4 Ideas for agriculture sourcing systems

Note: this is still rough, but with limited internet access I decided to send it anyways. Apologies in advance for shoddy grammar, spelling, and the like

As an EWB overseas staff member I’ve been partnered with a private company, TreeCrops. My work is this: set up a system of depots along a strip of lakeshore from Mangochi to Monkey Bay that we be used by rural Malawians to process, store and bulk baobab fruit. TreeCrops buys this fruit and exports it to the EU.

This is my second week in the field. My first job was to clean up and outfit a depot in Maldeco, a small town north of Mangochi. Yesterday, the depot was full of Malawians industriously cracking, separating, and bagging thousands of kilograms of fruit, each in her or his own way. Charming, but troublesome when trying to have hygienic food-quality baobab pulp as our end product. 

So I chatted with each of the dozen folks at work, sat down and wore my hands a bit raw extracting baobab pulp and fibre, and observed how each person went about their work. I stayed until quitting time, then helped clean and close up shop.

There’s a lot of need for improvement to the workers’ processing methods. It’s clear, however, that to change workers’ from what they’re doing to what we’d like them to do is going to take more than lecturing and demonstrating repeatedly. Everyone processes his or her own way, and for a reason. I want to get behind their eyeballs and see their work as they see it so I can understand how they might want to change what they do.

Thinking of all of this reminded me of a cantankerous English development architect, Eric Dudley, and his principle of designing for “maximum tolerance to failure”. This Dudley principle urges me to think not of how fantastically efficient everything could be, but of how I could set things up so if everything that could go wrong goes wrong, I’ll still achieve my most basic goals for my work.

All of this thinking meshed well with my engineering background, particularly control systems courses. Here are four ideas of ideas that should be incorporated into designing workable systems for rural agriculture purchasing.

A useful metaphor to help explain things comes from a course project in which we had to design a control system for a ball on top a “balance beam” of two parallel stainless steel bars. A disturbance knocked the ball off centre and our system needed to tilt the parallel bars until the ball was again safely at rest. Here are some general principles.

1. Definition of failure

What do I actually consider a failure when it comes to processing baobab? Germs found in a sample? Foreign matter above a certain threshold? Different grades mixed together? Perfection may not be required (or much less be achievable). With the balance beam failure is easy to spot—the ball falls to the floor. With baobab processing, failure is a fuzzier notion. A first step for me will be to adequately describe what actually is processing failure before I can design to avoid such an outcome.

2. Response

When controlling a balance beam, if the corrective action is too slow the ball will fall before the system is able to respond. If the corrective action is too fast, the system produces all kinds of jerky over-reactions (called over- or under-shoot) that will never let the ball actually settle down. With baobab powder, how long can we have people using substandard processing methods before we “fail” and also, what are the dangers of trying to quickly swoop in and correct every minor infraction? There will also be lag-time for any corrective response, but finding lag-time that is neither too fast or too slow is tricky.

3. Convergence

I expect that workers will eventually find methods that work well for them, and get themselves into a groove; they won’t endlessly change how they processing the baobab fruit. I don’t expect everything to go right the first time, but I want their eventual methods to be sufficiently hygienic by TreeCrops’ standards. How do I get people to converge on these targets instead of diverging towards bad practices? With the balance beam, how does the system produce the right type of feedback (positive or negative) that will cajole the ball back to a standstill? For us, what type of feedback helps people track towards good practice, not away from it?

4. Variation

No dynamic system will be in one state 100% of the time. There’s always variation. Even with the best balance beam control the ball will still oscillate back and forth a bit without the system having to respond. So should it be with us. If we overreact at every minor infraction—someone forgetting to remove their shoes, a newcomer mis-sorting grades, an unswept floor—we’ll burn ourselves out while frustrating our workers and gaining very little. Every control system must accept some level of variation about its target.

Each of these four points is just an idea inside of a balance beam metaphor. I’ll have to get out there and see if they actually apply to what we’re trying to achieve. Luckily, my next objective is to set up three other depots. This reminds me of another principle: the lack of truth in small numbers. I shouldn’t be okay with drawing many conclusions from one depot, or one dozen people. I’ve got to get out and see much, much more.

(Maybe) why it’s hard to find a good mechanic in Malawi.

After my shock and horror of witnessing a Malawian “mechanic” use a stone and a chisel solution to what was my motorcycle’s 10-spanner problem, I stepped back and thought for a moment: why is it that a good Malawian mechanic is so hard to come by?

Truth is, most of the mechanic work I see here in Malawi reminds me of my own handiwork in junior high. If my bicycle chain was stuck, I took the garden trowel to it. If the bearings squeaked, I smeared grease indiscriminately until they didn’t. After finishing a particularly shoddy patch job on a blown tire, I tossed my dad’s tools into my mom’s flower bed. It seems these are also the methods of local mechanics.

This is my armchair answer for why my teenage ways are the modus operandi in Malawi: over the years Malawians were bestowed plenty of serviceable equipment, with none of the tools with which to service it.

