Agricultural Administration and Extension最新文献

This paper reviews the ‘turnkey’ establishment of the 10 000 ha Ubima oil palm plantation in Rivers State, Nigeria, between 1977 and 1985. The plantation has a giant mechanised processing mill, mechanical workshops and other administrative and social buildings and facilities.

The plantation is now a major supplier of oil palm products for industries and human consumption. The project has itself generated sufficient revenue in under ten years to maintain and expand another oil palm plantation. It has stimulated the harvesting of numerous wild oil palms abandoned since the late 1960s and vigorous economic and social development activities in surrounding localities.

It is concluded that the ‘turnkey’ and high mechanisation approaches adopted, though desirable in providing sufficient oil palm products for Nigeria in the short-term, are not ideal for the country in the long-term.

Despite an increasing literature on monitoring and evaluation (M & E), no consensus has been reached on terminology, methodology, and the place of monitoring and evaluation activities in agricultural development projects. Any discussion of monitoring and evaluation activities must start with consideration of the planning and management cycle, of the anticipated sequence of project outputs, effects and impact flowing from project inputs, and of the different people involved in this sequence. From this basis, a more comprehensive terminology is suggested for different monitoring and evaluation activities, and organisational structures are proposed, to aid effective integration of monitoring, evaluation, planning and management. Finally, it is argued that project planning should give much more explicit and detailed attention to M & E activities.

Conventional wisdom suggests that relatively few farmers in developing nations have contact with extension, that those who do do not benefit from their contacts, and that those with contact are not representative of the farm population. This study, based on a set of survey data collected from 300 farmers in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, examines the general issue of how and where farmers obtain agricultural information. Particular attention is placed on levels of contacts farmers have with extension, the types of farmers being ‘reached’ by extension, and farmers' assessments of the utility of information received from extension.

The data provide evidence of relatively few farmers with any type of extension contact. Those with contact tend to be involved across several extension activities, and over time. There is also evidence to support the argument that it is the more ‘progressive’ farmers who have higher levels of contact with extension. Finally, farmers who are in contact with extension exhibit a generally favorable view toward the advice and information they received.

Patterns of resource allocation are examined in Bolivian lowlands farming during the early to mid-1980s, when longstanding problems of poor targeting of official intervention were compounded by the breakdown of market allocation mechanisms owing to hyperinflation. Each of Santa Cruz's eight principal agricultural commodities is produced by farmers having distinct ethnic, locational and farm-size characteristics. The success of corresponding Producers' Organisations in negotiating with the authorities over subsidised allocations of credit and foreign exchange, and over product prices is shown to depend partly on these characteristics, but also on the features of the product market faced by each group, and on the extent to which current production technologies require imported inputs. Patron-client relations postulated in earlier work as a mainspring of resource allocation are shown to be an incomplete explanation of observed patterns. These patterns give cause for concern, possibly on efficiency and certainly on equity grounds: from negotiations in credit, foreign exchange and price arenas, large commercial farmers secured the highest net gain per farm and per dollar of gross value added. Official intervention should be reduced in scale and focused more sharply, and market mechanisms strengthened.