Solomon, or "The slightly different farmer"
By Lukas Frey
The steep, finely detailed topography around Adi Behnuna, a community
in Eritrea's southern highlands, offers the outsider quite spectacular
views of the landscape, but it means tough working and living conditions
for the local farming population. For example, there is hardly a single
spot of land that is reasonably flat so that it could be irrigated with
the scarce supply of water, providing its owner with secure production
facilities.
In addition to the difficult natural geographic conditions, however,
there are also socio-economic and socio-cultural difficulties that only
allow limited forms of irrigated agriculture.
Only a few small-scale farmers in and around Adi Behnuna irrigate
their small parcels of land. But Solomon Ghebrekidan is one of them.
During a three-week local visit while producing the Adi Behnuna Community
Profile (see references at the end of the article on Eritrea), I was
able to have a long talk with Solomon. Among other things, this "slightly
different farmer" explained to me how and why he started irrigating
his fields.
"Here on the valley floor I have three tsimdi (0.75 ha) of land, and
I've been irrigating it for six years. Up on the hills I have five more
tsimdi, where I grow sorghum and maize like all the other farmers. Before
I started irrigating, I used to be amazed at the good crops the farmers
get in the region of Mendefera, the biggest weekly market near here.
So now and then I started talking to the farmers there, when I was on
my way to the weekly market. I learned a lot about the advantages of
irrigation and the way it needs to be done. Then I decided to start
irrigating as well. I asked the village council for a piece of land
on the river, and they gave me this field here. Then I sold a few of
my well-fed cows and in Asmara I bought a six-horsepower Lombardini
pump. I was able to pay 9000 nakfas (about US$1000) straight away, so
I didn't have to take on any loans and pay high interest."
"About 10 meters away from the river bed, I dug out a big pit into
which the river and groundwater seeps. That's where I installed the
pump. It's still working fine today - after all, it's imported from
Italy. Also it needs less than a liter of diesel per hour. I started
planting lots of different things. A few of them did well, but others
were pretty much failures. Nowadays I am planting maize, potatoes, bananas,
chili peppers, papaya, onions, hops, and eucalyptus. Tomatoes were never
a success, I don't know why - and there's no one here who could tell
me anything about it. I can usually sell most of my produce here in
the village. Rarely, when there's too much pepper, for example, I have
to sell the surplus at the market in Mendefera. But it's worth it for
me."
"I do good business with my produce, even though there are setbacks
now and then, and going from the village to my field takes more than
an hour. Also it sometimes happens that someone doesn't watch his cattle
properly and they break through my fence and eat their fill on my place.
The owner of the cattle has to pay me for the damage, but no one can
give me my crop back. My biggest worry is whether the field will still
be fertile enough years from now to bring in the same big crops."
The reasons more farmers do not do the same as Solomon - particularly
since his modest prosperity is obvious for all to see - became clear
in my many discussions with other farmers. The few pieces of land that
are suitable for irrigation have already mostly been distributed. Apart
from the access to land, there is also a basic lack of specialist agricultural
knowledge about irrigation, as well as the investment capital needed
(purchasing a pump, additional work). Irrigated agriculture is seen
as an additional burden of labor, for which there are not enough workers
available, and the risks of this type of investment are also high (defective
pumps, damaged crops). After a few years, it may only be possible to
produce good crops by using fertilizer and pesticides, and the farmers
also take this into account in their decisions. Finally, there are a
number of socio-cultural factors that hold many of them back from using
irrigation: farmers have high expectations of outside aid, and this
puts a brake on their own initiative. And last but not least "only he
who plows properly is a proper farmer." This means that people who use
irrigation do not plow properly, because they do things differently
from their ancestors.
Lukas Frey is scientific collaborator at the Center for Development
and Environment, University of Berne.
|
