Anthropology and Rural Development in West Africa

Michael M Horowitz, Michael M Horowitz, Thomas M Painter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429711916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Anthropology and Rural Development in West Africa documents the experiences of anthropologists with development in West Africa during the past ten years. It presents case study material to bring out the actual and potential contributions of social science to solving development problems found in Africa and in other parts of the Third World. The book is not a manual that seeks to present solutions; rather it describes some of the kinds of development situations in which anthropologists participated and examines the kind of tensions under which they operated.

1
Salvage Anthropology: The Redesign of a Rural Development Project in Guinea

ROBERT M. HECHT
The World Bank

Editors’ Note to Chapter 1

Why work with peasant smallholders as a means of increasing agricultural production in Africa when larger-scale, more “rational” production is needed? It was a particularly arrogant variation of this vision of agrarian change that informed the Agricultural Production Capacity and Development Project in Guinea described by Robert Hecht. The original project, which he was asked to help redesign, required large transfers of American techniques and equipment to Guinea, even though they were poorly adapted to the capital mix of most peasant producers affected by the project. Through a re-analysis of the rural economy of project areas, Hecht was able to recommend improvements in production techniques for a follow-on project that would not overload small-holders with debt-inducing equipment. Hecht’s materials, like those of Waldstein and Reyna, reflect the contradictions and difficulties faced by social scientists in development. Projects are based on considerations of internal rates of return, profit, and rates at which “modern” but often technically inappropriate techniques will be adopted by rural producers. Typically these economic considerations are divorced from the social reality of which they are a part. Under these conditions, it is no surprise that many projects fail. When these difficulties become serious enough, the anthropologist may be called in to salvage a foundering project through an examination of “interstitial” (i.e., social) factors neglected by planners.

Introduction

Salvage Anthropology

During the last several decades, “salvage archaeology” has become a common form of archaeological practice (Gumerman 1973). Ancient sites endangered by the construction of homes, factories, roads, and dams have been excavated by archaeologists in an attempt to save important artifacts from disturbance or destruction. In a similar way, social anthropologists are becoming involved increasingly in “salvage” work in living communities in Third World nations. Anthropologists have played a role in planning, implementing, and evaluating resettlement schemes that have displaced communities in order to carry out dam construction and large-scale commercial farming. Anthropologists have also assisted groups of people facing encroachment, and even genocide, at the hands of outsiders (Chambers 1969).¹ In such cases, they have worked to “salvage,” or save, threatened societies. The main difference between these endeavors by anthropologists and the work of salvage archaeologists is that while the latter have sought to preserve an artifactual record, anthropologists are engaged with evolving human communities. The challenge is thus not to preserve the communities as frozen in time, but to assist them to change and grow in a way acceptable to their members.

Social anthropologists are also being called upon by international aid agencies to help reformulate development projects intended to benefit communities in Third World countries. In this situation they are being asked to “salvage” the work of the development community. Projects may be in difficulty for numerous reasons, including failure to adapt their structure and activities to the existing social, economic, and technological features of the target communities. Anthropologists are playing an important role in improving the projects’ effectiveness in achieving their stated goals, such as stimulating national economic growth, enhancing social equity, and raising household incomes. In this context, “salvage” anthropology means extracting the viable elements of a foundering project in its design or operational stage, and combining them with new ingredients in order to arrive at a more effective project. Here, too, the emphasis is not on preserving a living community in an unchanging state; rather, it is on helping the community to evolve in a way that satisfies both local and national aspirations.

Just as salvage archaeology places limits upon the archaeologist’s ability to carry out problem-oriented research, salvage anthropology constrains the anthropologist’s research framework. Logistically, the short time-span of most development field work may prevent the investigator from carrying out broad statistical surveys, pretesting questionnaires, and becoming intimately acquainted with the project zone. Politically, the foreign aid organizations employing anthropologists may try to influence their analysis and conclusions. Methodologically, the choice of field zone for salvage research generally precedes the framing of a theoretical or empirical problem, which is the opposite of the process that usually takes place in research sponsored by academic bodies.

