Summer Medley, Volume 14 #3

The countryside is bleak and reddish-tinged, with little vegetation and many empty river beds. Every day of the dry season features exactly the same shocking heat and cloudless blue sky. The current drought is the result of poor precipitation in four of the last five years: not just low rainfall levels, but poorly spread out over time as well. The world-famous Victoria Falls trickle at a fraction of their full grandeur, whole semesters of school have been cancelled because the youngsters can't be provided with water, and women may walk twelve or fifteen kilometres a day carrying buckets for their families. Untreated human excrement not only drains into rivers and streams from which this drinking water is drawn, but is also often used as fertilizer for grains and vegetables, perpetuating epidemic levels of diseases that have been all but eradicated by the sanitation, diet and medication common in the West.

In the overcrowded and underserviced city, the lack of employment opportunities forces many young people into more creative means of survival. The largest note of currency is equivalent to about half a dollar, so a "tourist" has to carry around a huge and ostentatious bankroll just to make the most ordinary purchase. For most people who live here, on the other hand, that bill represents a substantial and elusive sum of money. City streets are dangerous at the best of times; at night people simply don't go out.

Welcome to Zambia.

AND WELCOME TO THE KASISI Agricultural Training Centre, where the Jesuit-led staff is trying to help do something about all of this. For two decades, they have been working to furnish ordinary Zambians with the resources to survive on an ever-challenging landscape in ever-worsening economic conditions. These enhanced skills and tools may even allow some to prosper, at least in the modest sense of that term applicable in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world's most neglected regions: the meeting of simple nutritional and hygienic requirements, the hope of a little more education and advancement for their children, the chance some day to afford things we in the West would consider the most meagre of consumer items. And at Kasisi, all of this hope is built around a central pillar of respect for the sustainable capacities of the land itself.

The centre is located about a half hour's drive north of the capital city of Lusaka, on a site that has been a mission since 1905. You'll find a chapel here, a cemetery whose monuments bespeak a rich missionary history, schools for students of both elementary and secondary ages, and one of the country's two orphanages, now overflowing with AIDS children. But you'll also see oxen wandering about, sometimes hooked up to carts, ploughs or milling wheels. You're bound to notice crop fields, barnyards and pastures dotted with cattle, pigs and chickens, all in use for teaching the agricultural sciences while simultaneously generating a large part of the centre's operating funds. You'll see some priests, nuns and brothers around here, though you may not recognize them as such. But you'll also run across a lot of local people, whether trainees, part-time students, staff members or villagers from the nearby communities that seem to overlap the grounds of Kasisi without clear distinction.

The bank's African origins appealed to Brother Paul Desmarais, committed as he has been to helping Africans help themselves. But he would soon have reason to regret the selection.

Things have certainly changed since the founding of the mission, and perhaps even more so in the twenty years since director Paul Desmarais SJ arrived with two shovels and two picks. Desmarais holds a master's degree from the University of Guelph, which subsequently honoured him with its Alumni Medal of Achievement for his contribution to development in the Third World. Even then the learning process was far from complete. "When I came here from southwestern Ontario," Brother Paul recalls with typical good humour, "I said, `Well, if you're going to have a farm, you can't have a tree.' So I cleared about 100 acres here. Well cleared, too, not a tree in sight! Now we're going back and planting some. And when we clear new land, now, we always leave some in place."

That's agroforestry, one of the many buzzwords you'll hear around Kasisi, along with others like integrated pest management, appropriate technology and the overarching sustainable development. But don't be cynical: they all mean something here.

Pointing out a single lonely but leafy tree in the middle of some pasture land, beneath which gratefully huddle as many sweltering cows as can fit, Desmarais explains the two important concepts necessary to understand what's going on. That tree, first of all, is a local variety with the remarkable property of coming into leaf during the dry season, when almost all of its neighbouring species are closing down to await the rains. Its leafiness makes it a rare refuge for the cows congregated underneath, where they naturally tend to leave behind a disproportionate volume of their fertile cow-residue.

The other thing you need to know is that this particular bit of land will be ploughed and planted once again--with maize, let's say--after its regular period of fallow regeneration, an essential of sustainable farmland stewardship. In the wet growing season for the maize, our friendly tree will have shed its leaves, allowing light to reach even plants very near its base, and of course, the soil there will have retained its extreme fertility. The result? Maize plants harvested from right near the tree will have grown to a visibly greater height and higher yield than their neighbours. One tree, giving two mutually reinforcing benefits to the land's overall health and yield. Agroforestry.

