The study on prospects for agriculture and rural development aid in the post-2015 development framework is commissioned by the Platform to the multi-experts Forward Thinking Platform facilitated by GFAR. Starting from alternative future global contexts for development aid, the interview progressively focuses on the current trends and ruptures in agriculture and rural development aid. Senior foresight and development policies expert at GFAR, Robin Bourgeois, highlights challenges together with potential responses and presents preliminary implications for the Platform.

 

Secretariat: The Platform is looking at how to position itself in changing global aid architecture. Your team there at GFAR Global Foresight has been commissioned by the Platform to develop different prospects for agriculture and rural development assistance in the post-2015 development framework. You looked at different scenarios, which we cannot capture in their entire complexity here, obviously, but there are a number of trends and ruptures that you identified. What is the main one of importance?

 

Robin: Maybe first, just to be clear, those scenarios are somehow the contextual backgrounds, under which the development aid might have to develop in the future. So, it was important to identify these backgrounds because the global world order will increase the type of development assistance that could take place in the future.

 

In terms of trends and ruptures, I would say the way we look at the challenge that we have to face is probably the key trait. We are considering right now that whatever problems we will have to face in the future, we will always have the capacity to solve it. Therefore, we do not have a very much anticipatory, pre-active approach against the issues of development that we have to face in the future. We believe very much that we will be able to face them, whatever they are.

 

Secretariat: You also spoke about major uncertainties for the post-2015. What do you think is the main uncertainty that should concern us?

 

Robin: Well, we talked about the major uncertainties because all these are interconnected, so it would be difficult to highlight one – for example what might happen with climate change or social transformations or technological breakthroughs. All of these things are interconnected, so I would say the way we deal with the major uncertainties is the big challenge, not each one individually.

 

Secretariat: But on the other hand, if you want to win a war, maybe the war against climate change, you would have to throw your resources into one direction. You would have to make a specific decision, so I am trying to get that from you a little bit here. Where would you think you should put your resources and then all the interconnected things will follow, will see what comes of it?

 

Robin: Well that is a bit of a tricky question. If you had an answer to that question, then I think we would have already solved the problem. I think the whole things lies in the willingness we have for changing the things we know need to be changed, and that comes from the behaviour of people. We have three basic powers that work in the world. One is the economic power. The second one is the political power. The third one is probably the power of people, stakeholders’ power. I think that if we want to handle or attack the one uncertainties such as climate change, we need to have a conjunction of actions and synergy between those three powers in order to work. The tricky point is: where do we start from in order to make this happen?

 

Secretariat: You also speak about that shocks have become a main driver for change. Can you explain that briefly and why was that not the case before?

 

Robin: I think this was the case before, but we did not realize this very much because shocks were not so unpredictable and they were not so frequent and they were not so systematic. Technological industrial revolution was a fundamental shock at the beginning of the 20th century and it has completely changed the face of the world. It was unpredictable, to some extent, and had some significant effect. It was one major shock. Now we are facing a series of recurrent, complex, systematic, interconnected shocks, which are linked with biological issues, with economic issues, the energy problem, societal concerns about equalities – all of those things work together and contribute to make this unique world more and more unpredictable. For that, we really need now to prepare.

 

Secretariat: The whole concept of being victim to shocks and change, therefore, is a very somewhat negative view that we are sort of plagued with and we cannot really do much about it. We just adjust. We mitigate and so forth. It seems to imply that we cannot do anything about change. What is your opinion on that?

 

Robin: Well, we are to some extent, of course, can consider ourselves as victims, but we are also, I consider, to be “betrayers” of most of the shocks (if this exists in English, I am not sure). The idea is that most of these shocks are caused by human agency, so we have a capacity to at least reduce our impact on the second seed of the unpredictability of these shocks. We have created dynamics and inertia, which will now have long-term effects on climate change, for example, but it does not mean we are powerless to fix them, or at least to work on them.

 

Secretariat: I think we are getting into a subject there where Nicholas Taleb, in his best-seller “The Black Swan”, the impact of the highly improbable spoke about (here is the book, I have it here on my desk). He goes into what he describes as extremist path, which is a situation we find our world in today with previously unthinkable extremes in all sorts of areas and ways with superstars getting super rich, not just environmental shocks that have not been like that. He has a new book where he talks about the anti-fragile – sort of a robustness on a much higher level, which allows for certain shocks to happen to the anti-fragile overall. So he speaks of ways to make ourselves more robust, or anti-fragile. Which one of your conclusions could work towards making us more robust, in your experience?

 

Robin: I would say the five conclusions have to be dealt with together in an interconnected way. Highlighting one of them would be somehow believing that there is a simple answer to being robust and resilient. Actually, the idea was, first, to make sure that we are addressing the right problem, which is the situation of food insecure people. Right now, at the world level, we are talking much more about food security, but really, what matters right now is what might happen to those people who are still food insecure right now and who would be food insecure in the future. That related to the mandates of the Global Donor Platform for rural development also needs to be addressed through who will be the farmers in the future.

