Whose grazing land? the seasonal rights on communal land

Atsbi, the study area in Ethiopia for my current project, has made a bold move from free grazing to zero grazing.

Free grazing means that animals can just freely move around the landscape and eat crop residues from fields and natural grazes where ever they find them. This leads to the classical tragedy of the commons, no one has incentives to keep the right number of livestock as feed is free. Therefore the landscape gets over-exploited.

The move to zero-grazing means that farmer keep their livestock at home and feed them from their own land. Livestock that does not move also consumes less, there is therefore an additional benefit.

But what is happening with the grazing land that previously was freely use? how gets access to that grass?

the grazing land that was still in private ownership

Grazing land is often considered as community land and therefore managed by the community. We have visited two of them and talked to people around to understand the management.

We discovered that access was seasonally regulated. During the rainy season access was restricted to all. After the rainy season, farmers with certified land would share the grazing land according to oxen ownership. Who has 1 oxen gets one share, who has 2 gets two share. Note that who is landless (who does not have certified farming land), does not get access, because they do not need oxen, though they might actually own a dairy cow. There are paid guards who make sure that no free grazing takes place.

This grazing land was open for free grazing

After a certain amount of time, the grazing land is becoming common grazing land again. Who has not made hay or collected his share of grass by that date, will just loose it, as others can come with their animals to graze it.

In conclusion, there are seasonal property rights on grazing land! There is only one exception : the church cow can graze anywhere any time, it benefits to all, so one one will chase it away :-) .

Fishing on Mount Kenya?

Recently, I joined a trip with some friends of mine to Mount Kenya. Yes, you know that's the place where people go to see elephants. But I usually do things a bit differently, so i went to see fish.

Some years ago, the Kenyan government has acknowledged that it is impossible to control protected forest areas, such as in Mount Kenya. Instead of having lots of policemen facing the mission impossible to make sure that no tree is cut, the Kenyan government rent out licenses to use the forest to communities, when the use is sustainable and does not threaten the natural resources base of the forest. In this way, the communities "own the forest" if there is illegal use, they will report to the authority. It is a quite smart way to manage forests in a developing country...

The first trout fish community, the ponds are covered to avoid that birds "go easy fishing"

Trout fish farming is such an non-competing use of the forest. Trout fish can be farmed in ponds that are colder than 18 degrees in which there is always running fresh water. Hence river water from Mount Kenya can be diverted through the ponds before joining the river again. In this manner there is no impact on this downstream communities.

A pond for growing trout fish, it has always running water, otherwise the fish dies

We visited two communities. The first has a fully functioning closed system that allows to produce the whole cycle from the fish fingerling to the trout fish for the market. This community even is testing an asexual breed, which is produced by a research center and which should grow faster than the normal fish.

This video shows a demonstration how to catch the "parent fish" and extract the eggs. The egg extraction needs a lot of experience, as a fish can only be out of water for less than 1 minutes and 30  seconds. These eggs are then kept indoor, in a small basin until they become fish fingerling. From there, they are kept in small wooden boxes that have running water, until they are big enough to survive in a small pond. From the small pond they will be moved to the big pond. A trout fish needs 10 months to come to maturity. A parent fish can produce eggs for about 2 -3 years before it needs to be replaced.

The extracted fish eggs

The fish fingerling, kept inside

Basin for fingerlings before they are big enough for the big ponds

This community also produces it own fish food with fish leftover, soy flour they buy on the market and other farm residues.

The machine to make fish food

The second community we visited, just has three functioning ponds, but run out of capital to construct other ponds, or the infrastructure to produce their food or the fish fingerling. The community of 25 farmers from the surrounding villages got the licence for the forest, and produce little fish but they have big plans. Next to a complete infrastructure, they also want to create an eco-lodge where people can enjoy the forest and come fishing. As trout fish has a huge potential and there is a market deficit, this is a promising project. 

The ponds of the second community, can yield at 6000 marketable fishes

Any idea where this community could get funds to develop further? then let me know!

