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By Charles Dhewa
Information about producing any food commodity is now abundant on the internet and in diverse manuals. For anyone who wants to know about how to bake bread or process fruits into drinks or jams, a quick search on the internet can produce tons of documents with step-by-step information on who to add value to diverse commodities including recipes on utilization. Such information can also be easily printed and bound into copies for communities to use in processing or preserving food.
However, there is a missing link
If information is so abundant, why are households not baking their own bread instead of waiting for formal companies to produce and sell bread to them daily? Many farmers can even grow their own wheat while others have access to different kinds of flours. If the availability of information and raw materials was everything, most confectionary companies would have gone out of business as households would have been able to produce their own bread and related products. The fact that, in spite of recipes being available to everyone, the majority prefer buying bread to baking their own suggests there is more to turning natural resources into food than the availability of raw materials and information in producing valued added and processed food.
Why some projects are impossible to scale up
For decades, Africa has seen various agricultural projects of different sizes, either remaining the same or being abandoned. Efforts to scale up some projects from one community to the other or to the national level have not been very successful due to several invisible barriers related to cultural, economic, political, and economic factors, among others. More importantly, most projects have been too small and context-specific to be scaled up. Otherwise, community dairy projects would now be competing with big dairy companies that continue to supply dairy products in cities and rural areas.
By now breweries would have seen their market share go down as people who have retired from brewing companies would have simply gone and started brewing the same kind of beer in their communities. Production zones that are famous for specific fruits like banana, mango, orange, pineapples, and many others would be full of processing plants if it was all about the availability of raw materials and information on how to process food.
Challenges around developing tastes for new products
In a desire to understand challenges around scaling up agricultural projects, eMKambo has been gathering evidence for years toward finding a promising way forward. The inquiry has tried to find out why tomato sauce or tomato puree has not been easy to produce in tomato production zones of Zimbabwe such as Mutoko, Murewa, and Chimanimani. One of the key issues is that local people cannot really confirm the nature of the final product that they want because developing tastes for new processed products is a difficult challenge. In addition, as along as fresh tomatoes are always abundant, local people do not see any need for tomato sauce or tomato puree.
Since processing and value addition is more of a science than usual agricultural production practices, scientific knowledge is needed for developing relevant expertise at the community level. Most products are processed by corporates because significant capital investment is needed to convert a raw commodity into a processed product. On the other hand, appropriate technology is still missing especially for processing fruits and tomatoes at the local level. Breakthroughs that have been achieved with peanut butter processing and small-scale maize milling at the village level have not been extended to perishables like fruits and tomatoes.
Exploring collaboration between development agencies and the private sector
After observing that development agencies and the private sector often work with the same farming communities, eMKambo sought to find out any pathways for these actors to collaborate in agricultural value addition enterprises. According to the private sector actors, most agricultural projects introduced by NGOs are too small to be integrated into commercial value chains. Part of the reason is that development agencies tend to focus on vulnerable members in communities with no capacity to produce volumes that are needed by private processors. On the other hand, the private sector is more interested in working with champion farmers who can meet targets and are receptive to innovation.
There have been cases where a private sector company is struggling to resuscitate its processing plant in a rural farming area where developing agencies are also trying to promote almost similar projects. Using its knowledge brokering prowess, eMKambo tried to get the private sector company and a development agency working in the same area to work together meaningfully. The private company suggested that the development agency provide funds to the company so that it acquires the remaining equipment which will enable local farmers to benefit from a functional processing plant owned by the company.
Since the development agency would be making such an investment into the company on behalf of the local community, eMKambo suggested that the private company allocate shares to the community so that when the development agency eventually pulls out, communities will be empowered. In reply to that suggestion, the private company said that was not possible because the company operates on purely capitalist values which do not have room for communities to be shareholders. To that end, differences between capitalist values and developmental values emerged as key barriers against sustainable agricultural interventions in developing countries.
Community projects are part of agroecology
The fact that pathways for integrating private sector business units with community projects in a long-term and sustainable manner have not been found in most developing countries for more than 50 years indicates that community projects are part of agroecology and local food economies. Such economies are better integrated to local mass food markets than trying to force them into vertically integrated commercial value chains that are driven by completely different sets of values. While private companies have tried to set up out-grower schemes with smallholder farmers for commodities like broiler chickens and tea, among others, successes have been few compared to failures. Revisiting and rethinking potential synergies and models can yield positive results.