An FAO programme to improve local farmers' access to markets. Above, Afghan pomegranates being shipped abroad. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Enzo Mangini
ROME, Oct 16 2013 (IPS)

When it launched in 2007, the FAO programme known as Food Security through Commercialisation of Agriculture (FSCA) tried to adopt an approach that differed from on-going efforts to achieve food security, which focused primarily on food production.

FSCA turned instead to the commercialisation of small farmers’ products, a step that was perceived as a gap in the food security circle.  FAO and the Italian Development Cooperation, which is FSCA’s main donor, examine what the programme has achieved."If we want to defeat hunger, increasing production is not enough to cope with the challenges of a globalised food market."
-- Maria Helena Semedo

“If we want to defeat hunger, increasing production is not enough to cope with the challenges of a globalised food market,” Maria Helena Semedo, deputy director-general at FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), pointed out on Oct. 14 at the FSCA side event during Food Week at FAO headquarters in Rome.

The underlying idea of FSCA is to focus on small-scale production and improve market access for farming households. The approach is to work on what’s called the value chain, a system which, from training, irrigation, and food processing technology to improved packaging and marketing, allows small farmers to obtain better prices for their crops in local, national and even international markets.

“The value chain approach makes this programme successful,” said Giampaolo Cantini, director-general of Italian Development Cooperation. Over the years, Italy has contributed 100 million dollars to a trust fund for food security, with half of that sum going to the FSCA.

“We are discussing…future funding” with FAO, Cantini told IPS. “What is granted is that Italy will remain committed to small farmers’ support and will take this issue also in the agenda of her six months of European Union presidency, in the second half of 2014” in an effort to keep the issue alive.

‘Farming is business’

In each of the four regions involved in FSCA – Central America, East Africa, West Africa and the Caribbean – countries adapted the programme to their needs.

Mousa Djagoudi, from FAO’s subregional office for West Africa, explained in his speech at the side event that in Sierra Leone, money has been used to build 30 agribusiness centres (ABC) to improve food quality and reduce food losses, in some cases by 40 percent.

“The programme improved technology transfer to small farmers, and it changed their approach to agriculture,” said Djagoudi. “Today they understand that farming is business.” Farmers’ communities and organisations were involved in the entire process, from business planning to marketing, he recalled.

Dominica, similarly, had small producers of the Nature Island Pineapple Producers Association (NIPPA) take part in the wider regional Caribbean implementation of FSCA.

Winston Magloire, senior technical officer of the ministry of agriculture and forestry, told IPS that thanks to the programme, “small producers were able to compete with big players of the market” and match consumers’ requests for quality – an important step given that “improved quality can be a first step to overcome safety restrictions on richer markets,” Magloire explained.

With exporting to markets in richer parts of the world a goal for some local producers, in the Great Lakes region in Africa, the emphasis was on cross-border projects and local demands, at least for some products.

Bright Rwamirama, agriculture minister in Uganda, explained that regionally, in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 15,000 rural households had directly benefited from FSCA projects.

Some projects were designed for local markets, such as honey, which “matched an untapped local demand.” Others, like pineapple and mango, went international when a private fruit company purchased them.

In Central America, FSCA has been the core of the programme Agrocadenas Alimentarias, implemented by the El Salvador’s ministry of agriculture.

According to Jorge Alberto Salina Rodrìguez, director of the planning and public policy office, over 600 local producers were involved in the programme, which helped reduce food losses “from 20 percent of the yields to around 8 percent”, while producers of jocote and loroco (local vegetable crops) saw their income increase by 50 percent. Plantain producers improved their share of the final price by 80 percent.

Tackling structural issues

But Edwin Cortez, from the directors’ board of the Salvadorean FUNPROCOOP, a farmers’ cooperative organisation belonging to La Via Campesina, has a different, broader assessment.

He told IPS, “This programme has been positive because it reduced a bit the state of neglect experienced by small farmers, but it is not enough to address structural causes of rural poverty”.

Although Cortez acknowledged that maize and bean seeds were distributed among small farmers, “breaking away from the [political patronage] pattern of the past” and challenging big business, he pointed out that “these steps were isolated from a strategic perspective of soil preservation and encouraged use of chemicals instead of greener methods of soil management.”

Furthermore, “measures to increase added value chains, technology inputs and marketing were very weak and their impact on the sector almost insignificant,” he added Nevertheless, in a country where rural production has been falling for years anyway, Cortez concluded, “any little effort is welcome.”

Irina Grigoryan, director of a kindergarten in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Region (NKR), does not want to lose another generation to war. Credit: Enzo Mangini/IPS

By Enzo Mangini
STEPANAKERT (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Caucasus), Apr 12 2013 (IPS)

Sixty-year-old Irina Grigoryan’s voice is drowned out by the merry noise of 230 children waiting for their lunch. Director of kindergarten N3, located in Stepanakert, capital of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Region (NKR) deep in the Caucasus, Grigoryan smiles tolerantly at the din.

But the poster hanging on the wall behind her desk – picturing a single dove flying above the words “Give peace a chance” – suggests that all is not well in this misty, mountainous city of 50,000 people, 2,400 kilometres south of Moscow.

In fact, NKR, nestled between Azerbaijan and Armenia, is in the middle of a long-forgotten war.