The community members presenting their projects

benefit sharing mechanisms to insure sustainable tourism

Rural tourism is a tricky business, it can represent an opportunity for a rural community, but it can also break the ties community has, through making some people very rich and some very poor. To avoid this, it is important to find option to make community as a whole benefit from tourism, but this without killing the entrepreneurship of individuals.

Recently i visited a community that has been building its own lodge. Today  would like to share with you how the community has been organised, so that the community as a whole can benefit from tourism.

The first thing that stroke me, is that each household had to hand in some land, that would then become communal land. This is a hudge step for Ethiopian smallholders who just recently got land security (i.e. long term leasing) from the goverment. On this newly communal land the lodge has been build and registered under the community's name. It has a board and a manager who work for the lodge. They also manage the bank account that is on the name of the community. As this lodge is at its very beginning the community has decided to save money, so that they could invest it further into the tourism industry or to keep if for an exceptionally difficult situation for everyone (such has hunger). There are clear rule on how money from the lodge can be used.

The material from which the lodge is build, as well as the baskets and other items for sale  are locally made by the women's labour exchange organisation. They are organised in groups of 20 women. Each group has its own bank account on which the money from a sale goes. The women then decide on how to distribute this money.

We were discussing pricing of goods sold to international tourists, and see how they would actually handle the value added from tourism. For them, it was always clear that they would charge a bit more (but also mentioning they would always stay fair) to international tourist. We discovered that any items sold would be first cashed by the community lodge and then paid to the women's group. In that manner it would be easy to fix a tax, insuring that the women's group get a fair price (why not 10-20% higher than local price) but what is above that would stay on the lodge's account and can be used for the whole community.We also discussed that they could actually sell goods at local prices but then charge an entry fee to foreign tourists which could be paid to the lodge, and then be used by the community.

We were pretty impressed by the smart way this community is organised to share benefits of tourism with the community as a whole. These mechanisms allow us to be sure that tourism will not hurt them, but contribute to real rural development. They earn the money they need through their own effort (i.e. do not depend on aid) and can decide themselves about what their priorities are to spend the money. What ever they do with the money, they will be feeling the owner, use it efficiently and maintain the purshased things/ investment. Also they will make choices that are feasible and useful to them (even if we sometimes might not understand these priorities).

In order to not forget anything that the community representative told us, we made a movie to capture the discussion. This quite lengthy movie, shows how difficult it was to understand clearly how the community is organised and how their benefit sharing mechanism works. But thanks to the patience of the whole team, we finally could understand the benefit sharing mechanism that could be summerized into a blog post... a great thanks to all who made this visit possible, and more particullarly to Kebebe for bringing us there and his endless patience to translate our questions and their answers.



















Wanna meet this community? contact inside travel !

An overview of informal institutions in Ethiopia

Last spring, an Ethiopian intern joined my team to do some desktop research about informal institutions in Ethiopia. Indeed i had the feeling that we do not know enough about the economic role of these institutions in farmers decision making (http://catherinepfeifer.blogspot.com/2012/02/informal-institutions-in-rural-ethiopia.html). Kiros looked at seven informal institutions in Ethiopia, namely Iddir, Mahber, Eqqub, Debo/Wenfel/Jigie/oxen sharing/labor sharing, Gadaa system, Elder’s group and Women’s association and tried to understand their role from an institutional economics perspective. Six dimensions of possible issues that can hamper transactions were identified. Each of the seven institution was analyzed along the axes of these six dimensions, namely  risk coping, access to credit, labor and animal power exchange, natural resource management, conflict resolution and information sharing.

Kiros came to the conclusion that there are mainly three categories of informal institutions in Ethiopia :

• risk reduction institutions (Iddr, Mehaber, women's associations)
• market failure institutions (Eqqub, labor and animal power exchange)
• conflict resolution (Gada, elder's group)

you can find Kiros report under :
https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B_BdeBrudKuyU00xV0tBbzVkekk/edit

What can Africa learn from China? (Mauritius reporting series)

Ethiopia and China : both countries have a socialistic background, both have been relatively closed countries. One has one of the most astonishing economies in the world, the other is still stuck in poverty. I have always been wondering what Ethiopia could learn from China.
It turns out that at the conference on water management in Africa hold in Mauritius, I met someone who could answer this question: Prof. Meine Pieter van Dijk from UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands. He has been running extensive surveys on water management in China. He has looked at which laws and legislation have an impact on the ground, and how the farmers on the ground interpret these laws and legislation. He found that even if in the past the government used to organize and control everything, farmers in China today organize themselves in informal institutions to address the gaps when laws and legislation do not reach the ground. There is lots of scope to understand these informal institutions and bottom up initiatives better and take them into account in policy recommendations.