However, the real differences between applied salvage research and academically sponsored research are less substantial than might first appear to be the case. Applied researchers have done lengthy field stints and employed elaborate survey methods, and all social science research has an intrinsically political and ideological nature (Asad, ed. 1975; Blackburn, ed. 1973). Through a dialectic of theory and practice, the initially practical orientation of applied anthropology can spawn theoretical propositions concerning social and economic change. In other words, there is no reason why salvage anthropology cannot be both theoretical and problem-oriented.

These issues became explicit in the case of the redesign of the Guinea Agricultural Production Capacity and Development Project, a major West African rural development scheme financed by the United States Agency for International Development. The redesign of the project showed how some large development investments may end up being built upon seriously inadequate assumptions about the technical, social, economic, and institutional capabilities of the intended beneficiaries. Such fundamental assumptions most often turn out to be erroneous, due to the ideological biases of the design team personnel or of their lack of knowledge of local socio-economic conditions. In the Guinean example below, the design team operated under the assumption that transfer of advanced, large-scale, capital-intensive technology would be the key to stimulating the country’s agricultural development. The team also made heroic—and largely incorrect—assumptions that Guinea’s farm extension service and its marketing and price policies were sound enough to provide a conducive environment for disseminating research results to producers.

The redesign effort further illustrated the ways in which anthropology can help to improve agricultural research and training projects. As in the Guinean case, anthropology’s contributions can include (1) encouraging broader farmer participation in design, (2) identifying farmers’ training needs, (3) building effective communications channels between farmers and research officials, (4) strengthening farmers’ local institutions, and, (5) incorporating socio-economic research into the larger framework of proposed “farming systems” research.

USAID Intervention in Guinean Agriculture

The Setting

Guinea’s roughly six million persons inhabit 246,000 square kilometers in the western part of West Africa. The country is divided into four main geographical zones. Maritime Guinea, including the capital of Conakry, is a wet (2,500–3,500 millimeters of rainfall a year), low-lying region crisscrossed by saline estuaries and mangrove swamps. It is settled mainly by the Susu ethnic group, who grow rice as a staple crop. Middle Guinea, one of the most mountainous regions in West Africa, with elevations above 1400 meters, receives adequate rainfall for maize and sorghum cultivation, but high population density, intensive farming, and deforestation have seriously depleted soils. The dominant ethnic group, the Fula, consequently subsists on fonio or finger millet (Eleusina digitaris), a cereal well adapted to the infertile conditions prevailing in Middle Guinea (Derman 1973). The geography of Upper Guinea, extending from the Fouta Djallon mountain range of Middle Guinea in the west to the border with Mali in the east, is strongly marked by the upper stretches of the Niger River, which meanders through the region’s vast fertile plain. Upper Guinea is inhabited mostly by the Malinké ethnic group, who grow rice, cassava, maize, and peanuts as food crops under woodland savannah climate conditions (1,250–1,750 millimeters of rain a year)(Hodge, ed. 1971). Finally, Forest Guinea, which shares a border with Liberia and Ivory Coast, has a humid year-round climate (1,500–2,000 millimeters of rainfall) suited to raising cocoa, coffee, and oil palm as export crops and rice as a food crop. The region is inhabited by a number of small ethnic groups belonging to the Southern Mandé group, including Kissi, Kono, Toma, and Guerzé.

Agriculture, the chief occupation of more than 80 percent of Guinea’s population, has accounted for around 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in recent years (Department of State 1980). These high figures reflect the undeveloped state of Guinea’s industrial and service sectors rather than any significant progress in agriculture. In fact, output in the primary sector over the past two decades has not kept pace with population growth, so that per capita farm production actually has declined since Guinea’s independence in 1958 (World Bank 1981a). Food imports have averaged around 100,000 metric tons annually in recent years. Agriculture’s share of exports declined dramatically in the 1970s, and currently accounts for less than 5 percent of total export earnings. This partly reflects the rapid expansion of bauxite production during the decade, with the opening of two new mines, but it is also due to a serious malaise in farming. Exports of bananas, once Guinea’s mainstay, dropped from 100,000 metric tons in the early 1960s to virtually nil by the end of the 1970s. Coffee exports fell from 14,000 tons to 2,000 tons during the same period.

