We have recently produced three new booklets summarising our work on themes relating to rural development challenges based on our work across our sites. The booklets contain lots of photos and draw from blogs published earlier on this site. They are being distributed in our field sites both to farmers and local officials who have been involved in our work. We thought that blog readers would like to see them too, so below there are links to low-res downloadable versions of all three.
The ‘hidden middle’: rethinking value chains
The first booklet covers our work on value chains across different agricultural commodities – maize, horticulture and poultry. The ‘hidden middle’ refers to the complex web of relations that exist between production and consumption where a whole array of activities takes place, including transport, processing and so on. This is often hidden, and so are the jobs and incomes that are generated directly as a result of agricultural production on the (mostly A1) land reform farms.
Appropriate technologies for land reform areas
The second booklet focuses on small-scale mechanisation, where innovation and manufacturing is occurring in all our sites, including in the small towns linked to land reform areas. The demand for labour-saving tillage, processing and transport equipment is high, and entrepreneurs have been developing solutions appropriate to the scale of farming that exists today, often adapting existing designs for local needs. The emergence of rural innovation and service hubs (for repair and maintenance) is important as these are decentralised and accessible.
Livestock and land-use after land reform
The final booklet draws on the work of Dr Tapiwa Chatikobo (from PLAAS, UWC, South Africa) who spent several years during his PhD studying how land use and access had changed in the livestock producing areas of Matobo district, Matabeleland South. The allocation of farms during land reform did not stop the need for livestock keepers to move their herds across highly variable dryland landscapes, and as a result a range of different solutions have been found. These range from reinstituting seasonal migration through leasing deals across farms to purchasing and leasing areas for relief grazing to intensification through purchasing feed externally.
This blog was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland