Development interventions in the livestock sector have, generally, not been very successful. Undoubtedly inappropriate technologies and the failure to deliver services to poor farmers have contributed greatly to the lack of success of many livestock development projects. However, even in cases where the technologies were appropriately targeted and the focus was distinctly pro-poor, technical projects have in many cases failed to deliver significant and sustainable improvements to the livelihoods of the poor. Analyses of these issues clearly indicate that an enabling institutional and political environment is indispensable in maintaining a pro-poor focus, enhancing the sustainability of pro-poor interventions, and ensuring that agricultural intensification strategies have impact at the desired social levels (Livestock In Development 1999; IFAD 2001).
The history of agricultural development in Europe and North America, for example, shows that development was not primarily constrained by the absence of technology, but that farmers were only willing and able to adopt existing technologies once an enabling policy and institutional environment was in place. Such an environment allowed them to access new technologies and reap the benefits of their adoption.
This enabling environment is influenced by economic and institutional factors that are beyond the households’ immediate control (Birner 1999).
In many countries, the policies and institutions within the livestock sector are heavily distorted in favour of large-scale producers. This presents an opportunity to improve the livestock-related livelihoods of large numbers of the world’s poor, through political and institutional reform.
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POLICIES AND INSTITUTIONS It is increasingly recognized that the process of development is strongly influenced by policies and institutions, which are “the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction”. These comprise formal constraints (e.g. rules, laws, constitutions) and informal constraints (e.g. often unwritten norms of behaviour, conventions, self-imposed codes of conduct) and their enforcement characteristics (North 1994). Rules governing access to resources, both between and within households, transactions between individuals and collective action are examples. Organizations are the subset of institutions associated with group or communal activities. They include farmer associations, co-operatives, other clubs and societies, farm households, commercial firms, local government and the state. For economic development to proceed, people need to trade with others, often strangers from outside the village community. The more complex and impersonal the trading links become, the higher are the transaction costs. Thus for economic change and development to occur, a society must adapt existing institutions, or create new ones, that will permit increasingly complex market exchanges across time and space. It is argued that “the inability of societies to develop effective, low-cost enforcement of contracts is the most important source of both historical stagnation and contemporary underdevelopment in the Third World.” (North 1990). |