But this isn't just an experiment. It's the kind of tried and tested minitechnology Zambian village farmers will take back and employ on their own smallholder farms. It's part of a better, more environmentally friendly way to eke out a rural existence in a harsh landscape. It's a paradoxical meeting between an agrarian culture less advanced in many ways than that of our own pioneer forebears, and cutting-edge technologies shared by a world community committed to alleviating poverty in ways that can continue into an indefinite future.

THE LINCHPIN OF KASISI'S PROGRAMMING is its two-year intensive agricultural training course for ten resident families at a time.

While at the centre, each trainee couple and their children occupy a simple brick hut consisting of two small bedrooms, a sitting room and kitchen. Each couple is allotted about an eighth of a hectare of land on which to practise irrigated-vegetable farming techniques, and another two hectares for those of rain-fed crops. At the start of the program, the couples receive loans for livestock and other capital items they'll need to complete their training and establish themselves when they return to their villages. The crops grown and the animals raised during their stay at Kasisi provide not only subsistence for the trainees themselves but also enough marketable surplus so that the initial loan can usually be paid off by the time they graduate.

Instruction is quite informal. "The fields are the classroom," Paul Desmarais points out. "They don't get any diploma when they leave; their certificates are the tools and livestock they've earned and bought." Success is measured by the level of internal cooperation existing among the families as well as by each couple's level of production. In the meantime they'll have received an extensive practical education in rain-fed and irrigated-crop production, cattle and pig keeping, oxen training for draught applications, basic hygienic concerns like sources of clean water and control of human wastes, pest management, and the financial skills necessary to operate successfully in the local market.

A newer program, just introduced within the last couple of years, trains village blacksmiths. Entering the three-month course with no prior experience in metalwork and varying low levels of education, the students leave with a complete set of forge tools they have made themselves, and the skills to create and repair a wide variety of agricultural tools and machine parts. Establishing a new shop back in his own native village, a blacksmith graduate represents not only another entrepreneur able to provide for his family, but also an enhancement to the efficiency and productivity of an entire community, as exemplified by one of Paul Desmarais's favourite anecdotes.

It concerns a farmer who needed a U-bolt for his plough and made a long and arduous journey into Lusaka in search of it, ultimately without success. After the expense and wasted time of that trip, and knowing of the existence of Kasisi, the farmer decided to drop by on his way back to his village, to see if they happened to have a bolt like the one he needed. They didn't, but in the blacksmith shop the trainees were able to make one from scrap iron in a matter of minutes at negligible cost.

CLEARLY, IF ZAMBIAN SMALLHOLDER farmers and tradespeople are able to stay on the land and raise their families on its productivity at a sustainable level, they will be actively contributing to their nation's economy, and creating rural employment and disposable income with which to pursue a better life. Besides being good development strategy (don't give me a fish but teach me to fish), doesn't this sound an awful lot like the sort of effects supposed to flow from market-driven, growth-oriented economic theory? Though funded by donations, the operations of the Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre are far from being a handout. On the contrary, they're exactly the kind of sustainable development thoughtful and informed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are struggling to implement all over the world, in partnership with their local brothers and sisters.

In his seminal work Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher called for exactly this kind of approach more than twenty years ago. [FN 1] Though most of the population of the Third World remains rural, uneducated and poor, he argued, what little aid exists tends to get concentrated in the hands of those who are urban, somewhat better educated and already more materially comfortable. It also tends to be directed towards large, capital-intensive megaprojects, based on western-style, labour-saving technology, in regions where capital and technological knowhow are in short supply and sources of labour all but infinite. Development aid having thus translated into a few, generally urban, jobs, hopeless rural dwellers continue to stream into already overcrowded cities in search of work and housing that don't exist in the necessary quantities.

On the site of a new community established by Kasisi graduates, Paul Desmarais SJ (right) shows the author a new house of bricks made of clay from ant hills. (Click on the thumbnail to view the fullsize picture; 90K.)

Against a scenario like this, the only development model that has any chance of succeeding is one that helps the rural poor make a dependable living from the land they've always known and inhabited. Outside injections, when necessary, must focus on education, health care, democratic empowerment of marginalized groups, real gains in affordable "intermediate technologies" and sustainable methods that leave the land's productive powers available to successive generations. The West is emulated only for the durable, sensible values it may be able to contribute, not for an obsession with material consumption and novelty that the world can ill afford to satisfy even at present levels.