 

We have also concluded that in order to make this happen, the revitalization of rural areas, for example, the key drivers of that would be policies and societal values behind the idea of having more free rural areas. At the level of what kind of options can be implemented we are highlighting activities to technology-based farm productivity, which means considering that rural area, and agriculture rural area, is not just a productivity-based approach of livelihood. It is more a systemic, comprehensive approach of why we need rural areas to be developed and not just having the urbanisation and everybody living in urban areas. So the whole issue there is to explore the diversity and to take into consideration the local dimensions of developments and the local dimensions of food security.

 

Back to your question, those five points have to be addressed simultaneously because they are interconnected.

 

Secretariat: I understand that your team does not do predictions, so I will not ask you which scenario you would think is the most likely to happen, but please pick one for us that you think would enlighten our thinking most and would encourage political change. We are mostly faced with attempts of organisational development, as if this would bring anything about, but it is probably more about political change.

 

Robin: Yes, I would say probably the most relevant scenario is the value change scenario.

The value change scenario actually – it is interesting to highlight it because it is more or less the framework, which is implicitly used in the current post-2015 talks about the development agenda, but it is not the scenario that is currently happening as a global world order. It is interesting to see that there is a disconnect between the values that are implicitly embedded in the current discussion on the post-2015 development agenda and the current scenario, which is more like the market forces scenario.

 

So why would I highlight the value change? It is because it shows, somehow, in order to make it operational, all these ideas, all this discourse that we have on the development of the post-2015 agenda, we need more than just having some kind of indicators; we need to have a change in the value and as I mentioned earlier, in the power relationship between the economic sector, the political sector, and the sector represented by the civil society organisations and other stakeholders.

 

Secretariat: In your presentation to the Platform board in October you mentioned something that looks as if you identified a possible fixation by many ARD donors on supporting small holders in a very narrow sense, meaning only looking at agriculture-related inroads and achieving development in that way. You argued that many smallholders had family income practices that made them more resilient to commodity price or environmental shock by diversifying their family income bases in the form of having a family member generating income outside of agriculture. So donor support should not push only into the direction of agriculture, but also include these aspects. Please explain that.

 

Robin: Well, you know that question that was asked to us and in this sitting was to think about the future of development assistance related to agriculture and rural development. Agriculture and rural developments are at the core of this work, so the question was how in the future might agriculture relate with rural development. The idea here is that it is the concept of having agriculture in rural development, which matters. The belief that the future of rural area is conditioned or determined only by the capacity of the farmers to produce more and more efficiently is not a systemic approach of the problems these people are facing and the problems of food insecurity, and nutrition insecurity. You may not want to just have rural areas that are at the places where we produce food and food stuffs – that is the idea. That leads to questioning the transformation of those rural areas if agriculture is the only vector. The answer probably is not, and the donors know that, but it is instituted in agriculture because it is where you may find the most immediate answers to investments with higher productivity, better yields, etc. But the long-term improvement of the welfare of the people, especially those who are living in marginalized, remote areas requires more than productivity increase and agriculture activity.

 

The argument that we have was that smallholders are providing a huge source of employment in rural areas, but they cannot be just the only ones doing this and they need to be incorporated into the infrastructure development, but also other activities from the secondary and tertiary sectors so that rural areas become places where it is pleasant to live, not just comfortable to produce.

 

The linkages between rural and urban area have to be reconsidered in the approaches of the donors.

 

Secretariat: Do you have maybe an idea about how that could be done? Obviously, programme design needs to be more holistic and look into long-term sustainability, without going into these buzzwords where everybody zooms out, I suppose. What would your suggestions be for programme development?

 

Robin: Well, that probably would require a different approach from the development assistance intervention side. We are now on a way of thinking, which is about building coalitions of interventions rather than having donors intervening with their own focus in some specific domains or specific regions. That coalition building is a goal that is more generic, it is not just for the development assistance. That would probably need also to incorporate other actors who can play an important role in development, not necessarily in development assistance, but in development by combining actions where you will have both public and private funds investing in the development of these areas; strengthening the capacity of the people; making their livelihoods, making their environments much more attractive. So, I think we need to reconsider to what extent the current way interventions are designed – how that will have to be modified.

 

Probably one pathway for that is to reconsider, for example, platforms like the GDPRD and their roles in the future as a means, maybe not only to coordinate individual member’s actions, but to engage them in collective action within the Platform as members, but also with outside actors of development, including, as I said, the business sector, but also policy makers, local organisations, and make those things focus on very specific, locally-based approaches where the main problems of food insecurity are concentrated right now and we know where those places are.