Stagnation and decline in Guinea’s agriculture can be traced largely to a series of postindependence government policies (Hecht 1981). First, the state has enforced a set of official producer prices that are so low that they discourage production. Black-market prices have been two to four times the official levels in recent years. Second, at various times the government has nationalized both wholesale and retail trading and transport of agricultural commodities, resulting in serious inefficiencies and higher costs. Third, less than 10 percent of the government’s investment budget has been allocated to the agricultural sector in recent years. This discrimination against farming has placed an additional fetter upon agriculture. Fourth, less than 1 percent of institutional credit in Guinea has been earmarked for farming, with almost nothing for peasant smallholders.

Probably the most important retarding factor in Guinean agricultural policy during the last decade, however, has been the heavy emphasis on large-scale mechanized farming. This policy has encountered major difficulties and yielded disappointing results. Such agricultural experiments are an outgrowth of the government’s ideological inclination toward “socialized” forms of production (even when these are ill-suited to prevailing technical, economic, and social conditions), and of its fascination with advanced capital-intensive technology.²

Between 1975 and 1978, most government expenditure in agriculture was directed into tractorized and ox-drawn production “brigades,” known as brigades mécanisées de production (BMP) and brigades attelées de production (BAP). These were organized at the level of Guinea’s more than 2,000 pouvoirs révolutionnaires locals (PRL), the country’s smallest political units, consisting of several contiguous villages. Members of the BMP and BAP were expected to farm some of their land collectively and to share the tractors, plows, and draft animals cooperatively on the remaining individually held plots.

The early demise of the brigades came in 1978, when most farmers refused to work in the collective fields. In any case, they were inadequately trained to manage such large enterprises. Poor equipment maintenance, lack of spare parts, and shortages of fertilizer and improved seeds were among the problems the brigades faced. Conceived in part by the state as devices for controlling the marketing of farm commodities, the brigades were forced to sell their output at unattractively low official prices.

Starting in 1979, the brigades were superseded by state farms, known as fermes agro-pastorales d’arrondissement (FAPA). Several FAPAs were set up at the level of each arrondissement, the administrative unit grouping together eight to a dozen PRLs. The FAPAs were equipped with tractors and staffed by former employees of the government’s (largely disbanded) agriculture field services and by recent graduates of Guinea’s secondary schools. The government assigned each FAPA a quota of land to be planted in various crops. Typically, this meant 90 hectares of cereals, 20 hectares of cassava, and 20 hectares of fruit trees.

The results of the FAPA program have also been poor (Hecht 1981). Planted areas have generally been less than one-quarter of targets. Output has been even lower, despite the fact that the FAPAs tended to appropriate the choicest farm land in the communities where they were located. Rice yields on the FAPAs, for example, have been consistently lower than on individually-held plots. The reasons are similar to those for the brigades: poor technical and managerial training for state farm employees, major bottlenecks in input supply and marketing, and unprofitable official prices. The Guinean state farm model has been viewed with indifference by the country’s peasant smallholders.

Agricultural policies have thus caused Guinean peasant smallholders to be neglected at best (e.g., by credit and investment policies), and otherwise to be harassed and punished (e.g., by the government’s stances on official prices and FAPAs). Nevertheless, more than half a million smallholders continue to produce nearly all of Guinea’s food and export crops and livestock. The country’s economic future is clearly predicated on increasing smallholder farm output. With the approval, in 1980, of the World Bank-financed peasant rice-production project in the Guékédou region, and expressions, In 1981, of government support for a USAID-backed project for smallholder farming in the Faranah region, there were some indications that the Guinean regime at last was interested in trying to dynamize smallholder producers.

The Original Project

The Guinea Agricultural Capacity and Training Project was originally designed by a team from AID in late 1975 (AID 1975a).³ The purpose of the five-year, $4.9 million scheme was to “train agricultural researchers, extensionists, and administrators and to improve the depth and scope of agricultural research and production techniques.” The designers felt that simply by promoting more vigorous agronomic research and expanded training of several echelons of Guinean civil servants connected with agricultural development, the project would lead to increased Guinean agricultural output. There was no perceived need to intervene directly in farm production.

