Empowerment of Farmers Through ICT

Draft paper for ECOSOC Expert Group Meeting on Promoting Empowerment of People in Advancing Poverty Eradication, Social Integration, and Decent Work for All, UN HQ, NYC, September 10‐12, 2012 Empowerment of Farmers through ICT Norman Uphoff, Cornell University 1.0 Introduction Many perspectives and many experiences could be provided on this subject. Some persons have specialized in the adaptation and integration of new electronic and digitized communications media for the benefit of farmers and other sectors of society whose economic and social advancement is the concern of ECOSOC and UN member governments as well as civil society.My perspective, however, is that of an applied social scientist who has spent over 40 years engaged in multiple rural development efforts with a continuous concern for participation and empowerment.1Serendipitously, in recent years I have become engaged in using a considerable range of electronic communications media for the promotion worldwide of an unprecedented agroecological innovation. This experience has engendered a confluence of theoretical and practical perspectives on the empowerment of farmers and others through ICT. This paper is thusnot a survey of ICT options,although manyare considered in section 1.4. Rather this is a first‐hand report from someone who ‐‐after dealing with participation and empowerment issues both analytically and practically for several decades ‐‐is now engaged with colleagues across many sectors, in over 50 countries,in an effort to reach and empower millions of smallholding farmers around the world. ICT by facilitating the promotion of changes in agricultural production methods ishelpingmany rural householdsto enhance their food security and raise their incomes, promote greater self‐confidence and innovation, contribute to environmental sustainability, and mitigate climate‐change effects. As a social scientist, I have been teaching and writing on power and empowerment since joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1970. Among the varioussubjectsthat I have worked on, these two concepts – power and empowerment ‐‐are some of the most complex and elusive in the social sciences, although they can be made fairly concrete through attentive analysis (Uphoff, 1989; Ilchman and Uphoff, 1998). We all know the saying: "Everyone talks about the weather,but nobody does anything about it."In similar fashion, almost everybody talks about power and empowerment these days, yet practically nobody examines and treats these subjectswith the rigorand clarity that they deserve. In a separate paper prepared for this EGM, I have suggested some ways of thinking and talking about power and empowermentin ways that are purposefully rigorous and analytical. Here I address the topic assigned to me. 1These publications include Cohen and Uphoff (1980), Esman and Uphoff (1984), and Uphoff (1985, 1988, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 2005), and Uphoff et al. (1998). 1 2.0The Roles of Information and Communication in Development Assessing the contributions that new technologies for information and communication (ICT) can make to poverty reduction, social integration and employment creation requires some understanding of and agreement on the rolesthat these technologies have in development. During the 1970s and 1980s, we had a multidisciplinary Rural Development Committee at Cornell University which focused on three major factors in development: resources, technology and organization. These constitute, in effect,'the factors of production for development' ‐‐ equivalent to land, labor and capital in economics, 'development' being definedbroadly as thecapacity to meet people's needs and wants(Uphoff and Ilchman 1972). Thinking about resources, technology and organization asmeta‐factors of development makes clearer, I think, where information and communication fit into development equations and strategies. The three domains of resources, technology, and organization make different and respective contributions to the capacities of countries, communities, and individuals for meeting human needs and wants. • Resources represent the broad category of inputsinto processes of production, whether these are economic, social or political, that can meet needs and wants. • Technology refers to everything from knowledge to machinery that is required toconvert available inputsefficiently and effectively into more, or more valued,outputs, for meeting people's needs and wants more fully, reliably or innovatively. • Organization then pertains to the social, economic, administrative and other structures that canmanage the various processes of production that are necessary to meet human needs and wants. This includes functions like accessing resources and adapting technology. These meta‐factors of development resemble land, labor and capital in that there can be diminishing returns in any one of these three domains if it is worked on and expanded without making appropriate modifications and increases in the other two. Further, any of these three can become a bottleneck for development, and needing particular attention and improvement so that these three meta‐factors can contribute conducivelyand complementarily to capacity for meeting needs and wants. These three broad categories should be regarded asnested in that organization is the encompassing factor within which technology is employed to utilize available or acquirableresources to best advantage. They are not simply separate domains. Organization can be a crucial factor in expanding the acquisition of resources and then managing them to best effect. Where do information and communication come into this conceptual scheme? In our Rural Development Committee discussions, some suggested that information and communication could be a fourth factor of production, in the way that some people have proposed technology as an additional factor alongside land, labor and capital. While recognizing the great importance of information (and the communication of information) for raising and sustaining productivity, however, our conclusion was that theseideational factors can and should be understood as related (concurrently and respectively) to all three of these meta‐factors of production. 2 Information has value and productivity not in itself but in what it can do to make each of these three factors more productive, i.e., contributing to the meeting of people's needs and wants. Not everyone may accept this conclusion, but it is presented here to propose an instrumental view of information and communication, and accordingly such a view of ICT. We should consider what IC/ICT can do to expand people's knowledge of and access to both resources and appropriate technologies andto improve the functioning and scope of organizations that are beneficial, particularly with reference to empowerment, security, employment, and other development goals. Improving the functioning and scope of ICTs for their own sake has little merit according to this formulation, but it has a crucial and potentially powerful role in achieving these goals. 3.0Empowerment for Farmers in Developmental Context ICT can be empowering for farmers, particularly poorly‐endowed ones with limited assets and purchasing power, to the extent that these information and communication technologies: a. Enable them to gain access to and control over more and better resources on favorable terms, which they can contribute to their own or others' production processes and for which they can get remuneratively compensated; b. Inform them about and give them access to new or better technologies that can make their available resources more productive, and also better knowledge and skills for utilizing these technologies; and/or c. Link them into organizations, formal or informal, that give them access on favorable terms to resources and technologies as well as to markets for their products, and also enable farmers' organizations to function more effectively, using their available resources and technologies more productively. These wordings refer quite evidently in the first instance to economic processes of production; but with appropriate modifications they can refer similarly to social and political processes that are also capable of empowering farmers. Particularly the third function (c.) is important as various forms of organization are appropriate to improving farmers' political and social as well as economic bargaining power, and for acquiring and protecting both social status and political rights. When widely accessible and oriented toward meeting the needs and solving the problems of farmers, ICT can create, enlarge and sustain what Shambu Prasad and Sen (2010) have called 'the knowledge commons.' 4.0 EarlierChannelsfor Information and Communication that Benefited Farmers There has been a succession of technologies that have provided information and communication facilities to farmers in the past. In much earlier times, traditional schooling from elders, and various means for word‐of‐mouth communication had to suffice. Also, from time immemorial there have been certain institutions that facilitated information flow, such as theregular markets that brought people together periodically within what we might now consider as a 'marketshed' (Johnson 1970), or pilgrimages to holy sites, when much informationwas exchanged among participants beyond religious thoughts and ideas. 3 For many centuries, formal schooling was a very labor‐intensive technology/organization for imparting information and knowledge. This continues to be a major source

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