The English were first. With independence in 1964, the colonial administration packed up for England leaving behind the electric transformers, the train tracks, and their one ferry in Lake Malawi, but took with them whatever wasn’t bolted down: the socket sets, spanners, welding torches and the like. This kicked off a generation of half-hearted repair jobs nation-wide. Following hot on English heels, NGOs arrived, put up plenty of infrastructure of their own, though never brought the tools or the parts for said infrastructure’s maintenance, and another round of in-a-pinch fixes were born.

Thus, today, while a boy who’d fathom using a set of vice-grips for pliers in places like Leduc, or Moose Jaw, or Brandon would earn a swift cuff upside the head from his father, this is simply standard practice in Malawi. 

Whirlwind trip to Zambia

Just got back from a whirlwind trip to Zambia.

It amazes me every time I travel to Zambia just how different it is from Malawi. There is big city life in Lusaka. There is huge mining activity in the Copperbelt region. The size of the farms in Southern Province dwarf the estates in Malawi. Victoria Falls—Mosi-o-Tunya, The Smoke that Thunders—is a sight so jaw-dropping it leaves me wondering if Malawi can ever wow me again.

Next door neighbours, yet just so different. Malawi, small land mass, scant urbanization, and high population density. Zambia, thousands of hectares of wilderness and 60% urban, 40% rural. I wryly joke to myself that if I ever want to find rapid development in Malawi all I have to do is drive West, straight into Zambia.

I am being a bit whiny, a bit over-the-top. Adventures always bring out wonder in me, though, and this recent adventure to Lusaka, Livingstone, and even to Mwinilunga near where Angola and the DRC meet, all have me hyped about the neighbour next door.

Luckily, this next week, I’m out adventuring in a region I’ve never been before: the south end of Lake Malawi. So expect my shine to be back on for Malawi. Just give me about a week.

What comes next

IITA and I have now broken up.

It's official: I sent an email to the staff listserv today to let my colleagues know that I'll be leaving at the end of the month. All the details had been finalized with the Officer-in-Charge, Dr Hailu Tefera, and my department head, Pheneas Ntawuruhunga, weeks ago, but my public announcement was today.

I'm not much thrilled at good-byes, not these kind anyway. I suppose that up until Tuesday I'll be greeting a steady stream of bemused well-wishers at my office door armed with as many questions as 'thank-you's.

What's next in store for me and EWB in Malawi is to be decided. My manager, Ka-hay Law, and I have made plans for me to meet with all the organizations in Malawi involved in value-chains facilitation in the first two weeks of April to suss out their directions and capabilities. After that, the two of us will sit down and sift out the best options from this list possibilities. While half-baked projects and organizations abound, I'm still confident in our ability to uncover a good opportunity.

So we'll see what comes next for me in Malawi.

Twitter

Twitter--what a damn neat idea.

Text messages from your phone get piped to your blog, making a quick update no more difficult than finding mobile phone coverage (which isn't too tough in Malawi; a benefit to post-colonial politics that carved out a narrow, land-locked North-South strip and said "Malawi!"). 

I've joined as of today for two reasons: one, phone coverage is a lot more readily available than internet access (especially when rural); and two, part of the fun of Malawi are the run-ins with the odd-reality of life much different from back home in Canada.

So, I'm going to aim for texting one message a day, to have my blog a bit more topical, a bit more tropical. Maybe I'm over-confident that one interesting thing happens to me each day. Or maybe Twitter was just too good an idea to pass up.

Fair Trade Thinking

I recently read an article on Fair Trade and its usefulness in development. A key point was (more or less) this:

Small farmers in developing nations have little market power. Fair Trade can be a private sector mechanism for increasing the power of these farmers to allow them to better shape their world in ways that suits them.

I liked it. In fact, I'm going to try to get into it. 

I think that, if really done well, Fair Trade local companies selling to international Fair Trade buyers could become the way economic growth could really connect with the rural African poor. If supporting a Fair Trade system that suitably gets rural farmers into the flow of international exporting could be the policy goal of Canada's foreign affairs/international relations (instead of haphazard projects littered across the African landscape) some change could really start to happen.

I'm looking to apply to a Canadian grant, the Gordon Global Fellowship, to learn more about the relevant policy challenges and try to connect the micro-level small farmers of Malawi with the macro-level flow of international trade.

Of course, this whole started grew out of a single well-written article--probably time to do more digging.

Interesting article from Frank Rich

New York Times: The Sin of Doing Good Deeds, by Frank Rich

The article's dated by a month or more, but lately I've been thinking of similar issues though from the perspective or field-level Malawi.

What both Mr. Rich and I are wondering is why does it also have to be some internationally funded bi/multi-lateral organization--cumbersome at inception, more or less doomed from the get-go--that gets to try to improve the situation out here in Malawi? How about this instead: a company, delivering a product or service at a profit that creates a market to which small farmers can sell, using these profits to reinvest in the business to open up further opportunities for small farmers? Doesn't seem so bad, so whimsical, though the domain of small farmer economics seems forever dominated by non-governmental/non-profit organizations.

As Mr. Rich quotes Dan Pallotta in his article, "Want to make a million selling violent video games to kids? Go for it. Want to make a million helping cure kids of cancer? You're labeled a parasite."

Something to think about--maybe even a future possibility.