Wakeup call
An aide enters a room in Beirut where the Minister of Agriculture is having discussion with a mission from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on the country’s precarious agricultural extension situation. The aide silently hands over a piece of paper and leaves the room. The Minister reads the note, smiles, and shares its contents with his audience. “Our Ministry of Foreign Affairs has informed us of complaints received from certain West European countries about chemical pesticides’ residues found on fruits, imported from Lebanon.” The smile is due to a coincidence because the mission members were sharing their field observations with the minister precisely on the same issue. That wakeup call was in 2005, about 14 years after a long civil war tore apart this beautiful country from 1975 to 1991. Apart from so much loss of life and physical infrastructure, most public institutions almost perished. One such institution was agricultural extension service, which was considered, once upon a time, as one of the best in the region, but the civil war had dissipated it to the core.
It is a well-established fact that food security and agricultural extension are tied to each other in a close relationship. Beyond the obvious link to increasing food availability, agricultural extension services impact, directly or indirectly, on aspects of food access, use and stability. FAO has an intriguing studyattempting to quantify this virtuous relationship, with its regional variations, as shown in the figure below. Depending on the country, MENA states would need to spend up to 1% of the agricultural GDP on extension services to provide for the needs of food security and sustainable agricultural development taking while taking into consideration climate change effects.
Figure: Investment in agricultural extension in % of the AgGDP for regional comparison
Outsiders filling in the post-war extension gap
For Lebanon, the above FAO estimates lead to the conclusion that about 0.3% of the nation’s AgGDP should go to extension investments; and while not all extension costs are assumed to be borne by the State, there is an estimated need of about 340 extension agents. What were Lebanon’s numbers by 2009? Less than 0.04% of AgGDP was estimated to be spent on Agricultural extension and there were just 90 extension agents (some estimates are even lower than that). As is sadly common in post-conflict situations, three things had happened in Lebanon. First, the vacuum created by the almost complete collapse of the extension service, was rapidly filled in by a foray of mostly international non-government organizations (NGOs) -some civil society and some religious- funded by different bilateral donor countries and philanthropists, which instantly sprang into action for grassroots re-habilitation and community assistance, including extension support to the Lebanese farmers, growers and producers who were suffering from a lack of technical guidance. Second, a host of private companies of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and weedicides took the struggling rural population into its grip with its own business agenda. Not only chemical products were openly promoted and sold but also there were instances where incentives were such that wrong technical advice was given by the zealous salesmen to the farmers with the sole purpose of increasing the sale of their products. As such, environmental hazards and risks to human and livestock were often ignored. And third, the farmers started demanding comprehensive extension support from the government for a variety of reasons including insufficient extension assistance by the NGOs’, exploitation by chemical inputs salesmen, and demands by the importing countries for compliance to international standards of quality of the produce. It was obvious that while the private and civil society sectors were essential partners, proper action must be taken by the government to provide the badly needed extension support
