Information that farmers will need to generate and provide

Market Related Information


Gooseberries in an Orchard in the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan, India
_________________________________________________________________

Information that farmers will need to generate and provide

In my last blog I discussed about information that small farmers and producers in the South needed. I now discuss the information these farmers will now need to generate and provide.

If small farmers and producers want to participate in markets which are rapidly becoming globalized, they will need to maintain information about their farms and farming operations so that they can be audited through Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and food safety standards set within their countries and countries where they may want their products to be traded. This entails that these farmers have a farm management information system. Farmers have to maintain information about their farm history, activities, workers health and welfare, waste and pollution management with recycling and reuse data, environment and conservation data and complaints.

For small holder producers this adds to the cost of their production. There is very little known about the costs to farmers to manage this information. My own guess is that it should be at the minimum around 5 per cent of the total cost of production. I guess this by considering that the farmer would need about 30 minutes to manage the records as required by EUREP GAP standards every day, the cost of transcribing and processing the records into a suitable format for audit and the cost of the audit. This estimate is much less than what a corporate body spends in managing its information for administrative and regulatory purposes. The cost of information may be higher if the farmer produces high value crops destined for export, if he/she cultivates more that one crop, uses genetically modified seeds or organisms or produces for the organic market. For small producers this cost reduces profit significantly. If the overall profit from farming is about 15 percent this cost is one third of the profits. For farmers in the South, where illiteracy is rampant, maintaining this information may need external services for information management and the costs may be even higher. Of course, it can add to employment potential of educated persons in rural areas.

Another type of information that will need to be provided by farmers is for traceability and labeling the product. As food safety standards become more stringent, traceability of the product to the farm rather than the processing plant is required. This would mean that farmers have to ensure that their produce is traceable to their farm. For small holder farmers with small amounts of marketable produce providing information for traceability and labelling will be prohibitively costly and the main reason for their not being able to participate in markets.

For small holder producers of the South, it is increasingly becoming important that they aggregate together to participate in markets. Aggregation will enable them to collectively reduce the cost of information management for participating in markets. This aggregation can be through forming farmer organization to have common production practices, cooperatives, farmer owned companies, contract farming etc. I classify aggregation from a farm information management perspective, as being at the production level such as the whole farming community aggregating their production system around land, a crop or commodity and having a common farm management information system, at the product level where the members of an agricultural community have independent production systems but aggregate at the product level; this means that the individual members maintain their own farm management information systems and aggregation at the processing level where the processor of the agricultural product maintains the farm management information system for labelling purposes. It is apparent that there will be a need for standards for farm management information systems. I see very little being done by agricultural research institutions in the South attempting to develop these information systems that may in the near future be vital for small holder producers they aim to serve.

It is well known from experiences in Soviet Russia and even China that when farming is practiced communally or cooperatively, productivity is seriously affected and the social and economic fabric of rural communities gets distorted in an undesirable way. Are there ways to use ICTs to aggregate small holder farmers virtually without them having to change the sovereignty of ownership of their farms? In my opinion, it is possible through use of appropriate farm management information systems linked to geographic information systems if need be to aggregate small holder producers in an agricultural community virtually. This would not disrupt the economic or social fabric of the community but benefit the whole community in farming that can meet the challenges of a globalized agriculture.