of Abidjan. Insufficient rainfall is one of two major obstacles farmers face in northern Cote d’Ivoire. The second is a lack of modern equipment that would allow them to work more efficiently. Members of Bodokro’s men and women’s farming cooperatives have received some hand-held tools from the World Food Programme (WFP) but they would like to work with machines so as to increase their production. Bodokro is one of 37 sites selected for the Projet Bas-Fond (PBF) - an agricultural project supported by WFP and the Japanese and Ivorian governments. The PBF, whose main aim is to ensure food security for rural communities and promote rural development, is being implemented in a zone north of the capital, Yamoussoukro, that the World Bank classified in 1998 as the poorest area in Cote d’Ivoire. The project, now in its pilot phase, had been delayed by the tense political situation in the country in 2000 following a military coup and various other upheavals. Nineteen of the sites are located around the town of Bondoukou in the northeast, while 18 are near Bouake. A total of 2,942 participants have been identified, 1,491 of them women. Rice and vegetables - including peanuts, corn, cassava, yams, tomatoes and sesame - are the two main products. To begin the project, 758 ha of ricefields and 48.8 ha of vegetables are being cultivated. By the end of the pilot phase, the project’s backers plan to increase the rice acreage to 1,000 ha and the vegetable crop area to 55 ha. They also plan to devote about 50 ha of land to plantain production. Sites are selected after assessments by teams from various institutions including the Agence nationale d’appui au developpement rurale (ANADER), WFP’s principal operating partner, with which the UN agency has signed a technical support agreement for US $273,000. Other participating institutions include the Association for International Cooperation in Agriculture and Forestry (AICAF), a Japanese NGO that is providing technical support and Cote d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Family, Women and Children which is monitoring the social impact of the project. The West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) is providing rice-related technical support. WFP says it hopes to obtain the participation of other institutions in the provision of education and training, and the compilation of socioeconomic data. The US $8-million project is expected to ensure a minimum of food security for people in the impoverished target areas, promote rural development, and provide financial stability for the beneficiaries through the sale of surplus food. WFP has decided to link this lowland project with a school-feeding programme (*) which it has been implementing since 1989: a portion of the PBF output is to be used to provide lunches for the children. The ultimate goal is for communities to provide all the food needed for the school canteens in about four years. The National Directorate for School Canteens and WFP “agreed to build a strong synergy between the PBF project and the school-feeding programme, recognising that the objectives of both projects were complementary”, WFP said in its 2000 project report. “Accordingly, the existence of a school canteen in the village is now considered to be one of the main criteria for the selection of a new site.” Soil type, topography, hydrology, poverty, motivation, interest for the project and capacity to work in groups are some of the other main selection criteria. Once a site is identified, rural extension officers explain to farmers the project’s framework, strategies, objectives and the type of technical assistance that will be provided. The main obstacle the project faces is locals’ unwillingness to buy into it, ANADER Director-General Yao Kouassi, said. The key to success is to ensure that they fully participate in the project so that they can experience its benefits, he said. Farmers are encouraged to participate in the project through the “Food-for-Work” strategy under which they receive rations of rice donated by Japan in exchange for work performed in the fields, including land clearing, digging, and helping to survey the land. The three kilogrammes of rice participants receive for each day’s work is given to the women to ensure that the food goes to the entire family. Food-for-Work aims to help households cope during the lean agricultural season and reduce their food bills so that savings are used to meet other needs. It is also a way of involving women, who constitute the project’s main target group. It aims to give them more decision-making power within the community, enables them to have greater control of resources such as food, land and money, and boosts their self-confidence, project sponsors said. Women account for 51 percent of participants and WFP hopes this figure will soon reach 60 percent, in line with its goal of committing 60 percent of project resources and interventions to helping women in countries where they lag behind. The project’s national coordinator, Germain Akoubia, said he was pleased to see women engaged in traditionally male activities but he noted that strong female participation could be a sign of food scarcity since men’s labour in the fields was not enough to feed their families. One of the major effects the project has had on women is to reduce their desire to head south to look for work in major towns, from where they usually came back with no earnings and “dirty diseases” (STDs), the president of the Bodokro women’s cooperative, Kouakou Eugenie, said. Women now have an activity in which they can participate fully and they are motivated to do so, she added. WFP and its partners hope that, by the end of the year, the number of rice and vegetable plots will have increased. They also hope to provide, by then, another 10 boreholes, 25 warehouses and other facilities as needed. WFP said its immediate concern was to obtain positive results that would convince the Ivorian and Japanese authorities, and other possible partners, to finance and expand the project to other impoverished areas. The idea, Kouakou said, is “to get us out of poverty”. [(*) For more on the schoolfeeding programme see http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/wa/countrystories/cotedivoire/20010615.phtml]