FODDER INNOVATION: REVISITING AN OLD PROBLEM
Adequate year-round supply of fodder is one of the biggest problems faced by livestock keepers in developing countries. It does not matter if they are pastoralists in the semi-arid regions of West Africa or cooperative dairy farmers in India, finding enough fodder for their animals is a constant struggle. While the underlying reasons may be different, the fact remains that access to fodder ranks alongside animal health as the key to success.

Not surprisingly livestock scientists identified this as a problem many years ago. Since the 1960s a range of technologies have been developed to deal with this problem: improved forage species; various silage techniques; and the development of cereals and legumes with straw and other residues more suited to animal nutrition. In the same way development projects have introduced fodder banks, and, to help introduce new fodder species, alternative cropping patterns. Sadly — and most livestock scientists would be the first to acknowledge this — the results of these efforts have been quite disappointing. 

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), with the support of DFID, has been trying to tackle this problem over the last five years. It began by testing to see whether partnering with local organisations would be a better way of transferring technology to farmers. The approach had some success, but it also revealed other problems that were stopping farmers using new practices.

It found, for example, that public seed systems were often arranged in ways that did not supply fodder varieties chosen by farmers and the private sector was reluctant to distribute seeds when initial demand was low. Often adoption of fodder technology was only worthwhile if animal health services were available or if there were links to markets.  Difficulties arose because, for some reason, it was difficult to get different organisations to work together to achieve this sort of complementarity.

In other cases it was found that since fodder requirements depended on unpredictable climate and market conditions, this year’s solution to the problem may be inappropriate to the situation in the next year. In some cases fodder shortages were caused by technical problems, but policy and institutional problems, such as access to common property grazing.

ILRI realised it needed to refocus its efforts. First, it needed to work out which organisations in a particular location to work with so that technology selected by farmers could be backed with technology supply, complementary information-based services, and, depending on the situation, access to markets. Secondly, it needed to work out what was stopping organisations working together and focus on changing the habits and practices of these organisations to help them work as part of a bigger collective and collaborative effort.

Thirdly, it needed to identify and tackle policy and institutional factors at national levels that were affecting activities locally. This, in turn, meant identifying the individuals and organisations in the policy process needed to help bring about policy and institutional change.

It was at this point that ILRI started working with researchers from UNU-MERIT who were interested in the agricultural innovation process. Their argument was that innovation was not a simple process of transferring technology to farmers. They believed innovation included a larger set of activities that both created technologies and ideas and which put this information into use.  They also believed that innovation was a demand-driven, responsive process. Not just in the sense of responding directly to farmers’ needs, but responding to unpredictable shocks and opportunities that affect the agricultural sector. In other words innovation was not about the introduction of one new technology or one policy change, but a continuous series of changes to help keep up-to-date with unfolding circumstances.

Like ILRI, UNU-MERIT researchers recognised there was a very wide spectrum of organisations involved in the innovation process and that the way it works — or often does not work — was very much a product of the routines in these different organisations and the policies they respond to. So, for example, it recognised that many civil society organisations are wary of the private sector, which, in turn, often does not take scientists very seriously. In their defence, scientists are still told to publish or die rather than participate and be promoted. No wonder they do not work well together!

For innovation researchers the big question is how to join the dots to get these groups to operate effectively as a well-articulated system — this is often referred to as an innovation system. Part of this question is about policies and other rules and incentives needed to make sure innovation not only takes place, but does so in a way that helps vulnerable agriculturalists. The reason scientists’ well-crafted technologies fail to get used is precisely because they — and all others with roles in innovation — are in malfunctioning systems with missing links and misaligned rules, policies and politics.

The UNU-MERIT researchers argue that if one follows this logic the task of tackling fodder scarcity is not a technology development and transfer task, although this is part of it. They argue that the task is to tackle these system malfunctions — missing links, misleading incentives, and unresponsiveness. They argue that fodder scarcity is not a result of technology scarcity, but of innovation capacity scarcity. Get the capacity right and a continuous process of technical change will follow.

DFID has funded ILRI, UNU-MERIT and their partners to explore whether this new focus on innovation capacity can help address the fodder issue. It is a difficult piece of research and it challenges many of the traditional approaches to this problem. 

For example, instead of looking at the technical determinants of fodder scarcity, diagnostic studies for project planning have instead investigated the existing patterns of linkage between relevant organisations. Baseline studies to track impact have not only had to characterise farming and livelihoods, but also the way different organisations work — how participatory they are, who they work with, and what are the politics and powers that shape this — as this is where changes in innovation capacity will be apparent. Similarly, the expected outcomes of this research will not be technology packages and recommendations, but principles about how to bring together the groupings of organisations needed for fodder innovation and how to stimulate the policy and institutional changes needed to support this.

The research is at a very early stage and will start its action phase in 2008. Let us hope that it moves forward on a problem that is as old as livestock itself — fodder shortage. Watch this space.

Contact Dr. Andy Hall at hall@merit.unu.edu