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New Generations, Old Challenges: Questioning Grassroots Development in the Horn of Africa
JOURNAL OF YOUTH RESEARCHES
kebeles, similar to the number of health practitioners discussed earlier. And they do not
have central offices to give proper level of consultation services to farmers. They usually
conduct house-to-house consultation and follow-up. But this becomes quite far from the
maximum capability of individual practitioners who cannot manage to visit entire homes
on a daily or even on weekly basis. And their knowledge and expertise are limited to some
aspects of crop or livestock production.
Although the efforts in the past six or seven years brought some changes, they are quite
far from productivity. Farmers in the target neighborhood are relatively good at the timing
of crops, while they lack knowledge of what, where and how to cultivate. They do not
have in-depth knowledge about the compatibility between particular soil types and par-
ticular crops. And even if they manage to guess the right crops for a given soil; they lack
skill of plowing, erosion prevention, fertilization, and shifting cultivation. In other words,
the farmers lack the awareness on latest ideas in terms of crop diversification (various
crops instead of few) and crop intensification (increasing productivity). At this point, an
emerging investor in the vicinity reflects on common weaknesses of the farmers:
The problem is the people do not have any idea about appropriate farm-sites for
particular crops. For me, for instance, not Enset but banana can be effective for
most part of these neighborhoods. And not avocado, but mango is more compat-
ible and productive; this is mainly because avocado needs large amount of water
(HOARCM38, 23/04/11).
Mango is becoming a dominant and productive crop in these neighborhoods while
the people are fond of unproductive crops. Avocado has also become an emerging
and favorable crop here around (FGD, 23/04/11).
HOARCM38 questions, “The road continues to be a headache. How would you be pro-
ductive when you think beforehand that you will carry three or four quintals of the yield to
Woyra Gebeya” (23/04/11).
The people are using the farming mechanism which has been used for over 100
years. They could not even have transferred into bull-plowing, as most of the bulls
get affected by predominant cattle diseases like the Gendi, trypanosomiasis (FGD,
23/04/11).
And as crops grow, they got destroyed by wild animals such as baboons, monkeys and
porcupines. These animals attack the corn, maize, wheat, Enset and other ground crops.
They appear devastating especially on seasonal crops such as maize and sugarcane.
Some residents reflect that the harms by the wild animals become far serious than even
lack of farming skills and widespread crop diseases.
Baboons too remain our pains. There were efforts even by the government side, but noth-
ing stopped these baboons from destroying all what farmers harvest, painfully all at a time
(HOARCM26, 25/04/11).