The original project envisioned three main activities:

1. Construction and outfitting of a laboratory at the National Agricultural Research Institute (INRA) at Foulaya, 135 kilometers from Conakry in Maritime Guinea. The lab would be equipped for research in soil science, entomology, nematology, plant pathology, and plant protection. Guinean researchers earning M.A. degrees at U.S. universities in each of these five specialties eventually would staff the Foulaya laboratory. 2. Construction and outfitting of additional facilities for teaching and farm production at the agricultural college (high school) in Faranah, 475 kilometers from Conakry in Upper Guinea. These facilities included dormitories, classrooms, laboratories, offices, a library, clinic, and cafeteria on the school grounds, plus stables, a piggery, chicken coops, a veterinary clinic, equipment sheds, storehouses, and offices at the nearby college farm. 3. Construction and equipping of a research sub-station and a demonstration-training farm near the village of Tindo, ten kilometers from Faranah. The Tindo farm would be run by U.S. expatriates with specializations in agricultural engineering, production agronomy, veterinary medicine, rangeland development, and rice culture.

The initial project was heavily oriented toward civil works and provision of American equipment. In all, the project anticipated building more than 60 new structures at the three sites, plus a ten-foot high, mile-long dike in the Niger flood plain at Tindo to protect a 30-hectare perimeter for irrigated farming.

Approval of the original project design in early 1976 was followed by an architectural and engineering study for the sites at Foulaya, Faranah, and Tindo. Two American agronomists on contract to USAID/Guinea in 1977 prepared detailed lists of the equipment and supplies, including U.S. commodities, for the three “legs” of the project. Construction commenced thereafter.

“Salvage” Redesign of the Project

Identification of Problems

By early 1981, the Guinea Agricultural Production Capacity and Training Project was foundering upon two problems of near-crisis dimensions. First, construction at the three project sites was running more than two years behind schedule, in part due to difficulties in the procurement and transport of building materials. Projected costs had also escalated more than threefold, from $4.9 million to $15 million. Second, with the construction phase limping toward its completion, it was becoming increasingly clear to AID that the use of the facilities at Foulaya, Faranah, and Tindo had not been carefully planned. AID had started to realize that detailed programming of research and training, and supplementary financing of this second phase of the project, were imperative to make the first phase pay off.

To deal with the construction problem, in early 1981 AID engineers began to oversee project construction on a weekly basis in an effort to expedite building and cut costs on a number of structures. A special AID administrative and logistics officer also was sent to Conakry, to speed the flow of construction materials and equipment to the three sites. As a result of these measures, the target date for completing construction was moved forward to June 1982, and costs were lowered slightly to $14.4 million.

To solve the problem of inadequate planning and budgeting for the use of the facilities, in August 1981 AID appointed a team consisting of an anthropologist, economist, and agronomist to prepare an identification document for a project to follow the construction phase. This would include training and research and, possibly, farm extension and crop production. The team’s first task was to analyze the weaknesses of the original project in order to prescribe appropriate corrective measures. The team perceived that the general weakness of the first phase was that research and training were only vaguely planned. Furthermore, the plans that were made bore little relation to the realities of the exis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Anthropology and Family Production Systems in Africa
• Introduction: Anthropology and Development
• Map of West Africa
• 1. Salvage Anthropology: The Redesign of a Rural Development Project in Guinea
• 2. Research for Rural Development: Experiences of an Anthropologist in Rural Mali
• 3. Anthropology and Rural Development in Ghana
• 4. Anthropology and the Peace Corps: Notes from a Training Program
• 5. Irrigated Agriculture as an Archetypal Development Project: Senegal
• 6. Libido and Development: The Importance of Emotions in Development Work
• 7. Assessing the Social Feasibility of a Settlement Project in North Cameroon
• 8. In Search of the Peasant Connection: Spontaneous Cooperation, introduced Cooperatives, and Agricultural Development in Southwestern Niger
• 9. Donor Investment Preference, Class Formation, and Existential Development: Articulation of Production Relations in Burkina Faso
• 10. Ideology, Policy, and Praxis in Pastoral Livestock Development
• References Cited
• Notes on Contributors