Do Technologies Help Farmer Equity?

When technology is available, the best thing to do is appropriate it to bring in as much equitability as possible.

One of the biggest ways technology has helped improve farmers' lives is by decreasing the exploitation that farmers confront in the market because of a lack of access to correct price information. Consequently, they sell their produce at a loss, and their economic situation remains stagnant.

People from solitary rural communities have started to use mobile phones, email and the internet to share their local adventures and good practices; they have begun to learn from one another.

The technology used as a result of this project gives the farmers the right information at the right time, which makes a crucial difference in how much farmers earn when they sell their crops. In one case, a group of potato farmers from Tanzania had long been exploited by truck drivers who passed that way. So they would pick potatoes at a low price on their return from hauling goods between Dar es Salam and Malawi. And then came a fresh system in which the price of potatoes turns available on mobile phones.

With such accurate information in their favor, the farmers refused to sell their produce at a lower price. So the truck drivers had to either return with empty trucks or pay the correct prices to the farmers.

This has caused the concept called 'Market Intelligence,' a kind of capacity or service given by market spies with a successful and popular role. This is how they operate: along with their mobile phones, they assemble price-related information personally and then share it by transmitting a text message or SMS to the farmers in the villages.

Not all own a mobile phone. So it's exciting to see how a traditional system like a billboard complements the information shift through the mobile, giving a complete solution to the problem.

Another instance where technology has brought farmers together, rather than allowing them to continue in isolation, is the 'Linking Local Learners' project, a website yet much more than a website. It includes face-to-face learning, in which local groups learn through experiences and discussion, and peer-to-peer learning, in which groups share information and experience over the internet.

But in countries such as Tanzania, internet use is still limited, so this problem has been conquered with a little help from 'intermediaries,' or those who can address and decode information from the internet.

This project has obtained the district' core groups' to interact with each other to learn and share best practices. The coordinator of the market linkages program notes that these core groups have helped farmers negotiate with others in market chains.

The greatest side effect of this is that it has assisted bring about market transparency, which has substituted the atmosphere of cheating and mistrust that has stood in the way of fair trade in the past.

By carrying efficiency into the value chain, the system ensures that all stakeholders benefit, including the smallholder farmers. This satisfies the larger objective of sustainable development and farmer empowerment.

But what happens in countries such as Ethiopia, where there is a dire need for timely information, yet the ICT infrastructure is very poor? It's not only the lack of electricity or telephones.

Even those who own mobile phones have issues understanding their full use. Here too, the farmers depend on local traders to sell their crops. And the greatest void of information may be in such pockets – where farmers need information on market prices and information that supports them decide what to grow, where, and how and when to market it.

There have been matters where technology has not completely helped the farming communities as intended. The reasons point to the fact that such designs did not advance in a 'participatory manner' or evolved in very different cultural contexts. After all, when technology is available, the best thing to do is appropriate it to bring in as much equitability as possible.