Watch Meine's key points  here :

Informal institutions in rural Ethiopia

The "barefoot hedge-fund manager" as described in the book poor economics (http://catherinepfeifer.blogspot.com/2012/01/rethink-again-again-looking-back-on-one.html) face a multitude of risk : droughts, health, death both from family member but also animals, income. With the rare exceptions of weather insurances (provided nowadays still on experimental bases), the is no insurance company to take over all these risks. Therefore, many informal institutions have developed in the Ethiopian rural area in order to help smallholder to cope with these different risks. Some institutions support cost of funerals, some help when medicine is needed, some allow to exchange labor. It is a complex issue, as most of the informal institutions address more than one risk. An intern started working on my project, and makes a broad literature review and test some hypothesis on an existing farm household dataset.

During one of my field trip (see http://catherinepfeifer.blogspot.com/2011/11/bahir-dar-reporting-series-do-you-think.html, I was invited to a Mehaber meeting. Mehaber is a religious based organisation. Every week farmers meet at the house of one of the members. Each member brings it contribution in food and in money. They share a meal and tela (local beer). They discuss and look for solutions for any emerging problem and conflict. If one farmer faces an individual problem, the Mehaber member can decide to support that member financially. In Adet, where i was invited to the meeting, the Mehaber also organised the collective management on grassland, and the cut and carry system. It suggests that some of these institutions are able to organize collective action around water management : another issue which the intern will try to investigate. 

Mehaber meeting near to Adet

find here a more recent post about informal institutions in Ethiopia  or check the institution tag.

Bahir Dar reporting series : Did you think that you have understood how land tenure influences farmers' decision making?

Land tenure has undoubtedly an influence on farmers' decision to invest on their land. Literature and common sense suggests that if a farmer owns the land and has certainty that he can use the land in future will be more likely to invest in capital or labour intensive technologies such as terraces or wells or plant trees. Also it is suggested that privately own land is better managed than collective land, because a farmer will optimize his own profit and not be able to free ride on the other (also referred to as the tragedy of the common).

untreated gully

I though that I had understood how land tenure is influence farmer's decision making. On my last trip to Adet (near to Bahir Dar), when I interviewed some farmers I discovered that I got it all wrong... 

One farmer rented land, that mean his has only the certainty to use this land for one season. So my theory would say that he would never build a terrace as it is very labor intensive. But this farmer was building it. He explained to me that he was allowed to rent the land only if he would build the terrace. The owner does not have enough labor to build the terrace and gave his land for very low cost to anyone who would invest labor on the land.

I also visited  a gully (erosion) that has been stabilized with an area exclosure (area where the livestock cannot access) with improved fodder, such as grass with long roots and multipurpose trees. It looked very good, the farmers are proud of it, and all see the benefit of this techniques. Despite of this 300m further there was an other gully, without stabilization, every year some centimetre from the field is lost, grass productivity is very low. So my first though was : a smart farmer improved his gully where as the non treated gully is communal land. And here wrong again : the treated gully was on communal land where as the non treated one belonged to a group of farmer privately. 

treated gully

What happened? Farmers are willing to give equal labour to rehabilitate communal land, as they understand that they are collectively responsible for this area. But on the privately owned land, farmers do not manage to coordinate, mainly because their field size are unequal, and so the smaller farmer would have to provide more labour to the bigger farmer, than the bigger farmer to the small one. As no one has money, one cannot pay for labour...

I had always believed that land tenure is a very important driver of farmers' decision making, but my field trip to Adet showed me that labour dynamics are the most important driver, at least in the Adet watershed.