If many, many people heard Schumacher's call, by and large it was not the ones with any real control over the purse strings. Today, sister organizations the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have a virtual monopoly on development aid, and are neither small nor beautiful. Their historical propensity has always been towards exactly the wrong kind of megaproject, rewarding the already rich and powerful with high-technology contracts at the expense of both the environment and already marginalized peoples. In more recent years, the World Bank and IMF have developed ever more aggressive and intrusive techniques, of which the most notorious is the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP).

Zambia's first experience of Structural Adjustment came between 1985 and 1987, when policies undertaken in its name led to food riots in the major cities. Forced to end these policies unilaterally, the government then decided to try to set its own adjustment course. But in an economy tied directly to the value of Zambian copper exports, which are in turn tied directly to the whimsical, declining prices offered by a world "market," times did not improve. So for more than four years, Zambia has once again been submitting to IMF-World Bank controls and restrictions. Elimination of price supports and other subsidies, devaluation of the local currency and abandonment of its exchange rate to the vagaries of international speculation, concentration on export-oriented commodity extraction at the expense of secondary, value-added industries, reduction of social programs and privatization of public services: these are the hallmarks of the SAP, and all of them have been imposed on Zambia.

Their objective? Well, the IMF itself will tell you that SAPs for sub-Saharan nations have been aimed at "liberalizing their economies, with a view to enhancing incentives and the efficient utilization of scarce resources." [FN 2] In other words, still giving the IMF the benefit of its own beliefs, if you can free the marketplace from an excessive burden of government intervention and manipulation of resources, the invisible hand of capitalism will rush into the Less Developed Country (LDC) like a tide, lifting all boats towards the ultimate end of all human existence, economic growth.

Critics have long argued that the only people who can benefit from such a "trickle-down" arrangement are transnational corporations with little philanthropy in their mission statements, bent on extracting raw materials cheaply and turning them into expensive items for resale. More recently, the benefit of the doubt regarding motives has begun to be withheld, as exemplified by development analysts Walden Bello and Shea Cunningham:

"While World Bank economists tried to sell [SAPs] as necessary to promote efficiency and sustained growth, Third World leaders accurately perceived that they were designed to blast open Third World economies. The objective was to dismantle the mechanism that made the exercise of economic sovereignty possible and effective--the Third World state." [FN 3]

If bankers, claiming to be acting in the interests of the economic development of Third World countries, cannot or will not help them clean up their banking act, then what are the World Bank and IMF for?

One of the public services the government of Zambia has been forced to "privatize" under its current SAP has been its short-term training courses for professionals involved in agriculture. In fact this entails the courses' complete disappearance. If it's difficult to make a profit selling food in Zambia, how many entrepreneurs are going to imagine doing so selling farming instruction? And yet, for the experienced staff of the Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre, there just might be enough monied, institutional demand for this training not only to pay for itself but perhaps even to subsidize its extension to the smallholder farmers who really need it. An impending void was perceived at Kasisi, and its staff began to plan to fill it.

By early 1995 they had outlined their objectives, struggled to raise the necessary funds, and even begun the major task of construction involved. Kasisi's new facility would offer courses from three days to two weeks, for up to forty-four people at a time, in such subjects as organic vegetable growing, the keeping of small animals, dairying, integrated pest management, agroforestry, appropriate technologies, alternative energy, blacksmith training and manufacture of low-cost housing materials. Courses would be aimed not only towards additional smallholder farmers but even more particularly towards people from the periurban areas, NGO leaders from other projects, agricultural extension officers and primary school teachers.

Although the bulk of the work on the new facility had been completed by the spring of 1995, outstanding elements included the installation of electricity, plumbing and water and the purchase of beds, curtains, conference tables and chairs. These remaining items were to be completed using approximately $150,000 in grants and donations sitting on account at the Meridien BIAO bank, an unusually high balance for an NGO used to operating on a shoestring. Meridien had seemed like a pretty good choice of bank, being at once international in scope and African in origins. The latter quality especially appealed to Brother Paul Desmarais, committed as his life has been to the idea of helping Africans help themselves. But he would soon have reason to regret the selection.

Go to part two