Two communities, Armenians and Azeris, who lived side by side for many years, are now wrenched apart.
When the USSR was still alive, Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region, but in 1936 the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin handed it over to Azerbaijan, sparking calls for autonomy by the primarily Armenian population.

At the end of the 1980s, amidst the rubble of the crumbling Soviet Union, opposition to Azeri rule grew more vocal, and Stepanakert saw mass demonstrations of citizens demanding that they be allowed to join the Soviet republic of Armenia.

At the end of 1991, the population of 191,000, 75 percent of which was Armenian, proclaimed an independent Nagorno-Karabakh Region (NKR) – a month later, in January 1992, Baku sent in its troops to quell the secessionist movement.

Today, the two countries remain officially at war, with 150,000 NKR citizens living in a political limbo.

For those who survived the conflict, the precarious situation is a source of daily stress and anxiety, and though nearly 20 years have passed since the declaration of a ceasefire, citizens continue to live under the shadow of war.

“During the war I was teaching at a local gymnasium, and I saw 80 percent of my male students die in the fighting,” Grigoryan tells IPS.

“I do not want this to happen again –that’s why here, in our kindergarten, we do not speak about the war and we do not teach hatred to our pupils,” she says.

But though she does not speak of her memories, they are still fresh in her mind.

With vivid clarity she recalls the 1992 siege of Stepanakert, when Azeri Grad rocket launchers positioned in the hills in the nearby town of Shushi rained missiles down on NKR’s capital every day.

Civilians, quick to learn the rhythms of war, soon discovered that it took soldiers 18 minutes to reload a Grad battery and would use those intervals to move around the city, or steal brief moments of normalcy.

“I remember the mothers and fathers of the children you hear in the next room playing 18-minute-long football matches (during the siege),” Grigoryan says.

She is also active with the Public Diplomacy Institute, a local organisation that works to build bridges between Armenian NGOs and former Azeri inhabitants of NKR who were forced to flee to Azerbaijan in their tens of thousands during the war.

Lamenting that “two communities, Armenians and Azeris, who lived side by side for many years” are now wrenched apart, she hopes to build ties between them, through direct dialogue among people and peace activists on both sides.

Part of Grigoryan’s work entails “explaining” to her fellow countrymen that if they want peace, they must be prepared to make sacrifices, including territorial and political concessions to Azeris, like giving up the buffer zone beyond the NKR border and allowing Azeri refugees to return.

“We do not want to lose another generation to war,” she added, referring to the skirmishes that constantly erupt along the ceasefire line, and threats issued periodically from the government in Baku, which suggest that conflict is not far off.

Until 2009, Grigoryan’s cross-border diplomacy between NGOs and peace activists received some support form the international community, including a series of meetings in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and in Moscow, facilitated by the UK-based NGO International Alert.

But then everything slowed down, and the negotiations taking place under the auspices of the Minsk Group, a diplomatic initiative co-chaired by the U.S., Russia and France to mediate between the governments on either side of the Line of Contact, or ceasefire line, reached a stalemate.

Geopolitics hinder chances for peace

Though it boasts everything from a parliament to a ministry of foreign affairs, located just a few paces away from Grigoryan’s kindergarten, NKR has not been recognised at the international level.

Soldiers in the trenches of the 1994 ceasefire line after the Armenian-Azeri war over Nagorno-Kharabakh. Credit: Enzo Mangini/IPS

Azerbaijan does not have any direct contact with NKR, leaving all negotiations to Armenia, which it has labeled the “occupying force” in the region.

NKR Foreign Minister Karen Mirzoyan says he is “ready to sit at the table with my Azeri colleagues, but the problem is that they are not ready to sit with a member of the NKR government.”

Mirzoyan was appointed several months ago, when the July 2012 elections gave the incumbent president Bako Saghosyan a second term, with 64 percent of the vote.

“We received a clear mandate from our citizens,” Mirzoyan tells IPS: “They want to be free and independent and I am ready to make any concession that is consequent with this goal.”

But what this means on a practical level is far from clear.

NKR authorities blame the Azeri government, led by President Ilham Aliyev, of running an anti-Armenian campaign at the international level and of silencing dissenting voices in its own country.

Experts point to numerous incidents that support this claim, including the case of journalist Eynulla Fatullayev, sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in Azerbaijan for his investigations on the Khojaly massacre, which cast doubt on the official Azeri version of the events. Faullayev was eventually pardoned in May 2011.

Experts like Richard Giragosian, head of the Regional Studies Centre, an independent think-tank for the southern Caucasus, believe there is a “desperate need for bold and creative political confidence building measures”, such as a universal withdrawal of Armenian troops from some stretches of the buffer zone.

“Armenia and Azerbaijan are stuck in a political stalemate that is hurting both countries,” he told IPS. “This could fuel instability in a region that is essential for the energy security of other countries, like Turkey, but also of Western Europe.”

Two major pipelines, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyahn and the Baku-Tiblisi-Supsa, plus the Baku-Tiblisi-Erzurum gas line, pass a few miles away from the NKR border.

Experts fear there could be severe ripple effects if the international community allows the issue to rot.

“Over the years, NKR’s independence has become an issue of national pride and national identity for Armenians and Azeris, thus making it all the more difficult to make concessions to the other side,” Giragosian says.

He believes strong players like Russia – which has sturdy relations with, and military bases in, both countries – ought to play a more prominent mediator role.